"Truth" - The Movie

Charles Justice, Truth Investigator.  I’m a PA, a Philosophical Anthropologist and I study Truth full time so the rest of you don’t have to.  “Truth” -  What is it?  How does it work? Where did it come from?  - Lately I’ve been particularly motivated to answer these questions because of the events and circumstances surrounding the  2016 U.S. Presidential election.

  Exhibit A:
 Kovitch and Rosenstiel, 2014, The Elements of Journalism, third edition:

 "The desire that information be truthful is elemental…. the evidence suggests its innate...Out of necessity, citizens and societies depend on accurate and reliable accounts of events.  They develop procedures and processes to arrive at what might be called  “functional truth”.   Police track down and arrest suspects based on facts.  Judges hold trials.  Juries render verdicts.  Industries are regulated, taxes are collected, and laws are made.  We teach our children rules, history, physics, and biology.  All of these truths - even the laws of science - are subject to revision, but we operate by them in the meantime because they are necessary and they work."


Exhibit B:  November 21, 2019: Fiona Hill, Russian expert, formerly working for the NSC, (National Security Council), Congressional Trump Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry.    “The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today, our nation is being torn apart.  Truth is being questioned.”


Exhibit C:  November 21, 2019,  Washington Post op-ed column by Dana Millbank - “Republicans have a new enemy:  Truth itself.”
“President Trump’s defense in the impeachment proceedings… is a bid to discredit the truth itself”

Exhibit D:  November 14, 2019, New York Times  op-ed column by Charles Blow,  “This is not a game.”

"Trump from the very beginning, has been overwhelming the public with lies and dissembling, while at the same time attacking society’s truth-seekers — journalists, investigators and jurists. Republicans in Washington, instead of pushing back and standing on principle, have simply followed suit."

And Blow concludes by saying:

 "People choosing to live in a Trump/Fox/Limbaugh world are unlikely to be altered by the truth because they are less likely to be exposed to the truth, the fullness of it, the unassailability of it.
 In the end, this is not a game. This is a tragedy. This is a mourning. This is an awakening. This is the moment where truth has to matter more than all else. That is the bar America has to clear."

Apparently good journalists care deeply about the truth, and have a good sense of why it’s needed in society.  I wish I could say the same for my colleagues in philosophy, but unfortunately I cannot.  And, speaking in the light of Trump’s coming Impeachment trial, I must say I am deeply troubled.

In the famous TV comedy series “Seinfeld”, Jerry and his friend George   propose the idea of a comedy show, apparently - “about “nothing” - to a bored TV executive.  It quickly becomes obvious that this is a wink and a nod to the Seinfeld show itself, a “show about nothing.”  I sometimes think that contemporary and twentieth century Anglo-American analytic philosophy is “Seinfeld Philosophy” - basically philosophy about nothing.  The reason I make this harsh judgement is that all too often analytic philosophy takes what should be a serious philosophical subject and trivializes it by essentially assuming away its existential significance.  We are left with problems of logic and meaning instead of problems of living.  The concept of “truth” is, sadly, a good example of this.

  It is a famous characteristic of Canadians that we say “sorry” a lot.  I’m simply continuing this tradition in saying that as a Canadian Philosopher,  I am exceedingly sorry about what Philosophy has done to the concept of “truth”.  In effect Contemporary Philosophy, following in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, has succeeded in emasculating itself and depriving itself of the means to explain what “truth” is and how it functions.   This did not have to be.

Exhibit E:
Derek Jarman’s 1993 film “Wittgenstein”,    the scene is a small seminar room in Cambridge sometime in the 1930’s.  Wittgenstein, in response to Bertrand Russell’s question is shouting: “Philosophical problems are a byproduct of misunderstanding language.”  Russell calls him out in response:  “Wittgenstein, you are trivializing philosophy.”

 In fact, I maintain that  it was Bertrand Russell who first began the  trivializing process, by spearheading philosophy’s turn to linguistics at the beginning of the last century.

As a PA, I’ve done a little sleuthing and come up with a plausible story that explains philosophy’s getting sidetracked about truth from the very beginning, and how “truth” ended up getting miniaturized and trivialized by modern philosophers. In the mean- time I think I’ve also uncovered the real nature of truth, the truth about “truth”. The incapacity of philosophy to come up with a serious explanation for truth goes deep, right to the very beginnings of philosophy, for what we get instead of any explanation of truth’s nature, is nothing more than  one  definition after another.

 Every philosophical question effectively starts with Plato and there is a good reason for this - Plato is the first philosopher to cover all the ground.  Every problem dealt with in contemporary philosophy has its start in Plato’s dialogues, and “truth” is no exception.  What is significant though, is that, Plato treats the concept of “truth”  like a hot potato.  He briefly defines “truth” in the dialogues Cratylus and The Sophist,  but he comes to admit that we  cannot figure out how we actually distinguish truths from falsehoods.  But that’s not to worry, because no other philosopher since has managed either.  However Plato, being the literary genius he was, presented something less rational but far more effective -  an account that has really set the whole tone for our understanding of “Truth”, with a capital “T”, for all time -  Plato tells a parable,  and boy, is it a doozy!

 Plato, truly a giant in Philosophy, couldn’t really figure out a rational explanation for how we come to the  truth.   In the single most famous image in philosophical history, Plato imagines a dark smokey cave full of ignorant prisoners. He asks us to imagine,  if one day, one of the prisoners is dragged out of the cave into the light of day.  The escaped prisoner, would at first be blinded by the light, because he would have been habituated to the darkness of the cave.  But then it would slowly “dawn” on him that what he sees now, in the light of day, is reality, and what he previously saw, in the cave, were only “images” and “shadows”. This powerful vision of Plato’s has pervaded the entire corpus of Western Philosophy, and planted an unconscious bias towards authoritarianism.   The Truth flows one way, from the inexhaustible  illumination of the Sun to the escaped prisoner - from the divine to the profane.  The transmission of truth is top down, just as it would be in a cult:   observations that support the theories are praised as “clear and distinct ideas”, whereas  the  facts that contradict the leader’s conspiracy theories become “shadows” and false “images”.

In case you can’t understand what all the fuss is about Plato’s parable, you might consider the pedigree of saying “that’s brilliant!”  or “He finally saw the light.”  or “the doors of perception were opened”, because they all allude to that same parable.

Plato’s “brilliant” student Aristotle came up with a very pedantic definition of truth, which he cribbed from Plato’s dialogues, but which appears to be a proto-version of every modern definition of the correspondence theory:

“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”  - Metaphysics 1011b25

I don't know about you, but I get a distinct sense of dissatisfaction from Aristotle's definition, and it is the same bad taste that I get from reading  modern deflationist and minimalist accounts as well. 

In my opinion, the fact that Plato tells a parable, rather than giving a rational explanation for the nature of truth has big ramifications for the history of philosophy: more than a thousand years of Christian theology based on the theories of Plato and his student Aristotle, and absolutely no progress uncovering the nature of truth in that same time period.  Yes there have been many accounts of the “definition” of “truth”, different definitions of “truth bearers” and types of correspondence, but no theory of how truth works,  because, other than Nietzsche, no other philosopher has gone beyond defining what truth “means”.

Cut to the year 1873,  one year after Bertrand Russell’s birth, when the German Philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche wrote an essay called “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”.  Kind of a strange title for an essay on truth, but we’ll get to that later.  The essay seems to start out as an adolescent rant, mocking the entire human race for making up the idea of “truth” and then for  having the impudence to actually believe that it exists out there, independently of us.

Nietzsche, in spite of his childishness, is very perceptive,  perhaps the most perceptive philosopher ever.  What is  so fascinating  for me, is how well he grasps the normative aspect of truth, and also anticipates deflationism’s emphasis on truth as a form of expression.

Neitzsche defines truth as:  “A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and, anthropomorphisms…. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors….”

"From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as  “red,” another as “cold,” and a third as “mute,” there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth.  The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes."

Here he is suggesting  that we get our obligation for truthfulness from the fact that using language obliges us to use words to refer to universal properties.  But, he points out, these “universal properties” don’t exist in reality.

 "A uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth.  For the contrast between truth and lie arises there for the first time.  The liar…(uses words)...in order to make something which is unreal appear real."

Nietzsche was a philosophical genius ahead of his time.  But he shared the view of so many twentieth century philosophers that the normativity of truth comes from the normativity of language.  I’m going to argue that the root of philosophy’s trivialization comes from this assumption, that is here summarized by Nietzsche’s observation: “A uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth”.  I’d like to suggest, instead, that philosophy can regain its potency by coming around to the idea that language both originates from and gets its normativity from the moral system, which I understand to be the basis for all normativity.)


"We shall not yet know where the drive for truth comes from, for so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.  Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd, and in a manner binding on everyone.  Precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth."

Nietzsche is here, in the above quote, showing his perceptiveness about how truth is a form of self-imposed  behavioural regulation, but also, unfortunately, his cynicism, eg.  “the duty to lie according to a fixed convention” and his Platonic rejection of “common”  morality for some supposedly higher individualistic standard.  In Plato’s parable, the sun represents divine truth and the prisoner has to be dragged out of the cave and given some time to, in effect,  jettison the fake  human “truths”  and embrace the divine “Truth” that transcends all human activity and knowledge. Then he, i.e. Socrates,  Plato, etc. has the unenviable job of going back into the cave and persuading its denizens that there is a better world awaiting them up above.  Nietzsche rejects the descent back into the cave in favour of idolizing the creative genius on the mountain top.  Cut to Ayn Rand, Donald Trump and the Republican party.

 Unlike Russell and Wittgenstein, but like Plato, Nietzsche is bewitching in a much more dangerous way.  He sees through the lies and artifice of bourgeoisie society but thinks that we could do better by abandoning morality altogether and embracing the leadership of strong and creative individuals.  Worshipping power and despising weakness, in other words - fascism -  seems to be where Nietzsche was heading.  It is no coincidence that his American posthumous disciple, Ayn Rand, bestselling author of “Atlas Shrugged”, a book which glorifies unchecked power and ridicules helping the weak and disadvantaged, would be so influential in today’s Republican party.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Post-Modernist philosophy of Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault gets some of its worst traits from Nietzsche’s influence, namely adopting the twin beliefs that truth is relative, and that social reality can be reduced to accounts of dominance.  Even Freud, with his crude hydraulic model of the unconscious and his over-emphasis on sex, has a better grasp of human nature than that.

With Plato’s mythological starting point and Nietzsche’s mocking fin de siecle deconstruction, things are not looking good for “truth”.  And the plight of “truth” only worsens as the twentieth century gets underway, because two of the  century’s greatest philosophers were about to make it even harder to understand truth by permanently  consigning it to the philosophy of language.  We get, as a result a  Tower of Babel of  truth "theories":  correspondence, coherence, redundancy, disquotationalism, and deflationism - all making truth less and less significant, and  hence the reigning term - “deflationism”.

Here is a quick guide to philosophical "theories" of Truth:

 Correspondence - what we say  is true if it corresponds to what happened, and false if not.
Coherence -  truth is the end result of exhaustive inquiry.
Disquotationalism -  Assume two kinds of formal language:  an object language that does not contain self-referential sentences, and a meta-language that contains the predicate “true,” that refers to sentences in the object language. Then “Snow is white” is true if, and only if, snow is white, and so on for all other similar sentences.
Deflationism, etc.  -  truth in ordinary language, is simply a way of endorsing an assertion.  Truth in logic is a way of generalizing over blind assertions.


Disquotationalism, is based on Alfred Tarski’s theory of truth, a logically sound theory based on the idea of formalized, (not real) languages.  What it does that other theories of truth do not do, is avoid the paradoxes of truth.  Lots of philosophers do not like the “liar paradox” because it subjects ordinary language to self-contradiction.  Example: “This sentence is not true.”  That sentence is false if it is true, and true if it is false;  and we can’t have that.  But the price of adopting Tarski’s theory is to avoid using ordinary language in favour of using set theory and logic when speaking of truth, and this leads to the ultimate in  trivia.  I can’t tell you how many books and articles I have read and reread the phrase “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.”

The twentieth century is notable for the sheer volume of books and articles on philosophical "theories" of truth.  These philosophical theories are not really theories at all.  The correspondence “theory”  is really a metaphor, mind you, an extremely powerful and convincing one.  Truth corresponds to reality analogous to the way that our perception of what is in front of us corresponds to what is in front of us.  That’s it. For true utterances there is no reality to this correspondence because it is nothing more than a metaphor based on perception.

  The coherence "theory" of truth  is a metaphor for the way we idealize inquiry.  “They’ll get to the bottom of it, won’t they?”  “We will soon find the answers, of course.”   “Eventually all the pieces will fit together to make a complete picture of what really happened.”  That last sentence combines features of both coherence and correspondence.  As Nietzsche, so perceptively points out - these are all metaphors.

Of course correspondence and coherence are metaphors, they correspond to what we ordinarily mean when we use the word “truth”.   But a real theory of truth needs to go beyond what we ordinarily mean by “truth”, and see what the concept is actually doing in social life; and as long as you are focussing on language use, rather than the more general field of human behaviour,  you cannot do that.  As a PA, I will always insist that truth is central to human existence, and I will continue to point out the scandal that contemporary philosophers of language simply tie their own hands,  so that they are incapable of understanding this.

Deflationism?  Another metaphor.  But this time the metaphor is reduction.  Just as physics reduces to the motions of particles,  truth, depending on whether you are referring to logic or ordinary language, reduces to logical operations or to feelings.  Why this reduction?  What motivated this turn to minimizing the importance of truth?   At the beginning of the last century  Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to reduce all of mathematics to logic with the publication of the unreadable “Principia Mathematica”.  But the larger project of reduction was halted in its tracks by Russell’s uncovering of paradoxes in set theory, and then given the final coup de grace by Godel’s definitive proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic and by extension, all of mathematics.

Russell, who got it exactly right about the insanity of World War I, and was arrested for saying so in 1916,  got it wrong on truth.  We can see why if we peruse  his mercifully short chapter on truth,  in his admirably written “The Problems of Philosophy”, first published in 1912.  Russell writes:

"Since erroneous beliefs are often held just as strongly as true beliefs it becomes a difficult question how they are to be distinguished from true beliefs.  How are we to know, in a given case, that our belief is erroneous?  This is a question of the greatest difficulty.  There is however, a preliminary question which is rather less difficult and that is:  what do we mean by truth and falsehood?”

That quote from “The Problems of Philosophy”  is notable for two reasons:  first, the point about it being “of the greatest difficulty” to distinguish between truth and falsehood, is a deliberate allusion to the discussion of knowledge in Plato’s dialogue “Theaetetus”.  Second, the question of “meaning” is exactly what leads to Wittgenstein’s trivialization of philosophy; so, I’m afraid, Russell was in on it too!

The linguistic turn towards “meaning” was a true philosophical error that led to philosophical impotence.  And this has real consequences, as we see today. I think a more productive question  Russell could have asked would have been: “What sort of work is truth doing in society?”

Philosophy has come to  trivialize truth by treating it solely as a “predicate”, i.e. a grammatical device. But truth is an ideal, it is obviously more than a grammatical device.  Our commitment to the goal of truth is part of a self-organized system of behavioural regulation.  And, this is completely overlooked if we insist, with Wittgenstein, that philosophical problems concerning truth are problems of misunderstanding language.

To put it in the simplest terms, as long as you are examining the meaning of concepts such as “truth” you are forced to use common metaphors.  If you want to know the nature of truth you need to look at what work truth is doing in human society, and that means looking at all of our behaviour, rather than only what we think we mean by using the word.  Journalists understand this, but philosophers don’t.  Contemporary philosophers have been bewitched, not by language, but by Russell and Wittgenstein and their myriad followers.

It’s not a surprise.  Remember how philosophy was lulled and deceived by the Father of philosophy - Plato - precisely on the question of truth.  Like father, like sons!   And Wittgenstein who promises to “free the fly from the bottle” and clear up all philosophical problems, succeeds only in collecting more flies, by expanding “necessary and sufficient conditions” into the broader, less confining notions - “family resemblances”  and “language games” - admittedly fascinating concepts,  but, in reality, simply more labyrinthian ways to get lost in a maze of “meanings” and definitions.

Philosophical problems are in our language, not in our world!  This idea of Wittgenstein is at the root of the mindless triviality of most modern philosophy.    That is how truth has been deflated and minimized in modern philosophy.  Apparently "Truth" doesn't add anything to the world, it doesn't do any work, except in logic. Deflationists are blandly making the absurd claim that there is nothing much to "truth",  that it doesn't add anything or do any work,  unless we are blindly generalizing about multiple statements, as in "Everything that Mueller said was true."

Now the problem becomes how can philosophy explain the discrepancy between our common view, shared by journalists, that truth is centrally important, and the deflationists’ view that there is no “there” there.

According to the current reigning philosopher on “truth”, Paul Horwich, truth is not susceptible to conceptual or scientific analysis.  All this time, though, we see that contemporary analytic philosophy, (with the notable exception of Paul Grice), has been taking for granted that people are expected to tell the truth in ordinary conversation.  Contra Horwich, this is the fact that needs to be explained.  And if we can explain this, then we can get a substantial theory of truth, rather than just definitions, i.e., rather than “the usual metaphors” as Nietzsche so perceptively puts it.

As a PA I want to emphasize that it is important to realize  that calling the various definitions of truths “metaphors” is not a rejection of the importance or centrality of truth.  Once we leave the philosophy of language (PL) behind, it becomes easier to understand the nature of truth.  PL, by focusing on language, effectively prevents any substantive understanding.

Humans are responsible animals.  We hold each other to account.   It is our collective commitment to truth that helps make morality work in the face of lying and fraud.  Lying is an action, it is a direct way of evading responsibility.  Truth is an ideal that we always understand indirectly, that is,  through metaphors.  We commit to being truthful, which entails telling the truth, avoiding lying, and not tolerating lying in others.  These are things we learn to do growing up in a society.  Truth is an ideal that we commit to as part of a system of behavioural regulation - a normative system.  In this way, truth has a very powerful effect, recognized in common, as holding up society.

 Truth is not an actual thing or a relation, although we often imagine it this way; and there is nothing wrong with imagining truth as real, in fact we ought to, because it is an ideal that we commit to, and the form that commitment takes is our collective honouring what we take to be the truth and  rejection of what we take to be lying.  Collectively, we can be wrong about what we take to be the truth or falsehood, and this may have been what Nietzsche was objecting to;  but our collective commitment to truth, though fallible, in general, works to make society possible.   The work done, is in the regulation of human behaviour - this is what our commitment to truth is doing.  We punish and sometimes even shun liars because lying is a way of evading responsibility for committing wrongs, and if too many people are allowed to get away with wrongs, then society stops working.  The discovery of scientific “truths” comes a hundred thousand years after that initial collective creation, it is ultimately derived from the moral system,  but scientific discovery is not  essential to the original moral necessity for truth.

 Remember journalist Charles Blow:  “This is the moment where truth has to matter more than all else.” If Trump and his henchmen can lie their way out of any oversight by the other branches of American government,  democracy and the rule of law may fail permanently in the United States.  When “truth is questioned”  and all you have is competing conspiracy theories, democracy is in serious trouble - it may, in fact, be on life-support. And, that is why the truth matters.