The Truth Shall Set You Free

Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash

The Truth Shall Set You Free

By Joel Levin

A friend of mine, a mathematician, once bet me that, in an upcoming legal argument in a court of appeals, I could not somehow work in the term ‘verisimilitudinous’. As good as he was at math, my friend had a very imperfect understanding of legal argument or that, at appellate arguments, one can say almost anything in front of what are often inattentive, preoccupied, and indifferent panels of judges. Moreover, one of the many character flaws of well-educated individuals, particularly in my experience, white male individuals that at that time dominated the appellate courts, is that if you used a term they didn’t know, they almost never admitted to ignorance of it. I used the term ‘verisimilitudinous’ and won the bet.

The term comes back to me today as one with a rich tradition in the history and philosophy of science, and one we ought to make use of in our overly heated political debates today. When taken with another powerful twin tool with its own rich tradition, the paired concepts of verifiability and falsifiability, it allows us a standard to examine and judge the political rhetoric that plagues us. We need without question some measure of confidence that truth, and all that requires truth as a predicate – freedom, equality, justice, safety, and prosperity – can be rationally measured, improved, and ultimately achieved. First, a quick look at what it is we are talking about, with the briefest glimpse of history and a slightly larger dose of demystification.

Truth, then. There are those who might want to dismiss the idea that there could be anything such as truth, finding it to be purely subjective (whatever that means) or inherently controversial  or unknowable, as in the inability to be sure of the “absolute truth“. This, is, of course, a very large subject, but for purposes here, let us try to defuse by looking to the kind of definition suggested by the great Polish mathematician, Alfred Tarski. (Indulging in an aside indicative of the world we find ourselves living in and what that world values: I was on the Jewish tour of Warsaw, which began with the guide asking the large group to name famous Jews associated with the city. The group, with historical and family ties to the city, had no trouble identifying a number of luminaries. Sam Goldwyn was quickly mentioned by several. I then asked about Tarski. Neither the guide, nor likely anyone on the tour, knew of him and he had never before been mentioned. We readily value contributions that might seem slight set against the mathematical logicians that gave us, among other things, hardware, software, and the internet). Asking about the property of truth is not inquiring of a thing about the world, or about people, but rather it is rather a property about statements. Other kinds of things have other kinds of properties. Consider ordinary nouns (things), as, for example, people, who can be tall or short, rich or poor, male or female, or tables, that can be wooden or metal, 4 feet or 8 feet, round or square. Truth does not apply to them, and we can make no sense of talking about a true person or a true table. (They may be called this metaphorically, but anything can be metaphorical).

Now look at statements. They have a number of properties, for instance, they may be in English or Spanish, printed or oral, poetic or dull. But they may also be true or false. Here we could suggest that the following statements – “2+4=6”, “Most cows have 4 legs”, and “Paris is the capital of Virginia is false” – all are true. That is all that is intended here by the term ‘true’. If one knows what a cow is and what a leg is and what the number 4 means, one also knows what it is for something to be true. There is no commitment to anything that might be the absolute truth or that might imply that only God would know something with certainty or that no one could ever make a mistake. Thus, we can confidently use the term ‘true’. Simply our own language commits us to this, because if we know what the number ‘two’ means or what ‘leg’ is, or what it means to be a state capital, all properties of things rather than of statements, we can put together the statements above and say that they are true.

Once we get there, that is, get to the property of truth, we can try to disentangle and make sense of the larger structure of the political debate where accusations fly of lying, hoaxes, fake this and fake that, and even denials of what seem to be ordinary notions of reality. Someone might be lying, but mistaken in their lie, thinking that something hasn’t occurred, but it has. In fact they are mistaken and it has occurred, so what the liar said, is, despite his hoping to mislead, in fact true. Take a not so unusual divorce proceeding, where one spouse accuses the other of having an affair to gain an advantage in the legal proceedings, despite not thinking that they did, but, it turns out that upon closer investigation, the other spouse did have an affair, making what the accuser said to be true even though it was intended to be a lie. There are any variety of things that people say without intending them to be true other than lies, and our language is rich in that verbiage because our behavior is rich in not telling the truth. Max Black has written on humbug and various forms of humbug – including balderdash, claptrap, hokum, drivel, and quackery, as well as a number of other now antiquated terms – and some of that has been updated in Harry Frankfurt’s surprise best seller, On Bullshit.

The shades of this are endless. Black’s description of deceptive misrepresentation and Frankfurt’s discussion of what is meant to be inaccurate do not quite align. Brian Steltzer has written recently about a rising problem in his book, Hoax. A hoax is a plausible story known to be false but which, in sufficient numbers and robust forms can overcome competing stories, regardless of their content, and be equally plausible and even acceptable to audiences. Then, the difference between what one might commonly see is reality and what one might take to be a hoax collapses. Any number of statements or even attitudes disloyal to truth color the twilight  area between the straightforward truth and a simple lie – hypocrisy, indifference, acting the imposter, nonsense, disinformation, exaggeration, embellishment, embroidery, fraud – can be mentioned as evidence about that disloyalty.

Central to the traditional notions of truth is the intent to do one’s best to tell the truth, not merely accidentally getting it right, or even getting it wrong despite all attempts to be accurate. So we will assume here, for purposes of getting to or understanding the truth, that people are trying to find the truth. It is not very hard to see that, without that constant intention in mind, all the roadblocks of deception and bullshit, illusion and hoaxes, can join weak assumptions, myopic observations, good ideas that disappoint and ordinary dead ends that get in the way of ever discovering the truth. But without even trying, the task appears helpless.

Enter verisimilitude. We discover the world piece by piece and one needs to stitch those pieces together in order to make sense of it. We require lamps against the darkness of ignorance and a way to locate a correspondence with reality and coherence of all the information. Is it real and does it fit together? We begin with ordinary notions of what seems real and rational, or at least practical and you and useful although he might recognize that they are not quite the same thing. In any case, we construct pictures, sometimes grandly known as theories, put all of these things together. It might be simple. We might see a number of signs of gathering storm and put together a picture of our impending hurricane or if we are warmer theorist of some kind of tropical storm movement. It might be might be the facts we gather for purposes of making a bet on the World Series or the observations we assemble on a political candidate to see how to vote. We might be bothered by inconsistencies, gaps in our knowledge, conclusions that conflict with common sense. We might wish to jettison any of those, knowing that we are always short on full knowledge (who could confidently make real observations about founders‘ intensive in writing the United States Constitution, the causes of the Vietnam War, or whether Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton were successful presidents? We might want to brush aside inconsistency while we might recognize common sense to be an imperfect barometer – even if we don’t believe with Einstein that it consists of the things we learned by 18 that were incorrect – and need to be somewhat untroubled by inconsistencies, which, like the poor, are always among us.

Here is where we might find the very awkward phrase ‘verisimilitude’ to be a very useful phrase, as it does not speak in general about the truth any individual statement, but rather the accuracy of larger pictures and larger views taken as a whole. Evolution gets most things right, and creation of some gets most things wrong and so one might want to look at the larger view. This makes theory-building central, and dispels this idea that there is some difference between reality and theory. If the theory is right, that could be done. If the germ theory of disease is it is it correct as imagined by Ibn Sina, Pasteur and Koch, then we would expect to see analysis of germs – viruses, bacteria, fungi – revealing truths about contagion and mortality, and promising hopes about vaccines and therapies. If the theory is wrong, and diseases are caused by unsavory foreigners, the wrath of the gods, or spell-casting magi and witch doctors, then we would expect theory to be highly profitable and predictive, in fact simply wrong at every point. We can’t dismiss it as just being a theory just as we don’t say the solar system where the planets go around rotate around the site rather than vice versa is just a theory: we say they are larger explanations of how things are.

We judge those theories in large part by verisimilitude how many things do they get right and how important are the things that they get wrong. Occasionally it is a very big thing that a theory gets wrong, as when the Copernicus and Newtonian view about time and space (and an ether) became impossible to defend, opening the way for Einstein’s theory of special relativity, but that is the rarest of events. Usually it is piece by piece as we put things together that we figure out this cancer is caused by this and not that, this economic policy has a certain effect and not another one, it is small change in human behavior, what is Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein called a nudge – a small default change in a practice that leads us to greater rationality and prosperity – could change things significantly.

In the hot house environment of today’s politics this idea of the primacy of theory has some relevance. To begin, there are very few “gotcha” moments in these cases. Someone in our political climate makes a slip of the tongue, a phrase inaccurate or impolitic, a single irreverent act that disqualifies. That would hardly do in any larger theory, where mistakes, dead ends, premature optimism, or simple false statements, and claims later shown to be mistaken later are a way of life. Ask any lab scientist, practicing economist, historical researcher, or individual trying to figure out a complicated and hardly transparent world. At a minimum, the commitment to falsifiability needs to be universal, not just limited to a few star gazers and lab techs. I once asked a former teacher of mine, the renown historian Akira Iriye, later president of the American Historical Association and author of more than 100 works, if anything could change his strongly anti-Communist, pro-Western view of 20th century East Asia. He said simply that, if he found evidence that South rather than North Korea had been the initial belligerent immediately prior to the Korean War, everything would change. This willingness to see potential falsifying facts is what makes scholarship viable, the truth primary, and the promise of improvement in the human condition possible.

The other end of this, though, is perhaps less obvious, but more interesting. What theory does is provide a prediction of what further research will show to be the facts of the matter. Einstein‘s theory about general relativity was confirmed by observations from a radio telescope in Nancay, France 105 years later while Watson, Crick and Franklin’s theory of the double helix was shown to be correct – a theory that has proven vast, rich, and able to solve an enormous number of otherwise inscrutable medical issues – when later experiments and greatly improved medical techniques and equipment were developed. That is, facts do not always precede theory and one might conclude, as do many in the philosophy of science, the two must be taken together in order to make sense of the world. In the world of astrophysics, we have the luxury of waiting 105 years for confirmation for theory. In the meantime you can prove useful, illuminating, solvable problems – 20th century physics gave us everything from the laser to the atomic bomb to nuclear energy to the CT scan to Google maps  – but we can remain tentative without feeling too much discomfort.

Politics presents a very different kind of problem. To take just this week’s factual controversies: Did this administration and this president disparage fallen soldiers, former prisoners of war, those who closed the line and helped win World War I, and injured warriors rolling their wheelchairs and balancing their canes in the concrete as they march in military parades? The facts are disputed. Someday there may be an answer to whether, for example, President Trump actually disparaged General Kelly’s fallen son, Robert, at Robert’s grave, or not, through memoirs, diaries, confessions, or later research.

That said, there is an election in which that has become an issue in two months. What the theory says about President Trump is relatively well-settled, based on his own actions, his own words, and the recollections of friends and family, the reports of his former colleagues, and any number of things of direct relevance, including his disparagement of John McCain and other POWs, his repeated actions to avoid conscription during the Vietnam War, and his threat (according to his sister), to disinherit Don Jr., his son, should he enlist in the armed services. In constructing  a larger theory, though, we might take what everyone seems to agree on: calling President Trump transactional. The essence of a legal or economic transaction is consideration, that is a quid pro quo, something in return for something given. Essentially, the difference between a gift and a contract is whether the quid pro quo or consideration is tendered on both sides. Trump has made it clear that it is only for some consideration that he would engage in any conduct. If he cannot understand military service because it is non-transactional, then he would be unable to understand almost any charitable giving. For a man of his immense wealth, one can find almost no record of any charitable giving. One see almost no record of any charitable impulse to are achieving any of the eight steps of charity suggested by Maimonides or any of the simple but recognized past service by one person to another suggested in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Given that Trump has a history of complete lack of gratuitous (eleemosynary or charitable) action for the benefit of another individual, organization, state, or cause, the words attributed to him ring true. That is, the theory of Donald Trump offers a solution to the factual uncertainty of a particular Trumpian action. We can solve the uncertainty using a theory when the verified facts run short, even when they don’t.

That is hardly the whole picture, as candidates for facts are sometimes not facts but errors, hopeful theories can be and often are faulty or misguided or at least in need of improvement, and controversy is epidemic. That brings us to to the second pillar of the philosophy of science literature: the position that theories and statements must be verifiable or falsifiable to be considered scientific. The fine points of the differences between verifiability (promoted by A. J. Ayer and W. V. O. Quine) and falsifiability (promoted by Karl Popper) need not detain us here. What they suggest is that, even though a particular theory may be true or a specific fact may be correct, if there is no way of establishing that, either by verifying it in some independent manner or falsifying it because it is inconsistent with proof or evidence, or at least in theory verifying or falsifying it, then it should form no part of the scientific debate. There is a bit of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, perhaps, in that some things are difficult to perceive or to verify or falsify. They are rarer, though, than one might think, given the real abundance of creative scientific ingenuity. Out go miracles, most of religion, magic, superstition, almost all conspiracy theory, and a great deal of counterintuitive gossip or rumor.

Let us consider what it means for a theory or statement to be falsifiable. We can certainly consider a science experiment or theory. Alexander Fleming asserted that a mold in his lab, penicillin, would generally cure bacterial infections. If one took it when infected and stayed just as sick, we would have falsified what Fleming claimed. That made his assertion one of science, not for example, religion or conspiracy theory. Take two examples: The biblical – Moses parted the (200 mile wide, 1600 foot deep) Red Sea and Mary was a virgin mother – which cannot be falsified because, to their believers, absolute nothing would count as disproof.

The conspiratorial. QAnon, a conspiracy theory that suggests, broadly, that a group of pedophiles enamored of Satan are running a child-trafficking ring that, for its success, requires the downfall of Donald Trump. A day of reckoning will come with liberals – journalists, politicians, the Rothschilds and George Soros, and particularly the Clintons – going to jail and Trump prevailing.

But it is the predictions that we might consider for the moment. Consider just a few of these listed by Michael Barkun in his article in Foreign Policy Magazine: “Trump would deliver a coup against the deep state during which no fewer than 25,000 sealed indictments would be opened. In a message on November 1, 2017, Q alerted followers that the opening of these indictments would cause widespread civil disorder. Therefore, because of the riots caused by the imminent arrest of ‘senior public officials’, the president was about to declare ‘a state of temporary military control’ within ‘the next several days.’” All false. All falsifiable. For Popper, that would be the end of the matter, but that is due to his robust use of a Tarskian truth. There are traditional targets of Popper’s falsifiability test, Marxism and Freudianism, to list just two, as nothing that appears in the world dissuades their adherents of the truth of their favored view. (We might add neo-liberalism to that list). They are older targets, now by comparison quaint in their intellectual methods and academic pretensions. The virtual world is shallower, more treacherous, more duplicitous, and more vicious.

That said, the inability to allow some robust measure of testing as to whether something is true is what qualifies any claim not only to science, but to our everyday life, perhaps even that life, including judging friendships and politics. Of course, it not impossible that what is claimed but untested is in fact the case, but we can only progress by being able to test that claim and ensure that it is valid. Then the claim to truth becomes reality, and offers us some reassurance and the possibility of a loyalty that we can now attribute to such statements. We can represent the world in a coherent way (the Tarski claim) and combine that with the requirement that any one wanting us to believe them must allow us to test whether their story is falsifiable (the Popper claim). This grounds us more securely and safely in the world. It allows us to construct a more solid world, construct bridges safe for family cars and for difficult diplomacy, an environment safe from crime and pollution and war, and a measure of autonomy and privacy and prosperity for our individual lives.

The contempt for truth shown in hoaxes and fakery and fraud is bad enough, but in some ways they pay tribute to the fact that there is a truth, even if one inconsistent with the fraudster’s story, not that of the honest or rational observer. What is more troubling is a kind of relativistic or subjective or criteria-less  world where truth doesn’t matter, where all things count equally as valid, where power and emotion and prejudice and popularity are arguments in favor of truth, and where there is no longer any need to use the term ‘verisimilitude’