Sam Harris reports that Jordan Peterson was the
person his current audience most wanted him to podcast just because the latter
was the only person who spoke of religion in a way that they (largely atheists)
could make sense of. The
pair started their discussion by agreeing their common ground on the issue of
freedom of speech, the Canadian human rights commissions being kangaroo courts
and the perniciousness of embedding social constructivist theories of human
identity in the law. Sam Harris then
turned to identifying what he thinks is their important disagreement: a disagreement over the nature of truth.
Jordan Peterson distinguishes religious/spiritual/moral truth from scientific
truth, claiming that this distinction is licensed by pragmatism, and Sam Harris
rejects that distinction. The conversation went on a very long time without
resolution and raised two possibilities: either one or the other was confused about truth or that there was a
deeper disagreement about truth than they had managed to bring to light. Quite
well known philosophical theory throws a light on this question.
Philosophers, however, are agreed that it is a
mistake to attempt to understand truth by taking apparent truth bearers such as
friends, art or arrows as paradigms.
It is better to start with entirely uncontentious examples and perhaps when
that is sorted out we can turn to considering whether contentious uses of
‘true’ speak literally of truth or are mere metaphor.
The truth bearers that philosophers consider first
are beliefs, sentences and propositions, the last understood as being what is
believed or what is expressed by a specific use of a sentence. These primary
bearers of truth are semantic entities because they are about something other
than themselves, a feature we call intentionality. But not all semantic
entities are truth bearers: for example, concepts are not truth bearers. Only
propositional semantic entities are truth bearers. From hereon when I speak of
propositions I should be understood to be speaking generally of propositional
semantic entities.
So now we can turn to what is borne by truth
bearers: truth. The first distinction here is between theories that deny or
affirm the existence of a property of truth. Minimalist or redundancy theories
deny, saying that the word and concept are merely semantic devices: that to say
it is true that the cat is on the mat is to say no more than that the cat is on
the mat. Their usefulness is exhibited in examples such as ‘what Henry said
about quasars last night was true’. On these theories there is no additional
property that a proposition has when it is true.
Correspondence, coherence and pragmatic
theories, by contrast, affirm the existence of a property of truth.
Correspondence theory says a proposition is true just in case it corresponds to
a fact (modern versions speak in terms of truth-makers). Coherence theory says
that a proposition is true just in case it coheres with a body of propositions.
Pragmatism says that a proposition is true just in case it is useful.
A further distinction is between realist and
anti-realist theories of truth. Realist theories hold that truth is entirely
independent of subjects and antirealist theories deny this. Under realism, we could
be ideal enquirers who had completed an ideal enquiry and thereby be in
possession of the best evidence, and yet still end up with radically false
beliefs about the world. Realism creates a gap between our beliefs and the
world that evidence cannot completely fill and thereby makes philosophical skepticism
(that we have no knowledge of the world) a live option. We might be deceived by
Descartes’ evil demon and our best evidence would never reveal this to us. Anti-realism
closes that gap: truth is ideally justified belief and whatever the best
evidence supports is therefore true.
Turning now to the dialectic between Sam Harris
and Jordan Peterson, I want to start with a bit of ground clearing. Neither
deny the existence of a property of truth and prima facie Sam Harris is a
correspondence theorist and Jordan Peterson a pragmatist. I think it is
unfortunate that Sam Harris characterises truth as an element of epistemology,
since this is ambiguous. For anti-realist theories of truth that define the
nature of truth in epistemic terms (ideally justified belief), truth is
secondary to epistemology, whereas for realists truth is presupposed by
epistemology. In terms of this distinction, Sam Harris is a realist and Jordan Peterson
manifests some anti-realist tendencies. Their discussion is sometimes obscured by
arguments about evidence because absent making explicit their view of the
relation of truth and evidence, such arguments can be question begging.
Sam Harris starts (and continues and finishes) by
making the standard objection to pragmatism by giving examples of propositions
that are true but not useful or useful but not true. Towards the end he offers
two virology labs in which all the scientist have identically true beliefs
about smallpox but one lab makes an error in handling and creates an epidemic
which would wipe out all humanity but for the other lab, which makes a vaccine
that saves half of humanity. The way I would put his objection is that according to Jordan Peterson
the beliefs of the first scientists must be false because of the bad result
they produce whilst those of the second scientists must be true because of the
good result they produce but the beliefs of the scientists are identical and
hence all the beliefs must be both true and false, which is incoherent.
Jordan Peterson’s response was to deny the possibility
of the example on the grounds that the difference of the outcomes means they
must have different beliefs. Sam Harris attempted to block this by claiming he
could simply stipulate that they do have the same beliefs and the only
difference is in their actions. Jordan Peterson then rejects this kind of stipulation
on the grounds that it always amounts to excluding crucial elements of the
wider context that cannot properly be excluded.
The way Jordan Peterson prefers to characterise these
examples is a matter of cherry picking a limited context in which a proposition
is ‘true enough’ for some purposes but which a wider context may reveal to
result in bad outcomes and therefore not be true. So the examples that Sam Harris
calls scientific truths are only true as what Jordan Peterson calls micro-claims, by which I
think is meant a fairly simple claim considered within an narrowed context for
which the question of value is ignored. An example he offers is the claim that
there is a fire in this room. When the context is widened and we take account
of their value then we discover that they are not true. The extension of his
example that he offers is when the question is whether we are in danger and the
building is on fire even if this room is not. In this way we should understand
scientific truth to be embedded in the wider moral truth, which determines
whether scientific ‘truth’ is really true, where the last is to be understood
in terms of pragmatism. We commonly think
that the distinction between moral truth and scientific truth is made by the
subject matter of their true propositions, but I suspect that for Jordan
Peterson that is incorrect. We should rather understand moral truth to be a superior variety of truth to that of
scientific truth and hence, ultimately, the true and the good are united by
moral truth (or perhaps I should say by religious/spiritual/moral truth).
The broader claim that Sam Harris wants to make
about his examples is that Jordan
Peterson is equivocating on truth: that what he means by scientific truth is
correspondence truth and when he moves to speaking of moral truth as pragmatic
truth he is really changing the subject to moral questions, such as the wisdom of
pursuing certain enquiries and the possibility that some knowledge ought not to
be known. So the claimed ultimate unity of the true and the good is effected by
changing the subject in the middle of theorising about truth. I think there may
be some truth in Sam Harris’s broader claim but I also think that there is
another possibility: that Jordan Peterson’s theory of truth is sailing under
false colours and doing so unbeknownst to himself.
Jordan Peterson defines his version of pragmatism
by Darwinian survival and offers an example of Irish elks that were ‘true
enough’ to get so far but eventually became extinct because sexual selection
resulted in the males have such unwieldy antlers that it interfered with
feeding. The first thing I want to say about this is that Jordan Peterson frequently
indulges in this kind of loose talk about truth bearers when speaking of his
pragmatism. Its cogency is much reduced when we query the idea that animals or
species can be truth bearers in the relevant sense because we see the danger of
an illicit equation of truth with the survival property had by such animals and
species. So we really need him to define
how propositions have or lack the
property of truth on the basis of Darwinian survival. Presumably this would
have to go via beliefs, for example, that true propositions are what is
believed when a belief is true and a belief is true when it promotes survival,
or belongs to a set of beliefs that promote survival.
That being said, perhaps we do not need to go
that way if we attend more closely to the analysis of scientific truth that
Jordan Peterson offers. When offered a scientific truth, and when he thinks we
need to attend to the nature of its truth, he repeatedly analyses this as a
matter of being true enough for some purposes and then criticises the limited
context that must be maintained to preserve this, suggesting that a wider
context will reveal that it is not true enough for other purposes. When he does
this I think the best way of developing what he wants to say is not as Sam
Harris interprets him, and as he himself seems on occasion to grant, as affirming
that the proposition has the property of truth but may lose it when the context
is widened. On the contrary, the best way of developing his position is as the
claim that no limited proposition is ever
true sans phrase. Limited propositions are only ever partially true. The
wider the context they encompass, the truer they may be, but their limitation
means they must fall short of truth itself. There is only one proposition that does
not fall short, an absolutely unlimited proposition that supersedes and subsumes
all the partial truths, namely, the absolute truth. The absolute truth may be
an ideal limit that is out of our reach but it is that to which our efforts
are, or should be, directed.
So here, truth is not a discrete property, that
is either had or not, but is a graded property, had to some degree, bounded
above by a maximal degree had by the absolute truth, which maximal degree is
therefore the only thing properly called truth sans phrase. This is naturally understood as a coherence theory of
truth, of the kind developed by Bosanquet and Bradley, in which the degree of truth had by limited
propositions is the degree to which they cohere with the absolute truth.
On this kind of account, being partially true
may be true enough for some purposes, and for that reason we may mistake it for
truth, but the partiality of its truth is revealed when we widen the context
and discover that it is not true enough for others. Since widening the context
must eventually include the value of the propositions, their tendency to
promote better or worse outcomes, or indeed their tendency to promote beauty or
ugliness, and since the absolute truth must subsume all such contexts, the
absolute truth thereby subsumes goodness and beauty. Hence we have the unity at which Peterson
aimed, the unity of truth, beauty and goodness.
On this account, the virology lab example poses
no problems, since now Peterson does not have to reject the scientists having
all the same true beliefs. Rather, the example proves the partiality of the
truth of their beliefs through its illustration of their beliefs having both
bad consequences and good consequences. The inadvisability of having any such
labs, the possibility that the knowledge is knowledge that ought not to be
known, is in part explained by the partiality of the truths involved. Indeed, the
partiality is precisely articulated by the categories of goods and bads
promoted by the beliefs, since these are ways in which they cohere with or are
incoherent with the absolute truth. Note, however, that the evasion of the
difficulty has been effected by shifting from pragmatism, the colours under
which Jordan Peterson sails, to a
certain variety of coherentism. What variety is that, exactly?
Well, now add in his Darwinian survival thought,
that truer is survival enhancing, and the thought that survival enhancement is
achieved by those parts of the world that can better understand themselves and
the world. Idealise these and we have truth is absolute survival which can only
be achieved by the world itself understanding itself in its entirety. Our
rationality thereby is seen to be a partial reflection of the absolute
rationality that the world is aimed at eventually embodying. This is a variety
of Hegelian absolute idealism, with Hegel's dialectical theory of the historical process
replaced by a Darwinian theory. So I think Jordan Peterson is better understood
as an absolute idealist sailing under the false colours of pragmatism.
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