Intro: Truth vs. THE Truth
This coming spring semester at Stanford, you will be able to sign up (if you have the prerequisite course or instructor’s permission) for PHI 182H: Truth. The catalog blurb reads, “Philosophical debates about the place in human lives and the value to human beings of truth and its pursuit. The nature and significance of truth-involving virtues such as accuracy, sincerity, and candor.”
Because it contains the words ACCURACY, SINCERITY, and CANDOR, the catalog blurb provides a point of departure for this blog on the crisis in truth America in general and science in particular face today: The verifiable accuracy of information.
You ought to sign up for that Stanford course, but hurry; registration is limited since discussion is the methodology. The lucky few will be able to talk to a philosopher (David Hills) about a subject that concerned not only the great ancient philosophers, but also the mundane and conflicted Governor of ancient Israel, Pontius Pilate, the guy who asked Jesus, “What is Truth?” Or did he ask, “What is THE truth?” There’s a difference.
“What is Truth?” can be asked in a vacuum. It needs no referent, no specifics. It’s a metaphysical question. “What is THE truth?” is the stuff of crime shows and science. “Where were you the night of the seventeenth when she was murdered? I want THE truth.” And in that context, the question demands real-world specifics and corroboration, say from one or more witnesses. In science, for example, those “witnesses are repeated falsifiable experiments in the tradition of Karl Popper’s dictum.
The difference between the two questions seems to me to be an encapsulation of Immanuel Kant’s rumination on analytic and synthetic judgment, which is a subject discussed in R. Lanier Anderson’s The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant’s Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics.* Pilate confronted a problem of everyday practical significance to the Hebrews on which he had to judge A truth: Was Jesus guilty of what his accusers said? The details were inherent in the problem. That other question about Truth itself, lent itself not to analytic, but to Kant’s definition of synthetic judgment.
Accuracy
If you are a regular visitor to this website, you know that I have written about the crisis in both science and the dissemination of information. Everything that we read or hear nowadays seems to be tinged by biases of one kind or another. That forces us to question almost all we hear or read about human behavior and science. The problem of accuracy as a corollary of the problem of truth (THE truth) is exacerbated by willingness, nay, eagerness of the media to further particular agendas and narratives. (Russia, Russia, Russia, for example, kids in cages, border agents whipping migrants, no Hunter Biden laptop, a fully functioning and energetic President Biden) with no regard for an analytic examination of a story for facts. One consequence of inaccuracy driven by propaganda is the destruction of lives, no better example of which was the travesty of false allegations of rape made by Crystal Mangum in 2006 against the Duke lacrosse team. The media ran with the story, essentially ruining lives in support of a liberal narrative. Now nearly two decades later, Mangum has publicly admitted she lied, but those young men, regardless of compensation by the University, had their life plans radically altered. As you know, once a story is broadcast, it becomes an underlying “truth.” No retraction has ever been adequate because Time’s arrow never reverses.
Has there ever been a time when biases played smaller roles in the dissemination of information? Probably, but that’s only because the dissemination was in fewer hands. Today, everyone is a potential disseminator.
Newtonian-like Thinking
One side of my brain believes in objectivity and Truth even as the other side recognizes the relative nature of reality and truths. The problem is that acquiring any truth is plagued by so many controllers with an agenda, as my recent blog on Laura Helmuth, the now former editor of Scientific American, documents. ** We’ll never know what articles Helmuth rejected not on the grounds of bad science, but rather on the grounds of perspectives that countered her beliefs.
The manipulation of science to further an ideological agenda has real and detrimental consequences that make truth elusive and illusive. Whereas it is necessary for editors and researchers to have some skin in the game to fulfill their roles, it is not necessary for them to jeopardize your skin by selective dissemination of information to protect a favored belief or perspective. For an inordinate number of publications readers now need need an SPF 100—no, not Sun Protection Factor, but Science Protection Factor. Otherwise, brains will be more than tinged; they will be singed. And I don’t have to tell many people that over the past 50 years we’ve all been burned by bad science repeated in defense of the status quo or an agenda.
Willing disseminators of flawed or biased studies then repeat their findings endlessly. That is how belief in climate change and in standing six feet apart to prevent the spread of disease worked their way into the public mind.
But it isn’t just popular science and knowledge that embodies this kind of intractable thinking. The so-called hard sciences, particularly physics, have also been subjected to biased selection. In theoretical physics string theory dominates, often to the exclusion of other theoretical frameworks, and certain physics research is deemed trivial in light of the “accepted” and espoused non trivial work.
What we all desire is some certainty, some demonstrable truth like Newton’s First and Second Laws. By personal experiment we can confirm the latter that moving a large mass is more difficult than moving a small mass, and we can track a spacecraft’s unimpeded drift until it encounters a slowing force like the gravity of some celestial object. We can’t fudge; we can’t change the principle of inertia just by saying “It ain’t so.”
“Just the Facts, Ma’am”
If I can guess correctly, you want from scientists something akin to comedian Stan Freberg’s parody of a line never spoken by Jack Webb in Dragnet: “Just the facts, ma’am.” You want to know that whatever science (and any media outlet) tells you is reliable information sans opinion: Whether this or that causes cancer, whether an asteroid will strike at 4:30 tomorrow morning, whether Vitamin D3 and zinc supplements will keep you safe from a resurgence of COVID, whether the laptop is Hunter Biden’s, and whether your seatbelts are worth wearing. “Just the facts, ma’am.” No beating round the bush, no fudging for a company selling tobacco or drugs, no lying about mild side effects when instances of death lie buried in the trial data, and no selection of scientific articles for a magazine based on a narrow ideology or popular belief.
In an affront to the parameters of methodology and truthfulness, some “scientists” nowadays aren’t above inventing or fudging data to support ideology, the status quo, and self-aggrandizement. The practice manifests itself in inventing hoaxes outright or in manipulating in a Machiavellian way to achieve a desired goal. But hoaxing is, of course, neither a new phenomenon nor one limited to “science.” The difference today lies in that proliferation of disseminators I mentioned above.
One of the most famous examples is Charles Dawson’s manufactured Piltdown Man, the “missing link” he presented to the world in 1912. His fossil wasn’t definitively dismissed as a hoax until 1953, meaning that it remained as an evolutionary icon for 41 years. Imagine the chagrin of all those paleoanthropology professors who included it in their lectures and authors who wasted time writing articles on the mishmash of human and orangutan. More importantly, the staying power of the hoax demonstrates that much that is supposed to be “science” can become unshakeable dogma and theory in the minds of those whose most fundamental obligation is to ceaselessly question and attempt to falsify.
Can you think of anything today that has become unshakeable dogma instead of science? Can you say, “Climate change is an existential threat”?
And now we can add to scientific hoaxes and data manipulation the supposed objectively acquired poll numbers that showed Kamala Harris with anything from a reasonable to a commanding lead in the run-up to the election. Bias overwhelms us in almost all phases of our lives, making Truth even more elusive than it has always been. In fact, Truth has become illusive. And ACCEPTABLE TRUTHS are even dangerous.
Don’t believe me? Take the United States Navy’s concern about climate change. Here’s a press release concerning the Biden Administration’s Secretary of the Navy:
NEWPORT, R.I. – Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro delivered remarks at the Forum at Newport, a conference about national security and climate change co-hosted by the Naval War College and the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, Sept. 5.
Nothing like a New England University hosting a conference in which climate change figures prominently. The Navy? Isn’t its job to defend the nation against military threats? Isn’t the Navy in conjunction with the other military branches supposed to be dedicated to breaking things and killing people? What’s the Secretary’s concern? Rising seas? Don’t ships float? But with no evidence that rising seas are an actual verifiable problem for the Navy or that cyclones are getting stronger, Del Toro addressed the problem as a serious naval concern, and he threw in mention of forest fires and droughts as germane to naval operations. Forest fires? Do we have fleets of wooden ships? I thought the Monitor and Merrimack ushered in an age of metal boats. The constant repetition of global climate change has become a truth in a human endeavor in which it is irrelevant. Sailors must now devote some of their energy and resources to combatting something that no one can show to be an actual threat without fudging or exaggerating data.
Procrustean Beds
I’m certainly not the first to recognize that contemporary United States is a house furnished in Procrustean beds. Whatever doesn’t fit must be made to fit either by coercion or cancellation. Typically, a small but vocal minority who troll people with whom they disagree makes today’s real world as unpleasant intellectually for free thinkers as the mythological world inhabited by Procrustes was unpleasant physically for travelers passing by his iron bed on Mount Korydalle.
If this were Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, we might see signs in universities reading Die Gleichförmigkeit uber Alles, so powerful is the pressure to conform not just socially snd politically, but also intellectually. Yet, today’s pressure to conform is sometimes subtle and unspoken; it is a pervasive but silent nod among the self-chosen elect who run and hire and distribute grant money for ideas they harbor like family pets. “Hard to believe, but Old Floppsy’s been with us for twenty years. Yes, our pet tortoise might be with us, well, how long do turtles live?” Yes, string theory has been with us for seven decades? How long can a “theory” live without a practical application, you know, like Newton’s action-reaction sending a rocket to the moon?
String theory is a tortoise. A malicious one, something like an attack dog without mitigating training. It’s been in the forefront of many university physics departments that won’t hire physicists who aren’t working on it. Conform, or take your advanced degree in physics elsewhere. Somewhere less ethereal. Some place where physics and engineering meet in a badly lighted factory with smells of grease, oil, and flammable materials. For string theorists, truth lies in the proliferation of versions of the theory.
So, There’s a Corollary Problem?
Choosing what in “science” is worth exploring and supporting on the basis of accepted dogmatic truths is bad for science for another reason: When science is hampered by preconceived notions (Understand, it will never be freed from axioms), it will not produce unexpected results, and, worry worry worry, it won’t discover—much if anything at all, leaving us wondering, “What really is true?” “What is THE truth?” We might be well advised to say, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
*Oxford. 2015. Oxford University Press.
** “Shuck My Corn and Call Me Doofus” (11/15/24)
This coming spring semester at Stanford, you will be able to sign up (if you have the prerequisite course or instructor’s permission) for PHI 182H: Truth. The catalog blurb reads, “Philosophical debates about the place in human lives and the value to human beings of truth and its pursuit. The nature and significance of truth-involving virtues such as accuracy, sincerity, and candor.”
Because it contains the words ACCURACY, SINCERITY, and CANDOR, the catalog blurb provides a point of departure for this blog on the crisis in truth America in general and science in particular face today: The verifiable accuracy of information.
You ought to sign up for that Stanford course, but hurry; registration is limited since discussion is the methodology. The lucky few will be able to talk to a philosopher (David Hills) about a subject that concerned not only the great ancient philosophers, but also the mundane and conflicted Governor of ancient Israel, Pontius Pilate, the guy who asked Jesus, “What is Truth?” Or did he ask, “What is THE truth?” There’s a difference.
“What is Truth?” can be asked in a vacuum. It needs no referent, no specifics. It’s a metaphysical question. “What is THE truth?” is the stuff of crime shows and science. “Where were you the night of the seventeenth when she was murdered? I want THE truth.” And in that context, the question demands real-world specifics and corroboration, say from one or more witnesses. In science, for example, those “witnesses are repeated falsifiable experiments in the tradition of Karl Popper’s dictum.
The difference between the two questions seems to me to be an encapsulation of Immanuel Kant’s rumination on analytic and synthetic judgment, which is a subject discussed in R. Lanier Anderson’s The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant’s Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics.* Pilate confronted a problem of everyday practical significance to the Hebrews on which he had to judge A truth: Was Jesus guilty of what his accusers said? The details were inherent in the problem. That other question about Truth itself, lent itself not to analytic, but to Kant’s definition of synthetic judgment.
Accuracy
If you are a regular visitor to this website, you know that I have written about the crisis in both science and the dissemination of information. Everything that we read or hear nowadays seems to be tinged by biases of one kind or another. That forces us to question almost all we hear or read about human behavior and science. The problem of accuracy as a corollary of the problem of truth (THE truth) is exacerbated by willingness, nay, eagerness of the media to further particular agendas and narratives. (Russia, Russia, Russia, for example, kids in cages, border agents whipping migrants, no Hunter Biden laptop, a fully functioning and energetic President Biden) with no regard for an analytic examination of a story for facts. One consequence of inaccuracy driven by propaganda is the destruction of lives, no better example of which was the travesty of false allegations of rape made by Crystal Mangum in 2006 against the Duke lacrosse team. The media ran with the story, essentially ruining lives in support of a liberal narrative. Now nearly two decades later, Mangum has publicly admitted she lied, but those young men, regardless of compensation by the University, had their life plans radically altered. As you know, once a story is broadcast, it becomes an underlying “truth.” No retraction has ever been adequate because Time’s arrow never reverses.
Has there ever been a time when biases played smaller roles in the dissemination of information? Probably, but that’s only because the dissemination was in fewer hands. Today, everyone is a potential disseminator.
Newtonian-like Thinking
One side of my brain believes in objectivity and Truth even as the other side recognizes the relative nature of reality and truths. The problem is that acquiring any truth is plagued by so many controllers with an agenda, as my recent blog on Laura Helmuth, the now former editor of Scientific American, documents. ** We’ll never know what articles Helmuth rejected not on the grounds of bad science, but rather on the grounds of perspectives that countered her beliefs.
The manipulation of science to further an ideological agenda has real and detrimental consequences that make truth elusive and illusive. Whereas it is necessary for editors and researchers to have some skin in the game to fulfill their roles, it is not necessary for them to jeopardize your skin by selective dissemination of information to protect a favored belief or perspective. For an inordinate number of publications readers now need need an SPF 100—no, not Sun Protection Factor, but Science Protection Factor. Otherwise, brains will be more than tinged; they will be singed. And I don’t have to tell many people that over the past 50 years we’ve all been burned by bad science repeated in defense of the status quo or an agenda.
Willing disseminators of flawed or biased studies then repeat their findings endlessly. That is how belief in climate change and in standing six feet apart to prevent the spread of disease worked their way into the public mind.
But it isn’t just popular science and knowledge that embodies this kind of intractable thinking. The so-called hard sciences, particularly physics, have also been subjected to biased selection. In theoretical physics string theory dominates, often to the exclusion of other theoretical frameworks, and certain physics research is deemed trivial in light of the “accepted” and espoused non trivial work.
What we all desire is some certainty, some demonstrable truth like Newton’s First and Second Laws. By personal experiment we can confirm the latter that moving a large mass is more difficult than moving a small mass, and we can track a spacecraft’s unimpeded drift until it encounters a slowing force like the gravity of some celestial object. We can’t fudge; we can’t change the principle of inertia just by saying “It ain’t so.”
“Just the Facts, Ma’am”
If I can guess correctly, you want from scientists something akin to comedian Stan Freberg’s parody of a line never spoken by Jack Webb in Dragnet: “Just the facts, ma’am.” You want to know that whatever science (and any media outlet) tells you is reliable information sans opinion: Whether this or that causes cancer, whether an asteroid will strike at 4:30 tomorrow morning, whether Vitamin D3 and zinc supplements will keep you safe from a resurgence of COVID, whether the laptop is Hunter Biden’s, and whether your seatbelts are worth wearing. “Just the facts, ma’am.” No beating round the bush, no fudging for a company selling tobacco or drugs, no lying about mild side effects when instances of death lie buried in the trial data, and no selection of scientific articles for a magazine based on a narrow ideology or popular belief.
In an affront to the parameters of methodology and truthfulness, some “scientists” nowadays aren’t above inventing or fudging data to support ideology, the status quo, and self-aggrandizement. The practice manifests itself in inventing hoaxes outright or in manipulating in a Machiavellian way to achieve a desired goal. But hoaxing is, of course, neither a new phenomenon nor one limited to “science.” The difference today lies in that proliferation of disseminators I mentioned above.
One of the most famous examples is Charles Dawson’s manufactured Piltdown Man, the “missing link” he presented to the world in 1912. His fossil wasn’t definitively dismissed as a hoax until 1953, meaning that it remained as an evolutionary icon for 41 years. Imagine the chagrin of all those paleoanthropology professors who included it in their lectures and authors who wasted time writing articles on the mishmash of human and orangutan. More importantly, the staying power of the hoax demonstrates that much that is supposed to be “science” can become unshakeable dogma and theory in the minds of those whose most fundamental obligation is to ceaselessly question and attempt to falsify.
Can you think of anything today that has become unshakeable dogma instead of science? Can you say, “Climate change is an existential threat”?
And now we can add to scientific hoaxes and data manipulation the supposed objectively acquired poll numbers that showed Kamala Harris with anything from a reasonable to a commanding lead in the run-up to the election. Bias overwhelms us in almost all phases of our lives, making Truth even more elusive than it has always been. In fact, Truth has become illusive. And ACCEPTABLE TRUTHS are even dangerous.
Don’t believe me? Take the United States Navy’s concern about climate change. Here’s a press release concerning the Biden Administration’s Secretary of the Navy:
NEWPORT, R.I. – Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro delivered remarks at the Forum at Newport, a conference about national security and climate change co-hosted by the Naval War College and the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, Sept. 5.
Nothing like a New England University hosting a conference in which climate change figures prominently. The Navy? Isn’t its job to defend the nation against military threats? Isn’t the Navy in conjunction with the other military branches supposed to be dedicated to breaking things and killing people? What’s the Secretary’s concern? Rising seas? Don’t ships float? But with no evidence that rising seas are an actual verifiable problem for the Navy or that cyclones are getting stronger, Del Toro addressed the problem as a serious naval concern, and he threw in mention of forest fires and droughts as germane to naval operations. Forest fires? Do we have fleets of wooden ships? I thought the Monitor and Merrimack ushered in an age of metal boats. The constant repetition of global climate change has become a truth in a human endeavor in which it is irrelevant. Sailors must now devote some of their energy and resources to combatting something that no one can show to be an actual threat without fudging or exaggerating data.
Procrustean Beds
I’m certainly not the first to recognize that contemporary United States is a house furnished in Procrustean beds. Whatever doesn’t fit must be made to fit either by coercion or cancellation. Typically, a small but vocal minority who troll people with whom they disagree makes today’s real world as unpleasant intellectually for free thinkers as the mythological world inhabited by Procrustes was unpleasant physically for travelers passing by his iron bed on Mount Korydalle.
If this were Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, we might see signs in universities reading Die Gleichförmigkeit uber Alles, so powerful is the pressure to conform not just socially snd politically, but also intellectually. Yet, today’s pressure to conform is sometimes subtle and unspoken; it is a pervasive but silent nod among the self-chosen elect who run and hire and distribute grant money for ideas they harbor like family pets. “Hard to believe, but Old Floppsy’s been with us for twenty years. Yes, our pet tortoise might be with us, well, how long do turtles live?” Yes, string theory has been with us for seven decades? How long can a “theory” live without a practical application, you know, like Newton’s action-reaction sending a rocket to the moon?
String theory is a tortoise. A malicious one, something like an attack dog without mitigating training. It’s been in the forefront of many university physics departments that won’t hire physicists who aren’t working on it. Conform, or take your advanced degree in physics elsewhere. Somewhere less ethereal. Some place where physics and engineering meet in a badly lighted factory with smells of grease, oil, and flammable materials. For string theorists, truth lies in the proliferation of versions of the theory.
So, There’s a Corollary Problem?
Choosing what in “science” is worth exploring and supporting on the basis of accepted dogmatic truths is bad for science for another reason: When science is hampered by preconceived notions (Understand, it will never be freed from axioms), it will not produce unexpected results, and, worry worry worry, it won’t discover—much if anything at all, leaving us wondering, “What really is true?” “What is THE truth?” We might be well advised to say, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
*Oxford. 2015. Oxford University Press.
** “Shuck My Corn and Call Me Doofus” (11/15/24)
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