A Short History of Truth
by Julian Baggini
(London: Quercus, 2017)
We all have a sense that truth is not merely an abstract property of propositions but somehow essential to living well. If your life turns out to have been built on nothing but lies, it is as though it has not been real.
Page 2.
‘Plain’ and ‘simple’ are among the most common descriptors of truth, because that is often exactly how the truth seems.
Page 2.
If there is a crisis of truth in the world today, the root of the problem is not the inadequacy of philosophical theories of truth.
Page 4.
Our problem is not primarily with what truth means but how and by whom truth is established. Truth used to seem simple because it was easy to assume that most of what we thought to be true really was true, that things were as they seemed.
Page 5.
Science showed us that much of what we think about how the world works is false and that we are even mistaken about the workings of our own minds.
Page 5.
Truth has become much less plain and simple, but I see no evidence at all that most people have ceased to believe in it. People remain as outraged by lies as they have ever done, which would make no sense if they did not believe they were untrue.
Page 6.
Talk of a ‘post-truth’ society is premature and misguided.
Page 6.
We wouldn’t even be talking about post-truth if we didn’t think truth mattered.
Page 7.
Feeling unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, electorates choose their politicians on other, more emotional factors. Losing trust in our brains, we tend to go with our guts and hearts instead.
Page 8.
To rebuild belief in the power and value of truth, we can’t dodge its complexity.
Page 8.
A neat, chronological history of truth would be a deeply untruthful one, since the concept h as no such simple, linear biography.
Page 9.
The claim we live in a post-truth world is the most pernicious untruth of them all.
Page 10.
One of the problems we face is not the absence of truth, but its overabundance. Competing eternal truths undermine many conflicts and divisions.
Page 14.
The majority of religious believers uphold the truth of their sacred texts while also accepting evolution the big bang, quantum physics and other scientific theories. They are also generally sanguine about the beliefs of those who are faithful to other revelations.
Page 15.
Sacred texts may not always be historical records but for believers they contain genuine, profound truths. To say Jesus is the son of God, for example, is not to say the almighty impregnated Mary but neither is it just a figure of speech.
Page 17.
To be religious is to accept that there is a divine mind beyond human comprehension, so of course our own understanding will be limited and partial by comparison.
Page 17.
The most essential truths for the believer can become not so much facts about the cosmos but insights into how we ought to live, ways of orienting ourselves towards the transcendent.
Page 17.
No one should mistake theology for science, myth for history. If any eternal truths exist, what should make them special is that they are not of the ordinary, empirical kind. Ironically, those who treat them as such diminish rather than defend their faiths.
Page 19.
Religion and secular knowledge clash when both see themselves as offering competing realities. When they accept that their truths are of different species, coexistence is possible.
Page 19.
Every culture accepts some people as authorities. Truth becomes a victim of this only when such authority is either unwarranted or exceeds its scope. It is unwarranted when there are either no truths to be had or someone is in no position to claim special knowledge of them. It exceeds its scope when people are taken as authorities on matters outside of their expertise.
Pages 27-28.
We need to defer to experts but not everyone who claims to be an expert is one.
Page 29.
We accept the authority of our own judgement in order ot decide whose authority of judgement to accept.
Page 29.
Reason’s dirty secret is that we have to rely on our own judgement without being able rationally to justify it completely.
Page 29.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves we can rely solely on logically following the facts.
Page 30.
Our current predicament is that authorities of expertise are routinely dismissed, with the authority of the gut, intuition, the people and /or God taking its place.
Page 30.
If we care about the truth, we can neither reject nor too enthusiastically embrace the authorities who appear to guide us towards it. Rather, we have to take more care as to whom we grant authority, and on what basis.
Page 30.
No one can make up your mind for you, unless you make up your mind to let them.
Page 31.
Conspiracy theories persist not because people are crazy, but because some truths are, and have always been, hidden.
Page 34.
‘Conspiracy theorists’ … make two entirely correct assumptions: that important truths are sometimes hidden, often behind deliberate lies, and that those who do the hiding usually do so to protect their own interests.
Page 36.
It is not enough to identify something as s conspiracy theory to dismiss it; anyone concerned with the truth needs to have a way of distinguishing between plausible and implausible plots.
Page 38.
Having good reason to believe there are numerous concealed truths is not a reason to believe most claims to have uncovered them. … In the absence of good evidence that something is being hidden, it is rash to assume that it is.
Page 40.
To take seriously any claim about esoteric truths we need a good reason to believe its veracity, not merely a suspicion of those accused of hiding them.
Page 41.
There is a difference between saying something other experts do not yet see a reason to endorse and saying something that other experts have strong grounds to believe is definitely false.
Page 41.
One of the perennial challenges of being a critical thinker is to be appropriately sceptical without being indiscriminately cynical. When we slide from the former to the latter we swap one form of gullibility for another, from being too willing to buy the official line to too quick to accept any alternative to it.
Page 42.
For the rationalist, reason is superior to observation because it can get behind mere appearances, the world as given to the senses, and see with certainty reality as it truly is.
Page 45.
All pure reason could analyse was the relationship between concepts. But this tells us nothing about the relationship between the things in the world those concepts relate to.
Page 46.
Reason works best in a blend which includes not just logic but experience, evidence, judgement, subtlety of thought, and sensitivity to ambiguity.
Page 47.
People often mistake the exposing of reason’s limitations with its debunking.
Page 48.
Reason is an imperfect tool with imperfect users.
Page 49.
Reason does not lead us to the truth, if only we obediently follow it. It is more like a navigation tool that can help us get closer to the truthy, if we know how to use it, and what we’re looking for.
Page 49.
It’s a smart creature that understands very well the nature of its own stupidity.
Page 50.
A lack of certainty is … part of the deal with empirical truthy. We need to give up on it in order to take up the possibility of knowledge of the world.
Page 55.
Absolute certainties can only be obtained about purely conceptual matters, such as axioms of mathematics and laws of logic.
Page 55.
What we hold to be true is constantly open to being tested, which makes the truths that pass the test more reliable. The strength of empirical truth resides in the fact that it is always open to scrutiny, revision and rejection.
Page 56.
The empiricist principle of experience being the arbiter of truth should not be confused with the fallacy that seeing is believing. I trust all sorts of things I know about the world on the basis of scientific experiments I have not witnessed, much more than I do some things that seem to have clearly happened before my very eyes.
Page 56.
People who deny anthropogenic climate change, for example, are not simply uninterested in evidence. Rather, they have learned the wrong lessons about the fallibility of scientific modelling and prediction so miscalculate the probability that human activity is dangerously warming the planet.
Page 58.
Evidence rarely provides a single, decisive, emancipatory break with error.
Page 59.
Truths are being created all the time, changing reality for better or for worse.
Page 63.
Being ‘creative with the truth’ is no more than a euphemism for not telling the truth at all. But because truth can indeed be created - sometimes merely by saying the right thing at the right time - it is not always easy to distinguish those who are creating truth and those who are creatively hiding or disfiguring it.
Page 65.
Exaggeration is a kind of natural social lubricant. People embellish anecdotes to make them more interesting, talk up their strengths in order to bet jobs, praise others excessively to ingratiate themselves to them or just to make others feel better.
Pages 65-66.
The relativist argues there are no bare facts only interpretations of facts, mediated through culture. Nothing is true, period; it is only true for certain people, in certain contexts, or in certain senses.
Page 70.
To disagree with someone risks contravening their right to a personal truthy. Truth has become personalised, with the individual sovereign over their own interpretation of reality.
Page 71.
In popular culture … the relativism card is often played as a conversation stopper: your truth is yours and mine is mine and that’s the end of the story.
Page 71.
Whether what we say is true or not depends on the world as well as our analytic framework. Not just any ‘truth’ is acceptable.
Pages 72-73.
There may be no one objective truth but there are objective truths, real truths about relative truths.
Page 74.
True and false do not exhaust all the categories into which we can put statements.
Page 74.
The defender of objective truth need not claim that all truths are clear and unequivocal.
Page 75.
Objective truth does not always have sharp edges. Indeed, sometimes the truth precisely is that something is ambiguous or indeterminate, and the falsehood that something is clear-cut and determinate.
Page 75.
To deny that a perspective captures the whole truth is not to deny that it captures some of it.
Page 75.
If what is true for me is not true for you then either one of us is wrong, or both of us have only one hand on the truth and need each other’s help to see the whole of it.
Page 76.
To control the ‘truth’ is to have great power, which is why anyone concerned with power and influence is also concerned to spin the truth n ways that suit them.
Page 81.
We must be careful not to confuse the frequent capture of truth by power with an equation of truth and power.
Page 83.
It is only because truth is more than power that we can speak truth to power.
Pages 83-84.
Relativism seems to be the logical consequence of accepting there are no moral facts, and accepting this seems to be the rational consequence of empirically failing to find them.
Page 87.
What tells you murder is wrong is your ability to see things form the perspective of the victim, to wee that to be deprived of life is to be deprived of something of supreme value no logical proof is required for this. Indeed, if you cannot in a sense feel or see why life is of value, no logical argument could persuade you to think otherwise. The psychopath lacks not rationality but feeling.
Page 88.
One of the most important reasons why attitudes to racism have changed is because claims of racial superiority and inferiority have come to be seen as factually incorrect.
Page 89.
Correcting false perceptions alters our moral judgements. When the facts change, we should not only change our minds but often our hearts.
Page 90.
It is not simply a matter of different ‘values’, ‘preferences’ or even ‘tastes’. Our moral views are intimately connected with how we see the world and a skewed perception can lead to a skewed morality, false beliefs to bad ethics.
Pages 90-91.
Prejudice arises because we reach a conclusion in advance of seeing the relevant facts. when we judge after having seen the truth, prejudice is replaced by fair judgement.
Page 91.
Our moral judgements only carry eight when they accord with the facts both of human nature and the world.
Page 92.
If you believe in an omnipotent God, no evidence uncovered by mere mortals could prove anything about the ultimate nature or cause of the universe.
Page 95.
Truths do not stand or fall independently but are held in a network with other truths, all of which mutually support each other. Belief in the scientific evidence for evolution, for example, depends on belief in the general uniformity of nature over time and space; the ability of human beings to be able to see reality accurately and to understand it properly; the integrity of academic science and scientists. We arrive at truth holistically.
Pages 96-97.
Not even our most fundamental tenets, the ones which hold the whole web of belief together, can be established with sufficient certainty that they demand universal assent.
Page 98.
We all have to make some basic assumptions that we cannot afford to doubt. Belief in our very sanity is in some sense a leap of faith.
Page 99.
Changing minds is hard, precisely because changing our view of one important thing often requires us to challenge a whole load of other cherished opinions too.
Page 100.
Beliefs are threads that if picked at can unravel the entire fabric they help keep together. Challenge someone’s truth and often you challenge their whole world.
Page 100.
Each revolution in thought brings the truth further out, even if none exposes it completely.
Pages 101-102.
Science is a good example of a network of beliefs because it shows how truth-seeking is a collective enterprise.
Page 102.
We rely on the knowledge of others to construct our own best understanding of the truth.
Page 102.
The post-truth society is in part a result of a malfunctioning of this social system of knowledge.
Page 102.
Falsehood masquerades as truth by retreating into incomplete networks of belief where convenient facts are overstated and inconvenient ones ignored or just simply denied.
Page 102.
Young Earth Creationists are very good at making their view consistent with the facts but the larger the network of facts they are forced to link up with, the more strained the connections become. When our coherent network of beliefs grows larger and is built on facts, each truth in it becomes stronger while every falsehood finds it harder to keep its place.
Page 103.
Establishing the truth requires ‘espistemic virtues’ like modesty, scepticism, openness to other perspectives, a spirit of collective enquiry, a readiness to confront power, a desire to create better truths, a willingness to let our morals be guided by the facts.
Pages 105-106.
To get our facts right we need to get our attitudes to the facts right.
Page 106.
Truth is there if we are prepared to look for it even though it is far from plain or simple.
Page 106.
Reason demands modesty not certainty.
Page 107.
To become smarter, we must understand the ways we are dumb.
Page 107.
Alternative perspectives should be sought not as alternative truths but as enrichers of truth.
Page 108.
For a better morality we need better knowledge.
Page 108.