Reclaiming Robust Truth under Authoritarian Assaults
Extortion and Anemia
Last month I wrote about how, facing the Trump administration’s attacks, American universities need to reclaim the central values of truth, academic freedom, and social solidarity. I titled that post Attacked Academy Is Tongue-Tied about Truth. In the meantime, Donald Trump’s authoritarian populist assaults have escalated: in early August he demanded that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) pay $1 billion to have hundreds of millions in federal research funding restored.
Extortion. Image created by Eucalyp
This extortion racket run wild has set off alarm bells. Frank Bruni, for example, has described it as “a sweeping, indiscriminate, performative smackdown of elite institutions by a crew trying to solidify its power under the banner of anti-elitism.” And William Broad has situated Trump’s attacks on science in a four-hundred-year history that stretches from the Roman Catholic Church’s attacks on Galileo through Hitler and Stalin’s totalitarian dominance over science to the less overt but equally effective control exercised by today’s “new authoritarians,” including China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
Yet public defenses of the academy’s core values, which Trump and other authoritarians reject, remain distressingly anemic. I find this distressing because, despite all the problems that beset today’s academy, science itself (in a broad sense that includes all academic disciplines) is a legitimate and important social domain of truth, whose integrity and worth universities are called to uphold and promote.
My previous post sketches a three-stage roadmap for responding philosophically to authoritarian populist attacks on scientific truth: (1) give a better account of what I call propositional truth; (2) provide a new understanding of what I call truth as a whole, which includes but exceeds propositional truth; (3) and, building on (1) and (2), offer a more robust account of truth in science. Let me address the first of these here. I’ll devote subsequent posts to the topics of truth as a whole and scientific truth. (I also plan to address all three topics in my Philosophy Colloquium talk at Michigan State on September 26. Here’s a link to that event.)
Surprising Agreement
Image from FreePik
Surprisingly, philosophers, scientists, and Donald Trump agree on one thing: when we use the term truth, we usually have correctness and accuracy in mind. That’s how most people use this term. We may disagree about how important truth is, about who can achieve it, and about whether it should be pursued. But we know what we’re talking about when we use the words “true,” “truly,” and “truth.” We’re talking about our making correct assertions concerning what things are like and our being accurate when we describe or explain them.
Correctness and accuracy are the hallmarks of what I call propositional truth. Incorrect statements and factual inaccuracy are the hallmarks of propositional falsity. Liars are people who try to deceive us by deliberately making incorrect claims and obscuring the facts; bullshitters are people who spread around false claims and obfuscations but don’t really care whether their statements are true or false.
According to the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in the little book On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005), bullshitters also try to hide their own lack of concern about propositional truth, and that makes bullshit “a greater enemy of the [propositional] truth than lies are” (p. 61). I regard Donald Trump as a master of bullshit and an enemy of truth.
It's one thing to describe propositional truth as a matter of correctness and accuracy. It’s quite another to give a philosophical account of it. The standard account in modern philosophy has been what’s called a correspondence theory of truth. This account says truth consists in a correspondence between statements or propositions and objects or facts. According to the correspondence theory, when I say, “The cat is on the mat,” my statement is true if and only if kitty is indeed on the mat.
But this standard account is in trouble. It’s in trouble, I submit, because it was too narrow to begin with. I believe there is more to truth than a purported correspondence between propositions and facts, and even this purported correspondence has been construed too narrowly. Hence a first step toward addressing the question of truth in science is to offer a more robust account of propositional truth—the truth of propositions, beliefs, assertions, and the like. A second step will be to argue that truth encompasses more than such propositional truth, the topic of a subsequent blog post. [You can find detailed accounts of propositional truth and truth as a whole in my book Social Domains of Truth: Science, Politics, Art, and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2023).]
Propositional Truth
Photo by SAIF AL-GBURI on Unsplash
What, then, is propositional truth? To begin, I situate it in a field of interrelations between human practices and the matters that lend themselves to our practices—matters that, for convenience, I label practical objects. Especially relevant in this field of practical interrelations are the speech acts whereby, in communication with each other, we give descriptions and offer explanations. I call such speech acts assertions. Propositions are the abstract content of what we assert to each other when we make assertions. When, for example, I tell you “Today it is warm in London, Ontario, Canada,” the proposition I have asserted is “that today’s weather in London is warm.”
What does it mean for such a proposition to be true? This is where philosophical debates set in among various truth theories. Unfortunately, all of these theories downplay how propositions arise within daily life practices and in interlinkage with practical objects. My own approach is to say that practical objects offer themselves for our various practices, including the linguistic practices of reference and predication. When we make assertions, practical objects allow us to refer to them and to say something specific about them.
For example, when I assert “My dog Ruby is a faithful companion,” I refer to a certain animal as “my dog Ruby,” and I specifically describe her as a faithful companion. The canine in question allows me to use these expressions to make this assertion about her. In this sense, practical objects like Ruby (who, of course, is much more than a practical object!) are predicatively available, such that we can make assertions about them.
Ruby at Lake Michigan Recreation Area, July 13, 2020
When this predicative availability aligns with another relevant way in which objects offer themselves, and our assertions pick out this alignment, then our assertions are correct. For my assertion about Ruby to be correct, what I say about her—i.e., that she’s a faithful companion—must line up in a relevant way with how she behaves towards me—i.e., with aspects of her nonpredicative availability, such as her staying close to me throughout the day no matter where I am.
The alignment between predicative and nonpredicative aspects of a practical object’s availability when we make assertions about it is what I call the predicative self-disclosure of the object. Predicative self-disclosure is what the object to which we refer allows us to specify in relation to at least one nonpredicative way in which that object is available to us. The correctness of assertions occurs in interlinkage with the predicative self-disclosure of practical objects. Moreover, the accuracy of propositions arises from such interlinkage. At a minimum, propositional truth encompasses both the correctness of assertions and the accuracy of propositions.
Valid and Accurate Insight
Photo by A Chosen Soul on Unsplash
Yet there is more to the truth of propositions than simple accuracy about the objects of our assertions. For propositions must also align properly with each other in patterns of inference or thought. And that is where logic becomes important for the truth of propositions. In my longer discussions of this topic, I show that the truth of propositions requires both the accuracy of the insight they offer and the logical validity of the inferences or thinking they involve. And accuracy and validity are required in ways that intersect. The truth of propositions involves a dynamic correlation between accurate insight and inferential validity.
Achieving such valid and accurate insight is not insignificant. Without it our lives and social institutions would quickly run amok. Nevertheless, I believe there’s much more to truth than the truth of propositions. We need to envision this “more” in order to understand why propositional truth itself is important. We need to envision what I call truth as a whole. Moreover, the correlation between accurate insight and inferential validity offers an important clue into what truth as a whole is like. For, as I’ll explain in a later blog post, the dynamic correlation within propositional truth both echoes and participates in the dynamic correlation within truth as a whole.
Deliberate lying, casual bullshit, and widespread misinformation undermine logically valid and accurate insight. They thereby damage not only the path of propositional truth but also the pursuit of truth as a whole. For infidelity to one societal principle—logical validity, in this case—both encourages and reinforces infidelity to other societal principles—such as solidarity and justice—even as the refusal to pursue accurate insight both fosters and strengthens other refusals to pursue what is societally good.
Time for Truth
Statue of Truth outside the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa
Photo by Tomkinsr at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
So, propositional truth is important. It is important in its own right: we need accurate and valid insight. It’s also important for the role it plays within truth as a whole: propositional truth helps foster a dynamic correlation between fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society.
Authoritarian populists who attack science inevitably also attack propositional truth. The society they envision is not simply “post-truth.” It is, in fact, anti-truth. For fascists undermine propositional truth; they oppose scientific truth; and they assault truth as a whole. This is not a time for anemic academic responses. It is time for robust truth.
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