Written by Geoffrey Chia
Philosophical Musings #4
Years ago, while gathering my own thoughts regarding the nature of truth, I had some interactions with a couple of Professors of the humanities. My own perspectives were based on my training and experiences as a physician (I got most of my diagnoses correct, however if I ever got a diagnosis wrong, I would be plagued with guilt and self doubt and an obsessive determination to get things right in future). I was genuinely interested in what “intellectuals” in other fields may consider to be Truth or truth, which might be useful to incorporate in my articles on truth.
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One character was a Canadian professor of law who gave a talk about David Hume at the Brisbane Skeptics society years ago. I was interested in what a law professor might define as Truth or truth, or at least what guidelines he might follow to make the best judgement about what is most likely to be correct. I can without reservation state that this was the most sickening and upsetting conversation with the most odious, vile, execrable individual that I have ever encountered in my life.
Bottom line was this:
He said that there was no such thing as Truth or truth, only what he could successfully argue to convince people to believe in.
I then said that surely objective evidence was important and used the example of the invasion of Iraq by the USA which was based on fictitious “WMDs” and not on any credible evidence.
He then repeated several times that “might is right” and strongly supported that invasion. (I started to wonder if he was actually an American redneck pretending to be Canadian. Irrespective of what his passport might show, if he could convince me that he was Canadian, then that was the truth).
His view was that the USA, having the world’s strongest military, was entitled to do whatever it liked around the world. Evidence did not matter, only what he could convincingly argue to be “true” (shades of Karl Rove, who created his own “reality”).
However ultimately when I pressed him regarding the wider applicability of his “principles”, he admitted that if he himself was ill, he would seek help from a scientifically trained, evidence guided physician rather than a convincing smooth talking faith healer. Furthermore, when I challenged him with an alternative “might is right” scenario, he admitted that if others were to develop military might surpassing his own “tribe”, he would not be happy or agreeable to that situation. “Might is right” was only applicable when his tribe was able to bully others, not the other way around.
Being gaslighted by this creep was akin to a surrealistic Kafkaesque fugue state. Orwellian is another term that comes to mind. Here was a “professor” of law who was arguing against the rule of law and promoting brute force, so long as it was used against others and not himself.
The other chap was a professor of literature, a published fiction author, who was my neighbour in the upstairs apartment. He considered himself to be an intellectual and invited me to dinner, his stated goal being to engage in the thrust and parry of debate between intellectual “equals”. I mentioned to him that my view of truth, particularly with respect to medical diagnoses, was always determined by evidence and reason. My truth was not and could never be absolute and was always a statement of probability (which however could be extremely high – almost 100% in some cases – depending on the strength of evidence).
Whereas he agreed that the invasion of Iraq was not based on evidence, he expressed “faith” that it was actually the “right” thing to do and that everything would eventually turn out for the best somehow (Everything? Best for whom? How? I thought to myself). This conclusion was based on his gut feeling, which was also how he personally determined truth in general.
His bottom line gotcha argument to me, delivered with smug self assurance, was the platitude that “Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth”. If something looked beautiful to him then it must be the truth. I mentioned that ideas of beauty may be different to different people and in my real world experience (involving life and death stakes), the only way to achieve the best approximation of objective reality was to stringently apply evidence and reason.
He then became irate and disputed my view that objective reality actually exists. As with Galileo, who famously said, “and yet it (the Earth) moves”, I continued to insist that objective reality does indeed exist because this is what our real world experiences tell us time and time again. (I do accept however that objective reality may not matter much to a writer of fiction. Indeed, wild flights of hallucinatory fantasy may be advantageous for his work.)
He insisted that because he had respectfully listened to my views, I was duty bound to respect his, which I obviously was not doing. He then angrily expelled me from his apartment before dessert (I was getting my just desserts by being deprived of dessert!)
Just before leaving however, when I pressed him, he himself admitted that if he fell ill he would seek help from a scientifically trained physician who made their diagnoses based on evidence and reason rather than whimsy.
Why have I all these years stuck to my guns about the nature of truth and why do I continue to consider the views of those so-called intellectuals nonsensical?
Because “my” rational approach (not really mine – actually inherited from a multitude of preceding luminaries much smarter than myself) has been shown to work spectacularly well in the real world, time and time again. It is not perfect, it is not correct 100% of the time but it has been proven to be hugely better than random chance.
Nobody’s approach works 100% of the time and the only people who claim that are fraudsters, typically religious cult leaders (including Papal “infallibility”) or Trumpian despots.
The method of skeptical enquiry is the approach, when the chips are down, that even those proponents of “might is right” and “gut feeling” would themselves seek help from, if they faced personal dire circumstances. Outside that, those characters choose to promote self-serving and self-aggrandising agendas based on what is largely bullshit.
You will be familiar with the term “the banality of evil” by Hannah Arendt. To me, this description was applicable to those two professors.
One caveat regarding the statement “truth is beauty and beauty is truth” may be worth exploring later. Truthful paradigms, particularly mathematical equations describing the laws of Physics, do indeed look beautifully elegant. But mathematical elegance does not always reflect objective truth.
Here is yet another topic to ponder: I assert that the spectacular real world success of the scientific method proves beyond any doubt that objective truth does indeed exist and can be determined robustly, dependably and reproducibly (but not absolutely).
However is there such a thing as robust subjective truth? After all, if I perceive a card to be sky blue in colour (under white light), I am confident this will be consistently agreed on by all other (non colour blind) people. If I am subsequently shown at random the same card on various other occasions (mixed with an assortment of other cards of different colours), I will repeatedly identify that particular card as being sky blue. Surely that represents a robust and dependable and reproducible subjective truth within and between people?
But what about synaesthesia where, to a particular individual, the musical note “F sharp” always evokes a sky blue colour? This may well be a robust and dependable and reproducible subjective truth to that individual person but is not shared by anybody else at all. And what about our genetically determined differing sense of taste which one single example, that of phenylthiocarbamide, calls into question?
To summarise this question: to what degree can/should we trust our senses? A topic for another essay!
Essays in this series to date
24 Jun 2021 – What is truth? Frustrating conversations with pseudointellectual professors
17 Jun 2021 – Why The Idea Of Biological Race Is A Toxic Brain Virus
02 Jun 2021 – Letter To A Young Philosopher: Should Philosophers Question Everything? What Is Truth?
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