Why We Should Reject the Conceit of “Objective Truth”

Tracking, mapping, understanding, and life’s role in the greater evolution of nonlife

Commonsense tells us that philosophers are merely impudent in questioning the standard conception of truth.

Whether they’re skeptics, idealists, or pragmatists, their insistence that there isn’t a real world of facts out there that we can make true or false statements about seems like an extravagant case of self-deception. Of course, statements can be true in lining up with the facts!

How else, for example, could NASA have first landed astronauts on the moon in 1969? How much knowledge must scientists, engineers, and administrators have had to succeed in that mission? Their success is a fact since astronauts walked on the moon. That means the process of getting to that point was a fact, too, and expert knowledge must have been part of that process. And you can’t have knowledge without accurate beliefs which agree with some facts.

Therefore, doubts about whether there’s such a thing as the plain truth are belied by the fact that there’s evidently success or failure in life. We tend to succeed when we know what we’re doing, which means our beliefs can line up with the facts. And that alignment we call “truth.”

But it turns out things aren’t so straightforward.

Tracking and Understanding

To see why, we need to distinguish between tracking something and understanding it. Tracking is largely a perceptual matter of labeling something in the environment so that whenever that thing appears, so does your label. Our primary labels are our mental representations such as our concepts, which act like mental baskets in which we put instances of a type, such as cats or dogs, or apples or oranges, to organize our thoughts.

But to get a sense of how tracking works, notice how wildlife conservationists track the animals they study. They fasten a tracking device to the animal, such as a collar around its neck, so that wherever the animal goes, the tracker pings the receiver. The conservationist gives the animal a name or a number and tracks its whereabouts in the wild.

There is indeed an improbable correspondence in that act of tracking. Ordinarily, things are only naturally or randomly related to each other. Wind might happen to blow a stone onto another stone, but stones don’t generally hop onto each other by themselves. For the label “squirrel” to pop up usually whenever animals of that species are around, and for that label never to be misused to relate, say, to whales or to wheelbarrows, the labeller must be motivated to track things in its environment.

As with the wind and the rocks, there’s an evolutionary process that produced the tracking ability. Animals evolved to perceive and to track dangers and opportunities. Tracking, or more broadly recognizing the importance of some things that are perceived is an elementary capacity of organisms. Even single-celled organisms have primitive means of keeping track of what’s out there to help them navigate, eat, and avoid dangers.

A squirrel, for example, learns to recognize the danger presented by what we would call a car barreling down the road. The squirrel associates the car’s noise, the approaching blob in its visual field, and perhaps the vibrations in the ground with this danger. Squirrels know that moving cars are dangerous, so they prefer not to cross the road when cars are moving towards them. But of course, the squirrel lacks the human concepts “car” and “road.”

And this is where tracking and understanding come apart.

Evidently, the squirrel can track cars without understanding what they really are. To a squirrel, a car is a fast-moving, dangerous blob, and the road is just flat ground. But to a human, cars are vehicles driven by people, and roads are part of civilization and of the progressive enterprise. The human concepts in this case are far higher in resolution, as it were, than the squirrel’s. As for expertise in climbing trees or in gathering nuts, the squirrel may have concepts that humans lack, or at least richer concepts in those fields.

We can say, then, that perceiving, tracking, and mapping the environment are needed for a kind of knowledge, namely know-how.

If you’re a squirrel, you can’t know how to safely move about in human-dominated areas unless you can track threats in your environment such as roads and cars. And if you’re NASA, you can’t land a person on the moon unless you can keep track of a million things: how oxygen is normally confined to Earth, how much oxygen humans nevertheless require to breathe, how much fuel the space shuttle would require to escape the planet’s gravity, how gravity affects things in outer space according to Newton’s laws, and so on.

Rudimentary Mapping

What is it, then, not just to keep track of things, and perhaps even to master the environment by mapping it exhaustively — and thus to know how to get what you want — but to understand what those mapped things are?

Is there really much truth in the squirrel’s tracking of cars on the road when the squirrel hasn’t the foggiest notion of what cars and roads really are? When the squirrel sees a car and thinks “Blort,” which is my human label for the squirrel’s concept of a car, that squirrel-thought aligns with the facts in that “Blort” pops into the squirrel’s head only when certain dangers seem to be present. Mainly when large, loud, fast-moving things that can flatten a squirrel register in the squirrel’s perceptual field does the squirrel think “Blort,” and act accordingly.

Mind you, squirrels are restless and often err on the side of caution. Indeed, because there are so many dangers in the environment for squirrels, it pays for them to overestimate threats, which means their tracking ability is more like a lottery than a kind of knowledge based on genuine understanding. A squirrel might think “Blort” not just when cars are around but when the slightest hint of a possible threat presents itself, which means the squirrel can’t distinguish cars from other large, fast, loud blobs.

If we concede, though, that the squirrel has some minimal understanding of cars, that understanding must pale compared to human understanding of them. Perhaps, then, our understanding of everything from cars to squirrels, to gravity, to astronauts on the moon is dwarfed in turn by even a higher order of understanding. Perhaps we’ll evolve one day into transhumans and look back at our present understanding as being roughly as meager as the squirrel’s.

What’s the difference between these levels of understanding? What’s added to tracking which even a computer’s sensors could accomplish, to support genuine understanding and the kind of truth in which we’re interested?

We want to say that “Astronauts walked on the moon” is true because that’s a known fact of human history. Unlike the squirrel, we’re not just guessing about possible threats, putting all kinds of unknowns in the same mental basket labelled “Blort.” We know how oxygen, fuel, and gravity work, as well as countless other things, which is how humans have succeeded not just in crossing the road without being run over, but in crossing the vast distance between our planet and the moon.

Degrees of Mastery

The difference in understanding, however, is just a matter of degree. We draw much finer distinctions than a squirrel does, at least in subjects other than those the squirrel has mastered, which are many. Presumably, our mental maps are much more elaborate than a squirrel’s, which enables us to master more of the terrain. We understand cars not just in practical terms, but at physical, quantum mechanical, and cosmological levels of analysis.

But those conceptual boxes we use to file patterns in the world are still our boxes, ones we use to achieve certain objectives. The squirrel uses its labels to survive and to flourish in its life cycle. We use our mental maps to progress, to spread meaning, happiness, and humanity across the planet and ultimately, if we could have our way, the universe.

Understanding something, then, is a degree of mastery, a depth of conceptual analysis and mapping that enables more and more sophisticated uses of the labels. What we should say about the truth of “Astronauts walked on the moon” is that NASA’s knowledge was true enough to accomplish NASA’s purposes, and that those who believe NASA succeeded in that mission know enough to vanquish skeptics who think instead that there was a grand conspiracy and there was no such stupendous achievement in science and engineering.

When we say, on the contrary, that “Astronauts walked on the moon” is objectively true, not just pragmatically so, what we mean is that the world itself enters our tracking, mapping, and understanding of how things work. And that’s likely true, but as far as we know, the facts impact our beliefs only to the extent that they’re understood and thus categorized and interpreted by the rest of our mental map. To say that the world makes our map accurate even when we don’t fully understand what the facts are is akin to the mystical statement that everything that happens is the result of some ineffable Source. Either assurance would be vacuous.

Absolute Knowledge?

What, though, would be required for “full understanding”? If the universe were to contain a finite (but astronomical) number of facts, and an intrepid species could map them all, would that species’s knowledge be absolute?

As I argue elsewhere, it’s not so clear because of the pragmatic aspect of knowledge. Knowing how the universe works isn’t the same as knowing what to do with the universe. The latter kind of knowledge or motivation requires a purpose, a vision of how things should be, and such idealism seems more open-ended even than the unimaginable variety of things that naturally develop in the universe.

To know what should be done about the facts is to put your stamp on the world, and the external facts don’t care about or authorize that stamp. Here, then, is a subjective aspect of knowledge and of truth, which makes the conceit of truth’s objectivity so presumptuous. To utter the truth about a fact is to understand enough via trackers and maps to be able to use the fact intelligently, and at the higher level of personhood, that understanding is an imposition of life on non-life (since animals are more confined to their natural habitats which are mostly full of life).

This should be emphasized: to say that “Astronauts walked on the moon” is true is to presuppose the validity of all the struggles and biases involved in generating NASA’s maps and models of nature. Only we care about the agendas we pursue with our knowledge, which means that that knowledge is a cog in the machine of life’s endeavours.

Nonlife’s Use of Life?

But isn’t life in turn a cog in the universe’s machine? Isn’t the universe somehow using life and therefore our maps and our knowledge to achieve some end? Doesn’t the universe therefore “care,” after all, about our attempt to understand our surroundings?

The typical teleological or theistic expression of that sentiment is dubious, although I won’t attempt to demonstrate as much here. But indeed, there’s likely some relatively objective relation between life and nonlife. Life’s origin is mysterious, seemingly very rare, and perhaps at least partly accidental. Even so, some natural processes enabled certain forces and elements to assemble rudimentary organisms which the planet protected long enough for them to evolve into a panoply of bacteria, plants, fungi, animals, and people.

Assuming most of the universe is mindless, right down to its origin and subatomic foundations, the question before us is whether the so-called objective relation between nonlife and life — that is, life’s real role and endpoint in the cosmos — is adequately captured by speaking of the “objective truth” of our best representations of the facts. Or does that semantic conception of truth load the matter in our favour, presupposing a secular form of anthropocentrism?

Suppose, for example, life’s objective function is a type of decay: solar systems sometimes form planets that generate life; life busies itself, mostly oblivious to the horrors of bedrock reality; and eventually life extinguishes itself as part of that planet’s geological development which is in turn an offshoot of the nebula’s collapse that formed the star that supported such terrestrial complexity. Or in general, imagine some such humiliating cosmic process that encompasses life’s real position in the universe.

To say that we know the facts, in that our symbols correspond and thus agree with what they’re about when we use the symbols well is to assume a kind of cosmic harmony which is disastrously absent. If life is essentially an absurd accident or by-product of indifferent, pointless natural evolution, not only do the natural facts not agree with our symbols, but we ought to be waging an existential rebellion against those facts’ indifference and absurdity.

Ultimately, then, the problem with the correspondence theory of truth is that this theory is glib in that it glosses over the direness of our universal predicament. We presume we can know The Truth because we presuppose the validity of our species’ characterological biases, ignoring the pragmatic role of our concepts and of our mapping skills. We presume that our level of understanding is supreme or at least good enough to justify the claim that some of our beliefs are true and others are false.

However, if all of life ends badly and godless nature dupes every single organism, in killing it and in tricking it with illusions of meaning and purpose, and if all life will go extinct without the universe shedding a tear, even the beliefs we hold to be true and based on deep understanding and mastery must be embarrassingly wayward. Our best beliefs would track certain facts, but the project we pursue with that map would be tragically heroic at best, and more likely the punchline of a cosmic joke.

Contrary to the standard conception of truth, which takes certain uses of symbols to agree with the facts, if the objective relationship between life and nonlife is closer to a humiliating joke than to a harmony, the truth of our best beliefs should be thought of as being premised on a profound disagreement. We categorize, map, interpret, understand, and know the facts because we’re waging a war against the absurd, godless wilderness with our arsenal of tools, machines, and cultures. We know the truth of some fact when we’re poised to master it, to be in the godlike position of creating a new set of facts, a humanized world that replaces the abomination of the impersonal one.

Does Pragmatism Refute Itself?

Perhaps you may think, though, that I’ve contradicted myself by presupposing the objective truth of life’s humiliating relation to nonlife. Science and philosophy may entail that terrestrial life will eventually be extinguished, and at that point the rest of the universe will go on as if nothing untoward had happened. Am I presupposing some such objective, naturalistic account of evolution and of deep time in saying, on the contrary, that all truth is largely pragmatic?

As I argue elsewhere, philosophy is like the snake that eats its tail. We doubt everything until we start to doubt ourselves and thus our ability to doubt.

But to make sense of this radical doubt about objective truth, what we should say is that not all truths are equally useful. Scientific and philosophical representations — such as the one about our ultimate role in the universe, given the universe’s indifference towards our eventual extinction — may not be objective in the naïve sense but they’re nevertheless foundational.

I’d call these deep truths, then, existential rather than objective. They’re the most profound stories we can presently tell. But we should never forget that even in the cases of science and philosophy, we’re just telling more or less rigorous stories, as far as nature is concerned.