The Truth about Truth

It's true, all of it.
  March 15, 2002

Digging through my scattered offline notes, I found an interesting sketch that dovetails nicely with my Processing Reality essay.  I have a hunch that when you cross one with the other you might get a theory of social responsibility ("is it wrong to reject the socially approved interpretation of reality?").  I wish I had time to write more than just sketches...

Truth and Disagreement

The world is the Truth.  The complete state of the world at moment t is the absolute Truth at time t.  Human consciousness is incapable of comprehending Truth in its entirety at any given moment, much less the evolution of Truth over a succession of moments.  Human perception catches only the most salient aspects of the Truth.  For example, by looking at a rock we see that it is (say) grey and (say) round.  We do not know the exact temperature of the rock.  We do not know the positions of molecules within it, etc.¹

Different people will perceive different sets of aspects of the Truth.  For example, I don’t know geology; therefore I won’t be able to tell the composition of the rock.  A geologist standing by my side will be.  His set of perceptions will overlap with mine in some aspects (grey color, roundness) and differ in others (e.g., knowledge that it contains spar).  Both sets will be true, albeit smaller than the entire domain of aspects defining the rock.  It may be possible for two people to grasp two true sets of aspects of some part of the Truth (such as a rock, or the Israeli-Arab conflict) with minimal overlap between those sets.  The people will have radically different worldviews—and yet both will be right.

Notes:
1. It sounds like those two sets will be complementary.  That means they won’t conflict.  Is it possible for two conflicting sets to be true?
2. People extrapolate from divergent sets thereby engendering conflict.
3. Given the violent disagreements between people, could it be possible that they all are (mostly) right (although their truths are incomplete)?
4. What is the implication of all this for the concept of what’s “right"?  Can we say that the person is right if, althought his perceived facts are true, they are incomplete?  Suppose a color-blind man claims that a red rock is grey.  Woudn’t we say “He is wrong because he doesn’t see the whole truth?"²  But seeing the whole Truth is impossible!  Is anybody ever right then?

¹ Robert Heinlein captured this problem in the idea of a Fair Witness in Stranger in Strange Land.  If you ask a Fair Witness what color a white house is, the answer will be “White on this side.”  This is because the other side of the house is concealed from view and therefore its color cannot be ascertained.  A Fair Witness never extrapolates.

² Note that there is a difference between being wrong and being untruthful.

Later notes:

1. Another wrinkle: if Truth were equivalent to the World, then speaking the Truth and creating the World would be the same act. God's creation then could be viewed as one extremely long statement. I think James Carse already covered this, though.

2. Note to self: is the World the Truth? Come to think of it, the truth should be a description of the world, not the world itself, right? (C.f. James Carse on nature as the realm of the unspeakable etc.). As a description, it emanates from the mind that describes; thus Truth cannot exist without the human (or alien, or whatever) who articulates or at least thinks it. Or something like that...

Then if you get rid of all intelligent life, can you say that Truth still exists? On the above view, it will go out with the minds.

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