On The Margins

Thursday December 16, 2004

[ Philosophy ] More on "Truth"

Goeff Arnold has written a short essay on a discussion I seem to have started with my note on Popper, sharing some of his ideas.

I found myself writing a comment in response to his, and decided, because of its length, that it was more practical to just say it here.

In his comments, Geoff asks: When faced with a claim that "proposition X is true", I want to know in what sense the claim is made. Is X a statement in some formal closed system, so that truth is essentially analytical? Are you claiming correspondence truth to some real world? Etcetera.

These are deep questions, the answers to which will require a far longer dialog, and frankly I may not be able to produce any satisfactory answers at the end.

In mathematics, Alfred Tarski answers Geoff's first question. In formal terms, it's also given in Joseph Shoenfield's book on mathematical logic. However, science is a different matter. Although certain parts of mathematics are used in science (and other parts, perhaps, in art, religion or other activities), there's a distinction between science as an activity and mathematics (and logic) as a dicovery of abstract structures of formal languages and models.

Science builds, in a large part, on induction, ultimately based on experiments and conceptual frameworks. To elucidate that such conceptual frameworks are somewhat arbitrary, I recommended Plato's classic dialog Timaeus, in my comment to Geoff's note.

Science (and much of human reasoning for that matter) moves through associations, a la David Hume. The significance of this, of course, is only related to its logical structure. Hume wanted to say that there's no bottom or foundation for the certainty drawn from such associations and inductions. Just because Sun, the star, has risen every day, does not mean it will rise the next (my physicist friend from Sorbonne always hated this example), even if I've deployed Newtonian and other explanatory frameworks and tools to explain how it does rise. Ultimately, in science, all "what" questions end up getting a "how" explanation. That may satisfy some but doesn't satisfy every one of us. Such reasoning may provide assurances but it does not provide certainty either at the micro or macro level. (See my earlier note on Popper to see what I mean by micro and macro levels of uncertainty.)

Hume's discovery was simple enough but Popper can be read to be simply adding that to call a constellation of activities science, and to do so in some honest way, i.e. in a way that distinguishes it from other human activities such as art or religion, must include with it a commitment to accept that science is structurally and inherently refutable. This is not simply about micro-refutability, i.e. falsifiability along the lines of the first clause of the statement Geoff quotes from Bertrand Russell. (The remaining clauses of Russell's statement fit very well, not only with Russell's positivism but also with his utilitarian attitude towards reasoning and choice, but that's a different discussion.)

To repeat what I said in my earlier note, if science needs to remain refutable, it cannot address some important questions, such as: Why is there anything at all when there can be nothing? In fact, it cannot address any question regarding existence. Now, some may argue that such questions have no value (again a utilitarian argument) but the fact remains that for many human beings (not to mention many great philosophers), existential questions remain the most important questions of life.

2004-12-16 11:49:29.0 -- Comments [6] ; Permalink ; Trackback.