Dealing with the Myth of Facticity

Critical Thinking

Thanks again to those who encouraged me after having read my introductory post. I’ll continue to promote this stuff as long as somebody wants me to share what I’ve learned during my extra-long program of study in psychology, philosophy and education.

In my introductory post, I described my background and mentioned the subjects that I like to discuss with anybody who might be interested in progressive dialogues, namely: thinking and learning, with particular attention to higher order thinking and practical wisdom.

That’s a lot of stuff, but if it will happen it will happen one step at a time, so I invite you today to look at the original basis of philosophy (the search for Truth) and at how contemporary (post-modern) philosophical work has resulted in the post-truth era of political and social discourse.

Ancient and Modern philosophy sought to distinguish the truths of the world and to articulate them in two ways: formal language (mathematics and logic, which describe the relationships of symbols according to predefined operational rules) and natural languages (words and sentences used to describe the relationships of objects in the world). Because the rules of formal languages include predefined truths and fixed operational rules, formal expressions and derivations are designed to preserve truth, and they do.

Unfortunately, natural languages can’t perform that function for various reasons. Here’s what the best philosophers and scientists have figured out about that in the past two hundred years:

1. Human beings ought never to claim to be absolutely certain about their beliefs regarding anything that they don’t experience directly.

2. We ought never to be absolutely certain about the objective truth of anything that we do observe directly.

Let’s take these one at a time.

Kant

Point 1. Inferences about unobservable things cannot be confirmed with certainty

Immanuel Kant thrust a discursive dagger into the heart of Modern (pre-1800) philosophical thought when he pointed out that the correspondence theory of truth suffered from a fatal flaw. He noticed the following: when we produce language which is purported to describe anything that we can’t experience directly, we can’t ever possibly confirm that our descriptions actually match anything that we can’t observe!

After he wrote that (in Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), philosophers understood that if there’s no way to actually confirm with certainty our ideas about the unobservable parts of nature, then it’s never appropriate for anyone to claim certainty about our knowledge of those things.

It seems obvious, right? When I first heard this (in 2000, at age forty-eight) I wondered about two things. How come it took people until nearly 1800 to figure that out? And how come everybody hasn’t been informed?? It seems important to me – and it revolutionized philosophy.

These days philosophers learn that as undergraduates. Perhaps it’s a useful idea; what do you think? (Philosophers seem to me to be somewhat less arrogant than people who haven’t learned this!)

Of course we can and should be very confident (“fairly” certain, based on well-founded justifications) about some of the things that we can’t sense. Some opinions and beliefs are better (more justified) than others; reliable evidence and perspicacious reasoning form the foundations of deeply coherent thinking. Some beliefs are clearly supported by all available evidence and reasoning, so it's very reasonable to be maximally confident about those.

However, there’s an important difference between well-justified confidence and overweening arrogance. This is a distinction that I find is missing in most of the conversations that I hear. It’s the difference between being open and being closed-minded.

‘Scientific truth’ is an oxymoron. It took a long time for most scientists to accept this, but in 1972 (in his book Objective Knowledge) the renowned philosopher of science Karl Popper, an avowed realist and a great fan of truth, admitted that scientific theories and laws should not be considered as certain. The philosophical consensus is that the Truth (or ‘reality’) is “out there” – and that there’s no way that we can know about it with complete certainty.

That why scientists must use probabilities to demonstrate that their theories are more likely than other (similarly tested) alternatives. And that’s why scientific paradigms are overturned time and again: scientists don’t know the truth better than anybody else!

Believing that science is true is now termed scientism; it’s the mythical aspect of science. Neil Postman wrote a pretty good academic book on this (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1993).

Having failed to produce a practical definition of truth that would allow us to be certain about the world around us, postmodern philosophers have turned to critical theory in order better to comprehend comprehension itself (rationality, coherency etc.). Critical theory holds that, when dealing with any set of contentious ideas, we can and should compare the consequences of applying alternative theoretical approaches to understanding and problem solving. We can examine how our implicit presumptions (our sociocultural backgrounds) affect how we think and what we understand. Once examined, these contextual elements of our discourses themselves become explicit parts of our analyses.

Critical thinking is a set of cognitive and discursive practices which generate coherency by analyzing and explaining our meanings and our justifications. This process requires active engagement in the following practices: analyzing discourses, examining alternative lines of reasoning, justifying presumptions, and creating coherent explanations about the dynamic interactions of the things that we observe. It also requires metacognition, the continual examination and correction of one’s own beliefs and opinions.

Deep learning entails applying those practices (sometimes referred to as cognitive skills) to justify our discourses about complex subjects.

There’s no ‘truth’ in any of this post-modern stuff! Knowledge (beliefs, theories, opinions and conjectures) is based on presumptions, and some presumptions are better justified than others.

We can’t rely on truth to resolve our conflicts, so the only way to resolve our interpersonal conflicts is to work together with others on justifying our presumptions. To resolve our individual (intrapersonal) conflicts we can apply metacognitive self-correction, and we can seek support in doing so from trusted advisors.

It takes some work to do all that, doesn’t it? (Is that why most people prefer to insist that their beliefs are true? I think so…)

If you’ve followed me so far, then you’re well into understanding the basis of the post-modern paradigm. So, how do we apply this information in our daily practices?

Practice. Conversing with others who also intend to produce deep coherency.

(How much of what we believe can we actually prove? None of it, I think – even if we’re great scientists we can’t design experiments to test most of our ideas – and if we could we’d have to gather a lot of data and do a lot of statistical analysis! And there’s still no certainty after all that! Insisting on knowing stuff for certain doesn’t seem to fit into this philosophy, does it?)

Okay. So let’s move on to seeing that nothing that we perceive can be objectively true. (Experience is subjective to begin with, right?)

Point 2. We don’t sense objects directly

We understand that people sometimes experience sensory illusions, dreams and hallucinations, but why do we think that we can ever perceive the things that are actually around us? Is it true?

Let’s reverse the question: Why is it that we don’t and can’t perceive the whole truth about the objects which stimulate our senses, and what do we actually perceive instead?

Time’s up! Here’s what I learned in my Psychology of Perception class in 1974:

Our senses operate when our sensory receptor cells are in direct contact with so-called “stimuli.” Our retinae are stimulated by light waves; our cochlea by air currents, our nasal tissues and taste buds by molecules, and our skin by pressure. Those are the things that we actually sense. Sense receptors when activated stimulate nerve cells, which then stimulate other nerve cells.

We don’t sense objects; we perceive them. Perception works by recall (analysis by synthesis). Our sensations get represented by neural pathways to our brains, and (somehow!) all of our sensations are integrated (synthesized) into historically familiar patterns. This means that we can only perceive what we already understand; unfamiliar objects are unrecognized so we’re sometimes driven to speculation about what things might be.

The bottom line, according to the postmodern paradigm, is that all perceptions (and all statements about what we actually perceive) are theory-laden, that is, dependent on our already-beliefs about what things are and what they mean. They’re completely subjective, based on historical experiences.

Wrap-up: Integrating (accommodating) unfamiliar ideas

So it’s well understood, by most top experts in philosophy and science (if not by a majority of humans on Earth), that no linguistic theory or description of things in the world should be considered absolutely true. Language is an imperfect mirror of the things we describe, but some discourses are more sensible (i.e. coherent) than others, according to whichever standards experts happen to agree on.

Given all of the above, the need for ‘truth’ as conventionally defined has evaporated, and many people now prefer to insist that whatever they think is useful for their purposes is true.

The gold standard for human understanding is critical coherency, not truth. I dearly wish that people would get that.

Was this useful to you? It takes a while to percolate through one’s consciousness…

I hope that this stuff will be as interesting and useful to others as it’s been to me; I hope that this will be a place where I can find out whether that’s the case. So far very few people have seen my work. There's a lot more behind it...

Most of all, I hope that the language that I’ve used is comprehensible to most adults who are interested in these subjects! None of the rejection letters I’ve received from editors or agents has rated my prose. If anyone ever reads this (fingers crossed!) and comments (what are the chances??) I trust that you’ll let me know how I’ve been doing. I already understand that the content is unpalatable to most people (!), but my purpose is to contribute to education if and when I can.

Thanks for listening. You can let me know if you’re interested in my work on higher order thinking.