Thoughts on Truth and Science

The other day I was reading a wonderfully articulate excerpt of a discussion on the nature of truth between Albert Einstein and the Nobel-Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore in Brain Pickings (http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-tagore/). 

If you have never heard of Tagore, you might be interested in why Einstein was interested in talking with him. It is true that Tagore's poetry was impressive. Yeats helped with the translation of his work Gitanjali, and his work is well worth a read for those who like verse (http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article776938.ece). But Einstein was probably interested in speaking with him because of his reputation as a great Indian thinker on a variety of subjects, rather than simply because he was a fine poet. He was so influential that Gandhi (a contemporary of his) was acquainted with him, and sometimes sparred with him on politics. He was also a popular figure in European culture at the time as well, particularly for a foreigner, and seen as a representative of Eastern 'mysticism.' The prospect of the greatest physicist of the West talking with a renowned representative of India would have piqued the interest of many at that time, and perhaps intrigued the two men themselves.

But discussing history is not my reason for writing this. I, too (foolish man!) feel the need to put in my two cents. Needless to say, philosophical discussion of the matter will not end with this blog post.

Not to trifle with Einstein, I agree with Tagore, and think that facts exist apart from human beings, but truth does not. My grounds for this is that we use the word fact to suggest that something is the case independent of us, whereas by truth I think we mean to say, "I have good reason to think this, and it seems compatible with the facts as I understand them. If I come to understand that the facts conflict with this, then I won’t call it truth anymore." Though there are objectively existent things, what is true about these things cannot be apprehended outside of a conceptual frame, as put forth in one or more minds and communications. We make conclusions about what is compatible with the facts, and with our values – which is what allows us to differentiate between reasons based on whether they are ‘good’ or not – based on our conceptions of fact and value, and we cannot fully step outside these conceptions all at once. Nor can truth be known – produced, constructed – apart from a cognitive faculty that perceives that frame, and is able to recognize whether a given statement or other concept coheres with segments or patterns within that frame of facts and values which that faculty has deemed relevant.

Truth for a group, as for individuals, is also a matter of coherence. But it is a coherence that is found among the concepts in many communications, as those communications are represented in a single mind or group of minds, and not among the objective things those concepts or communications point to. Therefore, coherence among poor concepts and communications seems like truth, even if it is not. And it is important to recognize that the coherence we find in a community – say, the scientific community – is found among the communications of scientists, and not in their concepts themselves. Just as we cannot access the atom in itself, without indirect means of observation and measurement, so we cannot access the concepts of others directly.

This is relevant because most of the truths we take for granted in communicating each other are social truths – coherence among communications by more than one person – rather than personal truths, coherence among concepts in our own minds. Yet, neither social nor personal truth can be recognized apart from a particular individual, who sees the patterns within it, and puts some understanding of it forward.

Scientific truth, insofar as it is sought by a group rather than an individual in isolation, is a particularly (and, generally, deservedly) privileged subtype of social truth. In this subtype, more than in any others, it is critical that we attend to the ways in which we attempt to lead others to recognize the same patterns as us in the communications of the group as a whole, and gain a consensus. Given the recent controversies over the review processes of the most recent edition of the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual in psychiatry, the DSM-5 (for an example of the critiques, the following was written by the chair of the team that created the DSM-IV: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201212/dsm-5-is-guide-not-bible-ignore-its-ten-worst-changes), this is particularly salient.

Insofar as scientific truth is sought by an individual, it has the same hallmarks of differing degrees of stubbornness and suggestibility as other kinds of individual truth, when it comes to accepting the facts and patterns that others see. For, we may be either too reluctant or too eager to adopt concepts suggested by others, and overly eager or reluctant to build on the foundation of the concepts we already have. But with respect to science, at least, individual truth is less and less of a concern, as the institutional approach to science – embedded in such venerable and admirable techniques as peer-review, when practiced anonymously, and including peers with non-majority conclusions but majority working methods – is dominant, and generally with good results. So, we shall put that aside.

But in either case, in either dichotomy – social or personal truth, scientific or non-scientific – there is no single truth, no single coherence, because the contents that that coherence must be found in are shifting. We refer to this as a shifting frame of reference, but this is simplistic; we only know the frame by the contents, and the contents, like those in cereal boxes, may settle in shipping. Unlike the contents of cereal boxes, they may also change dramatically. Reality surprises us in ways processed foods generally do not. And what that leaves truth-seekers with is a need to see a new pattern, or an old one, in the new set and arrangement of contents in question.

In short, we say ‘the truth’ to keep things simple – to stipulate, ‘the coherence I see among these contents, either in terms of the contents of my own head or the communications of this particular group, in a particular time-frame’ – not because truth or frames are singular. This is not to say that the facts are similarly shifting, but that our ability to see them is contingent on coherence among sets of information that we use to arrive at conclusions about facts, and our ability to recognize when they are relevant is contingent on our priorities, which is to say, on our values. These values include epistemic values, those that pertain to what we think to be useful to the cause of knowledge – but these are values nonetheless. And these values, without which we would be hard-discerned to determine truth, are present in the minds of human beings, and not in the universe apart from us. 

Tagore would agree, it seems. Einstein prefers the view that truths, like facts, are objective. What do you think is a better definition of the word, based on how you and the people you know use it in everyday life, and in special contexts like scientific discussions?