Harry Frankfurt: “On Truth”
- In “On Bullshit” Frankfurt argued that bullshitting constitutes a more insidious threat to civilized life than lying.
- “On Truth” was written to provide an explanation (hopefully convincing) why truth is so important
- “Accordingly, I propose to consider here…..the practical and theoretical importance that truth actually enjoys, whether or not we generally act as though we recognize that it does so.”
- This essay is NOT an exploration of various definitions of truth and falsity. Frankfurt’s approach is based on the COMMONSENSE understanding of the notions of truth and falsity
- Frankfurt also says that his discussion is concerned exclusively with the VALUE and IMPORTANCE of truth and NOT the value of importance of our efforts to find truth or our experience in doing so.
- “Is truth something in fact we do-and should-especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit?”
PRACTICAL UTILITY OF TRUTH
Frankfurt claims that no civilized society can flourish, or even survive, without knowing relevant facts to effectively and prudently cope with its problems. This includes natural and social sciences and conduct of public affairs. Practical and fine arts are included as well.
Critique of post-modernists:
“These shameless antagonists of common sense – members of a certain emblematic subgroup of the call themselves “postmodernists” – rebelliously and self-righteously deny that truth has any genuinely objective reality at all.”
Post-modernist attitude (as Frankfurt describes it):
- Denial that truth (lacking objective reality) is not worthy of any “obligatory difference or respect”
- The notion of “what the facts are” is not a useful notion with any intelligible meaning
- The distinctions between what is true and false are guided either by individual points of view or are imposed on us by sociological and political requirements and societal customs
- Frankfurt is puzzled by this attitude (how can anyone hold this belief? Surely, when an architect builds a bridge his plans MUST be based on certain, accepted truths?) Would anyone trust a (truly) post-modernist heart or brain surgeon?
Frankfurt: “There is a dimension of reality into which even the boldest – or the laziest – indulgence of subjectivity cannot dare to intrude.”
George Clemenceau’s response when asked what historians will say about the WWI:
“They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.”
NORMATIVE-EVALUATIVE JUDGMENTS (Morality)
Frankfurt offers an interesting clarification on why truth is essential in forming our normative and evaluative judgments.
Let’s accept the notion that normative judgments are NOT factual claims (they are neither correct nor incorrect) and that they are merely an expression of personal feelings and attitudes.
Our acceptance of these judgments is based on other judgments that are non-normative (factual).
“X has a bad moral character” is under these conditions a non-factual statement (neither true nor false). But this statement is made on “concrete evidence of moral deficiency” – specific acts and behaviours. These factual statements about X’s behaviour must be true and the reasoning by which we derive our evaluative judgment must be valid. The conclusion “X has bad moral character” is a conclusion that is justified by premises (facts about X’s behaviour) and valid reasoning.
So the distinction between truth and falsity remains critically pertinent to our assessment of normative judgments.
Adopting personal goals and purposes
Claim: We adopt our purposes and goals solely by virtue of what we happen to feel or desire.
Frankfurt’s response: We select objects we love or desire based on what we believe about them - they will increase our health, well-being, etc. These are all factual statements informing our goals and purposes and their truth and falsity is deeply relevant to the rationality of our choices.
SOCIETY AND CULTURE
“To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance. We need to know – and, of course, we must also understand how to make productive use of – a great many truths.”
INDIVIDUALS
“Our success or failure in whatever we undertake, and therefore in life altogether, depends on whether we are guided by truth or whether we proceed in ignorance or on the basis of falsehood.”
“We really cannot live without truth. We need truth not only in order to understand how to live well, but in order to know how to survive at all.”
TRUTH AND REASON
Humans frequently ignore the requirements of rationality. Why should we then care so much about rationality and therefore truth?
Spinoza – Our rationality is imposed on us. We cannot help but submit to it.
The nature of love: “Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause” (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium)
Each of us has an essential nature we strive to realize and sustain. Spinoza believed that each individual has an innate drive to become and to remain what he/she most essentially is.
That which enhances our ability to do so causes a sense of exhilaration, of joy. We feel more alive. A person then feels that he owes the joy to the object that has caused it and that he inevitably loves that object.
We love what we believe helps us to continue in existence and to become more fully ourselves. (paradigmatic instances of love support this: “you help me discover who I really am”, “you make me alive again”, etc.)
What we love is precious to us and we wish to preserve it and protect it.
Spinoza concludes that we cannot help loving truth. Truth is indispensible in enabling us to remain alive, to understand ourselves and live fully in accord to our natures.
A person who despises or is indifferent to truth is indifferent to his own life.
“Thus, Spinoza concluded that nearly everyone – everyone who values and who cares about his own life – does, whether knowingly or not, love truth.”
WHY ARE TRUTHS USEFUL?
“Truths have practical utility because they consist of, and because they therefore can provide us with, accurate accounts of the properties (including, especially, the causal powers and potentialities) of the real objects and events with which we must deal when we act.”
The defining, essential character of factuality, of being real is that the properties of reality and truths about those properties are what they are independent of the control of our will.
Facts cannot be altered by impulses or our desire.
We begin to feel that we are “at home” once we know what constitutes our surroundings, once we can manoeuvre within it without “bumping into things”. We now know where to go find what we need and how to go about acquiring it (or not).
“The problem with ignorance and error is, of course, that they leave us in the dark.”
To be rational is fundamentally a matter of being appropriately responsive to reasons. Reasons, in turn, are constituted of facts: it is either raining or not raining so either I have a reason to carry an umbrella, or I do not.
“If we have no respect for the distinction between true and false, we may as well kiss our much-vaunted “rationality” good-bye”.
TRUTH, TRUST AND CONFIDENCE: why are lies injurious?
“If people were generally dishonest and untrustworthy, the very possibility of peaceful and productive social life would be threatened.”
When we encounter a lie, we are disturbed primarily by what is done to ourselves. A lie (which we believed) has distorted our reality. A liar has, in a sense, “made us crazy”. We feel that we have been injured by it in a very profound manner.
“The most irreducibly bad thing about lies is that they contrive to interfere with, and to impair, our natural effort to apprehend the real state of affairs.”
“Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality. So they are intended, in a very real way, to make us crazy.”
Adrienne Rich (“Lies, Secrets, and Silence”): The “unutterable” loneliness of a liar who hides his thoughts pretending to believe what he does not believe.
Discovering that a friend has lied to us, Rich says, “exposes to us something about ourselves – something far more disturbing than merely that we have miscalculated, that we have made an error of judgment. It reveals that our own nature … is unreliable, having led us to count on someone whom we should not have trusted.”
THE VALUE OF TRUTH “AS SUCH” (distinct from individual truths)
“What does caring about truth, as distinct from caring merely about the acquisition and exploitation of specific truths, actually come to?”
It is because we care about truth that we then care about accumulation about individual truths.
Philosophical account of truth
We become aware of our separateness from the world by virtue of encountering obstacles to our will. We become defined as separate beings the more we learn about what our limits and boundaries are, i.e. by “recognition that there are facts and truths over which we cannot hope to exercise direct or immediate control.”
It is through our recognition that the world is an independent reality, fact, and truth that we come both to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our own identities.
Frankfurt concludes that we cannot “fail to take the importance of factuality and of reality seriously…”