On Truth

Dude really tried to debunk the entirety of postmodernism in like two sentences.

4 and a half.

A neat book, fits in the pocket like a gold nugget. Truly, truly: not much to knock here. Stylistically: compact, confident, self-assured and staightforward. Frankfurt is always admirably plainspoken and spares us the common vice of inflation, pleonastic tirades, and the engorgement of prose with fancy to hide the inadequacies of one's position, the many blemishes. Frankfurt doesn't want to hide at all. His position is completely transparent and simple:

Truth matters, and the main reason it matters is because facts about how things are (reality) are indispensable in navigating and changing the world and in the construction and maintenance of a well-functioning society and culture.

I am reminded of Wittgenstein's remark from the Tractatus that once he had accomplished his task, it should be apparent how little he has done--how little is done really when philosophy is done right. Good philosophy is innocuous, a clearimg out, and sometimes has an even bland and "No Duh" flavor. After the work and uncovering, one just looks at the result. The truth peers back up at us like a turtle, a bit dumb, uninterested and unconcerned, then we return to our days.

I don't think I'm on board in complete detail, especially because he doesn't give us complete detail. He doesn't pretend to exhaust the philosophical discussion on truth, just put it on commensical grounds. In any case, it is a good pitch for a pragmatist conception of truth. And I imagine some people knock him for critiqueing post-truth folks and "it's all historically conditioned ahhhh!" folks. He calls out a subgroup of them as postmodernists, and harshly, yet vaguely. He doesn't really cite anyone. It always makes it easier to slamdunk someone when that someone is a phantom.

Nonetheless, it is hard to disagree that when people point out that sociologically- and historically-based states of affairs have an air of contingency that doesn't attach itself to things like physics and engineering, that they fail to say to what extent and what hangs on it. Usually they just purport that everything is historically conditioned and socially constructed and fall back in their chair, arms folded, like they've struck the bedrock of knowledge.

Mussolini was the dictator of Italy throughout World War 2. That's true.

Golf, though socially constructed (artificial; from-us), has a great many facts about it: to make a birdie is to score one stroke less than the par is on any given hole; it takes place on big ugly-ass fields; and so on.

So the onus of what the "problem" is and whatever its limits may be are on the person bringing it up. But here I am fighting phantoms.

Anyways. It's really an admirable and concise essay. I don't know why folks would have much problem with it. Also, there is an incredibly cogent and lovely analysis of Spinoza's idea of joy and love thrown in there. Great. Might have to return to Spinoza.

A small yet profound examination on the value of truth to a society and an individual.

Eg Theory Book review

On Frankfurt’s Truth and Bullshit

I want to briefly summarize my reading of Frankfurt’s position. And then I’ll focus on a particular shortcoming: I don’t think Frankfurt focuses enough on how and what for Truth is used in practice. From the perspective of their relationship to investigation and inquiry, Truth and Bullshit start to seem much less distinct than Frankfurt makes them. And both start to look like the negative force — although in the case of Truth: sometimes a necessary negative.

First, I am not sure if these two works should really count as books; they are basically 20 page essays reformatted with big font, wide margins, and small pages to make cute booklets.

However, since I picked them up at Barnes & Nobles as books, I thought that I would classify them as such.

The former was originally published as an essay in 1986 and after its repackaging as a book it reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

This motivated the latter as a follow up.

Frankfurt observes that our life is full of bullshit, and sets out to provide an analysis and definition of the phenomena.

He summarizes his finding at the start of the second book: “bullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all.”

In this deception, they have a commonality with liars, but “what they care about primarily… is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false.”

This indifference is not shared by the liar who must keep an eye on the truth in order to mislead you.

As such, Frankfurt believes that the bullshitter is more dangerous to society than the liar.

He avoids pinning down exactly what he means by truth, suggesting that the common sense notion — by which, at my most generous reading, I assume he means something like Sellars’ manifest image — will do.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t only see truth as important but follows Spinoza to the conclusion that anybody who values their life must also (maybe unknowingly) love truth.

"Civilizations have never gotten along healthily, and cannot get along healthily, without large quantities of reliable factual information. They cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs. To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance."

The above statement is certainly effective in manipulating me to believe in the value of truth.

However, it is also sufficiently vague as to make it impossible to test whether what Frankfurt says is true or whether it is false.

Certainly the adaptive nature of positive illusions or our work on religion and the social interface theory might hint toward falsehood.

But a sufficiently slippery definition of truth can hint truth.

The real issue is that Frankfurt presents a straw-man of people who deflate or question capital-T ‘Truth’ as an organizing principle.

The whole point of pragmatic approaches to the question is to eliminate Truth as a category in favour of that with lets us avoid error and provide flourishing.

As such, they can agree with Frankfurt’s claim above without attributing it to ‘Truth’. In fact, they might point to very useful and cohesion enhancing beliefs that would not be Truth for Frankfurt.

If we are to think about Truth then I think we need to think about how Truth is used in practice.
In the real world.

From my experience, it isn’t static Truth that enables advances or lets us escape error and ignorance.

Rather, it is dynamic Investigation. Truth’s job, instead, is to end investigation and inquiry. To say “this case is done, let’s move on”.

Sometimes this is an important thing to do. Not everything needs to be debated. Not everything needs to be investigated. And not everything needs to be questioned. There have to be priorities.

And in this regard Truth can be useful.

..........

I think this also lets us better understand bullshit.

One of the practical uses of bullshit is usually the same as the practical use of Truth: stop investigation and inquiry.

Except whereas in using Truth as our stop requires some due diligence and wondering about if the point in question is a reasonable place to stop.

And sometime even gives us a means to potentially resume investigation later. Bullshit lets us avoid this.

But both end investigation.

..........

A tempting dissimilarity between Truth and Bullshit’s relationship to Investigation might be their role in motivating investigation.

A common position for Truth, and one that Frankfurt takes throughout, is that a desire for Truth can motivate us to investigate.

So from my anti-Frankfurt perspective: even if Truth itself is a — at times desirable and necessary — negative, it’s motivation role is a positive.

But I don’t think this is that different from Bullshit.

At least from the garden-hose of misinformation kind of bullshit.
From the merchants of doubt kind of bullshit.

One of the safety mechanisms built into our notion of Truth is that if we get two conflicting ‘truths’ then we should restart investigation to resolve the contradiction.

This is what bullshit can capitalize on if instead of stopping investigation, it wants to start it.

By throwing enough disinformation at us, it becomes difficult to know what to believe.

This can prompt us to investigate. However, since we are so conditioned on truth and mostly bad at actually carrying out investigations, this often ends up with us just arbitrarily picking the most comfortable — or most repeated or easily accessible — set of propositions as our static set.

In the end, I don’t think the line between Bullshit and Truth is nearly as clear cut as Frankfurt makes it.

In particular, if we focus on the uses to which we put both concepts. And without focusing on this practical aspect, I think that Frankfurt fails to engage with the more interesting challenges to capital-T ‘Truth’.

But these are my recollections from a pair of books I read 4 years ago. So I might have forgotten some of the nuance of Frankfurt’s position.

Well written. But as a philosophical argument I felt as though this was rather pointless and without surprise. When you really break it down, you may find that this is just academic rambling with no real direction or ultimate purpose.

I really appreciated On Bullshit, but Frankfurt lost me with On Truth. As a baseline, Frankfurt asserts there are truths that people must respect. The truths in question are not analyzed. Rather, Frankfurt deals with “the truth” as a concept in and of itself. I would’ve appreciated this more if he had addressed scale. At varying scales, the most basic truths are thrown into unresolved territory. For example, I know it is true that I recycle because I take my recycling out to the curb and watch it get picked up. On a small (quantum) scale, the objects I recognize as “recyclable contents” are indecipherable from the quantum foam in which their elementary particles are enmeshed. On a large (outside of my immediate view) scale, I can’t know for sure that my recycled contents successfully make it to the recycling plant. While this example may be dramatic, I believe it successfully illuminates my belief that “the truth” is a spectrum contingent on scale.

Frankfurt paints a picture of what it may feel like when someone places trust in a friend and learns this friend has lied to them. He says this will cause someone to feel that they are “by nature out of touch with reality, [and] may well feel that [they are] a little crazy.” (p.86) I feel that a similar feeling may arise when we advance our understanding of long-held truths and discover we were wrong. Rather than our worldview being thrown into disarray, (and people losing faith in the integrity of our institutions, practices, etc.), we should be primed with the understanding that the truth is forever unfolding. In fact, we should be constantly doubting and searching for ways to improve our understanding of what is “true.” Instead, Frankfurt believes that if we lack truths through “ignorance and error” we will be destined to “proceed only very tentatively, feeling our way.” (p.61) This sounds like a death sentence. How can one avoid atrophy if they are unwilling to experience “error.” I believe the premiere mode of bullshitting is someone pretending they have a full understanding of something when the very notion of a “full understanding” is unachievable and unethical. People who pretend they don’t need to “feel their way” are full of shit. I suppose this makes me one of the “postmodernists” Frankfurt condemns.

The highlight of the book was the inclusion of Shakespeare’s sonnet 138 which ends with the following “… Therefore I lie with her and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” Even during this portion of the book, I felt skeptical with Frankfurt’s takeaways. In response to the sonnet, Frankfurt writes, “Each knows what the other is really thinking. And each knows that the other knows this: they lie egregiously to each other, but neither is fooled. Each knows that the other is lying, and each is aware that his or her own lies are seen through.” (p.91) This explanation reminds me of the following explanation Frankfurt gave regarding “bull sessions”:

It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel… Each of the contributors to a bull session relies, in other words, upon a general recognition that what he expresses or says is not to be understood as being what he… believes to be true. (On Bullshit p.36-37)

In the case of Shakespeare’s sonnet, this “experimental or adventuresome” behavior has also been colored by flirtation and seduction. I would argue that within Frankfurt’s framework of truth-telling, lying, and bullshitting, the activity described in Shakespeare’s sonnet (even though Shakespeare refers to it as lying) is not lying at all. They’re lovingly “shooting the shit.”

Frankfurt is vehemently against the notion of “being true to oneself.” This sentiment is a continuation of the closing statement made in On Bullshit. There is a contradiction, however, when Frankfurt says, “In our efforts to conduct our lives successfully, however, a readiness to face disturbing facts about ourselves may be an even more critical asset than a competent understanding merely of what we are up against in the outside world.” It is also a contradiction when Frankfurt praises Spinoza’s belief that people love the truth “because they cannot help recognizing that truth is indispensable in enabling them to stay alive, to understand themselves, and to live in accord with their own natures.” (p.47)

Now, I’m going to read The Primacy of Doubt which includes the following opening quote from James Gleick:
“He [Feynman] believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish on our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.”

naive realism

I am no longer religious, but I grew up believing the 9th command. I wasn't sure why but I always told the truth. My daughters said I wasn't capable of lying. It served me well in my study of science, and later in business where I was honest, some would say to a fault. Only when reading this book did I fully understand the utility of telling the truth. Politicians, salesmen, and talk show hosts try to deceive us with lies and I suppose they somehow think they are justified. But we cannot reach our personal goals by telling lies and our society must be run on knowing what is reality. No problem can be solved without knowing the facts. Truth is simply reality. You cannot trust or even truly know a person who lies.
Frankfurt says it all very clearly. And that is the truth.