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The Problem of
Truth and the Truth of the Problem
Olavo de Carvalho
May 20, 1999
I. Radical
Questioning
§ 1. Of satisfied frivolity
Quid est veritas? This is the most serious and the most frivolous of questions,
depending on the intention of the one who asks it. Some admit that the
meaning and the value of human life depend on the existence of an eminently
certain and reliable truth, which may serve as a measurement to verify the
validity of our thoughts. Others think that life may perfectly well proceed
without any truth and without any foundation. Among the latter could probably
be found good old Pontius Pilate. When he exclaimed "What is
truth?", he was not exactly asking a question, but rather expressing,
with a shrug, his little disposition to ask that question seriously. The
prospect of there not being any truth — which would drive into despair those
who judge that life needs it to justify itself — was for Pilate a relief and
a consolation, a guarantee that he could go on living without any concerns.
Some wager on the existence of truth and cherchent en gémissant.
Others turn their backs and wash their hands of the matter. The verbal
formula through which they express themselves is the same: Quid est
veritas? But in the difference of their nuances lies all the distance
that goes from tragic to comic.
The frivolous or comic school is widely dominant
nowadays, be it in the universities, be it in culture at large. Even those
who seek to believe in an effective truth surround it with all sorts of
limits and obstacles, for example by reducing it to the kind of partial and
provisional truth that is given to us by some of the experimental sciences.
Others stick to faith, saying that truth exists, but that it is above our
understanding.
In any debate on the problem of truth these days,
the agenda consists almost invariably in rehashing the observations made by
philosophers, from Pyrrho to Richard Rorty, on the limits of human knowledge.
These limits, taken as a whole, make up a formidable mountain of obstacles to
any will to know the truth. And this mountain is an ever growing one, with a
peak that gets farther and farther out of reach the more we climb it. From
the half-witted objections of the Pyrrhonic school against the validity of
knowledge acquired through the senses, to the enormously complex
constructions with which Psychoanalysis denies the priority of conscience, or
Gramsci reduces all truth to the expression of ideologies that succeed
themselves through History, a lot has evolved in the machine that inoculates
disappointment in the truth-seeker. It causes no surprise that many of the
builders of this machine, as they add a new piece to it, instead of
regretting the consequent increase in human impotence, display on their lips
a smile similar to Pilate’s. The inexistence of truth – or the impossibility
of knowing it – is comforting for them. We shall see ahead what are the
deeper reasons for this strange satisfaction.
§ 2. Provisional definition of truth
For the moment, let us leave those creatures
aside, and pose the question of truth on our behalf. As we do not yet know
whether truth exists nor what it affirms, we have to resort to a provisional
definition that will enable us to start the investigation without prejudging
its outcome. To comply with such a requirement, this provisional definition
has to express the mere intentional meaning of the word, as it appears even
in the mouth of those who deny the existence of any truth; because in order
to deny the existence of something it is necessary to understand the meaning
of the word that designates it.
So I say that truth – the
truth whose existence we are still not sure of, the truth whose
existence and consistence will be the object of our investigation, as it was
of many other investigations that came before us – is the permanent and
universal cognitive foundation of the validity of judgements. If we say, for example, that the sole foundation of
the validity of our judgements is their utility, we deny the existence of a
cognitive foundation. That is, we deny the existence of truth through the
denial of one of the elements that makes up its definition. The same happens
if we say that all valid judgements are founded on faith. If we state, however, that there are no valid
judgements of any kind, then we deny the existence of any foundation,
cognitive or not. If we state that judgements
are valid only for a specific time and location, we deny that the foundation
may be permanent. If we state that judgements
are only valid subjectively to the one who utters them, we deny that the
foundation may be universal. If we say that
the foundation of the validity of judgements belongs only to formal logic,
without ever being able to reach the real objects mentioned in the judgement,
we deny that this foundation has any cognitive meaning.
All these denials of truth presuppose the
definition of truth as the permanent and universal cognitive foundation of
the validity of judgements. Likewise, if we say that
truth exists, that it is knowable, that based upon it we can build valid
knowledge, we will not have added or subtracted anything from that
definition, but only stated that the object defined in it does exist. Our
provisional definition, as it is therefore consistent with the two totally
opposed currents of opinion that dispute the question, constitutes a superior
and neutral ground from which the investigation may start without any
prejudices and with all honesty and rigor.
§ 3. Is the radical questioning of truth
possible?
We start thus from a consensus. The next step of
the investigation consists in asking whether truth, as defined, can or cannot
be the object of radical questioning. By ‘radical questioning’ I mean that
kind of questioning that, admitting ex hypothesi the inexistence of
its object — as for example it was done many times with the existence of God,
of innate ideas, or of the exterior world — leads to a conclusion that may be
favorable to the inexistence or to the existence of its object.
The radical questioner of God, of innate ideas,
or of the exterior world may question them because he positions himself, from
the outset, outside of the divine, innate or worldly ground, i.e., he reasons
as if God, or innate ideas, or the exterior world did not exist. As his
investigation unfolds, he will either come to the conclusion that his premise
is absurd — admitting therefore the existence of that whose inexistence he
had postulated —, or inversely he will come to the conclusion that the
premise holds perfectly well and that what was supposed to be inexistent
indeed does not exist.
The most classical example of this method is
Descartes’. He presupposes the inexistence of the exterior world, of what is
acquired by the senses, of his own body, etc. And he continues reasoning
along this line until he finds a limit — the cogito ergo sum — that
forces him to retreat and to admit the existence of all he had initially
denied.
Radical questioning is the hardest test to which
philosophy can submit any idea or being that might exist.
What we should then ask, right after obtaining a
formal definition of truth, is whether the truth so defined may be the object
of radical questioning. As surprising as it may be to many, the answer is a
flat no. The truth cannot be the object of radical questioning.
No investigation about the truth, as radical as
it may be, can take as a premise the inexistence of any permanent and
universal cognitive foundation of the validity of judgements and then
continue to reason in a manner consistent with this premise until reaching
some positive or negative result. And it cannot do so for a very simple
reason: the affirmation of the absolute inexistence of any permanent and
universal cognitive foundation of the validity of judgements would constitute,
itself, the permanent and universal cognitive foundation of subsequent
judgements made along the same line of investigation. The investigation would be paralysed as soon as formulated.
Let us briefly examine some of the classic
strategies for the denial of truth to which the questioner could resort in
order to escape from this cul-de-sac.
We may try for example the pragmatist
strategy. It states that the validity of judgements rests on its
practical utility, consequently assuming that the foundation of such validity
is not of a cognitive nature. If we said that the inexistence of a
permanent and universal cognitive foundation of the validity of judgements is
not itself a permanent and universal cognitive foundation, but only a
practical foundation, either this practical foundation would have to be
permanent and universal, or it would only be partial and provisional.
In the first hypothesis, we would have two problems: on the one hand we would stumble upon
the paradox of a universal utility, that is, of something that might usefully
serve all practical ends, even the most contradictory. It would be the
universal means for all ends or, more precisely, the universal panacea. On
the other, we should ask whether the belief in this panacea would have, in
turn, a cognitive foundation or whether it would only be a practical utility,
and so on infinitely.
In the second hypothesis — i.e., if the questioner admits that the affirmation of the
inexistence of truth is only a partial and provisional foundation for the
validity of subsequent judgements — there would always remain the unshakable
possibility that other permanent and universal cognitive foundations might
subsist outside the ground so delimited, capable of validating an infinity of
other judgements. The investigation could thus proceed indefinitely, jumping
from one provisional foundation to another, without ever being able to found
itself on its own premise, that is, on the radical inexistence of truth.
Let us then try a second strategy, subjective
relativism. It proclaims, as did Protagoras, that "man
is the measure of all things", what is currently interpreted as meaning
"to each his own". In other words, what is true is true only from
the point of view of the one who thinks it is true, and it may be false from
the point of view of everyone else. Can this statement provide the basis for
a radical questioning of truth, in such a way that the denial of the
existence of a permanent and universal cognitive foundation of the validity
of judgements does not become itself the permanent and universal cognitive
foundation that supports the validity of subsequent judgements in the same
line of investigation? Saying it in a simpler way: can relativism deny the
existence of judgements that are valid for all men without this very denial
becoming a valid judgement for all men? To do it, relativism would have to
deny the universality of this denial, what would amount to admitting the
existence of one, or some, or an infinity of judgements that are valid for
all men. So relativism itself would turn out to be relative. By stating that
some judgements are not valid for all men — which implies that others may be
—relativism would end up becoming a platitude without any philosophical
meaning. Subjective relativism cannot achieve a radical questioning of truth,
as pragmatism also could not.
Could historicism then do it? Historicism
declares that all truth is but the expression of a
temporal, limited world view. Men think this or that not because this
or that imposes itself as a universal and permanent obligatory truth, but
only because it imposes itself in a specific place
and for a limited period of time. But can historicism avoid that the
statement of these limits becomes itself the permanent and universal
cognitive foundation of the validity of judgements? In order to avoid that,
it would be necessary to admit that there may be some foundation that denies
the very statement of those limits. But if that foundation exists; then there
is a truth whose validity is unlimited by space and time, a truth whose
validity escapes from historic conditioning. And therefore historicism would
be reduced to the miserable realization that some
foundations of validity are historically conditioned while others are not,
not even being able to apply this distinction to concrete cases without
thereby affirming the invalidity of the historical principle taken as a
universal rule.
I will spare the reader the enumeration of all
the possible subterfuges and their detailed refutation. He can do that
himself as an exercise if he so wishes and I even encourage him to do so. In
any case, as many times as he tries them, he will always return to the same
point: it is not possible to deny the existence of a universal and permanent
cognitive foundation of the validity of judgements, under any pretext,
without this denial and its respective pretext becoming themselves a
universal and permanent cognitive foundation of the validity of judgements.
And thus it voids the next denial through which it would proceed the
investigation, if it only could. In short, truth, as we defined it, cannot be
the object of radical questioning. Neither can the possibility of knowing it.
Once we deny that it is possible to know a permanent and universal cognitive
foundation of the validity of judgements, either this very impossibility
becomes such a foundation, thereby admitting its own lack of any foundation;
or else, in order to avoid this embarrassing situation we should limit
ourselves to stating that some judgements do not have
any foundation while others probably do, a statement that lies within
the means of any school kid.
Not being capable of hitting its
target, the enemy of the truth is therefore eternally doomed to biting the
edges, without ever reaching the vital center of what he wishes to destroy. He will now deny one truth, then another, now with one pretext, then
with another, varying his strategies and the directions of his attack. But he
will never be able to free himself from his fate: each denial of a
truth will be the affirmation of another; and that denial as well as
this affirmation will always result in the affirmation of truth as such,
i.e., of the effective existence of some permanent and universal cognitive
foundation of the validity of judgements.
This also explains the continuous, unlimited and
irrepressible proliferation of the denials of truth and their total
incapacity of suppressing from the face of the Earth the belief in the
existence of truth, the belief in the possibility of knowing the truth, the
belief in the actual and full possession of a truth capable of providing a
permanent and universal cognitive foundation for the validity of judgements.
That is why the number and variety of the attacks
to the truth, from Pyrrho to Richard Rorty, greatly exceed the number and the
variety of the defenses that formally present themselves as such. That is
because these very attacks, however their authors deplore it, always end up
turning themselves into defenses and praise for the truth. Thereby, they do
not only reduce the workload of the apologist of truth, but also enliven what
they wished to lay to rest and honor what they wished to humiliate.
This is also the reason why the beginner,
impressed by the variety and continuity of charges against the truth that are
observed in the history of philosophy — nowadays in a notably increasing
speed — swiftly adheres to skepticism, so that he will not feel as belonging to
an isolated and weakened minority. But as he proceeds with his studies, he
overcomes that first impression based only in apparent quantity. He is then
no longer able to maintain that position as he realizes that the strength
does not rest in the number of those who deny the truth, as impressive as
they may seem, but rather in the quality of the happy few who serenely affirm
it.
II. The truth is
not a property of judgements
§ 1. Truth and truthfulness
The impossibility of radical questioning that we
verified in the preceding chapter leads us to the conclusion that the truth
may only be attacked by parts, and that each denial of a part reaffirms the
validity of the whole. Said in another manner, what may be questioned are
truths. "The" truth cannot be questioned and indeed never was,
except in words, that is, by the pretending of a denial that ends up being an
affirmation of truth.
But this takes us a step ahead in the
investigation. A venerable tradition, initiated by Aristotle, affirms that
truth is in the judgements, that it is a property of judgements. Some judgements "possess" the truth while others
do not. The first ones are called true judgements, the second ones,
false judgements. Therefore the set of true judgements is a subset of the set
of possible judgements. Possible judgements, in turn, constitute a subset of
the set of the human cognitive acts; these are a subset of the set of the
mental acts, which are a subset of the set of human acts, and so forth. Therefore, the territory of truth is a small detached area
inside a vast world of thoughts, acts and beings.
Is this really possible? How could truth be the
foundation of the validity of all judgements and at the same time a property
of some of them in particular? Isn’t that a blatant contradiction or at least
a problem?
To come to terms with it and solve the problem,
it is necessary that we agree in a distinction between truth and
truthfulness. Truth is the permanent and universal cognitive
foundation of the validity of judgements. Truthfulness is a quality
observed in some judgements, according to which their validity has a
permanent and universal cognitive foundation.
Once we understand that, it becomes evident that
the truth is a founding condition for truthfulness, not the opposite. If
there was no permanent and universal cognitive foundation of the validity of
judgements, no judgement could have a permanent and universal cognitive
foundation. However, if one particular judgement possesses this foundation,
nothing in the world can establish that it is the only one to possess it,
i.e., that the existence of the foundation depends of the existence of this
particular judgement. Yet this particular judgement could not exist and be
true if there existed no truth. The truth is thus logically prior to truthfulness
and constitutes its foundation.
Still, being the
foundation of truthfulness, truth is also the foundation of untruthfulness,
because false judgements are only false insofar as they may be truthfully
disproved, be it through their simple denial — itself truthful — be it
through the affirmation of a contrary truthful judgement.
Being the foundation not only of the truthfulness
of true judgements, but also of the untruthfulness of false judgements, truth
must be present in both, while truthfulness is only present in the true
judgements and cannot be present in false ones. Thus, the territory of truth
is not identical to the set of possible true judgements, but encompasses it
together with the set of the possible false ones.
§ 2. Is the foundation of all judgements a
judgement?
Must the truth, foundation of all
judgements, necessarily be a judgement? Can only a judgement be the
foundation of another judgement? The answer is yes and no. Yes, if by foundation we mean, restrictively and conventionally, the
premise upon which the proof of a judgement is founded. But a premise
states something about something, and what it states is not a judgement
but rather its object. Let me say, for example, that turtles have shells. I
found this judgement upon the definitions of turtle and shell, which are
judgements. But I found these definitions upon the observation — which is not
a judgement — of turtles and shells, which are not judgements either. Should
not that observation also be true, by apprehending traces which are truly
present in true objects? Or should I resort to the subterfuge according to
which the observation must only be exact, the concept of
"true" not being applicable to it ? But then what is the meaning of
"exact" in this case, if not that which informs me nothing more nor
less of what I truly observed in what an object truly showed? Moreover, is it
an authentic exactitude or just its simulacrum? There is no way out: either
there is truth in the observation itself or it cannot be exact, correct,
adequate, sufficient, nor have any other quality that recommends it except if
this quality be true.
So the foundation of the truthfulness of a
judgement rests not only in the truthfulness of the judgements that work as
its premises but — in the case of judgements concerning objects of experience
— also in the truth of the data wherefrom I extracted such premises and in
the truth of what I know about such data from experience.
Furthermore, if the foundation of judgements had
to be always itself a judgement, the primary foundation of all judgements
would be a judgement destitute of any foundation. Taken to this cul-de-sac,
Aristotle affirmed that the knowledge of the first principles is immediate
and intuitive. But he meant only that these principles had no proof, not that
they were devoid of any foundation. The principle of identity, for example,
thus expressed in the judgement A = A, does not have behind it any judgement
that may work as a premise to its demonstration. But it has an objective
foundation in the ontological identity of each being to itself, which is not
a judgement. What can be known intuitively is this ontological identity and
not the judgement A = A, that only manifests it. So the intuition of the
first logic principle does not take the form of a judgement, but rather that
of an immediate evidence which, in itself, is not a judgement. There cannot
be a judgement unless this immediate evidence is transformed by signs into a verbum
mentis. That is, into a conscious agreement which – not yet being a
proposition, an affirmation in words – is not anymore just the pure and
simple intuition, but rather its mental reflex and therefore a derivative and
secondary cognitive act, not a primary one.
So if the territory of logic premises begins with
judgements that affirm the first principles, that territory is very far from
encompassing all the field of cognitive foundations that extends itself into
the realm of intuitive perception, be it of the objects of experience, be it
of the first principles.
The falsity of the image of truth as a small
detached zone in the vast territory of possible judgements becomes thus
evident. Rather, it is all judgements, true and false, that are but a modest
spot in the immense territory of truth.
III. Where is the
truth?
§ 1. Truth as a realm
So we have come to understand that truth, being
the criterion for the validity of judgements, cannot be an immanent property
of these very judgements. Neither can it be something totally external to the
judgements which would evaluate them from the outside, because this
evaluation would in turn be a judgement. If I say "the chicken has laid
an egg", where can the truth of this judgement be? In the judgement
itself, independently from the chicken, or in the chicken, independently from
the judgement? The absurdity of the first hypothesis led Spinoza to proclaim
the inanity of the judgements that arise from experience, which are never
valid or invalid in themselves and always depend on something external. For
him, a true judgement would have to be true in itself, independently from
everything else. As, for example, A = A does not depend on what is A or on
any other external verification. But the identity of A to A lies not only in
the judgement that affirms it, but also in the consistency of A, whatever A
may be. There is no purely logic judgement that can be true or false in
itself without reference to the object of the judgement. Even a judgement
that refers only to itself unfolds into a judgement that affirms something
and into a judgement about which something is affirmed, and one is certainly
not the other. Affirming that a judgement is true in itself cannot mean a
total alienation of the "world" that is supposed by the very
possibility of enunciating a judgement. Fleeing to the realm of formal
identity does not solve the problem at all. Should we then say, along with an
old tradition, that truth is in the relation between judgement and object?
Now, this relationship is stated through a judgement that in turn must have a
relation with its object – the original relation between judgement and object
– and so on infinitely.
The other hypothesis, that the truth of the
judgement "the chicken has laid an egg"
is to be found in the chicken, independently from the judgement, would take
us to equally insurmountable difficulties. It would amount to saying that the
truth of the judgement does not depend on the judgement being made. That is,
that once the chicken has laid an egg, the judgement that affirms it is true
even though it does not exist as a judgement. Edmund Husserl would subscribe
to this view without winking: the truth of a judgement is a question of pure
logic that has nothing to do with the merely empiric question of a specific
judgement being made by someone one day. The confusion between the sphere of
the truth of judgements and the sphere of their psychological production did
indeed a lot of harm to philosophy, and Husserl has definitely clarified that
confusion. But if the chicken laid an egg and nobody said anything about it,
truth in this case is not in the judgement, but rather in the fact. The
judgement that has not yet been made cannot be true or false, it can only
have the possibility to be true or false. Being true that the chicken laid an
egg, the judgement that affirms it will be true if formulated, while the
truth of the fact is already given by the appearance of the egg.
But if the truth of the judgement "the
chicken laid an egg" is neither in the judgement independently from the
chicken, nor in the chicken independently from the judgement, not even in the
relation between chicken and judgement, where after all can it be?
We have just seen that, independently from the
judgements that affirm them, or from any judgements that might be made about
them, the objects they refer to may also be true or false. "The chicken
laid an egg" is opposed to "the chicken did not lay an egg",
independently from somebody saying so or not. There is identity and
contradiction in the real world, independently from the judgement which
affirms or denies anything about it, and even before this judgement is made.
In other words that lead to the same result: truth exists in reality and not
only in judgements, or it could not exist in judgements at all. There is
truth in the fact that the chicken laid an egg, there is truth in the
judgement that affirms it, and there is also truth in the relation between
the judgement and the fact, as well as in the judgement that affirms this
relationship: the truth thus cannot be "in"
the fact, nor "in" the judgement, nor "in" the relation,
but it has to be in all three of them.
Furthermore, if it is in the three of them, it must also be somewhere else, unless
we admit that a single fact and the judgement that affirms it, and the
relation that connects both of them, may be true even if everything else is
false. But this "everything else" that is not contained neither in
the fact, nor in the judgement, nor in the relationship, necessarily includes
the very existence of facts, as well as of logic principles implied in the judgement
and in the relationship. If there are no facts and logic principles, a
chicken will uselessly lay eggs in the realm of the non-fact, and a relation
between fact and judgement will uselessly be sought in the realm of
illogicality. Hence, the truth of a single fact, of a single judgement, and
of their relationship, imply the existence of truth as a realm that at once
encompasses and transcends facts, judgements and relationships.
Searching for truth in the fact, or in the
judgement, or in the relations between them, is like searching for space in
bodies, in their measurements, and in the distance from one body to another.
As space is not in the bodies, nor in their measurements, nor in their
distances – but rather bodies, measurements and distances are in the space –
likewise, truth is not in facts, nor in judgements, nor in their relations,
but they are all in the truth, or they are not anywhere. And even this
"not being anywhere", if it means anything and is not only a flatus
vocis, must be in the truth.
Truth is not a property of facts,
judgements, or relationships. It is the realm within which facts, judgements
and relations occur.
§ 2. Is the truth an a priori form of
knowledge?
At this point, the kantian temptation is
practically unavoidable. As a condition for the possibility of facts,
judgements and relationships, the truth is effectively an a priori
condition. But is it an a priori condition for the existence of these
three things or only for the "knowledge" we can have of them?
This problem is solved in a simple and brutal
way: if we say that the truth is an a priori form of knowledge and
intend this statement to be true, then knowledge must be in the truth and not
truth in the knowledge, because what is a priori cannot be immanent to
something which it itself determines. To be an a priori condition of
knowledge, truth must necessarily be an a priori condition of
something else that is not knowledge, but rather its object. Knowledge, like
facts, judgements and relationships, is within the realm of truth and that is
so independently of knowledge being considered exclusively in its eidetic
content or as a fact. The truth of what is known, the
truth of the knower, and the truth of knowing are all aspects of truth, and
truth is not an aspect of any of them.
After all there is no kantian way out. Either
knowledge is in the truth or it is not anywhere at all.
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