Monday Musing: Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth

[Please see NOTE at end of this post.*]

Richard Dawkins has been an intellectual hero of mine since college, where I first read The Selfish Gene. Though I thought I understood the theory of evolution before I read that book, reading it was such a revelation (not to mention sheer enjoyment) that afterward I marveled at the poverty of my own previous understanding. In that (his first) book, Dawkins's main and brilliant innovation is to look at various biological phenomena from the perspective of a gene, rather than that of the individual who possesses that gene, or the species to which that individual belongs, or some other entity. This seemingly simple perspectival shift turns out to have extraordinary explanatory power, and actually solves many biological puzzles. The delightful pleasure of the book lies in Dawkins's bringing together his confident command of evolutionary theory with concrete examples drawn from his astoundingly wide knowledge of zoology. Who doesn't enjoy being told stories about animals? If you haven't read The Selfish Gene, do yourself a favor: click here to buy it, and read it over the holidays.

I have read all his subsequent books, and Dawkins has only gotten better. Last year around this time, in a roundup of the best books of 2004 here at 3QD, I wrote this about The Ancestor's Tale:

This is Dawkins's best book in years, and he has never written less than a brilliant book. The literary conceit which lends the book its title is, of course, that of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Dawkins's tale is that of all of life. Starting in the present he travels back in time to meet the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, then further back to meet other ancestors connecting us to other life forms, and so on, until we are at the origin of life itself. At close to 700 dense pages, the book is filled with a massive amount of biological information. The sweep of Dawkins's erudition is truly astounding, and if you find yourself getting exhausted at times by the relentless and seemingly endless litany of facts, keep going: at some point toward the end, I had the supremely ecstatic experience of being absolutely awed at the majestic grandeur, variety, and tenacity of the whole history of life, as well as at the prodigious effort that has gone into classifying and understanding it.

Professor Dawkins has also been kind to me personally. Upon hearing of my father's death earlier this year, he sent a warm note of condolence along with a beautiful passage about death from one of his books, and he has been appreciative of our efforts at 3 Quarks Daily, as you may have noticed if you have ever clicked on our "About Us" page.

I have never had anything much of interest to say about Richard Dawkins's writings because I agree with 99% of what he says. He has also inspired feelings of gratitude and loyalty in me, so I am loath to disagree with him. But (you knew there was going to be a but, didn't you?) there is that 1%, and the twin dictates of intellectual honesty and deep respect for Professor Dawkins compel me to say something about that today. I am only able to muster the requisite temerity because our small disagreement is about a subject which I probably have spent much more time studying than he: the philosophical matter of truth. Because I do not have space here to write a lengthy disquisition on truth, my treatment of it here will necessarily be somewhat cursory, but I am hoping that it will be enough to show that Dawkins's concept of truth is overly simple.

In the past century, scientists seem to have become increasingly hostile to philosophy. Einstein was representative of a dying breed of physicist with a philosophical bent (see this). By the second half of the twentieth century scientists were frequently openly contemptuous toward philosophers. For example, in his popular books, the famous physicist Richard P. Feynman often expresses an impatient disdain for the whole subject: "Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong." The highjacking of philosophy by literary theory that took place in the 1980s and 1990s in the American academy and its subsequent conflation with cultural studies, minority studies, and other disciplines, mostly indulged by English departments across the country, with all its attendant (and now notorious) obscurantism and lack of rigor, certainly did not help matters. It was only a matter of time before an Alan Sokal would appear to burst that bloated bubble, and he did. Meanwhile, philosophy departments continued their more sober reflections, but science's attention had by now been focused on the regrettable abuses of science by a handful of postmodernist thinkers. (Where were these welcome objections to nonsense in the heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis, by the way?) What has resulted is a widespread tendency on the parts of scientists to not only dismiss philosophy, but to do it in a facile manner, more often than not using the straw man of relativism. And Richard Dawkins has also fallen into this tempting trap.

The second piece in Dawkins's collection of essays entitled A Devil's Chaplain is "What is True?" and it begins this way:

A little learning is a dangerous thing. This has never struck me as a particularly profound or wise remark, but it comes into it's own in the special case where the little learning is in philosophy (as it often is). A scientist who has the temerity to utter the t-word ('true') is likely to encounter a form of philosophical heckling which goes something like this:

There is no absolute truth. You are committing an act of personal faith when you claim that the scientific method, including mathematics and logic, is the privileged road to truth. Other cultures might believe that truth is to be found in a rabbit's entrails, or the ravings of a prophet up a pole. It is only your personal faith in science that leads you to favor your brand of truth.

The straw man is being set up here by Dawkins, so that it can be knocked down rather easily later. He cannot possibly expect us to believe that if he were to utter the words "It's true that whales are mammals," to his friend Daniel Dennett, say, that Dennett would then respond with the sort of reply that Dawkins has put into the mouth of his imaginary philosopher above. Nor would any other respectable philosopher. The words "true" and "truth" are used in many contexts in English, most of them ordinary everyday usages of the "Is it true that it's raining outside?" variety, where no normal person will respond with "What is truth?" or some other bizarreness. It is only in highly technical and subtle issues which surround the philosophical notion of truth, such as attempts to pin down what entities the predicate "true" applies to (it doesn't apply to words, but can apply to sentences, for example), and what it means for something to be "true" in a very general way which would cover all of its usages, etc., that the philosopher might object. Just as "energy" or "work" are technical words in physics, "true" is a technical word in philosophy (as well as in mathematical logic). And just as no normal physicist is going to heckle or object to someone saying, "I did a lot of work today carrying furniture down to the street from my fifth floor apartment," (no work was done in technical physics terms by carrying things down) no philosopher will object to common uses of "true" or "truth".

Similarly, I am not sure what Dawkins imagines a relativist to be, but according to his description above, if I say to the relativist, "Snow is green," the relativist will be happy to accept my statement to be just as true as "Snow is white." In fact, no normal English-speaking person will agree with me, or agree that my statement is true. To argue that philosophers are naive or wrong is one thing; to imagine that they are insane is quite another. What such a person would probably think and say is that perhaps I don't know English well, and I am referring to something other than snow with the word "snow", or that perhaps I don't know what "green" really means, or even that perhaps I don't know what "is" is.

There is an important principle in philosophy that any disagreement must take place against a background of much greater agreement. Before we can argue about whether "whales are mammals", we must at least agree on what "whales" are and what "mammals" are. If I believe that mammals are animals with legs, that walk on land, and always must be so, then we are presumably not even arguing about the same thing.

This brings me to the gist of the matter. What Dawkins is really defending is a particular view of truth: what in philosophy is called the correspondence theory of truth. By contrast to his own fictional philosopher, he is saying that "there is an absolute truth". In this view of truth, words refer to a reality external to the mind (for example, "hydrogen" refers to a substance consisting of atoms made up of one proton with one electron in orbit around it--ignoring the heavier isotopes of hydrogen), and sentences either capture that reality accurately (correspond to it), in which case they are true; or they don't, in which case they are false. At first blush this may seem commonsensical and unproblematic, but this is not so. Let me attempt to give a flavor of the difficulties with a quick example: suppose that in the fifth century B.C., Socrates one day came home and said to his wife, "I saw a falling star on my way home," and also suppose that I came home one night and said to my wife, "I saw a falling star on my way home." Suppose Socrates and I mean the same thing by each of the words in the sentence. I think it is fairly clear that both our wives would instantly know what we were talking about, and perhaps visualize something similar in their minds' eye to what we had just seen. But to Socrates, it was literally a falling star, while I know that stars don't fall, and that it was most likely a meteor being incinerated in the atmosphere, and I was deliberately referring to a meteor as a "falling star." Now according to me, Socrates's sentence to his wife was a falsehood, while I told the truth. Both women understood the same thing. Both had no reason to suspect that their husband was telling a falsehood, yet from Dawkins's point of view, what Socrates said was a falsehood (though he did not know it). And some future scientist may realize that meteors are actually something else, and on that day, suddenly, unbeknownst to me or my wife, my sentence will also become a falsehood. Is this not an odd notion of truth? There are many other problems with this sort of "absolute truth" view, but I must move on.

The other major theory of truth in philosophy is known as the coherence theory. This is a holistic view in which the meanings of words depend on the meanings of other words and so on. There is a "web" or "network" of interdependent meanings, with words at the periphery being pinned down by ostention. Words (or sounds) are initially associated with certain salient aspects of the environment by repetition. If every time we are in the presence of any rabbit, I say "rabbit", you will eventually understand that the sound "rabbit" refers to a rabbit. I may, by pointing and so on, also define the word "ear". Now if I say that a "tibbar" is a rabbit that does not have any ears, you will know what I mean. The meaning of "tibbar" then is given by the meanings of the words in terms of which you have understood it, not some external reality of tibbars. Truth in this view, is a predicate which applies to beliefs which cohere with other true beliefs. By this kind of holistic thinking, we get rid of the strangeness we encountered in the last paragraph where the same sentence is judged true when I speak it, but false when Socrates spoke it. Now, when Socrates says, "I saw a falling star on my way home," all that is required to make this true is that it cohere with his other beliefs. This sort of view gets rid of many of the difficulties of a correspondence theory of truth, but sometimes at the cost of giving up on a certain notion of a fixed and absolute reality.

This may sound a bit odd at first, but is a defensible theory and many (possibly even most) respectable philosophers, including Daniel Dennett, now hold it. What I am trying to say is that it is not automatically wrong and silly to say that "there is no absolute truth." There are reasonable ways of thinking in which truth is (in a very technical sense) not absolute, but dependent on our web of shared meanings, and our other beliefs. There is no need for these philosophical ideas to do violence to any of our common everyday usages of truth, such as "It is true that Plasmodium causes malaria," any more than our understanding through atomic physics that solid matter is mostly empty space should prevent us from saying, "It is true that the box is completely filled with iron."

There is, of course, a lot more than what I have hinted at to all this, but it strikes me as unfair of Dawkins to imply that all philosophers who do not believe in "absolute truth" are being ludicrous relativists. Dawkins has rightly and often urged us to give up on the comforting notions of religious superstition. Why then must we cling to the scientifically comforting notion that there is an absolute truth out there waiting for us to discover it, rather than the idea that truth (in the limited sense I have described above) has to do with who we are and what we make it? Many philosophers know a great deal of science and mathematics. My own advisor at Columbia, David Albert, has a Ph.D. in physics and publishes in quantum theory as well as philosophy. Hilary Putnam is a mathematician as well as a philosopher and holds joint appointments at Harvard. Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland know as much neuroscience as some neuroscientists. I could go on and on. But few scientists take more than a superficial interest in philosophy anymore, and it is their loss. Dawkins is right when he quotes Pope in the first line of "What is True?" above. I can only very respectfully recommend to him and to you to drink deep at the philosophical spring.

[*NOTE: It has become clear to me after looking at some of the responses to this column (here and at other sites) that I almost surely misinterpreted Richard Dawkins's meaning in the passage that I quoted from his article "What is True?" While I had originally thought that he is attacking philosophers in general, it is now fairly clear to me that he was there only attacking lunatics of the sort that would object to the use of the word "true" in a statement such as "It is true that snow is white." This does nothing to change my assertion that what Dawkins is really doing in his article is defending a correspondence theory of truth, nor does it in any other significant way change the main thrust of my essay.]

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick's Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka's President

Comments

[Azra Raza]

Dear Abbas,
I thought this meditation of yours on the meaning of truth and your appeal to the reader to drink deep from the spring of philosophy is particularly excellent. I have always enjoyed your ability to blend and express issues related to science, mathematics and philosophy in a language that all of us can understand. This thoughtful column you wrote on truth is one of the best examples of your unique style, not unlike that of Professor Richard Dawkins himself. You are a good teacher in that no matter what subject you are writing about, you make us think. Thanks for all the wonderful examples you gave so I could understand the subtleties of the correspondence theory versus the holistic view of truth. Now I hope that Professor Dawkins will rise to the challenge and respond. In the meantime, here is something for you to remember:
"Like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie".
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "The Tempest", Act 1 scene 2
Lots of love, Aps.

[Ga]

Dearest Abbasi,
This is brilliant! You do have a uniquely wonderful way of describing complex scientific and philosophical ideas which makes them accessible to lay readers.
Much as we have always found Professor Dawkins' writing so pleasurably clear and beautiful, I enjoy yours for it's own personal style.
with much love and admiration,
GW

[James Crowley]

You've presented a stimulating argument...but I might note that Dawkins, a superstar of natural selection would might not rest his argument on constructing words so much as reducing behavioral origins. Perhaps it is too limited a space to go in depth!

[Jonathan]

The paragraph that begins "in the past century" is transparently superficial intellectual history. Michael Bérubé's recent post on the topic provides some helpful context.

[Evan Post]

Two comments

a) This is a beautifully written piece that cleared up a great deal for me. I've been troubled by what I perceived as a deadlock between these two opposites, and now you've helped me begin to reconcile them. Thanks.

b) Is Dawkins attacking the strawman of relativism, or is he cautioning his detractors against using a certain line of reasoning without the proper philosophical background? I thought that your response actually proved his point, insofar as you demonstrated that good philosophy (like good science) is marked by intellectual rigor. I interpreted his remarks as aimed at folks who throw around terms like, "relative" the way our politicians use terms like, "the American people".

[Tasnim]

Great essay, even if it was a little above my head. I hope you sent a copy to Dawkins so we might benefit from his response. Now in your example of the falling star if we just think of the phenomenon that a star like object with a tail seems to fall in the dark sky without considering what is causing this then both Socrates and you would be 'truthful' even today. Does that make it relative or absolute?

[Abbas Raza]

Dear Aps and Ga, many thanks, but you flatter me too much!

Dear James, I am not sure what you mean...

Dear Jonathan, I enjoyed Berube's essay (thanks for the link) and in retrospect, perhaps I was too glib in the paragraph to which you refer. I am not really interested in arguing with Berube or anyone else about the exact effects of Alan Sokal's hoax. Nothing very important rides on it, and what I was trying to say in my column (which is meant for the general public, hence is not written in an academic CYA manner) doesn't rely on anything in that paragraph. Still, I stand by the opinions expressed there, and shall remain embittered about the ridicule brought down upon all philosophers by certain literary theory types, no matter what sophistry they now employ to excuse themselves.

Dear Evan,

1) Thank you very much.
2) On rereading the first couple of paragraphs of Dawkins's essay, it seems to me you might be right, but in that case, I wonder why Dawkins would feel it worth his while to argue against idiots? In any case, the main point I make stands: Dawkins spends most of the rest of the essay defending what is essentially a correspondence theory of truth, and saying things like, "Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when." He has made the case for the privileged position of scientific truth elsewhere also (for example, in the essay "Viruses of the Mind") and it is always a kind of "absolute" truth. If he is simply railing against morons who believe that "Snow is green" is just as true as "Snow is white", then I have little interest in that debate, as it is too ludicrous to engage in. You know what I mean? But thanks for your comment...

Dear Bhaisaheb, the predicate "true" only applies to sentences in philosophy, so the thoughts would at least have to be formulated as sentences. Then, the same sorts of troubles that I point out start to ensue. In other words, to a correspondence theorist, what causes the trail is essential to the truth of the sentence "I saw a falling star". Maybe we will speak more about this on the phone...

[James]

I agree with you on your argument against Dawkins' argument, at least in the sense that he is defending a correspondence theory...I suppose it would be better to critically review Dawkins in the same sense that R. Trivers or Wilson here in the US have presented their case, which is utterly removing themselves from philosophical methods and justifying doing so by appointing to human reasoning to a product natural selection (that's really oversimplifying it!). But again, I suppose that doesn't really hurt your argument against Dawkins' reasoning.

I suppose I didn't bring across...I extremely enjoyed this essay and personally would like to see Dawkins' response. Bravo on a job well done.

[Winfield J. Abbe]

For another perspective on all this it is instructive to read the comments of Otto H. Warburg, M.D., Ph.D. from the 1966 Lindau Nobel-Laureates Conference Lecture at Lake Constance, Germany, translated by Dean Burk, Ph.D.

...
"The early history of life on our planet indicates that life existed on earth before the earth's atmosphere contained free oxygen gas. The living cells must therefore have been fermenting cells then, and, as fossils show, they were undifferentiated single cells. Only when free oxygen appeared in the atmosphere-some billion years ago-did the higher development of life set in, to produce the plant and animal kingdoms from the fermenting, undiffentiated single cells. What the philosophers of life have called 'Evolution creatrice' has been and is therefore the work of oxygen.
The reverse process, the dedifferentiation of life, takes place today in greatest amount before our eyes in cancer development, which is another expression for dedifferentiation. To be sure, cancer development takes place even in the presence of free oxygen gas in the atmosphere, but this oxygen may not penetrate in sufficient quantity into the growing body cells, or the respiratory apo-enzymes of the growing body cells may not be saturated with the active groups.
In any case, during the cancer development the oxygen-respiration always falls, fermentation appears, and the highly differentiated cells are transformed to fermenting anaerobes, which have lost all their body functions and retain only the now useless property of growth. Thus when respiration disappears, life does not disappear, but the meaning of life disappears, and what remains are growing machines that destroy the body in which they grow.
But why oxygen differentiates and why lack of oxygen dedifferentiates? Nobody would dispute that the development of plants and animals and man from unicellular anerobes is the most improbable process of all processes in the world. Thus there is no doubt that EINSTEIN descended from a unicellular fermenting organism-to illustrate the miracle, molecular O(2) achieved. But according to the thermodymanics of Boltzman, improbable processes require work to take place. It requires work to produce temperature differences in a uniformly temperatured gas; whereas the equalization of such temperature differences is a spontaneous process that does not require work. It is the oxygen-respiration that provides in life this work, and dedifferentiation begins at once when respiration is inhibited in any way. In the language of thermodynamics, differentiation represents a forced steady state, whereas dedifferentiation-that is, cancer- is the true equilibrium state. Or, illustrated by a picture: The differented body cell is like a ball on an inclined plane, which, would roll down except for the work of oxygen-respiration always preventing this. If oxygen-respiration is inhibited, the ball rolls down the plane to the level of dedifferentiation..."

[rollo]

Winfield Abbe - I salute your eccentric tenacious obsession!
If you have any time to spare, the great and partially vindicated Immanuel Velikovsky could use some proselytic championing oomph as well.
-
The main post contains these phrases:
"But to Socrates, it was literally a falling star...
...our understanding through atomic physics that solid matter is mostly empty space...
...the scientifically comforting notion that there is an absolute truth out there waiting for us to discover it...
...that it is not automatically wrong and silly to say that 'there is no absolute truth.'"
Socrates as you point out called them "falling stars" accurately enough, because that was coherent with his concept of what stars were, which was inaccurate enough to include the atmospheric combustion of meteors. Stars being " those lights in the sky", meteors would be falling stars.
Something like that is operating on our current view of the "mostly empty space" within solid matter. It looks empty because we can't find anything in there. Of course I can't prove that there's something in there, but there is.
Absolute truth must be a companion to absolute locus. We now know enough about space and time to know that that absolute locus won't be contained or even describable by our useful, but local, coordinates.
A problem I've had consistently with the popularizers of physics knowledge generally is the consistent assertion of reached boundaries, of there being a continually pushed back and out - but always still there - limit, or end to things, both in the macro- and microcosms.
This has never stopped being absurd and profoundly irritating in its arrogance and seemingly intentional wrong-headedness - but of course I can't prove that it is, either.
It's no more silly for us, now, to say there is no absolute truth, or that there are large amounts of nothing in the sub-atomic interstitial, than it was for Socrates to tell his wife he saw a star fall from the sky. It's consistent with our partial knowledge of things, and coherently accurate in that context. But that's all it is.
There is an absolute truth just as there is an absolute locus.
Here we are, inside it.

[Malik Khan]

Thanks a lot for such a lucid and yet concise exposition of the centuries old arguments and debate about the nature of truth via your critique of Richard Dawkins. You presentation is very well done.

[Grigoryi]

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[E]

I'm afraid I can't say I much agree with you, or that your post clarified much to me.

Firstly, I do agree with Dawkins' (and most scientist's) idea of there being an absolute truth or something very close to it which science can build towards. In regards to your first point and example, about Socrates and the falling star: what Socrates is saying is quite clearly wrong. What you seem to be saying is that he is being honest (no argument there) and that his belief, and his wife's, belief that there are such things as falling stars is one that he truly believes and that is true to him. This doesn't change the fact that he is wrong. From your modern point of view you can prove this to him, and in quite great detail. Given this amount of proof it is quite unlikely that in some imaginary future some great scientist will come along and show that what you thought were meteorites are something else entirely. However, if this proved to be true, your statement would most certainly be wrong. This is not because your concept of truth is wrong or the future scientist has changed the boundaries of truth etc. but for the simple reason you made a mistake, just like Socrates made a mistake thinking those seemingly falling objects were stars. Now if Socrates was an honest philosopher, and willing to admit when he's wrong (which reading Plato's dialogues wasn't very often) once you showed him all the amount of research that has been done on meteorites and what they are in science as opposed to stars and so forth, he would himself admit that his statement was wrong. This is how we advance scientific knowledge and make it more precise, our definitions becoming more accurate. Imagine I was a thirsty man in the desert and saw a mirage of an oasis. Once I got there and realized it was all sand it would be little comfort for me to say "Ah, but my statement "there is an oasis there" corresponds to something that was real to me at the time, therefore there truly was an oasis. The present and the past me are both right, although we're both still thirsty".

Your second point is that a statement is true if corresponds to other held beliefs. This is the sort of thing that Dawkins is very much against. For him, truth is something that we can prove, not simply a system of beliefs. Hence his dismay when people come to him and say "evolution is true to your western system of beliefs. but there is a tribe in africa that has never heard of darwin and have a different system of beliefs, and that is true to them". It is of course important that all the things you believe in connect in a logical way but your system must also be testable in some way otherwise it can never be proven wrong and there would be no advances in the way that science has provided. In your example, this would again be Socrates' problem.

Finally, a word on two figures you have mentioned. I do not believe that Dennett would agree with you, since he follows Dawkins in believing in a correspondence theory of truth, in fact I think he goes much further, since he believes that the whole notion of there being a "truth outside the mind" is flawed. Dennett believes there is no separation between mind and the outside world, for him the mind is a physical object which can be investigates by science just as everything else. He doesn't believe in the mind and then a "truth out there" since he sees the separation between the mind and the outside world as false, and I think he would also argue it has hints of Cartesianism. Philosophically, I think it would be difficult to argue that Dennett believes that science cannot reach or is reaching "the truth" since the fight against subjectivism is a common thread throughout his books.

Feynman wasn't particularly hostile to philosophy as such but certainly had a lot of impatience with philosophers. But most of such examples come from anecdotal books such as "surely you're joking...". In one well known chapter he describes his frustration when he was invited to a philosophical conference to discuss justice in the educational system and they spent two days arguing about the meaning of justice. Even I can relate to this, even if I have done philosophy myself. My point is that Feynman never mounted a comprehensive critique to philosophy. There is no feynman book or essay that says "philosophy is bad and should not be attempted" just a general, personal attitude he had. It can hardly be called hostile. In fact, reading his lectures, he seems to have had a rather philosophical approach to many aspects of science.

I do think that you should send your thoughts to Dawkins though, as you are in contact with him and seem to have so much respect for most of what he writes. I would be very interested in hearing his own response.

[mark]

I suggest reading "The Day the Earth Changed". The author's conclusion is very interesting, because in a way he shows that science is a system built around paradigms based on our understanding, and it goes along partly with his strawman. Except that it is a little more logical.

[Abbas Raza]

Hi E,

Thanks for your detailed comment. I suspect we agree more than you seem to think. At the moment I don't have time for a lengthy reply, but I thought I would ask you to look at this post and its comments section where I address some of the issues you bring up. Tell me what you think after reading that.

About Dennett, you are simply wrong. He does not subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth, but is an avowed holist, and says this innumerable times. In fact he has written to me approvingly when I have acsribed coherentist views to him in an email himself.

Thanks for writing, and keep in touch.

Dear Mark,

Thanks for the reading suggestion. I'll put it on my list! Ciao for now...

[Benedict Eastaugh]

It's not clear to me that your example really demonstrates a problem with the correspondence theory of truth. What are Socrates and you referring to? Something you saw. If Socrates says, "A falling star is, quite literally, a star falling from the heavens to the earth" then he has said something untrue. But what is a falling star? It's a phenomenon; something he saw. And the thing he is referring to, when he says "I saw a falling star on the way home", is what he saw. Similarly, you are referring to what you saw, and I contend that both you and Socrates have managed to successfully refer to what you saw on your way home. What that phenomenon really is is a separate question.

To reframe slightly, we might place parentheses around "A falling star", like so: (A falling star). This makes it clearer that what we're talking about is a name for a phenomenon. People who talked about water in the fifteenth century could say true things about it, even though they didn't know that water is really H2O.

The problem is not with the correspondence theory of truth, but with the theory of reference you have decided to associate with it (I think David Lewis outlined a theory of reference of this kind; Stich (1996) talks about this with reference to eliminative materialism). Alternative theories of reference, such as the causal-historical account Putnam proposes, do not suffer from this difficulty. I don't disagree that the correspondence theory of truth suffers from problems, but I don't think this is one of them.

[BigBrown&Bootiful]

Pop into Brian Greene's office if you really want an insight into 'truth' and the 'fabric of the cosmos'.

Some of the insights which are coming out of recent work in the mathematics of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics is the role which Information plays in physics. Whether we are dealing with quantum entanglement or the thermodynamics of equilibrium one thing we are realizing over and over again is the universe's uncanny property of 'self-awareness'.

There is no question in my mind that this self-awareness constitutes an 'absolute reality' and that it is indeed a code which can be cracked via the application of human thought.

The 'language' of this reality, I imagine, will look less like english, and more like logic...

[random]

Your entire essay seems to be describing the problems that plague communication - not truth.

Both Socrates' and your relating of the "shooting star" was imperfect and inexact - something that communication always is. Communication is relative and subjective - based on the communicator's knowledge and skills, and it is always flawed.

But why do the inherent flaws of communication imply that the truth behind it is relative and subjective? That's a rather tenuous leap of logic.

If I may be so bold as to reduce your opinion to the following rather absurd sentence...

"It is absolutely true that there is no need for absolute truth."

[aero]

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[WILLIAM BRUKNER]

HI TO RICHARD DAWKINS, AND ALL HE'S FANS AS WELL, MY NAME IS WILLIAM, I AM A FAN TOO, AN ATHEIST ANGOSTIC AS WELL.
I THINK ALL YOUR BOOKS AND ALL YOUR WAYS IN HELPING POEPLE TO FREE THEMSELFS FROM SILLY SUPERSTITTIONS IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD TODAY AND FOREVERMORE,
WE NEED TO SAVE OUR PLANET FROM BRIANWHASHING OF EVIL RELIGION AND RELIGIONS OF ALL KINDS. THANKS TO GREAT POEPLE LIKE YOU, IT'S MORE THAN A DREAM COME TRUE, IT'S THE ONLY RATIONAL WAY TO BE HAPPY- FOR THE HUMAN SPICESES TO MAKE IT.
P.S. POEPLE NEED TO FREE THEMSELF FROM ALL KINDS OF RELIGIONS, AND CHRISTIAN RELIGION IS THE WORST ONE OF ALL.IT NOT TO LATE TO FREE YOUR SELF ANYTIME YOU WHAT TO.
RICHARD DAWKINS, AND POEPLE LIKE HIM, I GIVE ALL THE CREDIT TO THEM, BECAUSE THEY ARE GREAT FREEDOM THINKERS.

THANKS WILLIAM

[R.]

A little learning is a dangerous thing in philosophy, where a little means enough for someone to think he knows how to think rigorously in philosophy, and not enough to know better.

[P. Martin]

Certainly, what you express in your essay may be true, but is it accurate?

[mmed]

good!!