A-Typical male's journal.

It takes two to speak the truth--one to speak and the other to hear.
--Henry David Thoreau

Al Schroeder, one of the other journalers, and one whom I respect and read{And so should you!}, wrote today of Truth. I disagreed with him, as I rarely do, and wanted to write this.

I've been thinking about Truth lately. It's partly tied up in my thoughts about Faith, and partly on my new writing project. That project takes place in a world where Subjective Truth, the kind Al describes, really works -- or at least, a modified version of it does.

Part of the discussion which I read involved the scientific search for truth. It was a discussion of the scientific method, and how it works, and how theories are modified, discarded and made in an attempt to discover truth. Their conclusion was along the lines of "for this to make sense, there must be an objective truth to approach. Even if this objective truth isn't knowable by us, it needs to exist in order for science to have a valid purpose."

Personally, I disagree with this conclusion, and the assumption that truth must be objective. Even if truth is subjective, science has a purpose.

First though, I'd like to clear up what I mean by Subjective, and Objective, Truth. The words themselves hold the key to my meaning.

Where does truth reside?

Plato believed this, and had a theory of forms, which described it. The forms were perfect ideas, or Ideals, which had a separate existence of their own. We probably all agree that the statement "things equal to the same thing are equal to each other" is a true statement. Plato would say that there was a form, or Ideal, that was this statement.

This is the same idea that we have when we say that we 'discover' a truth. Galileo talks about discovering truths in the quote in the sidebar. You can't discover something that wasn't already there, after all, so there's a hidden assumption that it exists to be found. We say Newton "discovered" gravity. Certainly gravity was around before Newton!

If you think Subjective truth is the answer, then you think that truth lies in the subject. The observer, or arbiter of truth. That means that the statement "Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other." only exists in our minds, and it's truth is only there. In other words truth has no meaning outside of the understanding mind.

Going back to the example of Gravity, we know it worked long before Newton formulated the laws of motion. What Newton really did, was to create laws, which when compared to reality were accurate predictors of that reality. The laws didn't exist before Newton created them. Certainly the effects they describe existed, but the laws did not. So in effect, Newton isn't a discoverer, he's a creator.

Al, myself, and scientists in general, use the same 'yardstick' of truth. That is, does a particular statement match with our experience and understanding of the world. If it does, then we can tentatively say that it is a 'true' statement. I say tentatively, because there might later come evidence that it isn't true, or not entirely true. A good example of this is General Relativity, which adds and corrects Newtonian physics for certain cases (under acceleration, for example).

So, if there is no objective truth for science to seek out, what then is the purpose of science? The purpose of science is to increase our understanding of the world. Instead of searching for an external, objective truth, science should strive to increase our internal, subjective understanding of the world.

As Thoreau says, truth only exists when it is heard, and understood.

Generic Joe's A Typical Male