Truth and reality
A polygraph, generally referred to as a lie detector, is a piece of equipment to detect whether or not someone is lying by monitoring their pulse and other physical expressions. Certain patterns in these expressions are taken as indication that the person is lying. These are patterns that are not immediately accessible to the human senses such as sight and hearing.
Can the polygraph tell us anything about truth in general?
It can possibly help determine whether or not someone is lying or not in a particular case. But whether someone is lying or not in a particular case seems to have little to do with what is true in general.
It doesn’t even really affect the truth of the utterance we are trying to assess. The person connected to the polygraph might be misguided in their belief and uttering something they think is a lie, but in reality, they are telling the truth when they think they are lying. It’s not difficult to imagine a situation when this could be the case. If lying is saying something you believe is false, then it’s clear that it is possible to lie and tell the truth at the same time. It all depends on what you believe to be true and false.
So lying is a concept in the domain of belief. Our idea of objective truth on the other hand, should be independent of people's beliefs. That’s why the truth is objective and not subjective.
Whether or not someone is lying in a particular case, should then be an objective truth of a subjective truth. In other words, to know if someone is lying or not we need to investigate what that person's beliefs are. The polygraph is used for this purpose.
But is this actually possible? Is it possible to know as an objective fact what another persons beliefs are? Is what someone believes even an objective fact at all?
This brings us to the question of the relation between thinking and the brain. Are my beliefs somehow stored in my brain? If they are, then it would be possible with some device to scan the brain to determine objectively what someone believes or not. Of course this is not really technology that we yet have, and we can ask if this is even possible. Do the structure of our brain map directly to our thoughts? To a large extent it probably does. But it’s also possible that a certain structure in someone’s brain doesn’t exactly represent the same thought or belief that the same structure does in another person's brain. Context could be important. A local structure in the brain might have a different meaning depending on what surrounds it. But these are questions that we don’t yet have the answer to.
In any case it is clear that we don’t have the means today to determine objectively what someone’s beliefs are. It is at present beyond the scope of experimental science.
Of course in our daily life we often do these assessments. And we have always been doing this. All animals do it, even the plants do it. Deception is ever present in the realm of life.
For animals, and to some extent probably also plants, deciding whether someone is trying to deceive you is often a question of life and death.
So we are often assessing the sincerity of people that surround us. The people closest to us are generally people we have trust for. That is more or less the definition of someone being close to you. It is that you trust that person. Of course, this trust is never completely assured, otherwise it wouldn’t even be a question of trust.
Deception is always a possibility. That is part of the nature of human relationships.
In this sense, in our lifeworld, the question of truth and lying is constantly intertwined. And this is clearly not a new phenomenon. It’s older than humanity itself.
So it can be difficult to decide where the limit between subjective truth and objective truth should be drawn.
In other words the limit between facts and beliefs.
Science has made very big advancements in the last few centuries. It continues to make advancements every day. It is impossible for any individual to keep up with all the new knowledge produced. We use a lot of technology in our daily lives, but our understanding of how it actually works is very limited for most of us.
Therefore the question of trust becomes crucial also for the scientific community. The representatives of objective truth (the scientists) are in the end dependent on the trust of the general public.
It is clear to anyone following the development of our civilization that this trust is very thin. The distrust is widespread.
The scientific community has to take some blame for this.
And also some thinkers connected to what is called postmodernism.
Michel Foucault wrote in ”Discipline and punish: The Birth of the Prison”:
”There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations”
As I see it, Foucault locks us up in the prison of the social. In a sense, this is the prison in which we now all live – and in that sense he was prophetic. But he doesn’t give us any keys to escape this prison because he doesn’t even realize that it is a prison – he mistakes it for reality.
But of course there are ways out of the prison of the social. Even when we are in the midst of the social world we are never really completely inside the social, for we never have complete access to the inner lives of others. It is through their physical appearance that we interact with others. And this is really our only insight to their inner lives. In this sense we are locked out of the world of other people's beliefs. We are surrounded by facts. The world is made of facts as Wittgenstein once put it.
(This view from outside however at times somehow allows us to know more about a person than they seem to do themselves. This is because it is a perspective on themselves that they largely lack.)
I have a feeling however that Foucault didn’t really want people to escape – he somehow liked this prison. Living as an intellectual in Paris life is pretty good.
Contrary to Foucault, Wittgenstein often experienced unease in the social world, and at times left this world, going alone to a hut in Norway where he could live in solitude and wrestle with the facts of the world.
So, what did Wittgenstein find? That everything is a social game?! Not exactly, but also not that far from this. He eventually abandons his early attachment to pure facts, and finds that language is a kind of game.
By the way, alone in his hut, Wittgenstein very much longed for human connection. (See Ray Monk's biography). On the other hand, Deleuze said of Foucault that later in his life he became more solitary. Did he start to dislike the social? It wouldn’t be at all surprising, given that he seems to have conceptualized it as something that it is impossible to escape. These two thinkers here reflect each other in an interesting way. Foucault in the city of cities, desiring solitude; Wittgenstein alone in a hut, desiring human connection.
It seems we have to find a third way between the social, prison-like, world of Foucault and the factual, but solitary, world of Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein’s late idea of language as a game maybe approaches this third way. That language is a game doesn’t mean that it is not real. It just shows that language is integrated into the world.
When we consider a statement of someone, it is always in a context. And everything in the context can take on meaning, everything can be relevant. Our use of polygraphs confirms this. Even things we are unable to detect with our ordinary senses can affect our perceived meaning of a statement. Of course even the polygraph comes short of finally determining the intention of the person uttering the statement. Therefore we live in a state of non-reducible indeterminacy. That’s why trust is central in the social world.
The subjective and the objective are always mixed up. In Foucaults world-view we can’t escape the social. But we can just as well (with early Wittgenstein) turn that around and say that we can’t escape the objective – and that the social is at a fundamental level inaccessible. Or, in other words, we are at the same time profoundly solitary and profoundly social beings.
For Descartes a benevolent god is a guarantee that I’m not constantly deceived by my senses, and therefore a guarantee that I can have a relationship with truth at all. So even the relation to the physical world comes down to a matter of trust for Descartes.
In reality many scientists do well without a benevolent god as a guarantee of truth. What makes science possible is not trust in a higher power, but the basic fact that our reality is not completely chaotic. The fact that there is some order in reality is what makes life possible, and therefore makes it possible even to formulate the question of the existence of god at all. This is not to say that there doesn’t exist a god – of course I don’t know that. But science would be possible even if the world would be a deception by the devil that Descartes imagines. As long as the world contains some minimum form of order. And it must because without some minimum form of order there is no meaning at all, probably nothing at all. Nothing can be without some order. Pure chaos cannot exist. Pure order also cannot exist. The world must be a mix of order and chaos. Order and chaos are like yin and yang, they cannot exist without each other. I think this is exactly what time is, the constant unfolding of order-chaos.
The chaos our civilization is currently facing is/was predictable and based in the order of nature. So this chaos is really just an expression of order. This chaos is a form of order. The order of nature is also chaotic, the order is part disorder. That is what’s expressed on Earth at the moment – and really at every moment always.
For life to sustain itself in the order-chaos of nature, life must assume this order-chaos. And since Darwin we know that this order-chaos is the essence of life.
Since Newton we have lived with the idea of the universe as fundamentally ordered. Really since much longer than that. Many creation-myths are the story of the victory of order over the primordial chaos.
But, again, there probably never was and never will be anything, life or even physical matter, without a mix of order and chaos.
I started this text with a discussion of the relation between lying and truth. These two concepts show up in the most famous, and possibly the oldest, of all logical paradoxes, namely the liar paradox. It shows up with the sentence:
”This sentence is false.”
If the above sentence is false then it is true. But if it is true then it is false. So it is both true and false. So we have a paradox.
I think that the paradox arises because of a misconception about what truth is. The idea that a sentence can be true or false by itself.
Truth is something that pertains to propositions in specific contexts. It always depends both on convention and reality.
Even a mathematical expression like ”1 + 1 = 2” depends on context. It depends on what we mean by 1, +, = and 2, and all this has to be clarified before we can say whether ”1 + 1 = 2” is true. And clarifying this is clarifying context and conventions. The context and the conventions that are often just assumed – but necessary to clarify if we want an expression with as little ambiguity as possible.
Language only ever has meaning in some context. And the context always matters. Seemingly insignificant things can completely change the meaning of words.
As in the situation with the polygraph. In this case, how an utterance is interpreted depends on how fast the person's pulse is beating. A change in the pace of the heart can switch the perceived meaning of the sentence from true to false. This is an extreme situation, but the context can never be completely reduced in the case of any proposition ever.
Anything we ever say or express in any way whatsoever, we necessarily do so with the whole history of the universe as horizon. This is what gives our expressions their meaning.
Because in the end, context and reality are almost the same thing. The context of something is just all of reality except for this something.
Post-script. Realism and mysticism.
Someone believing or not believing something is a fact of the world. And it can be a very important fact. Our inner lives are real – and our thoughts and feelings matter. They are also, through our bodies, bound up with physical matter.
It’s all real. We are here, together. 8 billion people. And a lot of other animals. And plants. It’s all a profound mystery. That’s what makes it real. It couldn’t be any other way. If we could grasp it in our minds it wouldn’t be reality, it would be an idea.
There’s no realism without an element of mysticism. And no real mysticism without a profound realism.
Realism and mysticism goes hand in hand.
When Descartes tries to prove that a benevolent god exists, what he is really trying to prove is that reality is real. But it’s impossible to prove that reality is real. The realness of reality is exactly that it is ungraspable to the mind. Reality always exceeds our ideas of reality. That’s its most basic feature.