On Truth, Error, and Lie
Jan Sokol, April 6, 2017
Your Magnificence, Dear Colleagues, Dear Guests.
First, let me express my gratitude for the honor to stand in front of you and speak on the anniversary celebration of our University.
The topic of truth, error, and lie seems to me very topical for several reasons. Although it is not always easy to distinguish between a truth, an error, and a lie, or even a deceit, it does have an essential importance for a human life and especially for science. Two years ago, we commemorated the death of our renowned predecessor, Master Jan of Husinec, whose name has always been connected quite strongly with a struggle for the truth. A hundred years ago, the truth meant something almost sacred in the Czech society, and it had such a strong resonance that Masaryk chose truth as a motto on his presidential flag. One hundred years have passed, and “truth” has not only become a matter of doubt, but it is at times disdained, or even scoffed.A great number of educated people try to avoid the term, or they at least put it in the quotes not to lose face. How could this happen?
The topics that are publicly discussed in today’s societies, and the dilemmas that we have to willy-nilly assess and decide have become more and more complex. They become ever more “political” decisions in the sense that they refer to the near or farther future, which we can evaluate with a mere probability. Volatility of today’s world hardly helps us with a clear conscience to simplify a problem and make a clear-cut decision. Our real personal and societal issues and problems resemble less and less mathematical and logical problems with one correct solution. One, of course, has to make decisions in order to be able to act. However, one doesn’t feel that he necessarily made the right decision, that the judgment he made is truthful.
In addition, beginning in the 60s and 70s of the last century, the post-modern critics started pointing out a certain danger related to an overly strong meaning of the term “truth”. In their view, the people absolutely convinced about their truth tend to be intolerant to other opinions, and the disputes over the truthfulness of certain judgments led to violent conflicts and religious wars. With the praise for tolerance in current societies, a feeling alsogets the upper hand that the very concept and idea of the truth is something dangerously obsolete. Something that needs to be neutralized by the post-modern relativism. Everyone is rightin his own way, after all, as we can hear at times around us.
I will try shed light on what is the source of the conflict between truth and tolerance, and I will offer its philosophical solution. I will set aside the historical question, to what extent difference of opinion motivated the violent conflicts and wars, and to what extent they were only used as a cover-up for different interests. I admit that an unshakable conviction about a certain matter, a belief in an absolute validity of a certain opinion or stance may, after all, endow an individual with intolerance and lead perhaps to an act of violence. The more so that an individual is a “social animal”, or zóon politikon not only in a sense of a being that needs a social organization, but also as a being say, with a herd instinct, which experiences a need to accommodate and conform oneself to others. It is not easy for an individual to stand outside the mainstream, insist on something that a majority of society rejects, or by contrast, deny something of which people around him are convinced.In contrast,a considerable disagreement or dissent may even provoke a certain annoyance among the majority.
Even if we take into consideration all these risks of social tension and potential conflicts, we definitely cannot give up the concept of truth and truthfulness. The concept of truth, or better said, of a truthful judgment is always present wherever people speak, and it stands behind almost every utterance. The sentence, “It is Thursday today” has the same value as the sentence, “It is true that it is Thursday today”. Every statement implicitly declares that what it says is true. If it was not the case, how could it possibly declare anything? Every question assumes a truthful answer – it would make no sense to ask questions otherwise. Even a liar must elicit an impression of the truth; if he fails, his effort was useless.
In contrast to this stands the post-modern criticism of “truth” as a manifestation of bigotry: He who claims the truth is intolerant and therefore dangerous. However, if the relativist’s “everyone owns his own truth” was true, discourse would lose its meaning, talking would make no sense. If I own “my own truth”, why should I listen to yours? If what you intend to share with me is just and only your truth, why do you bother me with it at all? The sharp distinction and contrast between what is just mine, that is my own conviction - in other words, my opinion, and the truthful knowledge, which is not just mine is nothing new; it’s nota new invention, it’s not a malady of the present-day society. This distinction has been known since the beginning of the Greek philosophy,and it indirectly led to Socrates’ conviction and death.
Before this Charles University assembly, I cannot avoid mentioning the specific importance of the idea of truthfulness in science. While in other fields of human activity, truthfulnessand verified cognition is often just an instrument and tool to achieve something else – for instance success, in science and in philosophy, truthfulness is the actual and ultimate objective of any research, from which applications evolve. Today’s sciencesattempt to get around the term truthfulness, in reality however, they necessarily assume its existence. In mathematical logic, truthfulness is a value of the variable but it can also be – similar to mathematics – the final result of the proof. Although the impersonal “quod errat demonstrandum” pretends modesty, it is in fact a triumphant cry!
In empirical sciences, the claim to truthfulness of a description is often replaced by the requirement of “objectivity”, which emphasizes the fact that the statement is not true for you or for me only, but that it is in accordance with the very subject matter. Therefore, it is neither my truth, nor yours, but truthfulness in relation to the common subject matter, the common object of knowledge. Technically, the requirement of objectivity is often replaced by a weaker yet easier-to-decide requirement of repeatability of the result or measurement. The ancient Greeks expressed the ideal of objectivity through a requirement that knowledge should not be guided by anything else but the “subject matter itself”, kata to auto. In social sciences, it could be referred to as “hit or miss”, or “heads will roll”.This very attitude characterizes science and gives it its exceptional importance.If the sciences have imposed a ban on evaluation of their subject matter since the time of Max Weber, it is not because they can do without it, but only and only in order to let the central value of truthfulnessbecome apparent, which no other interest can overshadow.
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Before I proceed to some kind of deconstruction of the concept of truth, or better said, to a clarification and differentiation of its various meanings, it will not be off the point to demonstrate, in several trivial examples, how truthfulness works in common statements. Let’s start with a very neutral one:
100 + 100 = 200
Even this statement requires certain default conventions such as the decimal system arithmetic notation, however, it then always holds true for everyone and everywhere. That is, it is a tautology resulting from the definition of numbers and the operation of addition.
Non-judgmental expressions such as an “untrue statement” or an “invalid statement” was introduced by mathematical logic in order to emphasize its strictly formal approach and to avoid the distinction, which otherwise plays an extremely important role. Namely, the distinction between an error and a lie. We can demonstrate it on the following example:
100 + 100 = 300
The statement is certainly wrong. Based on circumstances, however, it can have two very different meanings. If a student writes it in a math class, the teacher underscores it with a red pen, marks it as an error, and explains to the student that he is wrong because one hundred and one hundred is two hundred. The statement gets a completely different meaning if it is said by a waiter in a restaurant. If the guest notices it and points it out to the waiter, the waiter may defend himself by saying that it was a mistake, yet still, the guest will have a hard time to overcome an unpleasant feeling that the waiter tried to rip him off.
What is an apparent error when it comes to the student, can qualify as a lie or an attempt to cheat on the waiter’s part. In our circumstance, there is a huge difference between those two. No one can completely avoid making mistakes and errors, and if he admits them, nothing should be held against him from the moral point of view, even though an error can cause enormous damage. In science, we simply talk about a mistake, for instance while reading the measurements, or an invalid hypothesis. While an error while taking the measurements means an unpleasant situation for everyone involved and is rather embarrassing for the scientists, the invalid hypotheses make an inseparable part of the progress in science, and according to Karl Popper, they are the only reliable result of any research. The hypotheses that have not yet falsified themselves can with almost certainty expect it in the future.
A mathematical logician can depict the “validity” and “invalidity” as a one and a zero respectively and leave the worries about their interpretation for others. In our context, however, we have to properly emphasize the difference between an error and a lie. While a mistake or an error may be the result of negligence but never intent, a lie or a deceit are rather complex mentalconstructs. A liar or a deceiver has a specific motive, which lends a meaning to his act.He has to convince his victim about something he very well knows it is not true, and often he has to arrange the circumstances in a way that would not reveal this discrepancy. This has recently been proven through a neuropsychological research, which confirmed several areas of the liar’s brain gets activated at one time.
Let’s go back to one more similarly trivial sentence. The sentence, “It’s Thursday today” is true just once in a week, while it is not true six times a week. Statements or sentences, which sometimes and somewhere are valid and other times not represent an important key for solving our problem. Although with a negligence typical for our use of words in an everyday conversation we would say that something is or is not “true”, we have to start making a distinction here if we want get a step further in understanding the truth. The sentence, “It is Thursday today”, which is valid only once a week certainly does not epitomize the “truth” as such. At best, it is only a valid statement – on Thursday, that is. It’s not even that on Wednesday or on Friday.
The fact that our sentence is valid only once a week does not take away from its meaning at all, just the opposite is true. In contrast to tautological statements in mathematics and logic, which only develop what is already included in the initial terms and their definitions, the empirical or posterior statements add something more to them. A man who claims that it is Thursday today adds to that sentence also a knowledge of what today means. Only in connection with the presence of the speaker, with his knowledge of the relevant day of the week, in other words, only by substituting this particular value for the variable “today” the statement becomes valid or non-valid. The truthfulness or untruthfulness is rarely an inherent quality or attribute of the sentence itself, but rather it acquires its particular value only in a concrete utterance. As long as it was just “atemporally” written on a wall, it would be neither true, nor false, and it could only become true or false as an actual utterance in someone’s mouth.
When I mentioned the post-modern criticism of the concept of truthin the beginning, I admitted that clashes of opinions on the truthfulness of certain claims couldleadto violent conflicts and wars. However, they never had to do with the truth per se, but rather, at most, with the truthfulness of particular opinions and claims. They could result in repression and violence only under the condition that they could be attributed to particular people, who would hold and defend such opinions.
In order to make my argument less abstract, let me illustrate it with an example that many of us have experienced in person or remember – that is, the political vetting of 1969.The committees didn’t even bother to ask, which of the responses the employee considered truthful: They only wanted to find out as quickly as possible on which side of the “barricade” the employee in question stood.They were not in fact concerned with his stands in August 1968 (those stands would be dealt with elsewhere); they only and exclusively wanted to know where he would stand in the fall of 1969, when he could already guess what he would most likely be up to. In other words, the committee was completely oblivious to the real opinions of their employees. After all, there were not many who would see the invasionas a counter-revolution, and those who did were mostly members of the committees anyway. These committees merely attempted to sort out their employees based on to what extent they might be willing to conform themselves and explicitly own up to it.
I am not saying that in conflicts of opinions or in wars of the past, a similar amount of cynicism prevailed. I only wanted to demonstrate that the source of violence here was definitely not one’s conviction of the validity of the truth, but the existence of a power, which could afford to sort out and exclude its subjects. As a criterion for this sorting or classification was not a question of the validity of certain claims, but rather an individual’s stand on power. Those who would resort to violence in similar disputes most likely thought poorly of their conclusiveness and they decided to repress their adversaries accordingly, because that way, they could avoid dealing with the very question of validity. The truth was supposed to be infallible excluded from the personal vetting of 1969, since it could otherwise have disrupted the smooth course of this sorting of employees.
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So far, we have come to two findings, which I would like to recapitulate:
1. Similarly to the natural world of our lives, in science, the fundamental difference between an error and a lie also plays a significant role. While the refuted hypotheses represents the very progress of science, deceit and a lie are as dangerous in science as in banking or politics.
2. To better understand the issue of truth, we should carefully distinguish between a multitude of valid statements and the truth itself as a sort of lightthat enables us to distinguish between the truthful and the untruthful. It shouldn’t be taken for granted as liars and demagogues will do anything to exclude such light, as we saw with the employee vetting. On the other hand, without the ability and willingness to follow this light, which does not belong to any of us, and to distinguish between the truthful and the untruthful, science would lose its meaning and so would human voice.
In the end, let us look at how this distinction is carried out under different conditions, how truthfulness is determined and verified. Let’s start with a very trivial sentence again: “It’s raining.” As a statement, Searle’s “assertive illocution”, it refers to a present situation here and now. If it is not uttered on stage or printed in a book, it will most likely be verified by a look out the window, or by a hand reaching out into the rain. The distinction is immediate and fairly reliable.
It’s different with a similar sentence, “It rained.”, which refers to the past and implicitly suggests that it’s not raining any longer. It can only be verified indirectly: Pools in the street, a testimony of those who got wet. But even if we managed to verify the sentence, a practical importance of such information would not be significant and it is hard to imagine a situation in which someone would find it worth to lie about yesterday’s rain.
In contrast to this, a sentence “It will rain” can be quite valuable even though its truthfulness can’t be yet verified. Meteorologists offer such information completed with time data to media although they are only of a probability character. Of course, tomorrow’s weather will somehow be influenced by yesterday’s and today’s weather, to which extent meteorologists’ weather forecasts are certainly not arbitrary. Even more valuable – but also less accessible - would be information about the future economic and financial development. This was the base for the idea of the planned economy, which might perhaps work in a strictly stable economy without any changes; however, it has been empirically proven false. Information about the future results of bets and lotteries would represent an extreme case. If it existed, it would be so valuable that various Mafiosos would attempt to replace it with “their own truths”, or fraudulently fabricate it although it would undermine the trust of lottery players and thus the whole lottery “business”.