“Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates’ “Know thyself” has as much value as the “Be virtuous” of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.” -Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
Is it possible to say something true about Truth? What would such a statement be supported by? By reference to itself? That would be circular reasoning. By reference to some other supporting statement? Then how could I know that statement is true? Using reason alone, it does not seem possible to say anything true about Truth. Nonetheless, I know that there are true things in this world. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes set out to discover a piece of knowledge that is so certain that it cannot be undermined by doubt. Descartes recognized that the world as it appears to us can always be mistaken, and so we can never be certain about the objective truth of the world, since it must necessarily be translated by our senses into a mere appearance. His conclusion is famous: cogito, ergo sum [I think, therefore I am.] In other words, I exist, and it is impossible for me to doubt this fact. If I am looking to say anything else about truth, I should draw from the one absolute perfect example I have. Thus, we should recognize that all of our truth must come strictly on the basis of appearances, the truth must be observed from a subjective point of view. We must remain on the level of the cogito.
Flat Earther
When I think back to any time I’ve thought something to be true, I can notice as its foundation an internal conviction. The true statement describes an element of my own experience. Consider how you might confront the claim that the Earth is flat. People often ridicule those who are ‘Flat-Earthers,’ but I empathize with them. My instruments of sight are not precise enough to detect the curvature of the Earth with my naked eye. In almost all cases where I’ve looked at an expansive horizon, on the beach, on top of a mountain, or in an airplane, I primarily see flatness. If I try hard, in some rare instances, I’ve detected some hints of curvature, but without any further scrutiny the Earth appears most likely to be flat. However, I know I can be wrong, or that at least I can never jump to conclusions on the basis of a single impression.1
You cannot convince a Flat Earther, who has only ever seen flat expanses and horizons, that the truth is contrary to all their experiences. Where I might have some success with the Flat Earther is by appealing to their experience, and offering a new interpretation. Experiences of the world are always true, but interpretations of those experiences might not be. It is an impossible task to interpret every bit of truth that there is in our own experiences. There are things that you will only ever find out by asking the right question, which you might never ask. You might never consider that reality might be different than how it immediately appears. We might never consider that the flat expanses we see could actually be a very “zoomed-in” section of a very large sphere. This is a way to reconcile the flat visual experience with the notion of a spherical Earth. But for the Flat Earther, this is not an obvious interpretation to make if you never question the Earth’s flat appearance.
Source https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/262015/drawing-wave-propagation-using-tikz
You can only convince a person of a truth by appealing to their own subjective experience, by anchoring your entire reasoning on a subjective intuition of experience. Mathematical calculation, abstract rationalization, and obscure hypotheses, these will never give us truth on their own, especially if they have not been validated in a person’s lived experience. We have to find truth on the level of the cogito, and must only abstract from it in order to return anew to the cogito.
Abstract Truth
But, mustn't there be some objective truth about these things? How can we rely on the whims of our experience and of our interpretations to find truth? Shouldn’t we appeal to something more objective? …Like what? Everything that I know of this world and of myself is infected by my subjectivity by virtue of the fact that everything is first and foremost an experience. I cannot know anything outside of a context of selfhood. We might consider some mathematical truths in hopes of finding some objectivity. 2 + 2 = 4; surely, this is an objective truth, Math will save us from the subjectivity of truth. Yes, 2 + 2 = 4. But I think this is true in the same way the following is true:
P → Q
P
∴ [Therefore,] Q
The abstract conclusion is true, and 2 + 2 = 4, but these facts are empty of the real content which make truth matter to us. I think it is important to ask: what good is truth for us? Why do I care about it? This is a question often raised against pure mathematicians and philosophers who stay too long in the abstract. “When will I ever need to know this?” I think this is a valid criticism, but I do not think abstract truth is inherently useless. It is in applying the form of these abstract truths to reality that we both benefit from the objectivity of the abstract and also fall back into the shortcomings of subjectivity.
If I drink coffee → I will feel energetic.
I drink coffee
∴ I will feel energetic
Though this follows an objectively true form, it is still necessary to verify the truth of the premises in order to validate the conclusion. Is it really true that drinking coffee will make me energetic? I have to subjectively assess my own reaction and properly associate my increase in energy (or lack thereof) with drinking coffee. The truth of the premises is fundamentally based on a subjective interpretation of experience. Only after this subjective process can we benefit from the objective structure of logic, but by then all hope for the certainty of pure objectivity has been lost. These are simple examples, but one can imagine how complicated things can get very quickly.
The claim I am making here is that all of our truth is subjective in its foundation. Everything that is true for me is derived from a set of fundamentally unjustifiable subjective interpretations. It is natural to feel repelled by such a lack of objective foundation for Truth and to desire to have some ability to know what is ‘actually’ True without misinterpretation. I am arguing that no such ability is available to us. Our subjectivity– the necessity for a person to do their own interpretation of every experience, every piece of information– makes each person their own arbiter of truth, and people often try to ignore their own interpretive role and thus their own responsibility and ownership of their truth. If I am of Christian faith, it is because I have chosen to read the Bible, I have interpreted the doctrine and felt that this interpretation, which I created, has the sacred honor of being True. I cannot do away with the fact that I had a major interpretive role in my own understanding and belief in Christianity. I can never honestly say “Christianity is True, therefore I believe it.” I can only rightly say “I believe Christianity, therefore it is true.” There is no escaping the subjectivity of truth for us mere mortals. We have no capacity for objective truth, it is not an option.
Subjective Truth
To summarize, I am trying to understand Truth, and I have found that objective Truth is either not accessible to me or is not applicable to my world, I am left with subjective truths. Therefore, I can only understand truth subjectively, and to each question, I must give an unjustified answer, produced by my ‘best guess.’
This loss of objective Truth could entail the equality of all truths. Without objectivity, there is no concrete standard against which to judge the correctness between a Flat-Earther and a Round-Earther. Subjectively, this feels absurd to me. I want there to be some way to judge one truth as correct and another as not correct. Luckily, my subjective desire for an evaluation of truths is all the justification I need to look for one.
On what basis should I develop a method for ranking truths? Again, at every step on this path to Truth, I must remember to ground myself in the cogito, i.e. in my own subjective experience, the source of the only Truth I know [that I exist]. All of my own subjective judgments are based on my own experience. As I get more experience, I refine my judgments and grow more confident in them. Implicit in this process of refining judgments across experiences is that I always assume my previous judgments might be wrong. Moreover, I assume that I refine my judgment from a less-correct to more-correct with each added experience. This opens us up to a social understanding of truth.
There are many other people in my world. They have all had many of their own experiences and interpretations. At bottom, their experience is equally as true as mine. As I noted, experiences are always true, interpretations not so much. Thus, if I develop an interpretation of reality, I can go and investigate if this interpretation of reality makes sense according to another's experience. I can try to validate my truth in their experience, or perhaps battle my truth against their conflicting truth, and possibly find that their truth is a better approximation than mine. I think Truth is similar in its development to evolution. Instead of survival of the fittest, we have a survival of the truthest. A population of experiences and interpretations battle it out, trying to convince one another of the best interpretations, and those which explain the greatest number of experiences, or best approximate even a single experience will win the battle and ‘survive’ by continuing to be believed. From a witness’ perspective, the distribution of truths across a population works almost as a points system, where a truth is considered more-true if more people agree with it. That the sun rises every morning is about as true as it gets, nearly every single person in the world has individually validated this truth.
As an individual, I am limited in the years I will live, the places I will see, by my inability to see everything all at once, so other people and their experiences are valuable to me in understanding more of the world. They are like my scouts, giving me insights from perspectives I am incapable of gathering on my own. This is why the opinions of others, their ideas of truth, are valuable to me. If they individually validate my truth, it means I have approximated objective truth somewhat better. However, it never means I am objectively correct. I myself cannot develop opinions based on what everyone else thinks, if anyone did that, it would contaminate the data. It is possible, and there is no shortage of examples, that a group, an institution, or a nation, can be collectively wrong while each within has validated the others’ truth [maybe there were too many people who were simply accepting others’ opinions without thinking for themself]. What is required is an approach to truth based on individual verification. I can try to understand all the people that disagree with me, and the sheer amount of them is something to consider in taking them seriously, but if alas I hear their reasons and compare their experiences with my own and still disagree, I must maintain my own conviction.
“Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right, but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don’t be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own.” - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Whether or not other people agree with you, you should still develop your own judgments independently. You can take hints and suggestions from other people, recognizing that the whole world agreeing with you is a reasonable indication that you might be right or vice versa, but ultimately the conviction of the entire population is still merely a finite collection of subjective interpretations which, as I argued previously, always fall short of being objectively True.2
One might ask how it is ever reasonable to make a judgment about things we can never be certain about, in a world where we can always be ‘proven wrong’ by a new revelatory insight. This is an issue that comes irreducibly with making subjective judgments [the only kind of judgment available to us.] As a result, I might abstain from ever making a judgment or forming a conviction. This would be a surefire way to avoid being wrong, but it would also mean an avoidance of ever being right. I must forever keep my judgments in question, while nonetheless making a judgment that is merely approximative. No judgment will ever be perfectly justified, but this is not a good reason to avoid making judgments altogether. We should give an unjustified answer, while also being humble to the possibility that we have answered incorrectly.
I asked at the beginning if it is possible to say something true about Truth. My answer is unjustified. Note that this is the only kind of answer I can give.
Or on the basis of an existing finite set of impressions. Possibly even countably infinite impressions. Maybe uncountably infinite too? There is no universe.
I don’t know what would happen if infinitely many subjective people agreed with me… that might not be enough, there are bigger infinities that might disagree with me.