Thinking Straight and Loving the Truth

Continuing Attacks

The Trump administration’s attacks on American universities continue. So do the academy’s distressingly anemic responses. A few days after my blog post Reclaiming Robust Truth under Authoritarian Assaults went live, the Guardian announced that the University of California at Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, had given the Trump administration the names of 160 faculty members and students under suspicion of alleged antisemitism.

This list includes the prominent Jewish feminist philosopher Judith Butler, whose pathbreaking work I’ve read and taught. Butler is one of the few listed people who has begun to speak out against this McCarthy-era-like attempt to suppress truth-telling and academic freedom. What she finds especially shocking, according to the Guardian, is how ready the university has been to comply with the Trump regime’s illegitimate demands.

It may be so, as Alan Blinder reported last week in the New York Times, that the entire University of California system relies on $17 billion in annual federal funding ($7 billion for research and student aid plus $10 billion for programs related to Medicare and Medicaid). That’s a staggering amount. Yet it does not excuse the university’s reluctance to protect its own faculty and students from bald-faced political coercion. As I’ve said before, this is not a time for anemic academic responses. It’s time for robust truth.

Thinking Straight

According to the roadmap sketched in my blog post Attacked Academy Is Tongue-Tied about Truth, a robust philosophical response to fascist attacks on science and the academy needs to explain what I call propositional truth, describe what I call truth as a whole, and, on this basis, offer a fulsome account of truth in science.

In the next post I explained propositional truth as a matter of valid and accurate insight. I also said the dynamic correlation between accurate insight and inferential validity within propositional truth both echoes and participates in the dynamic correlation within truth as a whole. Now I’d like to explain how this goes and then give a more detailed account of truth as a whole.

Photo by Mohammad Reza on Unsplash

When I talk about inferential validity, I simply mean the ability to think straight (in the logical rather than the sexual sense). Let’s say I tell you it’s warm in London, Ontario, and you decide on that basis to wear a summer outfit in the freezing climate where you live. If so, then you’re not thinking straight. You’ve drawn the wrong conclusion from an irrelevant bit of information.

Similarly, if I say my dog Ruby is a faithful companion and you conclude I must be one lonely guy, you again are not thinking straight. You’d need a lot more information to draw any such conclusion. You’d also need to understand the difference between saying Ruby is a faithful companion and saying Ruby is my only faithful companion. In other words, your thinking would not be inferentially valid.

From these examples we can see how not thinking straight interferes with gaining accurate insight. So too, not having our facts right—not being accurate—gets in the way of thinking straight. That’s why I say propositional truth involves a dynamic correlation between inferential validity and accurate insight.

In order for inferential validity and accurate insight to correlate, those who make assertions must not only follow the rules of logic (i.e., they must think straight) but also do justice to what they make assertions about (i.e., they must be accurate). Or, to use the terms introduced in my previous post, their fidelity to the societal principle of logical validity must correlate with their doing justice to the object’s predicative self-disclosure. Further, this correlation is dynamic, for each side inflects the other: our fidelity to the principle of logical validity serves to promote the object's disclosure, and our doing justice to the object’s predicative self-disclosure partly depends on how faithful we are to that principle.

Truth as a Whole

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As I’ve already suggested, this correlation within propositional truth echoes similar correlations within various social domains of truth. It also participates in the fidelity/disclosure correlation that characterizes truth as a whole. Just as propositional truth requires a dynamic correlation between fidelity to logical validity and a propositional disclosure of the object, so in general truth consists in a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles, on the one hand, and a life-giving disclosure of society, on the other. Moreover, a version of this general correlation shows up in every nonpropositional sort of truth.

As a whole, then, truth is a dynamic correlation between two axes: between (1) human fidelity to societal principles and (2) a life-giving disclosure of society. This dynamic correlation shows up in distinct social domains such as science, politics, art, and religion. In each social domain, truth displays a specific correlation between fidelity and disclosure. While each specific correlation participates in the dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure in truth as a whole, each differs from the others in how the whole comes to expression. Specifically, it differs in which societal principle has primacy there and in the sort of disclosure that correlates with fidelity to this societal principle.

According to this conception, which my book Social Domains of Truth calls “holistic alethic pluralism,” not all truth is propositional. Nevertheless, propositional truth displays the sort of dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure that characterizes all truth. And, as I’ll show in a subsequent post, so does scientific truth. Now let me explain what fidelity to societal principles and life-giving disclosure involve.

Fidelity to Societal Principles

In speaking of societal principles, I refer to how, throughout history and within diverse cultural practices and social institutions, human beings have developed, and responded to, a limited plurality of shared expectations about what makes for goodness in social life. Among prominent societal principles in a contemporary setting, I would include solidarity, justice, and resourcefulness (what some people call “stewardship”)—and, of course, logical validity.

Ruby as lap dog, November 29, 2020

But what does fidelity to societal principles come to? Fidelity implies both being persistently faithful and taking responsibility for what we are faithful to. Fidelity to a societal principle such as justice means that we try to do what justice requires even as we take responsibility for shaping this requirement by how we respond to it. Fidelity also implies an attachment, even an attraction, to what receives our faithfulness. Our fidelity is more than a sense of obligation; it is a kind of love.

Fidelity to societal principles is one axis of truth as a whole. It is the axis along which we try to be true to what truth requires—i.e., we try to be faithful to what justice and solidarity and other societal principles ask of us. These responses belong to the trueing of social life—to our social life’s aligning with what makes for goodness in society.

Life-Giving Disclosure

The second axis within truth points to two other concepts that I need to clarify: “life-giving” and “disclosure.” Let me begin with disclosure. Disclosure refers to an ongoing historical process, and it pertains to society as a whole. It pertains to whether and how society opens up rather than closes down. Here “opening up” means that society develops in a direction that minimally allows and maximally encourages human fidelity to societal principles. A disclosure of today’s society, for example, would occur when social conditions become more conducive to the pursuit of justice.

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This process must also be life-giving. The disclosure of society is life-giving when it lets human beings and other creatures flourish in their interconnections. A society whose trajectory pushes human beings to dominate “nature” and exploit it for their own purposes would lack life-giving disclosure. So would a society in which the rich and powerful regularly oppress the poor and marginalized. “Life-giving” indicates a call to human beings to care for the Earth and one another. It also points to the potential they have, in heeding this call, to foster the interconnected flourishing of all creatures.

Dynamic Correlation

So fidelity and disclosure are the two axes within truth as a whole. Now we can ask how they intersect. I’ve already described this as a dynamic correlation. By correlation I mean that the two axes are mutually interdependent: we cannot have one without the other. The ultimate aim of human fidelity to societal principles is to promote a process in which human beings and other creatures come to flourish in their interconnections. Conversely, a life-giving disclosure of society partly depends on the degree to which cultural practices and social institutions come to align with societal principles such as solidarity and justice. To flourish in their interconnections with other creatures, human beings must contribute to that process via their fidelity to societal principles.

Photo by Marek Pavlík on Unsplash

Both axes in this correlation are historical: they take shape in human history and change over time. Both are also open to a future that is still to come. And that makes their correlation dynamic. Truth as a whole is the historically rooted and future-oriented correlation between human fidelity and societal disclosure.

Science in the broad sense can participate in this process. It is one social domain among many in which truth unfolds. Although we should not equate the findings of science with truth as a whole, anyone who cares about truth as a whole also needs to care about scientific truth. My next blog post will say why.

Note: I’ll be speaking about these topics at Michigan State University on Friday, September 26, at 3:00 pm. Here’s a link to more information about this event.