the whole truth

There's been an interesting discussion about the "What is truth?" question over at the other post, and a school of thought has appeared in the comment threads that deserves to be addressed: is truth simply binary, not admitting of degrees? Commentor Bob Koepp puts it this way:

"2+2=4" is true. "2+2=4 and 2+3=5" is also true, but not more true, or true to a greater degree than the former. There's an important difference between 'more truths' and 'more true.'

BTW, I think that people preparing to testify in court should agree to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth -- leaving the whole truth to the gods.

Later, he writes:

..."partial truths" are not "partly true"; they're "wholly true", but not the "whole truth".

Malcolm adds, riffing off my "light as wave/particle/wavicle" example:

"Light acts as a particle" is true. "Light acts as a wave" is also true. "Light acts as a wavicle" might pick out some finer-grained properties of light, and be a more informative description, but it isn't "truer".

So let's once again set out the three propositions:

P1: Light acts like a wave.
P2: Light acts like a particle.
P3: Light acts like a wavicle.

If we define "truth" degreelessly, i.e., as a binary of yes/no or true/not-true, it becomes impossible to distinguish which of the above three propositions comes closest to describing what light actually is. The only conclusion we can draw is that all three claims about light are equally true. This problem crops up in other areas as well. A person who testifies in court might make nothing but true statements in response to a lawyer's questions, but still manage to avoid telling the whole truth (or, if not the whole truth, at least as much truth as is relevant to the case). It does us no good to think of the deceitful witness as 100% truthful (which, according to the simple binary way of thinking, he is); without some notion of degree, we are unable tell liars from the sincere.

So while I can understand how

2+2=4

and

2+3=5

might be called "equally true" according to a certain view of truth, I think that truth, if we take it to be the relationship between propositions about reality and reality itself, has to admit of degrees.

If I insist on defining truth this way, however, one uncomfortable implication may be that the above equations shouldn't necessarily be thought of as "true," per se, except as descriptors of something tangibly real. As long as the equations aren't referring to anything in the real world, they aren't true: they're correct. Think about the difference between valid and sound arguments in syllogistic logic:

All borogoves are mome raths.
Mimsy the Tentacled Hamster is a borogove.
Therefore, Mimsy is a mome rath.

The above syllogism points to nothing real; it can be called "valid" or "correct"... but is it true?

The equation 2+2=4, then, isn't true except as a descriptor for something real, such as when we add apples together. Truth must be relentlessly linked back to reality, or we aren't talking about truth.

Addofio added something interesting to the discussion. In my first draft of the original "truth" post, I'd actually mentioned something similar to what she wrote about, then I deleted what I'd written. Later on, Addofio apparently read my mind:

Truth as simply a property of language? Or even of ideas and concepts, which aren't always entirely captured by language? Somehow, that always seems to lack a level of profundity that "truth" ought, at least, to have. At the very least, it leaves out "Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth"; beauty is definitely not always a matter of language.

The passage I had written and deleted dealt with the idea of "nondiscursive propositions" such as, say, a work of art. There's a sense in which art "speaks" to us and says something about reality. What the message is might not be discursively available, and yet we feel its resonance, as when a poet describes a "black whiteness" or a "round square." These are ideas that might be logically incoherent, yet might nevertheless orient our sensibilities toward something valuable, something about reality that can't be captured in words. I would hate to think that all reality can be rendered as text; this would strike me as too much of a concession to the paleo-Derridean school of differential postmodernism.

Anyway, for the moment at least, I remain unconvinced that it's useful to speak of truth as a simple binary. It's not enough to point out whether there is or isn't a correspondence to reality; it's also important to realize that greater and lesser degrees of correspondence are possible. Not to do the latter is to have an unnuanced view of truth, and that, in turn, opens the door to needless relativism.


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