THE TROUBLE WITH TRUTH
If a statement is true, only a fool would refuse to believe it and only a madman would reject its guidance. Those words sound self-evident. Yet what we call truth is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Some of our truths are shining beacons on hills, illuminating reality and revealing processes that give rise to our experiences. But others intoxicate us with illusions of knowledge, competence, and virtue, blinding us to dangers and encouraging us to act in ways that are reckless, fruitless, destructive or cruel. An apparent truth may be unworthy of trust. Even the most convincing statements may mislead us.
Just as veneration of law and sausage requires us to ignore the ways they are made, uncritical veneration of what we view as truth requires a kind of blindness. For the processes by which truth is manufactured are often corrupt. And the products of those processes rarely embody the virtues we assume truths to possess.
Of course, I’m referring to apparent truth – not to truth itself; to that which humans accept as true – not to the Platonic Ideal (Kraut, 2012). When I use the word truth, I am not referring to that which the wise yearn to embrace, but to that which the arrogant embrace, thinking themselves wise. I am not referring to those daunting revelations that the strong can endure only with support, but to those reassuring misconceptions that lead the weak to see themselves as strong. I am not referring to that which science incrementally approaches, but to the blind alleys of scientific fashion that masquerade as progress. I am not referring to that which the principled strive to speak, but to the twaddle that, in the mouths of the frivolous, tastes like virtue. I am not referring to the lightly-held conceptions of those who struggle to understand complex and changing phenomena, but to the disfigured horrors that ideologues create when they torture bothersome facts into compliance with their doctrines.
Although philosophers have proposed diverse theories of truth (Simmons, 2006), my trusty dictionary (McKechnie, 1983) suggests that English speakers call a statement true if they view it as accurately describing the way things are. This simple, straightforward view of truth is common even in the most sophisticated circles. According to a large-scale, on-line survey, more doctoral-level philosophers adhere to this view of truth than to any other (The PhilPapers Surveys Preliminary Survey results, 2012).
Let’s clarify what I mean when I say we consider something to be true. Inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce, 1931-1958), when I say that we view an assertion as true, I mean that we would confidently act under its guidance. In other words, to say we view an assertion as true is to say that we are convinced that it provides us with actionable intelligence.
Here’s an example of what this view of truth means. Imagine that Linda hates getting wet. Imagine that she is preparing to take a walk in the park. As she’s about to leave her home, she discovers that weather.com predicts thunderstorms within the hour. If she views that forecast as true, she’ll delay her walk. If she heads for the park anyway, odds are she questions the truth of that forecast.
Linda must be in a particular state of mind to view that forecast as true. First, she must experience it as making intuitive sense. The appearance of the sky and the texture of the air must make her feel that a storm is inevitable. If, upon walking outdoors, her intuition tells her that pleasant weather is approaching, she’s likely to doubt the accuracy of weather.com’s report. Second, she must be able to generate a narrative that justifies her intuition. Such a narrative might be as concrete as “Look at the sky! That storm is moving towards us!” or as cerebral as “Weather.com says that there’s a 100% chance of rain in the next hour. Their short-term predictions are never wrong!” Finally, she must believe that she can defend that narrative. If she can’t explain why she believes it’s going to rain or sees her explanation as unable to withstand questioning, she’s unlikely to see that prediction as true (Margolis, 1987).
What creates this state of mind? The answer is simple. If our experience is consistent with an assertion, we see it as true. If it’s stormed every time the sky and the air have felt a particular way and if the narrative Linda uses to justify her intuition has consistently fit the data and withstood criticism, Linda’s likely to become confident that she knows when a storm is coming.
This approach to truth may seem unproblematic. But the processes that create belief-consistent experiences all too often do so by taking advantage of flaws in the ways we perceive and reason.
There are many such flaws. Some have negligible effects, but many – like our insensitivity to ambiguity – engender powerful biases that compromise reason and objectivity.
The ambiguity of a statement is determined, in part, by the range of observations that are consistent with it. The more ambiguous a statement is, the broader the range of observations that support it and the narrower the range of observations that challenge it. On this view, the prediction that a roulette ball will land in one of the wheel’s eighteen red pockets is more ambiguous than the prediction that it will land in one particular pocket.
When we’re gambling, we’re aware of this sort of ambiguity, as the following thought experiment suggests: Imagine you’re about to play high-stakes roulette. And imagine that you can choose one of three consultants to help you place your bets. Imagine that each potential consultant is a certified fortune-teller who has demonstrated clairvoyance under the scrutiny of scientists, auditors, Las Vegas security experts, and magicians by correctly predicting the results of five consecutive spins of a roulette wheel (Carroll, 2012).
Fortune-Teller “A” correctly predicted the individual pocket into which each ball fell. Fortune-Teller “B” correctly predicted the color of the pocket (red or black) into which the ball fell. And Fortune-Teller “C” correctly predicted that the pocket in which the ball landed would be a manifestation of divine will. Most of you would choose Fortune-Teller “A” – the fortune-teller who successfully made the most precise predictions – because you both sensed and judged that his or her predictions reflected the greatest prescience.
Of course, this exercise is what Howard Margolis might have called a “toy problem.” Its stakes are trivial. (In fact, they’re imaginary.) The issue of interest is contrived. And the problem is devoid of the uncertainties, complexities, passions, and yearnings that affect most decision-making. It portrays an approach to ambiguity under ideal circumstances. But it doesn’t depict the way we handle ambiguity when grappling with real dilemmas.
In a 1953 Cambridge University address, Karl Popper revealed that he was inspired to reflect on the distinction between science and pseudo-science by the insensitivity to ambiguity that characterized the principal intellectual movements of his time (Popper, 1962). Popper was living in Vienna in the years following the collapse of the Austrian Empire, when that city, he later wrote, was animated by “revolutionary slogans and ideas, and new and often wild theories.” Among the new and wild theories that fascinated Popper were Einstein’s theory of relativity, Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, and Adler’s “individual psychology.”
Each of these theories provided adherents with a cognitive lens through which to view its respective area of interest. Einstein’s theory invited adherents to envision a universe in which the laws of physics and the speed of light were the same for all observers in uniform motion; the speed of light was independent of the velocity of its source; and space and time were interwoven and warped by mass and energy, slowing the flow of time and dragging space into tornadic vortices (Einstein, 1920), (Thorne, 2003). Marx’s theory encouraged devotees to view historical events, social institutions, values, and ways of thinking as driven by relationships between social classes (Marx, 1977 (originally published 1859)). Disciples of psychoanalysis viewed the human drama as animated by conflict between the desire for immediate satisfaction; the desire to be true to the standards of parents, teachers, role models and traditions; and the desire to realistically manage conflicting needs, maximizing pleasure and avoiding distress (Freud, 1949). Adler’s followers, on the other hand, viewed human behavior as determined by the insatiable desire to overcome feelings of inferiority (Adler, 1964).
While all these theories were intriguing, Popper felt that only relativity theory was truly scientific. Marx’s, Freud’s and Adler’s theories, he suspected, resembled myths more closely than science.
Popper found the explanatory power of Marx, Freud, and Adler troubling. Followers of Marx, Popper said, found confirmation on every page of the newspaper, “not only in the news, but also in its presentation – which revealed the class bias of the newspaper – and especially of course in what the paper did not say” (Popper, 1962, p. 34).
Popper was particularly disturbed by the ease with which Freudians and Adlerians formulated conflicting explanations of the same phenomena. Popper noted that if a man pushed a child into the water, intending to drown it, Freudians could attribute that act to repression, while Adlerians could attribute it to the man’s desire to mitigate feelings of inferiority by proving that he dared to commit a crime. If, on the other hand, that same man risked his life to save the child from drowning, Freudians could attribute his act to sublimation – that is, transformation of the energy of a biological impulse to serve a more acceptable use – while Adlerians could attribute that act to the man’s desire to mitigate feelings of inferiority by demonstrating courage (Popper, 1962, p. 35) .
In other words, the theories of Marx, Freud, and Adler were profoundly ambiguous. Their inability to predict future events, combined with their effortless explanation of past events, made them the epistemological brethren of the fortune-teller who predicted that the outcome of each spin of the roulette wheel would be consistent with God’s plan.
Popper noted that the nature of the evidence that supported Einstein’s theory was quite different. One of the predictions of relativity theory was “gravitational lensing” – the bending of light by gravity. Einstein’s theory, unlike the theories of Marx, Freud, and Adler, made a precise prediction – in this case, a prediction about the degree to which our sun would bend light passing close its surface. That prediction was even more daring because it conflicted with Newton’s conceptions of space, time, and gravity, which were supported by two centuries of astronomical observation. Unlike the predictions of Marx, Freud, and Adler, those of Einstein were as risky as that of the soothsayer who repeatedly predicted the particular slot into which the roulette ball would fall.
That’s why Popper was intrigued by the reactions of Einstein’s followers when, in 1919, a solar eclipse off the coast of Africa made it possible to measure shifts in the apparent positions of stars whose light passed close to the sun. Those measurements, it turned out, clearly supported Einstein’s model.
From an objective point of view, those measurements justified righteous euphoria among Einstein’s supporters (Kennefick, 2009). Yet, according to Popper, even in the wake of those measurements, the devotees of relativity were less passionate about the truth of their theory than the followers of Marx, Freud, and Adler were about the truths of theirs. Of course, Einstein’s followers were thrilled by confirmation of his predictions. But the passions of the followers of Marx, Freud, and Adler were of a different order, forged by visions of their theories as embodiments of truths so manifest and sublime that only those who perversely closed their hearts and minds could doubt them.
Popper’s observations point to a profound irony: that ambiguity makes beliefs less illuminating while making believers more passionate.
Recent research into the adaptive unconscious (a modern conception unrelated to Freud’s model) has uncovered a mechanism that accounts for that ironic reality. According to Timothy Wilson, we are more likely to pay attention to things that resemble what we’ve encountered before. The more often and more recently we’ve encountered an idea or phenomenon, the better the chance that our adaptive unconscious will admit it to conscious awareness (Wilson, 2002). Since ambiguous ideas subsume more phenomena than precise ideas, they are likely to be called on more frequently – and, on average, to have been accessed more recently – than more precise notions. In addition, their ambiguity is likely to facilitate satisfying but spurious explanations of our concerns, enhancing their subjective worth. As such, it’s easy to imagine how our adaptive unconscious can render ambiguity-related biases self-reinforcing.
It would be comforting to think that we, who live in a sophisticated and skeptical age, might be as immune to ambiguity’s charms as we are to the beauty of a Neolithic Venus. Sadly, that is not the case. For evidence, we need look no farther than The Secret, a seductively packaged distillation of positive thinking, co-authored by a bevy of self-styled coaches, trainers, and motivational speakers. The Secret, as you may recall, was featured on Ellen and, twice, on Oprah. In DVD form, The Secret topped the amazon.com bestselling DVD list; in print, it topped the New York Times bestselling book list (Lampman, 2007). As of 2010, the print version of The Secret had been translated into 46 languages, with worldwide sales of more than 19 million books (Coming Soon: Sequel of The Secret, 2010).
Sales of The Secret reflect a broader trend. As Barbara Ehrenreich documented in Bright-Sided (Ehrenreich, 2009), the positive thinking movement has invaded almost every area of endeavor, creating passionate, confident believers and inspiring ineffective approaches to innumerable problems.
The Secret, like the positive thinking movement it typifies, gains its power from its apparent truth and its apparent truth from its ambiguity. The great secret this work brings to light is the law of attraction. The authors of The Secret hold closely-held knowledge of the law of attraction responsible for concentration of the world’s wealth in the hands of a select few (Byrne, 2006, p. 6). They also suggest that knowledge of that law is responsible for the achievements of Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Edison, Einstein, Emerson (Byrne, 2006, p. ix) and others.
Descriptions of the law of attraction in The Secret are diverse and lyrical, but they share a common premise: that everything that happens to each of us is caused by images in our minds. One of co-authors of The Secret, Bob Proctor, is quoted as saying, “It’s what you’re thinking. Whatever is going on in your mind you’re attracting to you” (Byrne, 2006, p. 4). “If you see it in your mind, you’re going to hold it in your hand” (Byrne, 2006, p. 9). Rhonda Byrne, primary author of The Secret, maintains that the law of attraction “determines the complete order in the Universe, every moment of your life and every single thing you experience in your life.” “You,” she declares, “are the one who calls the law of attraction into action, and you do it through your thoughts” (Byrne, 2006, p. 5).
In The Secret, the power of the law of attraction is dramatized by a young woman who receives an expensive necklace because she imagined it was already hers and a man whose securely chained bicycle disappears because he worried that it might be stolen. The universe, as it (allegedly) always does, transformed their thoughts – the woman’s desires and the man’s concerns – into realities. In the same way, imagining recovery from an incurable disease can allegedly restore health. Echoing this motif, Rhonda Byrne states, “Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight” (Byrne, 2006, p. 59).
Bob Proctor describes the law of attraction as functioning as precisely and predictably as the laws of physics. According to Mr. Proctor, “The natural laws of the universe are so precise that we don’t even have any difficulty building spaceships, we can send people to the moon, and we can time the landing with the precision of a fraction of a second. . . Wherever you are . . . we’re all working with one power. One Law. It’s attraction!” (Byrne, 2006, p. 3).
Such descriptions suggest that the law of attraction is as precise and falsifiable as the claims of engineering or medicine. But more careful reading reveals it to be shielded from falsification by a cloud of ambiguity.
One source of that ambiguity is the relationship between thoughts and their consequences. The law of attraction does not hold that one’s thoughts lead to manifestation of the events they envision. Rather it holds that thoughts of a particular “vibrational frequency” attract realities that share that frequency. Rhonda Byrne illustrates this notion when she states that events in which “masses of lives were lost” were the result of large numbers of people whose “thoughts of fear, separation, and powerlessness” led them to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” In such cases, she explains, “the frequency of [the victims’] thoughts matched the frequency of the event” (Byrne, 2006, p. 28).
Unfortunately, advocates of the law of attraction have yet to generate a reference that specifies the vibrational frequencies of thoughts and events. In the absence of such a reference, it’s impossible to claim that a thought failed to generate an expected event or that an event occurred in the absence of a corresponding thought. It is, however, easy to attribute events that have already occurred to thoughts with broadly similar emotional content.
Second, the law of attraction fails to specify the quantity of thought of a particular vibrational frequency necessary to attract events of that frequency. While its advocates maintain that events are summoned by persistent thoughts of a particular frequency (Byrne, 2006, pp. 28, 34-5, 43), they fail to indicate the duration or intensity of thoughts necessary to attract a corresponding event.
Third, according to The Secret, the universe manifests the results of thoughts only after unpredictable delays. As co-author Joe Vitale says, “I don’t have any rulebook that says [how long it’s going to take for thoughts to become realities] . . . It’s more a matter of you being in alignment with the Universe itself” (Byrne, 2006, p. 62). Thus, according to Dr. Vitale, our thoughts do not manifest here and now, but in a temporal pipeline of indeterminate length. Although a dying woman may imagine herself healed, and, by so doing, implant a miraculous recovery in that pipeline, that miracle may arrive too late to save her.
Nor does failure to attract what we experience ourselves as envisioning, regardless how passionately or consistently, cast doubt on The Great Secret. For, according to The Secret, incompatible thoughts or doubts, even if subconscious, can stop our desires from becoming realities or evict gestating realities from the temporal pipeline. And as co-author Marcy Shimoff tells us, “It’s impossible to monitor every thought we have” (Byrne, 2006, p. 29).
Although the law of attraction may not operate as predictably as the laws of physics, it is, in the eyes of those who accept its rules of evidence, a profound truth. After all, every reality preceded by a believer’s vaguely related thought can be seen as a confirmation. Disappointments, on the other hand, can be readily explained away. Some can be attributed to believers’ failures to recognize vibrational kinships between thoughts and realities. Other disappointments can be blamed on equivocal, feeble, or scattered deliberations. And any remaining disappointments can be blamed on doubts or incompatible thoughts that believers may have overlooked.
There are, of course, many other ways that ambiguity interacts with vulnerabilities in human reasoning to create truths as unworthy of that appellation as those The Secret claims to reveal. And there are many characteristics other than ambiguity that fashion similar products (Mahoney, 2004). But these specious truths all have one thing in common. They appear to provide us with profound understandings of broad swaths of reality. But they do so only because they are consistent with all outcomes and immune to all challenges.
Such beliefs appear rich in wisdom only because they are devoid of content. They are subjectively reassuring only because they are objectively vacuous. They appear to inform us about the world, but closer examination reveals that they do no such thing. Rather, by inducing us to accept their opportunistic rules of evidence, such beliefs transform our vision and our judgment, rendering us incapable of doubting them and addicting us to the reassurance they provide. Such beliefs are as independent of reality as the belief of those who, oblivious to the sleep masks they’re wearing, insist that the world has gone dark.
Truths like these are nothing but illusions. Submission to habits of thought that lead us to believe such illusions and accept their guidance is an abdication of our responsibility to strive for what Bernard Lonergan and his admirers call “authenticity” (Helminiak, 2008), (Helminiak & Feingold, 2011), (Lonergan, 1957).
None the less, I believe that the members of the Vienna Circle overreacted when they proclaimed all statements other than mathematical tautologies and scientific claims to be nonsense (Uebel, 2012). Such statements may not describe the world, but they do change it. We can and should evaluate those statements by examining what they do.
If such illusory truths change our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functioning, transforming us into persons in whose eyes they are beyond question, we can evaluate them by asking such questions as, “Do we wish to be transformed in the ways they transform us?” and “Do we wish to be the kinds of persons they make us?” It is, after all, as Bernard Lonergan observed in Method in Theology, “. . . up to each of us to decide for himself what he is to make of himself” (Lonergan, 1972).
Of course, questions like “What do I wish to be?” or, less narrowly, “What should I, as a human, wish to be?” are profound. And all answers to such questions are controvertible. But it is possible to reduce the intoxicating influence of specious truths by incorporating a few simple steps into our evaluations, and, by so doing, to answer these questions with clearer eyes and purer hearts.
The first step is to place ourselves behind a veil of ignorance similar to that which John Rawls suggested be used when making decisions about justice (Rawls, 1971). That veil must render us agnostic regarding the truth we’re evaluating, the assumptions that spawned that truth, the web of observations and beliefs shaped by those assumptions, and the web of observations and beliefs the truth in question may have inspired (Quine & Ullian, 1978). The opacity of that veil and the expanse it should cover may be debatable, but there is little question that such a veil, however imperfect, improves the odds that exploration of a truth will be informative.
We can also attend to how our truths and the rules we use to judge them affect authenticity. That is, we can attend to the effects of such truths and their influence on how we seek and understand information, communicate our insights, determine whether our insights are accurate, and use what we know to guide our actions (Popper, 1962). To the extent that our truths bias or impair those functions, they render our commerce with the world less effective and reduce our ability to formulate and achieve satisfying, worthwhile goals.
Finally, we can attend to how our truths affect our ability to create and sustain relationships, standards of discourse and other norms and institutions that support authenticity (Feingold, 1995), (Habermas, 1990 [1983]), (Helminiak, 2008). For the struggle to function authentically requires unrelenting confrontation of our limitations, our failings, and our mortality; and is rife with intellectual challenge and emotional pain. And, even if achieved, authenticity is an ephemeral state, as unstable as an inexperienced mountain climber on an icy, windswept peak. We need all the help we can get.
These questions are essential to assessing illusory truths. But I doubt that they are sufficient. I suspect that many of you would want to include the effects of such beliefs on one’s chances of achieving and sharing genuine happiness (Haidt, 2006), (Seligman, 2002). Others would likely wish to consider the impact of such beliefs on the chance of creating a world that supports other heartfelt values (Haidt, 2012). Still others, I’m sure, would find it important to attend to other effects.
While it is unlikely that persons of candor, intelligence, and goodwill ever achieve complete and permanent agreement about how to assess apparent truths, the effort to do so is worthwhile, for the stakes are high. Whatever might allow us to see through one another’s eyes, however fleetingly, increases the odds of human survival and meaningful progress. In the absence of an approach to mitigating the intoxicating effects of counterfeit truth, all too many of us will continue to see those whose vision differs from our own as depraved, wicked, or less than fully human. History reveals the results of confident commitment to such insular truths to have been disastrous, leaving us, in our millions, bound, blinded, and, if we are fortunate, merely bloodied.
It is the obligation of believers and skeptics alike to examine how we are shaped by subjectively true beliefs that may, unless constrained, transform us into “true believers” (Hoffer, 1952), and to do so fearlessly, objectively, and painstakingly. In this endeavor, may we be guided by the spirit of Saint Jerome, who said, “The scars of others should teach us caution,” and, equally, by the spirit of Ernest Hemingway, who said, “Call ‘em like you see ‘em, and to hell with it.”
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