According to the Correspondence
Theory of Truth, our statements are true if they measure up to reality and
describe it accurately, and false if they do not. However, it is difficult to
know whether statements do correspond accurately or not, especially since it
can be argued that human beings do not have direct access to reality – our
experience of reality is limited, and it is mediated through our Ways of
Knowing, and it is filtered by our minds. Moreover, reality seems to be far
more complex that our understanding can be.
In the search for knowledge we
must be careful to check whether our beliefs are well justified with evidence
or not. Attaining the truth can be difficult, as sometimes we can have a lot of
evidence for a belief, but in the end we may discover that the belief is not
true after all. Certain tests can be applied in order to help us to make a
judgement about whether a belief is true or not, or at least, whether it is
likely to be true or not. Some tests are more successful and reliable than
others, and it may often be the case that more than one test is needed to see
whether something is true or not.
Is it coherent?
Here we are using Reasoning (one of our ToK Ways of
Knowing) to decide whether a claimed truth actually makes any sense at all. For
something to be coherent means that it adds up and all fits together. There are
two main ways in which something can be incoherent. The first is that it can be
contradictory, for example, according to the USA’s constitution all men are
created equal by the God and all have rights to life, liberty, and happiness,
and yet at the same time it allowed slavery meaning that legally many of its
citizens were denied liberty, could be executed for disobedience, didn’t own
their own lives, and were condemned to unhappiness. This is a direct
contradiction which was thankfully rectified.
The second main way for a
perspective to be incoherent is if it doesn’t support itself and seems to be
full of holes and unexplained gaps, for example, imagine that someone said
“Everyone wants to be happy so I think we need to teach everyone lots of
languages at school.” This is an incoherent statement because it gives no
indication of why the two should be linked in any way; why and how does
learning languages make anyone happy?
Without support and structure the argument has no coherence at all. Coherence
plays a key role in areas of knowledge such as Mathematics, where the essential
guiding principle is that something is true so long as it is not self-contradictory.
A big question when it comes to
coherence is “does this claim sit well with currently believed theories?” Let’s
suppose that someone tells me that they have done a dance and that this has
caused it to rain. My response may well be “that’s ridiculous, no one can
control the weather!” I am rejecting the person’s claim because it does not fit
in with the other beliefs that I already hold, which are that weather is a complex
system which a human being can have almost no impact on – for example, waving a
fan around may well cause a small current of air, but it has not got the
strength to cause a hurricane. Since the claim contradicts what I already
believe, and doesn’t fit in to my picture of the world, I am entitled to reject
it. Julian Baggini gives the
following example: suppose a woman called Dhara has lived all of her life in a
desert and has only ever seen water in its liquid form. After a two year
absence, the woman’s cousin reappears for her travels, and brings bold tales of
places where the water gets so cold that it turns solid like a stone. Although
the cousin is actually stating something that is true, Dhara has no reason to
believe him, the very idea of water turning solid goes against everything that
she currently believes and all her experiences with water. Therefore, surely it
is reasonable for her to reject her cousin’s bold stories, just as it would be
reasonable for her to reject tall tales about flying horses, magical healing
spells, and fire breathing dragons?[1]
Unfortunately, sometimes our
picture of the world may be incorrect, which can lead to us rejecting new found
truths because they do not fit in with old false beliefs. Until modern times
many people believed that the Earth was only around 6,000 years old having been
created by God. However, geological studies suggested that the Earth was much
older: sedimentary rocks such as chalk or slate take thousands of years to
accumulate and build up, and yet there are whole mountains of them, mountains
which often have fossilised fish in their rocks. This geological evidence
strongly suggested that the contents of the world must have taken hundreds of
millions of years to become the way they are, and therefore that the Earth was
not a mere 6,000 years old. Because of the pre-existing beliefs in the stories
of the Bible, many people rejected these new scientific discoveries, and still
reject them today, for example, people tried to explain dinosaur bones as
creatures wiped out by the Great Flood of Noah, or as being put there by God to
test our faith in his revelations. When confronted with a new piece of evidence
which contradicts your pre-existing beliefs it might not always be a good idea
to reject the new belief as unlikely or impossible, but instead, to double
check your initial presuppositions for it may instead be these that are at
fault.
One problem with the coherence
test is that two or more entirely different explanations for something can each
be perfectly coherent – they can both make sense. Imagine that Alf is a
scientist who is working on a proof that mobile phone masts cause illnesses.
After an argument with a phone company executive Alf meets with a series of
unfortunate events, his funding is halved, his laptop is stolen, there is a
fire in his laboratory, his pen drive goes missing, and finally he nearly dies
after being run off the road by a black Mercedes with tinted windows. Alf comes
to the conclusion that the mobile phone company are trying to stop him from
discovering the truth, and that his life is at risk, so he turns to his friend
Bert for help. Bert doesn’t believe Alf at all, arguing that the funding has
been cut because the university’s finances are being squeezed, and that the
laptop was expensive and was probably just stolen by an average criminal, and that
fires and car crashes happen all the time to lots of people. In short, Alf has
simply had some rotten luck and the events are unconnected. In despair Alf
declares “Oh no! They’ve got to you too!” and makes a quick exit. Alf believes
that a conspiracy is afoot, whereas Bert thinks it is just a series of
unfortunate events. Both perspectives are perfectly coherent, each is equally
possible of being the truth, after all, conspiracies do on occasion occur. If
both stories are coherent then it seems that coherence by itself is not enough
to tell us which is true, and the same often applies in arguments about topics
such as science and history where more than one explanation is possible for the
same phenomena.
Does it correspond to observed data?
Here the idea is to use Perception
(another Way of Knowing) to check that something is true. As the saying goes “seeing is
believing.” If you want to know what
caused the death of a particular animal (say a dog) you need to dissect its
body to look for causes of death, things which may be present in the dog’s body
which are not found on a healthy dog, such as a cancerous growth or a wound. If
you want to know how many pupils there are in a school you need to count them.
If you want to know how fast a particular aeroplane can go you need to get
someone to fly it to its maximum capacity and use some means of measuring to
see its speed.
Use of observation is primarily
how we test theories in science. The basic scientific method claims that first
we observe that certain events occur, and we notice patterns in these events.
Following this we make generalisations about these events, which we call
hypotheses, e.g. ‘water always boils at 100 degrees.’ Then we carry out
repeated testing to see if these hypotheses hold true, and if they do then we
might call them laws of nature, facts about how the world operates. Of course, this
is just a simplification and science is much more complex than I have described,
but it is enough to show the value and importance of correspondence to observations.
Much of what we believe or know is based on observation, from our awareness of
human anatomy to our understanding of the motions of the planets, although we
must often turn to Reasoning in order to make sense of what has been seen.
A key problem with correspondence
to observations is that you can’t always trust what you see: there can be
hallucinations, and observable data can mislead us and not show the truth, for
example, when a straw appears to be bent in a glass of water. However, some
would argue that there are ways around these problems; when two pieces of
evidence contradict each other we must use Reason to decide which evidence is
best and to come up with explanations for the observed differences in results,
e.g. the law of refraction of light.
Is it likely?
We are often faced with a
multitude of possibilities as to how an event came about and we look for
possible explanations. But some of these explanations may seem more likely to
be true than others. For example, if a student arrives with no homework they
may well try to give an explanation for this which gets them out of trouble for
them not doing their work. If a pupil says that they were doing their homework
on the train on the way home last night, and that they left it on the train by
mistake, then this seems like a plausible explanation, but we might also think
it’s more likely that they just haven’t done it and have made the story up.
People claim that ghosts, aliens,
and even angels exist, and what better evidence can one provide than one’s own
senses – seeing is believing, as they say. But many people would ask, what’s
more likely, that a person has genuinely seen an angel, or that they were
hallucinating, under the influence of mind bending chemicals, or just
drunk? We use notions of probability to
work out what we think is true all the time, even if we are not particularly
accurate at calculating probabilities and tend to guesstimate instead. For example, when it comes to the 1969 moon
landings we might ask “what’s more likely, that the USA faked it all and
managed to get thousands of people working for NASA to lie, as well as fooling
the USSR and all its spies, or that it actually happened?”
A classic example of the ‘is it
likely?’ test for truth is Ockham’s
Razor. The philosopher William of Ockham said that “entities are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity.”[2] What this essentially means is that the
simplest explanation is probably the one that is true, for example, if you hear
loud music coming from your next door neighbour’s house it is far more likely that
they have one stereo on very loudly, rather than several stereos on each at a
medium volume, each playing the same CD in perfect synchronisation. However, at
best this test can only be a guess, and quite often we don’t know the
probability involved: we can say there is a 1 in 36 chance of getting a double
1 when rolling two dice, but we can’t say what the chances are that ghosts
exist, or that someone has hallucinated rather than seen an angel. Moreover,
just because something is unlikely does not mean that it is impossible and
therefore untrue.
Does it work / is it practical?
Newton’s laws of motion were
groundbreaking when he wrote them, however, they have now been shown to be
false. There are times when calculating the motion of objects using Newtonian
physics will give the wrong answer, for example, Newton’s physics can explain
most of how the planets move, except that the planet Venus does not move quite
in the way that Newtonian physics says it should. For a long time its movements
were a mystery, and it was thought that there must be another planet, as yet
undiscovered, which was causing Venus to move strangely due to its gravity. Astronomers
called this undiscovered theoretical planet ‘Vulcan’ and spent years trying to
find it. However, Einstein’s physics, centred around his theory of relativity,
were able to explain the movements of the planets: when large objects are
moving fast unusual things can happen meaning they move in ways which seem
totally foreign from a Newtonian perspective. Einstein’s physics are correct,
Newton’s were wrong. But still, the inaccuracy is so small when applied to the
slow moving objects of ordinary life as to not be worth worrying about, and
Newtonian physics are easier to calculate with, therefore, Newtonian physics
are still used in engineering, and were even able to send men to the moon. In
this sense Newton’s physics are still generally regarded as true because they
produce good results. Newtonian physics are practical, and thus in one sense
are true. We call them true out of pragmatism.
The heart of pragmatism is that if something works then you can stick with it.
A good example of pragmatic
reasoning is the approach to Climate Change that many people take. It is
arguable that we do not yet know whether climate change is being caused by
human activity or not, but that if we wait around for the evidence it could
already be too late. What we have to decide is whether to do anything about
climate change just in case. We have two options: do nothing, or do something.
If we do nothing and it turns out that climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t
our fault, then we’ve got a good result of continued economic growth. But if we
do nothing and climate change is real we are in deep trouble: countries will
flood or turn to desert, resources will be scare, there will be mass migration,
more wars, prices will soar, health issues will multiply, and so on. Now let’s
imagine that we decide to take action; it may turn out that climate change
isn’t real, in which case economic growth has been stunted, quality of life and
employment will be lower; but if climate change is real and we take action then
we can help to avoid the worst effects of it mentioned above. So does it not
seem, in practical terms, that the wisest thing to do is treat climate change
as if it were true, because that way we avoid the worst consequences and have a
chance for the best? This is pragmatism – after all, can we really rely on the
‘carry on as normal and some solution will present itself’ approach? It doesn’t seem very pragmatic, just like
vain hope!
A similar question is, “is it
useful?”
Some people may say that if something is not useful then it is not
important. For example, billions of pounds have been spent on the Large Hadron
Collider in Switzerland to discover interesting information about elementary
particles. Some will argue that since this knowledge isn’t really useful, and
since there are more pressing concerns in the world such as war and hunger, we
should not be spending all that much money on it. However, whilst this may be a
good argument to say we shouldn’t bother doing it (although there are good
arguments to the contrary) it is not a good argument to say we should regard
that research as false.
Conclusion
Certainty as to what is true and
what is false are not always easy to obtain because there are many potential
obstacles to knowledge: our senses can be deceived and we can misinterpret what
we see, our view on the world can be skewed by upbringing or bias, and we
cannot always be sure that the media present us with the complete truth.
However, by utilising the various tests for truth it is possible to come closer
to certainty as to what is true and what is not.
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