CC BY
37
Section 11. Philosophy
Reference:
1. Beer St. Cybernetics and Management for the Production. 2 nd edition. Nauka. Moskow, - 1965, - p. 38, (translation from English into Russian).
2. Kobozjev N. I. The research in the field of thermodynamics of thinking and information processes. In the book: Kobozjev N. I. Selected works. Vol.2. Moscow University Publishers. Moscow. - 1978, - pp. 3-240 (in Russian).
3. Tsekhmistro I. Z. Implicative logical nature of quantum correlations (Il).//Voprossy Philosophie, - 2012, - N 5.
4. Tsekhmistro I. Z. Implicative logical nature of quantum correlations.//Physics-Uspekhi (44), 4, April, 2001.
5. It can’t in essence be the task, whose exact target is the explanation of the possibility of thinking and consciousness. Otherwise it is the inevitable mistake, known in logic by the name per idem — that is to say, explanation by means of involving the explained.
Chernyakova Natalia Stepanovna, Herzen Staty Pedagogical University of Russia, Professor, Northern People Institute E-mail: Cherns2011@yandex.ru
The notion of truth: between rejection and rescue
Abstract: The notion of truth is considered in the article as the category of thought by which we express the property of our thinking to reflect, to be in correspondence with objective entities, which are transcendent to the thinking itself. This universal meaning of the notion of truth couldn’t be changed by any theoretical interpretation of the notions “being”, “correspondence" or “criteria of truth”.
Keywords: truth, being, thinking, knowledge, correspondence, true, false.
For the last two millennia the sacramental question “What is Truth?” turned into a ritual formula, the recitation of which demonstrates respect to the mysteries of human existence and cognition, but not to the notion of truth itself. The content of this notion seems for many philosophers so obvious that, like R. Rorty and after him, they think that “the fact that we possess such a notion is in itself no guarantee that there will be an interesting philosophical theory about it” [1, 282]. Calls to resolute reconsideration of the classical concept of truth were heard in the philosophy of the second half of the 20th century so often, and prospects for the future use of the very notion of truth were discussed by philosophers so seriously, that we should doubt not so much possibility of any interesting theory of truth as the fact of availability in our minds of just the notion, and not only a word “truth”. Do we really understand the content of the notion “truth” and its status in intellectual activity, if, like K. Popper, believe that anyone can destroy or rehabilitate truth? At the XVIII World Congress of Philosophy (Brighton, August 1988) K. Popper considered it his duty to express gratitude to Alfred Tarski and to make a confession of his faith: of his “opposition to relativism” and his “54-year-long adherence to the Aristotelian theory of truth, rehabilitated by Tarski and successfully applied by him and by
Gödel to some mathematical problems” [2, 6]. Isn’t it better to refuse the use of the notion “truth” at all than to consider, that two thousand years we fight over the decision of the elementary cartographic tasks, and together with D. Dennett rejoice that “serviceable, modest concept of truth... has its uses: when we want to compare two maps of countryside for reliability, for instance, or when the issue is whether the accused did or did not commit the crime as charged” [3, 97]? I think that the experience of philosophical thought and discussions of the 20th century must not be lost if we don’t want continue to stand before a dilemma: either to use no more “marketable” concept of truth as correspondence of the trivial judgments to the evidences of common sense, or contemplate the greatness of metaphysical Truth, the concept of which can’t be defined and can’t be used in the cognitive process or in practice.
Despite the fact that in Aristotle’s works there is no real definition of the truth and that statements of Aristotle himself, which is often cited in connection with the discussions of the problems of truth, doesn’t form a theory, definition of truth as correspondence of the thought to reality is regarded as the quintessence of exactly Aristotelian understanding of truth. Sustainable philosophical tradition linked not only this definition, but, eventually, even the Latin formula "adaequatio
228
Секция 11. Философия
intellectus et rei” directly with Aristotle tuning the expressions “classical concept of truth”, “correspondent concept of truth” and “Aristotelian concept of truth” as synonyms. However, “truth” is a category, to be in possession of which people is due not to the peculiarities of this or that subject of knowledge, but to the specifics of the cognitive activity as such and moreover — of the way of human existence, an integral feature of which thinking is. As Bernard Williams wrote, “there is no history of the concept of truth”. Considering the historical conception of Thucydides, Williams emphasizes, that “it was not that he introduced a new definition or theory of truth”. On the contrary: “Everybody everywhere already has a concept of truth; indeed, they all have the same concept of truth. (The fact that they may have very different theories of truth just shows how much people’s theories of truth misrepresent their grasp of the concept)” [4, 163]. Indeed, it’s impossible to believe that not only philosophers, but all sensible contemporaries of Aristotle needed in proving that anyone who asserts that disconnected is disconnected and bound is bound says the true and anyone who thinks back to that state of things — the false, or that somebody is pale not because we consider him/her a pale, but, on the contrary, it is because somebody is pale, we who claim it tell the truth. Of course, these judgments became trivial long before the emergence of philosophy itself. So there are no more reasons to consider Aristotle as a founder of the concept of truth as a correspondence between thoughts and the real state of things than to consider him as an originator of the opinions that the Sun rises in the East or the wind blows up the sails. The essence of Aristotle’s reasoning isn’t the statement of trivial correspondence between our judgments and evidences of common sense (“I see that Socrates is pale, and I tell the truth: Socrates is pale”), but the understanding and theoretical explication of the idea that a judgment can be either true or false, because that to which the judgment is referred to and the existence of which is asserted in this judgment may in fact not exist. In other words, true or false, according to Aristotle, may be only that, in which being may be represented or not represented. Thus, the epistemological problem of truth turns into the ontological problem of existence, because the statement is true if and only if that, which is asserted in it, is really exists. But is it? That is the question the answer to which may be obtained only in the process of cognition.
Trivial interpretation of epistemological correspondence as copy, ideas as a print, the mind as a mirror and etc. is a consequence not of the basic meaning of the
term “adaequatio” or essence of the classical concept of truth, but of a highly simplified theory of knowledge. The classical understanding is based on a much more uncertain interpretation of “adaequatio" as coordination of thoughts with the objects without explicitly underlining or implicitly meaning the moment of absolute identification, copying, or making snapshots. The content of the classical definition of truth as correspondence of thoughts to their objects does not give grounds to think that thoughts can be brought into one-to-one-correspondence with reality, or make a conclusion about presence of intuitively clear and undisputable criterion for establishing whether thoughts correspond to object or not. It should be emphasized that questions about how exactly to verify/falsify any statement or proposition and what is the criterion of really true content are not included in “the classical concept of truth” in any interpretation of this concept.
It seems to me that a special historical case of the struggle against the classical concept of truth was only possible because, despite mutual criticism and the apparent incompatibility of fundamental principles, all philosophical schools of the 20th century involved in logical and methodological researches of scientific knowledge were united in their desire to reduce epistemological problems to the level of concrete scientific problems of mathematical, logical, linguistic or physical type. It is because of this total reductionism a tradition has arisen to call “classical”, “traditional” or “correspondent” such interpretation of the notion of truth, which is due not to the essence of the classical concept of truth or its definition, but only to a limited scientific approach to the study of fundamental problems of epistemology. The principal feature of this pseudoclassical interpretation of the truth is a consideration of thought not as a product of vital activity of the subject, but as an ideal object, existing among material objects. The concept of the idea as something that exists along with the object has led in its turn to the identification of epistemological relations of the correspondency between thoughts and objects with relations of structural similarity in mathematics and natural sciences [5, Part IV. Civilization, Chapter 16. Truth] and has resulted in that understanding of truth, which R. Rorty ironically described as a «vegetarian». According to this pseudoclassical interpretation of the notion of truth a true thought is likened to a map, diagram, formula or any other sign, which refers to the object, but is independent of it and exists along with him. This sign/image you can freely select, replace, refine or destroy without
229
Section 11. Philosophy
losing sight of referred object and achieving maximum expressiveness of the sign or accuracy of the iconic image. Moreover, it’s considered as possible that one and the same idea can be put in some different relations to the object and vary in more or less adequacy, just as two people can be to each other in relations of kinship, or of official subordination, demonstrating various properties of character and behavior.
The specifics of the critical attitude to the truth in the postmodernist philosophy was such that just this reductionalistic in relation to the epistemology and essentially pseudoclassical interpretation of truth was recognized as a “classical" and identified with the essence of what is possible to conceive “under the sign of Truth” in general. As a result, some philosophers have tried to get rid of this “classics” by creating various “non-classical” theories of truth — coherent, pragmatic, conventional, etc. and eventually formulating the question about expediency of application of the concept of “truth” as such, and others didn’t lose hope for the salvation of the classical concept of truth in the name of salvation of the Truth itself. Not many others have noticed the non epistemological meaning of the prevailing interpretation of the classical concept of truth and senselessness in itself of the appeals to “deliverance from the truth”.
The fundamental difference between such representations, as, for example, a map and the quantum theory, is that only about map we really know what it represents. Therefore the question, “Can the map be true, i. e. whether it can be a true representation of the object?” hasn’t the epistemological sense, because we know exactly what this map represents. As to the quantum theory, a search of the referents for this representation coincides with the process of cognition of the microworld. We only then understand what it represents, when we obtain the corresponding referents by this representation itself. Maps, models, photos, schemes, etc. could be more or less accurate, but they can’t be true or false, because creating and using maps or models, we know exactly what was the object of mapping or modeling, and comparing map with its referent we define only the accuracy of the two rows of dots: on the map and on the ground. In all these aspects, which are described by the concepts of homomorphism and isomorphism, no actually epistemological problems arise, because the photo is, of course, reproduction of the appearance of quite certain and no other person, the map is a representation of quite certain areas, and the model — a copy of quite certain object. As to epistemology, it, unlike cartography or modeling, considers only
those problems, which arise when the subject of cognition seeks to understand: a map of what locality has he created, and whether it is a map at all. Thought is not a map or a model that can be checked with the terrain or compared with the object of modeling. Thought is a product of intellectual activity of the subject, some state of his consciousness. The subject of cognition can’t look at his own thought like at the map or model, because the content of his thought is exactly what replaces in his consciousness the object of knowledge, and he operates thoughts as the objects themselves, even not knowing whether they represent any object or not. Thought is “presenting” to the consciousness directly just itself and only indirectly — an objective referent. That is why the problems of references and ontological interpretation occur, on the one hand, and the concept of phenomenological intentionality — on the other. If being was presented to the consciousness per se no any problems of knowledge would ever exist.
It’s important to emphasize that in the semantic correlation of language expressions with referents there is really no specific epistemological content. This content appears only when the subject of cognition doesn’t know, what is being referred to, what should be considered as “facts”, and, therefore, — whether his statement has as a referent a really existing object. In other words, the knowledge originates and exists only because the subject of cognition doesn’t know, whether images arising in his mind really correspond to any objects, and therefore he can’t operate with these images as with models or maps, about which it’s precisely known, representations ofwhat objects they are, or as with symbols, the meaning of which he has set himself. The process of establishing the validity of thoughts can’t be presented in the form of correspondence between content of thoughts independent from the consciousness of the subject with an objective reality equally independent of consciousness, because the question of the truth occurs only and exclusively in the situation when there is a problem of existence of those characteristics which the subject of cognition attributes to the object. And this situation is an attribute of a single kind of relations — epistemological — between the object existing by itself and the image representing it in the consciousness of the subject. In other words, the notion of truth implies the unresolved question of the representation of things in the mind of the cognizing subject.
The fundamental difference between semantics and epistemology is that the significance of the symbols or terms of formalized languages is always arbitrarily set
230
Секция 11. Философия
and known, while an assessment of the true content of a judgment is always problematic. Thinking cannot exist, not expressing itself in judgment, but the true content of propositions, unlike the semantic meaning of linguistic expression, consists not in a matching of two objects, but in a correspondence between an object and a thought about it. True thought is such that it has the property of correspondence, which means that the objective being, which it represents and replaces in mind, “shines" through it. But it means that the thought, true or false, can’t be in a different relation to an object, and that it’s impossible to determine the truth through relations between material entities. The real epistemological problem is not whether our statement “It’s raining” represents the fact of the coming rain, but whether the rain is coming in fact or is it only seems to us. Only the prob-lematization of the content of the judgment makes the question of the truth really relevant, for the question of truth arises only when the content of the judgment problematic relative to things, when we really don’t know, is there something external to which our contemplations is referred. The need to assess thoughts at their true content reveals problematic nature of the existence of those characteristics that the subject of cognition attributes to the object. This is the situation which generates actually cognitive attitude of the subject to the object. And precisely because the existence of somehow comprehended transcendental object is always only allowed as an ontological precondition, the actual development of knowledge consists in solving of the question about the truth of this assumption. If no request about transcendental is made, if the existence of properties attributed to a transcendent object isn’t questioned, the notion of truth has nothing to speak about, because the truth speaks only about the identity of being and thinking in the sense that any ontological assumption is problematic and should be subjected to the evaluation of its true content. Judgment asserts something as existent and can be true or false only because the real something either exists or doesn’t exist. Neither at the moment of judging, nor in the process of verification/falsification we don’t know if that which the judgment asserts really exists, i. e. don’t know is the judgment true or false. Only our real ignorance compels us to question the true content of our statements and makes this content really problematic. If a representation of being in the mind could be anything, no problems of cognition would ever exist, for it would mean that any thoughts are equivalent as representations ofbeing itself. However, in a real process of cognition there are both true and false thoughts. And the essence of the process of
cognition is to distinguish the ones from the others. The question about the possibilities of cognition we can reformulate as the question of whether there is knowable? Is there something this thought corresponds to? — If there is, the thought is true; if there isn’t — the thought is false. So the epistemological question about the truth is tuned to the ontological question about object itself.
A semantic approach to the study of truth is based on the withdrawal of the judgment from the living process of thinking, as the result of which the judgment turns to be not the form of thought but the form of language in which just thought as the state of consciousness is lost. Due to this approach an opinion has arisen that Aristotle or Locke thought of knowledge as a relation between persons and objects, while the modern researchers think of knowledge as a relation between a person and a proposition [1, 141-142]. However, a person hasn’t any relations with propositions. When a person says “I know that..he expresses his attitude not to a proposition, but to the content of what he says. And this attitude is such that the speaker is sure that what he’s talking about really exists. ”To know” means to claim something as an existing or to approve the assertion of the existence of something as true. “Not to know” means not to claim something as an existing or not to recognize the proposition of the existence of something as true. The category of truth reflects not the relation of the sentence to its referent, but the attitude of the living thought of the subject of cognition to being. It’s just being (reality, object) corresponds to consciousness as a property, an ability, an attribute of the cognizing subject. And only for the cognizing subject, only in his mind the being is revealed or hidden. The true judgment about the object is such a judgment, the content of which replaces in the consciousness the object itself. This mental substitution of object means his identification with the idea, but identification only and exclusively within the boundaries of thinking about the object. Comprehensible in this way "identity” of the thought with the object means its accuracy, adequacy, representativeness, but not the transformation of thought in knowable object itself.
The causal link between an object and a thought about this object only means that the object exists prior to and regardless of the act of thinking and that the reason for the existence of thought about this object is, undoubtedly, the object itself. Otherwise thought would forever reflect only itself and no cognition problems would ever exist. Meanwhile, the knowledge exists and exists only because the idea is not identical to the object itself. The
231
Section 11. Philosophy
relation between the object and the idea is not an unambiguous, or the nature of a rigid determination. Nothing in the object creates the only possible idea of the subject of cognition. On the contrary, “the contact with reality” might result in true thought as in false. And the notion of truth represents just this problematical nature of knowledge by reflecting both the relation between thinking and being and the content of thought, which stands for the being in the mind.
Precisely because the category “truth” is an epistemological name of being itself, not imaginary but the real ambiguity of the word “truth” arises. This word means in the common sense as in the theoretical consciousness simultaneously not only a content of thought which is corresponded to an object, but this same object that is reflected in this thought. This semantic contradiction in the word “truth” is as stable, as the content of the category itself. That is why saying “truth” we mean “reality”, or “being”. The opinion that we can search for truth as if truth is hidden somewhere is possible only because in our consciousness the truth is identified with reality itself, and any judgment, perceived as true, has for us an ontological value. Asking “What is truth?” people are not meaning the semantic content of the word “true” or even the content of thought that this word signs, but they are meaning the reality to which thoughts must correspond to be true. Common sense perceives the question “What is truth?” as a question about the real object. This “natural attitude” of the consciousness towards the identification of the true thought and reality, the true thinking and being is the result of cultural and historical development. The destruction of this “natural attitude” is the specific task of epistemology as a branch of philosophy.
Only at the epistemological level the question “What is truth?” is becoming a question about the content of our consciousness, but not about the real objects. The epistemological question about the correspondence between thinking and being implies the possibility of their fundamental lack of correspondence. More over, the epistemology that is not aware of this possibility simply can’t exist. Epistemology as the theory of the knowledge is necessary just because
of knowledge about object is not the same as the object itself, and it is for this reason epistemology must disclose how the subject of cognition can obtain the correspondence between his thoughts and the object. The problematic character of epistemological relation, which exists solely in the consciousness of cognizing subject, means that evaluating the ideal images of his mind, the subject of cognition simultaneously is aware of the distinction between his own belief in the truth or falsity of these images and their objective value. There isn’t a formal logical or linguistic criterion for the distinguishing of true and false components of consciousness. This means that the fundamental uncertainty of cognitive situation consists not in the subject’s awareness of his ignorance, but in his not knowing about his so-called “actual knowledge”, i. e. about where his knowledge ends and ignorance begins, which he is considered as knowledge. This uncertainty should be taken into account in the judgment of true and mistaken. At every moment of time the subject of cognition knows something about the world, but he doesn’t know with absolute certainty whether his knowledge of it is just knowledge and not a mistake.
If thought is true, then through it “shines” the being itself. It’s in this idea the sense of the classical definition of the truth is. The question of truth applies to only one: the presence or absence of representation of things in the mind, in whatever way this representation was achieved. But, strictly speaking, if the methods and ways of establishing correspondence between thoughts and their objects are not problematic, there is no space for the category “truth”. All forms of cognitive activity — from daily to theoretical, from fortune-telling to the philosophical understanding of the world — operate on the same categorical form, even if in ordinary consciousness of some subjects there is no theoretical concept of “truth”. Ultimately, the very existence of the category of truth means that the subject of cognition not only distinguishes thoughts about the object from the object itself, but also realizes the possibility of their full discrepancy. One who isn’t aware of it can’t ask, “What is truth?”
Reference:
1. Rorty Richard, Philosophy and the mirror of nature. - Princeton, NewJersey: Princeton University Press, - 1979.
2. Popper Karl, A World of Propensities. - Bristol: Thoemmes Press, - 1990.
3. Dennett Daniel. Postmodernism and truth, in Questions of philosophy, no. 8. - 2001.
4. Williams Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy. - Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, - 2002.
5. Alfred North Whitehead. Adventures of Ideas. - New York: The Macmillan Company, - 1956.
232
