TEEMA
Truth
and the Dangers of its Denial
America has nearly completed the term of a President widely, and with real justification,
considered amoral if not immoral, pernicious if not evil, environmentally negligent if not
destructive, and comfortable outside the norms of democracy if not more at home with
full-fledged autocracy.
One complaint, that Presi-dent
Trump is indifferent to
truth, might seem small by
comparison, but it is central
to all else. In an adminis-tration
started by lies about President
Obama’s birth and ended with accu-sations
of a stolen election, the value
of the truth is suddenly elevated. It is
worth taking a moment to remember
how truth arrived as the central tenant
of modern democracy.
The property of truth
Truth enjoys a rich tradition in science,
one we ought to recognize in our over-ly
heated political debates today. When
taken with another powerful tool with its
own rich tradition, falsifiability, it allows
us to examine and judge the deafening
political rhetoric. We need some meas-ure
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.
Truth, then. There are those who
might want to dismiss the idea that there
could be anything such as truth, find-ing
it to be purely subjective (whatever
that means) or inherently controver-sial
or unknowable, as in the inability
to be sure of the “absolute truth“. This
is a complex subject, but let us try to
unpack it by looking to the definition
suggested by the Polish mathematician,
Alfred Tarski.
For Tarski, asking about the property
of truth is not inquiring of a thing about
the world, or about people, but rather of
a property about statements. 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, 1 or 2m, 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.
Now, look at statements. They have
a number of properties. They may be in
English or Finnish, printed or oral, po-etic
or dull. But they may also be true
or false. Here we could suggest that the
following statements - “2+4=6”, “Some
cows have 4 legs”, and “Paris is the
capital of Finland is false” - 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, or what a capital is, one also
knows what it is for something to be
true. There is no commitment to any-thing
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’.
The traditional notions of truth
Once we understand the property of
truth, we can try to disentangle the lar-ger
structure of the political debate whe-re
accusations abound of lying, hoaxes,
fake this and fake that, and even denials
of ordinary 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
TEXT BY JOEL LEVIN
Truth is not so fragile
that it needs
protection behind
glass in a museum but
must be constantly
tested for accuracy,
plausibility and
consistency.
6 | SAM MAGAZINE 4/20