Against Truth
No, I’m not “For Lies”. I just think people value truth too highly.
Knowledge is what is important. Not truth.
What sort of things can be true? Statements. Most of the deep thinking I’ve seen into the nature of knowledge focuses on knowledge of statements [sep] . You know a statement when the statement is true, you believe it, and your belief is justified. Even in this limited arena, I think that truth just gets in the way. Knowledge seems like a mental state that could be understood and stable, Truth is a capricious external force that may or may not reveal itself. But this is not the fight I want to pick today.
I just don’t think that “knowledge of statements” is all that important. What matters is knowledge that affects your actions. Statements are static, thinking is dynamic. Think about what it means to know how to read, or to know how to play the piano. Truth is almost irrelevant to that kind of knowledge.
Even knowledge that seems very fact-oriented is useless without its dynamic side. Imagine a kid who sees two piles of two quarters, but has to count them out to realize that there are four altogether. Does it matter if the kid “knows” that 2 + 2 = 4 is true? I say no. Knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 entails some ability to use this fact to understand new information, to make sense of the world around you and perceive it at a deeper level.
When I teach my children, I want to give them this real knowledge and I don’t care too much about what facts they know. Knowing facts is just a side effect of learning. The problem is, when I talk to them all I can do is communicate a bunch of statements. They need to do something with those statements to turn them into understanding. The knowledge I care about cannot be taught. All I can do as a teacher is guide them in the right direction, carefully choose the facts and lies you want them to think about, and hope that they think the thoughts I expect. As I’ve noted before, I’m no master guide and I’ve found the best strategy is just to show my kids a lot of things and help them out when something sticks.
Understanding and Skill
I see dynamic knowledge roughly breaking down into two types: understanding and skill. When you understand something, it changes the way you perceive the world around you. Understanding text allows you to get meaning from scratches of ink on paper. Understanding economics may cause you to see prices as a rough expression of collective desires, scaled up by the money supply. Understanding General Relativity may cause you to feel that you’re always being pushed up by the Earth rather than pulled down by gravity.
When you have a skill — like piano playing or neurosurgery — it changes the way you manipulate the world around you. If you thought of yourself as a fancy computer, you might say that understanding is how you receive input and skill is how you produce output. Input and output are closely linked, as recent hoopla over mirror neurons shows(described nicely here at one of my favorite blogs). When we see someone doing something we know how to do, we have mirror neurons — neurons that are usually responsible for producing action — that fire. Perhaps this neural activity is understanding, and the links in our mind that cause the excitement are knowledge.
But this sharp division between input and output is misleading. Even an act that is as fundamental as seeing is a very complex skill that requires sophisticated coordination of nerves and muscles. Observation requires action, and it produces thoughts or models in your mind. It seems to me that understanding is just a special kind of skill, a skill of perception.
As Polanyi points out in Faith and Reason, when we learn a skill we have extended ourselves. As you play the piano, it is as if the piano is a part of you. You pour yourself into the instrument, not thinking a bit about its pieces and parts or physical existence. When you read, you form the thoughts of the author in your own head, as if you were thinking them yourself. You are not dwelling at all on the specific shapes of the letters on the page. To me, all knowledge has this personal sort of aspect. Knowledge allows me to ignore the details of something and experience it as if it were a part of me. In subjects like Mathematics this sort of deep understanding of a subject allows you to produce complex arguments quickly, and produce surprisingly good guesses about what sorts of things might be true.
So Where does Truth fit in?
What does truth have to do with this sort of knowledge? What is true about playing the flute? Or reading a book? Knowledge as I’m trying to describe it is not something that can be true or false. When you understand a subject, it may cause you to think thoughts that are true (or false), but the knowledge itself is not true.
Truth is still relevant. Knowledge that makes you think true thoughts is probably better than knowledge that deceives you. But just as any non-trivial scientific theory is surely wrong in some circumstances, I’m pretty sure all knowledge is capable of deceiving you. We can’t discard knowledge just because it is wrong sometimes, and in practice we never do until we find better knowledge (Feyerabend’s How to Defend Society Against Science helped me realize this).
Knowledge is valuable because it helps us live our lives. Truth is important only to the extent it helps us evaluate our knowledge. Truth does not define knowledge and often it is irrelevant.
Personal truth is finding out what is important to one’s own self : ethics, compassion, strength. Society has truths too ( yeah, I’ve heard of sociology ) : leadership and enabling insightful people to contribute are tough assignments. Take a look at the mis allocation of policemen article from India today : part of the dysfunction of our times.
Some Deceptive Knowledge is tracked at Center for Media and Democracy ; although I often ignore it for periods of time, I think we need to realize how much is wrong with public information services.
opit
September 1, 2007 at 8:02 am
opit: Deceptive knowledge is definitely dangerous, and people should do what they can to unmask it (your blog is a good source of links in this direction). Whether it is accidental or malicious, so much public information is misleading and it pays to be skeptical.
Personal truth is the most important to me — my biggest question in life is “how should I live?”. The thing is, personal truth is fuzzier than the mathematical or absolute truth people usually refer to. I try to know my values, and I think I know them today but they may change tomorrow. Also, I’m sure to discover that what I think I value was not quite right, and I need to refine my personal truth. In other words, I know that my “personal truth” is not absolute. It is just my best guess, and I need to keep making it a better guess.
I’m still trying to figure out how I think society can and should work. I know I’m not too happy with current world politics, but I’m not sure what to do about it.
Rolfe Schmidt
September 1, 2007 at 1:58 pm
[...] Rolfe Schmidt I’m learning. Slowly. « Against Truth [...]
Against Lies « Rolfe Schmidt
September 2, 2007 at 4:59 am
Emulate Diogenes ?
opit
September 2, 2007 at 9:44 am
That was a quick quip on a serious subject – Policy is paramount.
“Sin” was a concept that bugged me for a long time. Somewhere I wrote about “synne” being a term from medieval archery – a reference to the inevitable results of our efforts to fall short of perfection.
An entirely different tangent comes from the term “Dead Reckoning Navigation” and the practice of setting a couse, holding it a while, measuring progress according to the sea-log ( towed behind the ship and measuring velocity through the water ),’shooting the sun’ with the sextant, and fudging for known currents ( vector analysis ). The result of all that is remarkably accurate.
We can bemoan our lack of an ‘Owners Manual’ or accept our life as a gift to be appreciated.
opit
September 2, 2007 at 9:51 am
PS I forgot wind ! Hah!
opit
September 2, 2007 at 9:52 am
Yes, I like the dead reckoning analogy. It took quite a bit of collective work for navigators to accumulate that knowledge, and it takes a lot personal of experience to use it well.
And I think an owners manual would make life pretty boring.
Rolfe Schmidt
September 3, 2007 at 4:36 pm
This discussion made me think of how well the “collective wisdom” approach has been shown to work, given certain kinds of questions and responders.
Maybe we shuld add that to the “dead reckoning approach” as another form of “truth” or at least human knowing, that we can benefit from?
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/11/15.html
http://www.collective-wisdom.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds
JJ
September 4, 2007 at 6:11 pm
JJ – I wasn’t familiar with the “collective wisdom” idea. It is interesting because it is the opposite of what I would have expected from a crowd. I guess the key point is that the groups do better when they are full of individuals trying to do their best — the opposite of the (stereo)typical mob.
I should say that I don’t mind using the word “truth” a bit more loosely. I just think that some people use the word to imply mathematical precision when they are talking about things that are far from certain. This sort of pretense to sound authoritative is a wicked lie. As long as you accept that our “truth” might be imperfect, it imply errors somewhere down the road, then I think it is fine to keep using the word truth.
Rolfe Schmidt
September 5, 2007 at 8:32 am
Didn’t we segue into the “What is Truth” question ?
Anyway, the ‘Dead Reckoning’ comparison was one I took from Dad – a natural for him as he trained in navigation because that was one of his jobs in Bomber Command in WW II !
He was a priest and an interesting guy. Who else would set his teenaged son to read ‘The Screwtape Letters’ by CS Lewis because he found it a hoot !
I twitted him once that after he quit selling Life Insurance and went to college on the Veterans’ Bill he hadn’t changed occupations at all – he was still selling Death Insurance !
Comeback ? I should check the riders in the policy. By the time it was possible to check if it was any good, it would be too late !
opit
September 5, 2007 at 9:29 am
Rolfe, I read the Wisdom of Crowds after seeing the NYT book review of it, and found it fascinating for the same reason! Diverse individuals not trying to influence each other or reach consensus or even particularly thrusting themselves into the problem on purpose, can collectively know stuff that no individual could possible know or DOES know — that was the most amazing part to me. If only polls worked like that, instead of the way they do — think of what we’d learn!
JJ
September 7, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I’ve just started reading David Chalmers’ A Conscious Mind and it is making me rethink a lot of what I was trying to say here.
He distinguishes between psychological belief (the part of belief which effects your behavior and may be subconscious) and phenomenal belief (the part of belief that you consciously experience). I think that this distinction will help me with some of my nitpicking. I have this feeling that phenomenal belief isn’t as important as it may seem, and that psychological belief is important and is not easily tied to truth.
So I may follow up on all of this later.
Opit — you’re dad sounds like he was quite a guy!
Rolfe Schmidt
September 9, 2007 at 6:48 am