Searching for truth used to be the central theme of my life. The search didn’t make me happy, and recently I realised how much of this anxiety showed up in my publications. Was I the only person with a built-in need to keep probing until I found the real truth? Everyone around me seemed very certain about everything. They used the word freely. But all I could see was holes in their arguments and outrageously knee-jerk judgements. But they were contented while I was not.
So what was it in my perspective that was torturing me, and what was going on in everyone else’s perspective that let them cruise along claiming not only certainty but truth? How had the human race have survived with such a murky window on the world?
Perspective. That’s the thing that has made me learn to stop worrying and love the human animal. It made me remember that decades ago I published an article called ‘The Prospects of Understanding for a Worm’. The earthworm’s perspective on the world seems limited to burrowing and not drying out or drowning. Its knowledge is purely sensory, but sufficient for evolutionary success. The worm doesn’t bother about truth. Nor does any other animal apart from the human animal.
An individual human perspective is infinitely more complicated than any other animal species. It’s the sum of all its experience and belief. Its input starts at birth, and ideally soon embeds a happy sense of self-identity.
The earthworm’s self-identity is important too. If a spade cuts off its head it can generate a new, identical head. But the old fixed identity comes with it. A human animal’s head can’t regenerate, but over time its perspective becomes more and more stuffed with experiences and beliefs.
Yet however varied, tested, intense or wide-ranging these additions may be, they will never contain a single Absolute Truth. Truth with a capital T is – if it exists – objective. Our beliefs are in contrast subjective; states of mind inside a human animal‘s head. Truthfulness is also a subjective state of mind. We can aspire to telling ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’, but our account will inevitably be selective.
Is the best human certainty we can imagine fallible, too? Yes. As a subjective state of mind in a specifically human intelligence system, it is to a greater or lesser extent unreliable. However, human certainty is worth aspiring to. When backed up by maximal evidence it has the status of our best use of human intelligence to date, and we are entitled to be proud of it. The Truth of a state of affairs is not influenced by our beliefs about it. But thank goodness some of our forebears expanded our perspectives instead of leaving us rootling in the mud. We may not be able to generate new heads but we are brilliant at generating new ideas.
In sum, I’ve learned to respect the Truth, out there beyond our reach. I’ve also learned to respect the limits of reason. That makes me happy. As to certainty, in a fast-changing world our perspectives are assaulted almost daily by new information, soon to be replaced by newer claims. Much of this apparently non-negotiable data is just ungrounded opinion. Beware.
Personally, I no longer make any claim to human truth, and make almost no claim to certainty apart from my claim that all human-animal knowledge is fallible. So I find any very strong opinion or conviction suspect.
Personally again, I’m happy to tolerate a wild opinion if is headed by a polite disclaimer – literally a dis-claim to Truth and a nod to the fallibility of human certainty. How about “as I see it …”, “I may be wrong but ..”, “correct me if you like but … ”, “in my understanding” and above all ”from my perspective”?
We do not hear such disclaimers very often. But this touch of modesty would make a lot of people happy.
Optional check list:
The Term ‘Cloud-cuckoo-land comes from a play called The Birds by the 4th century BC Greek satirist Aristophenes. In the play the birds build an imaginary city in the air, and this is the name they gave it.
Q. Do you think we can ever have evidence for a non-human realm of Truth?
Q. Would you be happier if you could say on oath that you will ‘tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as I saw it’?
Q. What does it mean if we say ‘in fact’?
I don’t think people are really certain of things – they often just buy into their beliefs and opinions as if they were true. You are correct that it’s a question of perspective – we project our perceptions out there and mistake them for the truth. I think there is an ultimate Truth but it’s not knowable to us and the best way is for us to learn to be happy with the paradoxes our search leads to.
Thanks for the feedback, Heather. I really like your second sentence – a perfect way of putting the problem about human truth. The problem comes when people insist that the opinion they’ve bought into not only falls short of human truth, but claim it to be eternal, unchangeable and infallible Truth. That’s why I’m writing a book to show the dangers of careless opinions, and the wise use of the safety net of modesty and disclaimer. There are lots of historical, political, scientific, medical, legal and human-relation cases of complacent judgements resulting in flawed claims to certainty, and I’ll be… Read more »
Maybe we feel a distinction between cases where people who would admit that the ‘truth’ they promote is imperfect (but they have forgotten to add the polite disclaimer) and those who would knowingly twist the ‘truth’ for their own benefit? I think that when we hear the legal oath we understand your version with ‘as I saw it’ but the use of the term suggesting an absolute truth is to protect society from liars?
My target in the search for certainty was the notion that a human being could claim to tell the whole truth. All testimony is subjective evidence, with potential mistakes or gaps in perception, memory and conjecture. I could argue that a witness who swears total truth has committed perjury before saying a word more. But you are right, the oath is meant to prevent lying by intimidation. This bears out Bertrand Russell’s claim that testimony plays an important part in the social fabric of belief, but is fallible because it presupposes that we all respect the oath. Russell was sceptical… Read more »