Is the Search for Truth a Game?

The terrors beyond our cognitive sandboxes

Have you noticed how gameshow trivia mixes up the truth with getting an answer “correct”?

If the question is whether a war happened in one year rather than another, and a contestant guesses the wrong year, her answer is supposed to be false. Truth in that context is a game, and both the questions and their answers are fictive in that they’re assigned by the show’s producers and researchers. The arbiter isn’t the world’s reality, but the show’s judges.

Only under such conditions could truth and falsity be equated with rightness and wrongness, or with correctness and incorrectness because the answers would be stipulated: the truth becomes the right answer as determined by the researchers and judges. And the contestants submit to that arrangement by suspending their independent experience and judgment for the sake of winning a prize.

Is the ordinary search for truth a game?

We might wonder, then, how a search for truth in the real world would differ from that gameshow context. If I say, “The daytime sky is blue,” that statement is supposed to be true rather than false. But is that truth independent of any comparable stipulation? Is the statement’s truth some magical objective relation between the statement and a fact?

The statement is made up of symbols that have meanings, including many connotations. We must stipulate, then, the conventional definition of the words “daytime,” “sky,” and so on, in which case those social conventions seem to act like the stipulations of the gameshow’s researchers and judges after all.

Thus, uttering even a plain statement of empirical fact in ordinary discussion is game-like. In other words, there’s no private language, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said. Stating the truth occurs in a social context, and that context always seems to rest on stipulations, conventions, suspensions of disbelief, and acts of faith.

Specifically, we suspend our doubt about the hubris of starting up a cognitive game despite life’s existential stakes. We may decide to play a game for fun, and we “play along” with the rules to achieve that purpose. But the fun is liable to end as soon as you start to think philosophically about the rules’ mere conventional and therefore arbitrary nature.

Even when I say, then, that the sky is blue, you’ll interpret the statement not just as factual or as aligning somehow with reality, but as right or correct. It’s as though all of society were a gameshow, and social conventions dictate which statements are correct and which are beyond the pale. Truth in the sense of correctness is a game-like property. The correctness is relative to social norms that dictate the relevant conceptions behind the symbols used in ordinary language. Without those stipulations, we have ambiguity and uncertainty.

Mind you, we’d like to say that a statement may be objectively true or false regardless of our uncertainty. But this is to say that there’s a semantic assignment which makes the statement true, regardless of how we feel about it. In that case, every false statement can be made true and every true one made false. Just reinterpret the statement’s meaning with a nonstandard semantic evaluation.

For example, is it true or false that Jesus Christ is dead? The answer is that he’s dead if we interpret death in physical terms, but if we reinterpret them in spiritual ones, the correct answer, according to Christians, is that Jesus is still alive.

Rhetoricians, obscurantists, salespeople, politicians, and lawyers are experts at never seeming to lose an argument because they frequently resort to such sophistry. They avoid unpleasant facts or emphasize favourable possibilities by sticking to their talking points and by equivocating on their key terms.

Once again, the search for truth becomes a game, and the question is whether all the players are playing by the same set of rules. The deviant interlocutor avoids conventional meanings in pursuit of a private agenda, which suggests perhaps that there are private languages after all. So-called narcissistic “bullshitters” such as Donald Trump, who aren’t interested in conventional assessments of the facts seem to be speaking under a condition of solipsism. Their private world is the only one that matters to them, and they only seem superficially to accept conventional meanings long enough to con their victims.

Is science a game?

Setting aside the messiness of natural language, we might wonder about the status of scientific truth. If we speak an artificial, highly precise language such as mathematics or the logic of theoretical physics, is there a well-understood sense in which our statements are empirically true or false without being merely correct or incorrect, as in right or wrong relative to game-like stipulations?

We might think, for instance, that scientific models include structural relationships between the equations which reflect the structure of some real system or process in nature. In that case, as the early Wittgenstein said, truth would be a kind of abstract similarity or pictorial relation.

The problem is that there’s nothing objectively special about any such similarity between a set of symbols and an arrangement of facts. Physically, even the symbols of theoretical physics are just squiggles on a chalkboard or vibrations of air molecules. No such squiggles or vibrations could hope to mirror natural facts. Instead, at best, the symbols drastically simplify the facts.

A scientific model would thus be comparable to a caricature of a person’s face. There’s some structural similarity between them, rather than identity as in a mirroring relation. But precisely because the similarity is necessarily imperfect, due to the simplifications, the model would be both true and false. A cartoon drawing of Albert Einstein may look like him in certain respects but not in others, because the artist leaves out some details. The resemblance is imperfect, and even in a hyper-realistic drawing, the resemblance is only two-dimensional.

If empirical truth is a matter of similarity, the ideal would seem to be to establish an identity, as in a duplication of the fact. Einstein’s face would be the fact in question, and the ideal representation would be a perfect duplication of that face. So, you’d need a second Einstein or else the representation would simplify due to practical limitations, and that imperfect representation would be strictly false or only partially true. An accidental representation of Einstein’s face on burnt toast would be just as partially true.

Also, the partial truth would evaporate upon further scrutiny. The image might look like Einstein from a certain angle and distance but change the perspective or indeed the eyes of the perceiver, and the similarity vanishes.

Which representations count as intended and which as similar enough to the original would once again be a judgment call. We’d need something like a referee, such as the judge who decides which scientific article to publish in a prestigious journal, and that sociality would introduce a game-like atmosphere to the empirical inquiry.

Moreover, while the relations between artificial symbols allow for rigorous precision, they’re game-like, too, because they’re detached from intuitions and from our capacity for understanding. Scientists understand what they’re talking about only when they translate the artificial language into a natural one and use analogies to simplify the exotic or abstract scientific concepts.

The abstractions themselves proceed from axioms and rules of inference which are explicitly stipulative and therefore game-like, meaning that the scientific or mathematical inferences are correct or incorrect in the sense of cohering or not with the rest of the model. Those predictions may prove useful in the real world, in which case we say the model passes an empirical test. But scientists typically demur from speaking of that kind of model as “True” in a philosophical sense. They prefer to speak pragmatically and tentatively about the model’s utility because scientists know better than anyone the artificial language’s arbitrariness.

Mental maps and postmodern doubts

Our ordinary concepts, too, are models that simplify phenomena. The relations between our thoughts or neurons somehow imperfectly map what we expect to find in the world. We make predictions from those mental maps, and we get them “right” when we’re pleased with the results. But are any of our thoughts objectively true without being subject to a game-like suspension of disbelief in the audacity that drives the positing of rules?

Our worldview is largely the product of our upbringing, which means our modes of interpretation depend in complex ways on the judgment calls of our parents or of our guardian figures who act as referees. Even if we outgrow those formative experiences, we typically find new role models and authoritative sources to whom we defer. Is there an objectively best semantic referee or source of data? Of course not. Some are better than others in that they’re useful or counterproductive to achieving certain goals.

The very act of thinking is thus part of a social game, and we can be pragmatic in playing our roles only because of underlying leaps of faith in the whole enterprise. We may try to improve our sources of information, searching for better authors to read or teachers to follow, but that assessment is largely a matter of trust, just as we must trust the wisdom of the gameshow judges who decide which questions to ask, or which simplified answer counts as correct. Some authorities may have an objective track record of success, but those results will themselves be subject to doubt, in which case we need a fact checker to check the fact checker.

The postmodern condition is that we no longer trust so automatically in our authorities. Technological advances have eliminated too many intermediaries, opening the game for too many players to step onto the field, so the array of potential sources and judges is overwhelming. Affirming your confidence in any of them is like cutting the Gordian knot.

But is any thought objectively true or false, regardless of our postmodern doubts? Are we only falsely humble when we doubt each other as we’re swarmed by so much information in cyberspace? Or does the plurality of judges prove that truth is only an illusion, an act of faith in some set of rules that stipulates the correctness of certain answers while disqualifying others?

We used to have an all-knowing judge in the sky to settle such disputes. The truth was whatever God says it is, and the universe was an artifact supporting the game God wanted us to play. With no such divine arbiter, other games came to the fore. But is there a search for truth that isn’t just a game?

The games behind the naïve conception of truth

We might think that truth is just the facticity of some sentences or thoughts. Empiricist philosophers would explain truth with the following schema:

• The sentence “The sky is blue” is true if and only if the sky is blue.

Thus, saying that the quoted part is true adds nothing to that sentence’s content besides just stating that content, namely that the sky is blue. Truth is just the facticity of the situation to which a statement refers.

But that deflationary account of truth is quite false.

First, the biconditional relationship between the schema’s left and right sides is too strong. The truth of statements has to do with what speakers think and with how they communicate. The facts themselves don’t always depend on those subjective conditions. The deflationist would have to say that if the sky is blue, then “The sky is blue” is true. But if there were no living things in the universe, the sky above this planet might be blue (during the day), and there would be no statements such as “The sky is blue” to be either true or false.

The deflationist might insist that the fact of the sky’s colour would nevertheless make the statement true in a possible world. But that appeal still injects anthropocentrism into the theory of truth and into the nature of objective facts. The fact of the sky’s nature need have nothing to do with the conditions that observers would bring to bear, yet the deflationist’s schema says that the fact suffices for the truth of the relevant statement. On the contrary, an objective fact could be what it is, independent of the doings of observers and thus independent of the issuing of statements for the sake of speaking the truth.

Then again, there’s a second problem which arises when we note the subjective meanings and categories at play. Would the sky be blue even if there were no living things in the universe? Or is blueness a relational property that holds only when light interacts with receptors in the eyes of certain organisms? And is the notion of the sky observer-dependent, too, in that it implies an upward and thus an anthropocentric viewpoint?

If natural language categories are riddled with such human-centered affordances and presumptions, there must be much more going on with truth than what’s stated in such deflationary, “disquotational” theories (as philosophers call them). As I said earlier, there would be the semantic conventions that set the social context and that turn the search for truth into a game. The truth of “The sky is blue” becomes a matter of mere correctness, loaded as the statement is in our favour.

Truth becomes a kind of adequacy, in the sense of being something that’s fully sufficient, suited, or fit (often for a specific purpose), and as is assumed in the more expansive, correspondence theory of truth. The root meaning of “adequate” is that of being matched. Thus, true statements are supposed to agree with the facts. But that agreement is prearranged by the parochiality of our terms’ meanings or by the purpose of acquiring knowledge.

Of course, we can still use natural language to make false statements such as “The sky is green.” But even here, we’d be talking about what Immanuel Kant called “phenomena,” about things like the sky or the colour green. We’d be mixing things up in the case of calling the sky green since the sky is blue, but even our erroneous intuitive talk would be like playing a game on a gameboard. We’d be talking about the world as we naively perceive and conceive of it, not as it really is.

Friedrich Nietzsche makes a similar point in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” when he says, ‘When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding “truth” within the realm of reason.’

However, it’s not just the realm of reason in which we hide things where we know we can find them. It’s the realm of all the conditions of human experience, of all that we take for granted in our inquiries and our discourses. And my point here is that that human realm is governed by rules which make our normal endeavours, including our naïve talk of truth game-like.

The existential limbo beyond all games

Again, I ask whether there’s a search for truth which isn’t just a game.

I think there is. What we discover when we step off of every gameboard and confront reality directly is an absurd state of monstrousness. No symbols fully capture the eeriness of that encounter, but we can sense the alienness of the wilderness, the ultimate irrelevance of all our questions and answers, and the relative small-mindedness of our social games.

In short, the reckoning with our existential condition is no mere game, and that’s only because the results are so disturbing. You know you’re playing a game when the outcome’s a foregone conclusion. The rules dictate which moves are winning and which are out of bounds, and we decide to play by the rules because we trust in the endeavour for some personal or social reason.

We stop playing games when we recognize that the rules are merely arbitrary or are stipulated to suit our needs and interests to which the rest of the universe is indifferent. When we appreciate the overriding absurdity, the impudence of our maps and inquiries, and the inevitability of our engulfment by nature’s inhumanity, we occupy a terrifying, potentially transhuman limbo.

It’s as though we move all our chess pieces to the edge of the gameboard or we step onto the border that marks the edge of the tennis or basketball court. In that case we’re neither playing nor not playing. We’re like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man who’s stuck in a mode of relentless contemplation, unable to act with resolution because he’s outgrown the capacity for naïve self-confidence. We’re like deer caught in the headlights, squaring off against the godless wilderness, alienated from both reality and the games we play.

We can only imagine what nongames a fully self-aware species might practice.