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Value of Truth

Foust is SO authentic

03:32 / 01.10.06

So when we're arguing over what is true and what is false, what exactly is at stake? If I hold a false belief, why is that a problem for me?

Does "truth" have a value all of its own?

An example. Let's say I believe that jumping out of a plane without a parachute is perfectly safe. What exactly is at stake in that belief? Is it only the potential harm? Is the practical matter of death the only reason it is better to have an accurate picture of sky diving?

What about a more abstract issue? Let's say I'm an atheist, and that I'm wrong. The Christian God exists. Is the only thing at stake my eternal soul? Does it actually matter that I'm wrong, per se?

Or, what if I hold some basically trivial untrue belief... say, I believe that WWII began in 1950 and ended in 1961. What is at stake there? Is the only important thing about this the fact that I'd look like an idiot to my peers?

What if i believe something that could be correct, but as yet is unverifiable? Say I believe in aliens, and I'm wrong - while this remains unverifiable for us, it is true that no intelligent ETs exist. Let's also say I keep my belief to myself, so I don't have to worry about ridicule from my peers. Am I losing out on anything by secretly holding that (hypothetically) false belief?

So is "truth" valuable per se? Or is it only the practical results of holding true or false beliefs that is important?

*

05:17 / 01.10.06

As an experiment, when I was a wee kayoss madjckyan, I decided to believe that automatic doors were opened and shut by door daemons (I chose this belief because I had no reason to believe that it was true). The experiment was designed to show that this belief would not impair my functioning in life, and of course that's exactly what it showed. This proves nothing meaningful about the nature of holding untrue beliefs in general. If I believe that WWII began in 1950 and ended in 1961, this seems harmless on the face of things, but if other untrue beliefs follow from it— that therefore the Holocaust didn't happen, because there weren't very many Jews in Germany in 1950 and in fact slightly more in 1961, for example— then I may very well create harm for myself and for others. And we can't really know what untrue beliefs can create tangible harm.

Aside from the possibility of measurable harm, there is also the lack of potential benefit from holding a true belief. If I really believed that automatic doors were opened by door daemons, and if this is not true (just pretend it's not, okay?), and for some reason I wanted to fix or jury-rig an automatic door at some point, my incense and chanting wouldn't do it. If I instead held the (let's say true) belief that automatic doors are opened by an electric motor triggered by a motion sensor, I might have a shot at making it work. So if there's the potential for harm coming from holding an untrue belief, and I'd be missing out on a potential for good coming from holding a true belief, I might as well strive to believe things that are true.

Foust is SO authentic

12:19 / 01.10.06

I agree with everything you are saying, id. But those are all practical consequences. Potential harm, etc.

If I hold false belief x, and by sheer luck, never face harm because of it, does it matter that I was wrong?

12:22 / 01.10.06

How do you distinguish between false beliefs that may cause harm, and those that won't?

14:01 / 01.10.06

I really wish I could get to post here more often.

I think there is an interesting polarity between truth and falsity. You can say, for example that something is false, that it is a lie, that it isn't how it appears to be or that it is illusory.
But how many different ways can you describe something as being true, especially without a specific classification?

There is an essay by Nietzche called 'Truth and Lies in The Extra Moral Sense' (sorry I don't know where to find it online) which points out among other things that it is not the effect of a lie that is offensive, merely the feeling of having being deceived.

14:06 / 01.10.06

Nietzsche essay is available here.

Unconditional Love

14:39 / 01.10.06

Its possible to hold the belief that the door daemons exsist as an inherant part of the structure of the electric motor and motion sensor, in fact the whole of the door, so the daemons themselves are like consciousness to the doors. Not so harmful. Repair the body and hold a ritual for the spirit of the doors.

The notion that there are true and false beliefs lies first in proving that consciousness is capable of truth and falsitiy that is not bound by abstract language and ideal structures and truth and false exsist outside of conscious abstractions, my own experience they dont, there is conscious consensuality to a variety of differing cultures and thought structures, truth is relative to what information network you are communicating in, as are lies. Neither really exsist at all, except as information.

Unconditional Love

15:02 / 01.10.06

Also another thing to add, information structures are impermanent systems, even base truthes relative to the system can change over periods of time, generational truthes can be seen in human culture on a daily basis, ie the mystification of technology to the point of phobia through lack of aquaintance.

Information wether it be in the form of truthes and lies or facts and fictions changes with regard to informative relationships, ie a change in perception metered by the other surrounding meaning, connotations and interpretation.

Nothing is the same as it was from one moment to the next, the illusion that it is is perpetuated by recording truthes, in writing and other media etc and then propagating those truthes until they become a consensual belief.

There is something thou i think in the notion of being true to yourself, and in this regard i mean self expression to the self, but how you choose and what you choose that information to reflect is still down to informational choice, the truth of feeling imbedded in the body remains, as does what the body feels, truth as feeling is for me at least very different to truth as information.

Finding the right sounds to express the feeling can make the sounds seem more truthful.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:37 / 02.10.06

Slackula- I'm afraid I don't understand your post, so in regard to the first example, is it true or false that jumping out of a plane without a parachute is a bad idea?

09:10 / 02.10.06

I think that Slackula is referring to the idea that truth is just perception. That your truth and my truth are different things, that there are cultural truths and generational truths.

But there are some truths that are fact. It's factually correct that automatic doors work because of electric motors triggered by a motion sensors. That's still fact regardless of whether I think it is or not. So I think the idea of truth as perception can obviously be disputed in some cases but in others it's a more esoteric concept. I also think there's a difference between truth and belief. It's possible to believe that sky-diving without a parachute is safe without it being true.

I think the word 'true' here in this discussion is confusing. True things are binary, they either are or aren't. It's true I had marmite on toast for breakfast this morning. False belief is a better term because it encompasses a wider set of feelings.

It's possible to go through life falsely believing a thing and if believing that thing causes no harm then I suppose in one sense it doesn't matter. But in another the person doing the false believing is deceiving themselves, and so is living under the delusion of that false belief. It does no 'harm' per se, but it's not the ideal way to live, either.

09:30 / 02.10.06

True things are binary, they either are or aren't. It's true I had marmite on toast for breakfast this morning. False belief is a better term because it encompasses a wider set of feelings. - lula

As the hard nosed scientist which I sometimes pretend I am, I think I would disagree with that statement. Its more or less clear if you look at science that strict binary truth doesn't have many interesting examples, and that it is rather more natural for truth to indicate something, well, a bit fuzzy - any discussion with creationists, for example, makes this very clear. "True" and "False" are reductive shorthand which apply well in some situations, but not so well in others.

10:35 / 02.10.06

But then aren't creationists referring to something other than truth, i.e. belief?

I just looked up truth in the dictionary to confirm my understanding of the word 'truth' and some of the definitions are:

1. the true or actual state of a matter: He tried to find out the truth.
2. conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.
3. a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like: mathematical truths.
4. the state or character of being true.
5. actuality or actual existence.

So that says that truth has to be an actual factual state or thing and that it can't be fuzzy. Doesn't it?

12:03 / 02.10.06

Well, I think you can't avoid the fuzzy, to an extent. For instance, (to take some examples which people care about) if you ask how many civilian casualties there have been in Iraq due to US coalition actions, you might expect there to be some number. But the actual number is pretty hard to determine and also depends an awful lot on how you interpret the various words in the sentence - civilian, US action etc. Pretty much any question of this kind is better answered in a fuzzy way.

Or, better, if you want a yes or no question...Are the current models for climate change which warn about the dangers of global warming and human responsibility for that true or false? Well, the question itself probably isn't that helpful (this is a lot like the creationist stuff I hinted at). Because if you are really strict about it, you will probably answer "false" since the models aren't perfect...but that it obviously an unsatisfactory sort of answer, since perfection isn't really that useful a standard.

And this is commonplace, even in fairly simple examples, especially those to do with human affairs. Sure, there are lots of questions where answering true or false makes sense, but also lots where it gets more complicated. (Even math has some odd murky stuff that makes it less clean cut than people think.)

12:08 / 02.10.06

So is "truth" valuable per se? Or is it only the practical results of holding true or false beliefs that is important?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't every morality system based around practical results? Don't kill or you'll go to jail. Believe in God or you'll go to hell. Do your homework or you'll never get a good job and you'll end up homeless under a bridge. I can't think of any system that prescribes or denies an action without framing it in the context of the action's consequences, though some have decidely vague results such as being a good person or helping society.

However, there is the possibility of untruths being wrong if you believe that anything God made is sacred and good, and anything he didn't make is bad (being infinitly wise, this seems like something he might be inclined to do). Under these conditions, an untruth, being something which is not, would then be inherently bad (if you consider something defined by God as "bad" to be "inherently bad").

I just woke up, so I'm not gonna promise that makes sense.

13:46 / 02.10.06

If I hold false belief x, and by sheer luck, never face harm because of it, does it matter that I was wrong?

Well, no. If I believe Venus is the closest planet to the sun, and never discover otherwise, it surely only matters in terms of it's effect on other beliefs that might affect me or other people, and unless I care about astronomy it's likely never to come up.
Quite often people say things that are false and I don't bother to correct them because it doesn't matter that much, the harm of making them feel bad is greater than saying 'Actually it's tell-tale, not tell-tell.' If someone believes something false but trivial, who cares?

A bit of philosophy background here, assuming True means 'corresponding to the real world', knowledge is sometimes classed as Justified True Belief. A True belief isn't really knowledge if it's arrived at by spurious means, a reasonable belief isn't knowledge unless it's true, you don't know something unless you believe it.
Epistemology article, Philosophy of Truth.

sdv (non-human)

19:34 / 02.10.06

probably the most important 'living' philosopher who regards the concept of truth as important is Alain Badiou. It's important to note though that he would exclude most of the examples used in this discussion so far as being not really truths at all. (I tend to agree with him - that I drank espresso at breakfast is not a truth, that i am a militant atheist because of the impossibility of evidence supporting any deity is one...)

What Badiou suggests is that " we must concieve of a truth both as the construction of a fidelity to an event, and as a generic potency of a transformation of a domain of knowledge..."

What event (you might ask) for example the invention of modern science (circa 17th)- which radically transformed our understanding of what constitutes knowledge. It's this after all that guaranteed the arrival of atheism here at least. Similarly one might say that both the 20th C feminist movements were truth events in this sense - because both transformed who we are and social and political domains of knowledge.

Can you have a personal truth like this ? (Badiou goes on about love) but I don't know and i'm not sure it matters...

Unconditional Love

22:07 / 02.10.06

I would suggest this depends on the context of the imaginary plane, if grounded one does not need a parachute, if flying it may be desirable, but not if suicide is the intent. Alot of what is considered truth is based also on surrounding connotation, if commonly accepted meaning are percieved by the mind, this further reinforces the imaginary facts.

Repetition of common themes, that you would just be considered stupid not to believe is great reinforcement for what somebody wishes to pass as truth.

If on the other hand we are talking me in a plane skydiving without a parachute, when faced with the reality of sensory experience as compared to language constructs, i am not jumping from the flying plane without a serious of ground based lessons, medical checks,etc etc.

How we construct what we call truthful statements or what seems like truth, sometimes appears to me to be a series of self created cleverly constructed lies, that bares very little relation to sensory experience and phenomena.

There can often be more truth in the tone and feeling of a voice then the words it is speaking, much more is also revealed by what is not said and concealed by what is.