Concerning Truth

In some of my previous posts, I have indicated that I do not believe in the correspondence theory of truth, or, to put it more accurately, I do not believe that the correspondence theory of truth is at all helpful. I have signalled, perhaps obliquely, that I share a similar attitude towards truth and reference as the philosopher Richard Rorty. In tonight's post I wish to discuss Rorty's espoused philosophical perspective, termed 'pragmatism', and attempt to show how pragmatism is different from relativism. I also wish to talk about my life a little more and make an observation about current political discourse. As usual, this post is a kind of long-form miscellany, but I hope that the transitions between topics won't prove too jarring.

The correspondence theory of truth is the standard, common sense view of truth, the default position among the laity (insofar as ordinary people ever interrogate their notion of truth) and among the priestly class, professional philosophers. The correspondence theory of truth states, simply, that a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds with a fact in reality, or, to put it differently, with a state of affairs. The proposition "p" is true if and only if p. Thus we could say "The cat is on the mat" is true if and only if the particular cat to which we are referring is indeed on the mat. This theory of truth seems self evident. However, it is not difficult to find problematising cases – we might think, e.g. of Kantian analytic truths as counter-examples. For instance, the proposition "All bachelors are unmarried" is true in all universes, including universes in which there are no bachelors. So, in the case of analytic truths, the correspondence theory is either otiose or downright misleading. In the post "The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction" I gave another example, which I'll give again. Suppose we are to make the claim "Pluto is a planet". This proposition is true if and only if Pluto is indeed a planet – and it seems that this proposition was true twenty years ago but is false today, because in the intervening period we have redefined the word "planet". This all suggests that the correspondence principle does not enable us to escape language even though it is intended as a bridge between language and the real world.

Another class of problematising counter-examples are fictional objects. The proposition "A dragon breathes fire" seems to be true even though it does not correspond to any object in the real world. Likewise "A unicorn has a single horn" or "Sherlock Holmes is a famous detective who lives at Baker Street" seem to be true even though they do not correspond to things in the real world. Many philosophers would argue, as Bertrand Russell did, that the proposition concerning Holmes is false because it fails to refer to anything, but my intuition, an intuition shared by many people I believe, is that such sentences are both meaningful and true. (I have discussed all this in the post "Fictional Objects".) So fictional objects, like analytic truths, cast doubt on the utility and universality of the correspondence theory.

A third class of problematising counter-example may be propositions concerning abstractions. Consider the proposition, "Jealousy destroys the thing it loves" – we could appeal to Othello as evidence for this proposition. The problem with it is that there is no thing in the world to which the term "jealousy" refers; there is nothing in the world we can point to and say, "That is jealousy". It seems that in order to parse this sentence we need to rephrase it in the following way: "If a person becomes jealous, he or she will destroy the object of his love and jealousy" or, alternatively, "Jealous people destroy the ones they love". The move from the original sentence to its more empirical form is a kind of reverse reification – an adjective that has been made into a noun must become an adjective again. Consider another proposition, "Crime doesn't pay." In order to make sense of this sentence in a way that satisfies the correspondence principle, we would have to say "People who commit crimes do not benefit from the crimes they commit." But we don't seem to need to mentally reformulate such statements.  The use of abstractions is rife within ordinary language discourse, and we seem to manage and make sense of abstractions quite well without parsing them into more concrete forms. It seems to me that abstractions also present difficulties for the correspondence theory of truth. I admit, though, that this particular issue, the question of whether abstractions fail to correspond to anything and thus militate against the correspondence theory of truth, is an issue that I haven't fully thought through as yet.

Consider the following proposition: "Global warming is caused by human activity." This is a proposition that has been at the heart of public debate and proposed public policy for at least twenty years.  If we accept the correspondence principle, we might say, "The proposition 'Global warming is caused by human activity' is true if and only if global warming is caused by human activity." And yet affirming the correspondence principle is no help; there has been and still is considerable disagreement about the truth of this proposition among many groups of people, with some still denying that global warming is occurring at all. The problem is that we can't point to anything and say, "That is global warming." We have only the indirect evidence of global warming provided by scientists, evidence such as temperatures recorded at various places at various times, shrinking glaciers and arctic ice, and coral bleaching. To defend the theory that global warming is caused by human activity, we need a scientific argument. The argument exists and runs as follows: greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapour, and methane, created by humans and domesticated animals, prevent infra-red radiation from escaping the atmosphere, trapping energy in it, and raising global surface temperatures as a result. Yet even this scientific argument does not persuade a large swarth of people, particularly religious people and those on the political right. The fact is that this issue, the issue of whether global warming is occurring at all and, if it is, is anthropogenic, is still subject to passionate debate around the world. This demonstrates the failure of the correspondence principle to settle many important questions. It does not help furthermore that 'global warming' is another abstraction. If we were to try to de-reify it, to apply Bertrand Russell–style predicate calculus to the proposition, we might say, "Something exists such that it is the atmosphere, had a particular average temperature in 1980, has a higher average temperature today in 2019, and this increase in temperature (a change in property) is the result of changes in greenhouse gas concentrations (another property)." But this cumbersome reformulation, I admit not a particularly good reformulation, doesn't really help us at all.

It seems that there are myriad objections we can raise to the correspondence theory of truth. Yet if we reject it, what should we replace it with? It might seem that the only alternative is a coherence theory of truth: I used to believe this myself. However, there is a better alternative – pragmatism. Richard Rorty is not an easy philosopher to read but I believe he regards truth as the outcome of a process, of conversation, dialogue, with others; furthermore he regards truth as always provisional. To espouse the pragmatist position is to say that we should believe to be true only those propositions which are useful to us rather than presume that true propositions somehow mirror reality. The traditional definition of knowledge is that it is 'true, justified belief': Rorty argues that we should drop the word 'true' and say that knowledge is simply 'justified belief'. (For an interesting discussion of pragmatism, see the Youtube clip "Pragmatism with Rorty, Putnam, and Conant" in which Rorty advances this claim.)

The problem with pragmatism is that it risks falling into relativism, the position that truth is totally subjective and that I can believe some proposition to be true and you can believe it to be false and we can both be right. In the clip I just recommended, Rorty says "Relativists are what people who don't like pragmatism call pragmatists." Is there a way to be a pragmatist without falling into the relativist trap? I have thought about this and one solution, not a solution advanced by Rorty so far as I know but one that has occurred to me, is to subscribe to the view that true knowledge is that set of beliefs held by an ideal totally rational and objective agent who is acquainted with all the relevant information. We might suppose agents who approach this ideal already exist or that, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, such agents will exit in the future. Such an agent might, on assimilating and considering all the facts and arguments as reported by newspapers and scientific journals concerning climate change, conclude correctly that global warming is occurring and that it is the result of human activity. Knowledge exists in the mind of a knower, for sure, but, to avoid relativism, we might posit a mind that is superior to others in its rationality and in its ability to discriminate between legitimate facts, legitimate arguments, and bullshit. We might say that real knowledge is simply that set of beliefs held by such a consciousness. This provides a way of approaching knowledge without appealing to the correspondence principle.

And yet...

There is a difficulty or complication with supposing that knowledge is that set of beliefs held by a totally rational consciousness who is cognisant of all the facts and arguments. It supposes that 'rationality' itself is unproblematic. Imagine we let loose on the web a powerful artificial intelligence that scrutinises everything daily added to the internet and attempts to form a 'picture' of the world from what it reads– it is not impossible that such an intelligence, discovering all the ghost stories that people tell each other every day, will decide that ghosts are real. Most people who opt to wear the 'rationalist' label will say, however, that any belief in ghosts is irrational – an a priori assumption at the foundation of rationalism is that the world is materialist and that the supernatural does not exist. Is belief in ghosts rational or irrational? It depends on the type of rationality at work. Different rational systems start from different premises. Could a purely rational intelligence work out which is correct – the neo-Darwinian perspective advanced by Dawkins and other mainstream evolutionary biologists, or the theory of morphic resonance proposed by Rupert Sheldrake? I don't think so. It seems that any rational system contains premises that cannot be justified, and so one cannot adjudicate between different systems. In order to create a pragmatism free of relativism, to ground a theory of knowledge in the way I have sought to do by positing an ideal, totally rational and objective mind, we need to suppose that if more than one such mind existed, they would all arrive at the same conclusions. But it may be possible for different entirely rational and objective minds to arrive at different conclusions. So my proposed method for separating pragmatism from relativism fails.

This issue is still something I have no clear answer to. I may never have a satisfactory answer. But this should hardly surprise anyone. It is unlikely a mere lowly blogger could work out the answer to the ultimate questions, Life, the Universe, and Everything, when no one else ever has. It is an answer that has eluded philosophers since Socrates. Perhaps I should just say that the answer is 42, and leave it at that.

At this point in the post I wish to stop talking philosophy and start talking about my life again.

In this blog, I have often railed against the psychiatric profession. The year before last my psychiatrist proposed at an Independent Review I had requested that I had treatment resistant schizophrenia – peculiarly, however, she downplayed just how profoundly psychotic I was in 2007, when I first became 'ill', and you would think that if she was trying to prove me insane, she would have mentioned just how completely delusional I was that first year. I think I have finally worked out the mistake the doctors made with respect to me, and I will come back to it later in the post. For now, I simply want to describe some aspects of the psychotic episode I experienced in 2007. I may go over old ground again but sometimes a person needs to repeat himself to be heard.

While living at the Big House in early 2007, I formed the delusion that the world was full of closet homosexuals. I began to believe that I was under surveillance, that there were listening devices in the smoke detectors; I began dividing my flatmates, of which I had twenty, up into angels and demons. I have talked about this before in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". What I wish to stress now is that after I left the Big House, returned to my mother's home, and became a medicated patient of the Mental Health System, the delusions did not go away. Or rather they went away briefly and then came back after I became a patient of Tony Fernando.

I had formed the belief that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, and that the closet homosexuals who ran the world would kill any whistleblowers who threatened to expose their secret. This delusion endured all of 2007. There were times that year that I even became afraid that the homosexuals might try to poison me by putting arsenic in the wine I sometimes drank. Shortly after I became a patient of the service, I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses and that the media were listening to everything I said; I thought that if I said the wrong thing I would be destroyed somehow. I never discussed these delusions with anyone. The closest I came was on one occasion when I went for a walk on Mt Albert with a sympathetic support worker; although I was terrified at the time that the American government was spying on me using satellites, I brought myself to say to him that I believed myself the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by Mikey Havoc. When we got back in the car to go home, he said, "Who's Mikey Havoc?"

After my experience working writing news stories at bFM, I decided that literally all the news reported on the television and through the radio was fabricated, made up. I even briefly entertained the idea that the Holocaust didn't happen – this particular delusion only lasted a day. The next day I had an experience that forcefully impressed upon me the reality of the gas chambers and, after that, I never doubted the reality of the Holocaust again. In fact, I decided that the Jews were all straight and the Nazis were all closet homosexuals. I decided that Israel was a paradise and that all the bad press it received was intended to dissuade closet homosexual from moving there. My core delusion, that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals, that homosexuals ruled the world, swept everything up into its matrix. I believed that the famous New Zealand historian Michael King, who had died in an unexplained car accident in 2004, had been assassinated because he had threatened to expose the homosexual conspiracy. In the middle of the year, my mother and I travelled to Whanganui to visit my godmother; during the trip, we were followed by a lorry and I became frightened that it was acting on behalf of the homosexual conspiracy and that it would run us off the road. After I had spent a couple of days in Whanganui, however, I decided that it was a heterosexual paradise, a small enclave of enlightened heterosexuals who had fled there to escape all the closet homosexuals who made up the bulk of the rest of New Zealand's population. I thought the bad press Whanganui received (supposedly Whanganui has gang problems) and the impression of it created by Michael Laws, then its mayor, were an elaborate deception intended to dissuade closet homosexuals from moving there. In other words, I thought that Whanganui was the New Zealand equivalent of Israel.

The people treating me seem to have thought that the cause of my 'illness' was sexual confusion; in truth, the thing that made me sick that year was an explosion of homophobia. There were times in 2007 (and again in 2009) when my thoughts took on a religious bent. I sometimes thought that the Apocalypse had occurred and we were living in the End Times; I thought the Rapture had happened. My feeling that the entire world had ended sprang directly from my awareness that having become a patient of the Mental Health Service, I would never fully escape it. Occasionally, in 2007, I believed that I was a Jesus-like figure and that my role was to divide the world into the saved and the damned, heterosexuals and closet homosexuals. I don't fully understand why my delusions sometimes took on a religious aspect. I was an atheist then and an agnostic today.

I never told anyone that I believed the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. The closest I came to discussing sexuality out loud at all was during my first contact with the Taylor Centre and perhaps once or twice a little later. I said at that first contact, among other things, that I wanted "to come out as straight". What I meant by this was that I had always been heterosexual and that I wanted people to know this. At that first contact, I was close to well – in fact, the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals had briefly gone away. I became 'sick' again after my first appointment with the fraudulent and sadistic psychiatrist Antony Fernando. Every psychiatrist I have ever met seems to have a different understanding of what 'schizophrenia' is and what 'homosexuality' is; many psychiatrists seem to think that sexuality is inborn and unchangeable. I believe that Fernando decided, deliberately, that I was a gay man who wanted to turn straight, that my claim to being straight was a delusion because it is impossible for homosexuals to turn heterosexual. This insanity, the idea that my saying I was straight was either a lie or a delusion, has dogged me for over twelve years. It has often been a source of considerable psychological distress. After that first contact with the Taylor Centre I never said I was straight again for six years. Nor did anyone ever ask me how I identified in terms of sexuality. However I have been saying that I'm heterosexual either directly or indirectly reasonably frequently ever since Easter 2013. It is something I literally can't understand, the utter corruption of the psychiatric profession – psychiatrists train for thirteen years and come out the other end of their training stupider, more ignorant and more mendacious than they were when they started. They can't seem to see what's right in front of their faces.

Over the last couple of weeks, a number of things have become clear to me. My intuitions regarding the cause of my first psychotic episode have come into sharper focus. I have also come to a clearer understanding of the role my older brother has played in my 'illness'. This is not something I feel I can talk about in this blog though. I know readers sometimes go back to older posts – I would like to recommend the post "Bruce Springsteen vs. Faith No More" as an important essay worth revisiting. I may in the next post articulate more explicitly the reasons I became ill 'in the first place'.

I began this essay by saying that I also wanted to talk about a feature of current political discourse. I was watching Don Lemon's show on CNN a few days ago and a contributor opined that Donald Trump is antisemitic. I felt like throwing something at the screen. I don't like Trump. But he is not antisemitic. His son-in-law Jared Kushner is an Orthodox Jew. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism. As Bill Maher pointed out on his show once, half of Trump's cabinet when he first took office were Jewish. All of his policy decisions with respect to Israel have been in support of his pal Benjamin Netanyahu, decisions such as moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognising Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, and legitimising the building of settlements in the West Bank contrary to international law. It seems to me that in the same way that the Republican Party wooed Evangelical Christians by opposing abortion and gay marriage and by supporting the teaching of creationism at schools, it is now seeking to secure the Jewish vote by supporting Israel.

Supposedly, a trope of antisemitism is to suggest that Jews have a 'dual allegiance'. I would like to suggest that many Jews do have a dual allegiance but this shouldn't be surprising. Any ethnic group, any group of immigrants, contains a proportion who are partly loyal to their ancestral homeland. In the 1950s, New Zealanders of English descent, even those born here, referred to Britain as 'Home'. I read a newspaper article a couple of years ago about a survey which found that a significant chunk of the Chinese community here in New Zealand would put Chinese interests ahead of New Zealand interests. If we recognise that a kind of dual allegiance is common to any immigrant group, it is no longer a specifically antisemitic trope – rather it is a simple fact about ethnic and national identity.

It is possible to oppose Israeli policies without being antisemitic. Consider the Squad. Ilhan Omar got into trouble for criticising the lobbying of politicians by pro-israelis organisations in February of this year. And yet three members of the Squad have endorsed Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders is Jewish. What I am trying to get at here is that the issue is complicated and that the current discourse, in which people tell lies about whether Trump is antisemitic or not and say that any criticism of Israel is anti-Jew, misleads the public and contributes to a fog of bullshit that plays into the hands of the liars and bigots.

Some years ago I read The Divided Self by RD Laing. It wasn't a good book. But RD Laing did say something very true. He said that madness is a sane reaction to an insane world. This is a sentiment I can endorse.