It doesn't matter whether you're conservative or liberal, religious or skeptical, the very fact you are able to understand the words you're reading right now—that we are all able to communicate with each other using language—means we must share a vast body of beliefs. While language may shape the way we think about the world to some small extent, it makes much more sense to say truth shapes language to a very large extent. That’s the central argument of this book: Truth is the condition that makes language possible. |
(Also, you should know that her book A Footnote to Plato is an excellent addition to the canon of campus novels. It’s like a mashup of Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Definitely check it out if that subject is of interest to you.)
While Tina’s solo works are great, T&G is a co-production that has an interesting origin story. This is best explained by quoting from the foreward that Tina wrote.
My husband wrote the first draft of this manuscript nearly twenty years ago while he was still teaching at Marlboro College. He retired shortly after, and I suppose at that time he was perfectly happy to stuff the manuscript in a drawer and get back to it someday. … I’ve always felt the book needed to be published, but I also knew how much work that would require. Back then, I didn’t even know where to begin. Time passed. Neal is now 81 years old. The last thing he wants to do is spend his retirement years going through the academic publishing process, so I offered to publish it for him. I understand if you’re skeptical of such ventures, but I hope you’ll make an exception in this case. After all, Neal has paid his dues. He went to prestigious universities and taught philosophy at Marlboro College for nearly forty years. He has published academic works, but he has also seen commercial success and has even appeared on Good Morning America. There’s his ‘social proof’. Make of it what you will. |
On my website’s page for epistemology, I wrote, “In summary, Plato laid down the most influential definition of knowledge as ‘justified, true, belief.’ But this has proven to be untenable and I propose that it ought to be replaced with an understanding that knowledge can only ever be justified beliefs that are currently surviving our best tests.” Also on that page, I have links to my three most important essays on this subject so far — Knowledge Cannot be Justified True Belief; Evolving Our Trust in Science; and The Bayesian Balance — as well links to four other epistemology books that I have reviewed in this website — Kindly Inquisitors; Knowledge and Its Limits; How to Talk to a Science Denier; and Mental Immunity (Part 1 and Part 2).
Finally, I think an important concept for this discussion is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Truth, which has these important descriptions for the term as it is often used in philosophy:
There are two commonly accepted constraints on truth and falsehood: 1) Every proposition is true or false. [Law of the Excluded Middle.]; and 2) No proposition is both true and false. [Law of Non-contradiction.] These constraints require that every proposition has exactly one truth-value. Although the point is controversial, most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time. |
Truth & Generosity: How Truth Makes Language Possible by Weiner & Forsee
- Table of Contents
PART I: The Principle of Generosity
CHAPTER 1: The Principle of Generosity
CHAPTER 2: Violations of the Principle of Generosity
CHAPTER 3: The Poetry of Ordinary Language
CHAPTER 4: What Language is Not
CHAPTER 5: Etymology and Truth
CHAPTER 6: Social Influences on Semantic Change
PART II: Generosity and Shared Belief
CHAPTER 7: Politics and Relativism
CHAPTER 8: Trust and Doubt
CHAPTER 9: The Origin of Language
CHAPTER 10: Radical Interpretation
CHAPTER 11: How We Recognize Language as Language
PART III: Generosity and Truth
CHAPTER 12: The Body of Truth
CHAPTER 13: The Heart of Truth
CHAPTER 14: Generosity Beyond the Sentence
CHAPTER 15: The Interpretive Ideal
CHAPTER 16: Interpreting the World Through Generosity
This table of contents excited me! We begin with PART I: The Principle of Generosity.
- (p.2) The very fact that we can communicate with each other and translate other languages into our own means there must be a vast body of belief we all share—a body of belief which, taken on the whole, must be true. To put it in a snappier way: Truth is the condition that makes language possible.
As I shared above, this is the central argument of the book. W&F introduce this right from the start, which I appreciate, but I could have used a bit more background. Although the word “truth” is in the title of the book, and it is used 101 times in 113 pages (according to my Kindle search), I didn’t find a clear philosophical definition of the way they are using the term. In the IEP entry for Truth that I mentioned above, there are sections for the correspondence theory, the semantic theory, the coherence theory, pragmatic theories, and deflationary theories of truth, each of which have several subsections. This is a highly discussed term in philosophy! And without a lot of agreement. So, it would have helped me to know where W&F stand. But let’s adopt this book’s other main term — generosity — and see if their language will eventually demonstrate what they mean over the course of the book.
- (p.2) This is not to say every single opinion must be true; after all, surely some of the beliefs we hold contradict each other. And I certainly don’t mean we should blindly embrace the status quo either. What I mean is, ordinary opinion, on the whole, has things basically right, and a sensitive and careful distillation of what is presented there is the best approach to seeking truth.
This is a telling caveat to the declaration in the first quote (“a body of belief which, taken on the whole, must be true”). According to the three constraints on truth that I listed above — excluded middle, non-contradiction, and universality — the way philosophers use “truth” is very much as a black and white term. But by using and emphasizing words such as “on the whole” and “basically”, W&F seem to allow for a fuzzier, blurrier, folk usage of the word truth. “Must be true” has transformed into “basically right”. That’s not exactly what epistemologists have been fighting over, but it can still help the “approach to seeking truth.”
- (p.2) Some of what I have to say will be drawn from Donald Davidson’s work, which stretches back to the early sixties and has won great respect in academic philosophy.
- (p.25) [Davidson] argues that the truth of a sentence comes first and the meanings of its words are adjusted to make this truth possible.
Ok, what does that mean?
- (p. 26) Suppose an auto mechanic from the rural south currently living in New England tells me that to deal with my car problem, I’ll need an auto holler. … I realize he is using the word-sound holler as I would use the word-sound hauler, and from that point on everything proceeds smoothly. … The initial confusion does not get straightened out by anyone’s explaining to me the conventions of the Southern dialect. Instead, I presupposed the truth of the mechanic’s speech—in other words, I assumed the mechanic was quite aware that yelling at my car would not solve a thing …The point is, the truth of the sentence came first, the word and its meaning came second. I can be sure then that for me, the word did not get its meaning by convention, but by generous interpretation of its usage in accordance with my beliefs about the world.
This is an extremely helpful example, demonstrating both truth and generosity in action. In other words, W&F are saying that in order to communicate at all we must begin by being generous and assume the good intentions of the mechanic to speak the truth. That’s great, but it doesn’t address the traditional problems of knowledge where skeptical arguments (e.g. evil demons, Gettier cases, or the Matrix) imply that these good intentions may not be enough. How can we ever know we are really talking about the same thing?
- (p.27) meaning is plastic and takes its shape by conforming to the contours of a presumed shared reality.
This, to me, is a key move of the book that isn’t highlighted enough. In my own work, I’ve called this “presumed shared reality” our first assumption or our first hypothesis. Donald Campbell, who coined the term evolutionary epistemology, called this “hypothetical realism”. Once that stance is taken, all communication and knowledge-seeking can proceed as basically a test of this presumption. But how can we ever know if our meanings actually do conform to these contours?
- (p.33) novel usage puts the word under a kind of truth stress so that it must change meaning to relieve that stress. If for whatever reason the untrue way of speaking becomes widespread and the process is allowed to reach its logical completion, then whatever is strictly speaking not true or not believable about the novel usage is eliminated by a shift in meaning. At this point, an ironic sort of miracle occurs: the meaning of the word adjusts on a grand scale to make the untruth true
This is a lovely demonstration of how knowledge and language evolve. But it does not show how we could ever hope to attain the very strict status of “truth” as laid out in the philosophical definitions above. Claiming we can become “on the whole” “basically right” is an important counter to nihilistic relativism, but that is not strictly “true”. I would happily just admit that as part of my own larger project of evolutionary epistemology. But for W&F, I think is too easy for skeptics to poke holes in their language.
- (p.43) the principle of generosity underlies all communication whatsoever and thereby guarantees the unified, public character of anything worth calling a world.
After my review of Naomi Oreskes’ book Why Trust Science?, I’ve been using her term “consensus” to describe this “unified, public character” but I love how this principle of generosity describes an important aspect of the cooperation we rely upon to reach this consensus. Perhaps the other side of that would be a “principle of stinginess” to describe the competition that uses disagreements to whittle away at any differences in our consensus. But this ends the discussion of Part I: The Principle of Generosity, so the topic shifts now. On to PART II: Generosity and Shared Belief.
- (p.44) It took a long time, roughly from 1776 to 1976, for political equality (equality of political rights) to turn into first social equality (equality of income or opportunity) and then epistemic equality (relativism), but it happened.
- (p.45) There was and still is real oppression, both political and epistemological, but the blind worship of equality comes at the cost of the distinction between knowledge and opinion.
- (p.45) Relativism speaks to the demand for an egalitarian society. The question is how to retain its democratic virtues without its nihilistic vice.
- (p.52) Relativism makes the unity of being a mere appearance while preserving the diversity of opinion. What I propose is the reverse: to make diversity of opinion the appearance and preserve the unity of being.
This is a fascinating analysis of the spread of individualism from politics to economics to epistemology. I’ll leave the political-economic discussion for another day, but in epistemological relativism the control of knowledge, which has slid down from powerful groups and elites to the common individual, still has one more step to take. As I shared in my overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch (a title that sounds like it also advocates for generosity), the liberal system of inquisition has two foundational principles — no one gets final say, and no one has personal authority. In other words, the power to decide what is accepted as knowledge drops not to any one individual, but it actually resides in zero people! Not with kings, queens, or aristocracies. Not with popes, ayatollahs, or religious councils. Not with professors, philosophers, scientists, or academic councils. Not with western white men, eastern gurus, or indigenous wisdom councils. And certainly not with billionaire tech bros. The best production of knowledge is now governed by an inanimate process — the scientific method, broadly construed — whose practices we can all continue to shape as well. I call it “the epistemological power paradox” that as the power of individuals to determine knowledge dropped to zero with the discovery of this method, the power of that knowledge actually grew to its highest point. That, to me, is how we retain knowledge’s democratic virtues without its nihilistic vice. That is how a diversity of opinions can actually be shaped into consensus about the (presumed) unity of being.
The next sections of the book take us through a bit of theorizing about the origins of language. At first, this feels like a sidetrack from the main theme of the book, but the link does quickly become apparent.
- (p.54) Throughout the 19th century, debates on the origin of speech had become so contentious that, as contemporary writers are usually quick to point out, in 1866 and 1911, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all papers on the subject.
- (p.56) In our thought experiment we eliminate the possibility of misusing established meaning because there is no established meaning. In ur-sentences, there is absolutely nothing available to give meaning to words except the very objects described. In other words, our thought experiment takes us to the very bedrock of truth.
I would not put it that way and don’t really understand how W&F could make such a claim. These ur-sentences are still based on our perceptions and perceptions are fallible. To put it as Kant would say, there is still a difference between the phenomena and the noumena.
- (p.56) The vast majority of those who have given the matter serious thought have favored the idea that the first utterance must have been a sentence rather than a word.
- (p.57) the most persuasive reason is obvious and not technical at all: Words only function in sentences. They are good for declaring, commanding, promising, begging, asking, wishing, warning, and so on, but they can perform these roles only in sentences
- (p.57) Sentences, at least as they are usually defined, are complete thoughts. The implication is that anything less than a sentence—a word, phrase, or syllable—is a fragment of a thought.
- (p.58) In an inquiry into natural language’s origin and evolution, however, to suppose words could arise independent of sentences is rather like supposing bodily organs could arise apart from the body to which they belong.
But organs (sorta) did arise prior to bodies! Not the fully finished organs that we see today, but the discrete functional elements of protists (e.g. photosynthetic energy production, flagellate movement, parasitic consumption, stalked reproductive spores) evolved separately before combining in a Major Evolutionary Transition to create multicellular life. I think W&F’s argument here could be turned on its head. How could bodies have evolved without the organs being out there to comprise them? Evolution of complexity requires simple steps along the way that each give an evolutionary advantage. Turning back to the evolution of language, perhaps the definitions of “words” and “sentences” need to be thought of more flexibly so we can imagine their simplest protist versions way back at the beginning of their journey towards today’s linguistic complexity.
- (p.61) It is surely not the case that language began with the naming of things followed by a synthesis of names into sentences, sentences which may or may not have been true. For reasons we have already discussed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how language could have come about by such a process. It is even more difficult to imagine truth limping behind the first sentences; the first utterance could not have been false.
- (p.61) Without established usage, there is simply no way to bespeak things other than they really are. In other words, in order for the first utterance to count as language, it had to be infallible.
Did you catch Dennett’s alarm bell for a weak argument there? (The use of “surely.”) I don’t see how “the first utterance” might not have been mistaken or illusory and therefore false. Again, I could really use W&F’s definition of true here because maybe they mean something different. Which theory of truth are they using? Does it need to be universally true? Because that would be far too high a bar to clear. Other animals have been observed shouting false warning calls so they can obtain the foods left behind by their fellow creatures after they run for cover. So that lying is an example of at least some false communication happening before human language even began.
- (p.62) We are supposing this to be the birth of public language, so one way or another the semantics had to become shared by the entire community. This means that public language depends on the whole community taking these ur-sentences as true.
- (p.62) Suppose FLABEH meant, Run! A mammoth is coming! Someone might have mistakenly screamed it after hearing a loud crashing noise on a very dark night. But that would be a case in which the bespoken object was absent, which absence is precisely what makes the falsehood possible. This sort of error could not have been normal. If it had been, the result would have been either semantic change or the destruction of referential usefulness for the incipient language.
So, not each and every utterance is true. But the generally accepted usages that arise must hone toward truth after many, many iterations. This is exactly the same process that is used today. But it does not start from some bedrock of truth. It starts with a guess and proceeds in a Bayesian fashion from there towards consensus.
- (p.64) Only one conclusion is possible: We have not left the epistemic Eden; we are as infallible as our forbears. Within a certain limited range, we, too, cannot be wrong.
- (p.64) But we can be wrong!—you may be thinking. If this conclusion seems shocking, let us not forget that the infallibility I am talking about applies only to the description of objects directly experienced, while they are experienced, and this should not be confused with other types of assertion.
Ah hah. So perhaps W&F are accepting the line of argument, leading from Descartes, about “self-knowledge” being especially secure. But this is easily refuted. Our “direct experience” is just not infallible.
That closes Part II about the origins of language giving us reasons to believe we speak truth. I found this section very unpersuasive, but let’s proceed to the conclusion of the book with PART III: Generosity and Truth.
- (p.78) the shared beliefs we are talking about are not merely widespread agreement—they form an absolutely necessary agreement that is the condition for the possibility of recognizing language and intelligence as such. Such beliefs are not merely uncontested or not contradicted; they are not, as a mass, contradictable. Thus the indispensable body of belief may be undefined, but it is on the whole and for all practical purposes, infallible. Which is to say, to contradict them in their entirety and in their very possibility is to contradict oneself. And so for us, the undefined body of belief must be taken, on the whole, as true.
- (p.80) What I wish to borrow from Quine is the general idea of a gradient of confidence and stability based on the degree of upset caused by the abandonment of a given belief. Quine's system measures beliefs by their logical connectedness to other beliefs, but ours measures them by how dispensable they are for interpretation.
- (p.81) Thus it seems plausible to imagine a slowly evolving mass with some of its propositions stable enough as individuals to be candidates for eternity, others locked into groups that are either rigid or elastic, and still others that live alone, so to speak, and as individuals are relatively changeable. … To put it another way, you can sometimes change your mind about certain propositions, but you can’t change your mind about all contingent propositions, or even a great many of them, all at once.
I loved seeing this reference to “a slowly evolving mass.” That is the right process, and we do end up with a huge, interconnected network of stable propositions. We just don’t need to start with “truth” to arrive there. And the history of skeptical arguments show we shouldn’t ever expect to arrive at a finishing line either.
- (p.82) when a belief cannot be dispensed with, what can we call it but true?
Looking at the thesaurus for synonyms of “correct” we can could call it right, accurate, veracious, unerring, faithful, faultless, flawless, or error-free. We could call it widely accepted, a proven fact, or a justified belief currently surviving our best rational tests. But according to the strict philosophical definition of truth set out above (passing the tests for excluded middle, non-contradiction, and universality), these indispensable beliefs are not known to be “true”. That powerful term should not be bandied about too casually. It cheapens the philosophical ideal. And calling something true sets us up to fail to see new information. I would much prefer to treat truth with the reverence it deserves. When I’m speaking and writing carefully, I try to only use the term “true” for the abstract philosophical concept of perfect knowledge that we can seemingly never actually achieve. True is a future goal. Not a currently reached destination or designation. That, to me, helps enormously for keeping our knowledge evolving in the right direction.
- (p.82) Theories such as coherence and correspondence are like species of truth, but none can be a satisfactory definition of truth (or of being or goodness, for that matter). Reductionisms such as materialism, idealism, and hedonism make the same mistake. Definition must stop somewhere, and, logically, it must surrender at both the top and bottom of the conceptual mountain.
I honestly am not sure what this means, but it might explain why W&F don’t take the time to declare their preferred definition of truth. Maybe I would agree that definitions cannot capture everything, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to keep working on them. Definitions are like all knowledge in that way. I don’t think of them as having a solid bottom and top but rather as an ever-expanding light exploring the darkness of our ignorance that was once total and complete when life first arose.
- (p.86) Meaning depends on context, and context is a series of ever-more-encompassing wholes. The word-sentence relationship is but one part of the series. Below it are the mere sounds—prefixes and suffixes, for example—which have the word they belong to as their context (consider: ing means different things in bring and chopping). Above this stretches a long sequence of ever-larger wholes in which the same sentence can have more or less plausible alternative meanings. First the paragraph, then the chapter, the section, the book, the author’s other works, the author’s life during that period, the totality of the author’s works, the totality of the author’s life, the library in which the works are stored, the culture of which the library is but a single institution, and the sweep of world history in which that culture is but a small part, not to mention the universe itself.
This is a great evolutionary view of knowledge along a continuous spectrum! I hope to publish more on this soon.
- (p.88) The conclusion we can draw from this is that the assumed sense of an entire work adjudicates between alternative or competing meanings of its components,
- (p.93) The truest interpretation is, all else being equal, the one that best fits the parts into a coherent whole. To the extent that we cannot make them fit, we cannot understand the work.
This has echoes of the famous Wilfred Sellars quote, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” It is also reflected in my definition of knowledge as justified beliefs currently surviving our best rational tests.
- (p.99) As a regulative principle, the principle of generosity amounts to a presupposition of what it means to make sense running alongside the principle of sufficient reason: things must be assumed to make sense. To put it another way, we cannot make an earnest attempt to interpret anything while at the same time assuming it makes no sense.
- (p.106) Thus we arrive at the sheer, bare form of understanding from which all concrete belief depends. Perhaps it can only be called a kind of faith in the comprehensibility of the world.
Or, to avoid using religious terms, and instead preferring to draw on the scientific method as the best way yet discovered to gain knowledge, we could call this “comprehensibility of the world” our first hypothesis. And after all of the evidence that has rolled in to support this idea, it is no longer a leap of faith to believe in it.
Despite some qualms about the middle section of the book, and with its general usage of the word truth, I thoroughly enjoyed Truth and Generosity. Tina Lee Forsee should be commended for rescuing it from Neal Weiner’s archives and sharing it widely. I look froward to using some of its arguments in my own efforts to help us understand truth and knowledge better. And I’m sure I’ll need a plea for generosity when I do.