TRUTH IN PHILOSOPHY- LECTURE THREE

What is truth in Philosophy?

To further explain the point, it will be helpful to answer a very philosophical question: “What
is truth?” Initially, this seems to be a very daunting and abstract question, but the question, but
the answer (at least for our purposes here) is fairly simple. We say that a statement is true if it
corresponds to, that is, matches up with, the way things are. For example, if I say “my cat is
my hat”, what I say is true just in case my cat really is my hat .Otherwise, what I’ve said is
false.

So consider the philosophical claim “God exists”. This claim is true just in case there really is
a God, and otherwise the claim is false. Now it’s common to think of certain philosophical
issues such as the existence of God as mere matters of opinion, not capable of being true or
false. I suppose this is in part because people have opinions about these sorts of issues, and in
addition have no idea of how to determine which claims are true and which are false. But the
mere fact that people have different opinions about an issue does not prove that there is no truth
to the matter. For example, people (at least, people without expertise in biology) have different
opinions about whether humans evolved from lower forms of life, but certainly people either
did evolve from lower forms of life or they didn’t and whichever is the case, the corresponding
claim is true. And even if most people don’t know how to prove which answer is correct, surely
one or the other is correct. Similarly people have had differing opinions regarding the shape of
the earth: at one time, most people thought the earth was flat, and a few believed it was not.
But certainly the earth is either flat or it is not, as we now know the earth is not flat. (By the
way, the philosopher Aristotle proved the earth was not flat over 2000 years ago – chalk one
up for philosophy!)

Similarly for philosophical issues they are being truth or false have to do with the way things
are, and not merely what people believe. think of it this way: imagine, just for the sake of
illustration, that God really exists , that God is out there somewhere in ( or around) the universe
.My believing that there is no God certainly could make such a powerful being disappear!
Similarly imagine for a moment that there is no God anywhere. My believing that there is a
God certainly will not make such a powerful being pop into existence! Our minds just don’t
have that kind of power over the way things are.

So if philosophical issues are worthy of serious critical study and scrutiny, it is because such
study offers the possibility of discovering interesting truths.

Philosophy as the beginning of a progress towards the truth

In science and philosophy there are certain big questions for which there is no one answer that
scientists and philosophers in general hold to be correct. Indeed, in philosophy, when these big
questions are solved, it will not be by one really smart philosopher just sitting down and
figuring them all out. Rather, the solution will be a long time coming, resulting only from
generations of philosophers slowly progressing towards the truth.

Philosophical methods
We've talked in very general terms about what philosophy is. But to fully understand
philosophy as a discipline, we can't just look at its subject matter. We also need to examine the
methods philosophers use to answer philosophical questions.

We'll begin with what both philosophers and scientists do NOT do. One thing neither
philosophers nor scientists do is try to resolve controversial issues by appealing to the beliefs
of an authority figure. A popular idea about how philosophical disputes get resolved involves
someone noting that Confucius or Plato or some respected figure said AAA and BBB, therefore
we should all believe AAA and BBB. Actually, a contemporary philosopher's response to such
a claim would be "Well, what reasons did (Plato, Confucius, etc.) have? Are they any good?"
The fundamental deciding factor in whether philosophers or scientists accept a claim is not
who said it, but whether their reasons for the claim are any good.

So what are good reasons? Well, first of all, there are different kinds of reasons.

One sort of reason is provided by observation. For example, the fact that you see a dog in the
yard is a pretty good reason to believe there is a dog in the yard, all else being equal for
example, there are no dog facsimiles in the yard, you have not ingested hallucinogenic drugs,
etc.).

But most of the more interesting things we believe require more than just observation: they
also require inferences. For example, if you believe that there is a dog in the yard, you
presumably also believe that there is an animal in the yard, and your latter belief is based on
the former. This kind of reasoning is called deductive reasoning, and this particular instance of
deductive reasoning constitutes what philosophers call a deductive argument.

Another example: if you believe that if you call the dog, it will come to you, your belief, if it
is a plausible one, will likely be based on your own or others past experiences with the dog's
behavior. You will have inferred that a future occurrence (your calling the dog) will be similar
to past experiences in which you called the dog and it came to you. These are called inductive
arguments.

Inductive and deductive arguments are the central tools of philosophy and science (as well as
everyday reasoning), so we'll want to get as clear as we can about what they are. We'll begin
by talking about arguments in general, and then discuss the nature of inductive and deductive
arguments. An argument is a set of statements one of which is called the conclusion and the
rest of which are called premises. The premises are intended to support the conclusion. The
premises really do support the conclusion if they make it likely or certain that the conclusion
is true (see above for a definition of truth).

We can greatly clarify an argument, and make it easier to talk about, by numbering each
premise and writing each premise and the conclusion on a separate line. For example, the
deductive argument about the dog could be stated this way (where "P" stands for premise and
"C" stands for conclusion):

P1 All dogs are animals.

C An animal is in the backyard.

Similarly, the inductive argument about the dog given above can be represented as follows:

P1 In the past, whenever I've called the dog, he's come to me.

C If I call the dog now, he'll probably come to me.

Arguments can have any number of premises, from one to as many as you like. But each
argument has only one main conclusion.

So what exactly are deductive and inductive arguments? Well, they are the two basic kinds of
arguments. We'll talk about deductive arguments first.

Deductive argument

Deductive arguments are those which are intended to be valid (having premises from which
the conclusion follows logically).

A deductive argument is actually (as opposed to merely intended to be) valid if it is such that
on the assumption that the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. Any deductive
argument that is not valid is invalid. Consider the following deductive argument, from the very
first logic textbook written by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) over 2,000 years
ago:

P1 All men are mortal.

P2 Socrates is a man.

C Socrates is mortal.

If we assume that all the premises of this argument are true, then we can see that, given that
assumption, the conclusion would have to be true - there is no way it could be false. This is
what makes this argument valid. Similarly, the above deductive argument about the dog is
valid. It's important to note that the premises do not actually have to be true in order for the
argument to be valid. Validity has to do with the way the premises link up to support the
conclusion, not whether the premises are actually true. Thus, a deductive argument with one or
more false premises can still be valid, as in the following example:

P1 All radishes are purple.

P2 Elmo is a radish.

C Elmo is purple.

Both premises and the conclusion are false. But this argument is valid because on the
assumption that the premises are true, the conclusion would have to be true. Obviously, when
philosophers speak of a deductive argument being valid, they are not using the word 'valid' in
its ordinary sense. When philosophers speak of an argument's being valid, they almost always
have in mind the technical sense of validity we have just described.

An example of an invalid deductive argument would be the following:

P1 All men are mortal.

P2 Socrates is mortal.

C Socrates is a man.

(If you read carefully, you'll notice that this example differs from Aristotle's in that here, P2
and C have been switched!) The above argument is invalid because it is possible for all its
premises to be true and its conclusion false. This would be the case, for example, if Socrates
were a cat.

Now for deductive argument to be a good argument (i.e., one which shows its conclusion to be
true), it's not enough for it to be valid. It also has to be such that all its premises are true. A
deductive argument that has all true premises, is valid, and commits no fallacies (fallacies being
certain errors in reasoning - we won't need to worry about these here) are called sound
arguments. Sound deductive arguments are the good ones: they are such that the truth of their
conclusion is guaranteed.

Inductive argument

The other main type of argument is called the inductive argument. Inductive arguments are
those whose premises are intended to make their conclusion likely, but not certain. For
example, suppose you are wondering whether all swans are white. You might construct the
following argument:

P1 All the thousands of swans I have seen are white.

C Probably, all swans are white.

Or

P1 all the fishes that I have ever seen have scales

C probably, all fishes have scales

This is an inductive argument. Its premise, if true, may make the conclusion likely, but it cannot
make it certain, for there is always the possibility that one of the swans you have not seen is
black or some fishes you have seen have no scales.

Since inductive arguments are not intended to be valid, we won't ever use the terms 'valid' or
'sound' to evaluate them. Instead, we'll say that an inductive argument whose premise(s), if
true, make its conclusion likely is a strong inductive argument, and all other inductive
arguments will be weak. An inductive argument that is both strong and has all true premises
we'll call cogent. An example of a cogent inductive argument is as follows:
P1 the sun has raised every morning in the past.

C Probably, the sun will rise tomorrow.

Now, back to philosophy. Philosophers use argument to try to determine the correct answers
to philosophical questions. To see what’s really at issue in the philosophical arguments, it will
be helpful to talk a little about conceptual analysis.

Conceptual analysis

In order to understand what conceptual analysis is, we need to understand what concepts are.
We can think of a concept as a feature or characteristics of something. For example, one feature
of cans of coke is that they are red hence redness is a concept. Another example: suppose that
Fred knows that 1+1=2. Then, one feature of Fred is that he knows this, and we can take
knowledge to be a concept. Similar, if murder is morally wrong then one feature of murder is
that it is morally wrong, so moral wrongness is a concept. Other concepts of philosophical
interest tend to be quite general and fundamental.

A crucial point to keep in mind here is that concepts are merely mental – concepts are not just
ideas or thoughts that people have. Concepts are real things. Similarly, concepts are not just
words. It is common for philosophers to keep words and concepts distinct by placing words in
single quotes. Thus, ‘redness’ is word, whereas redness is a concept. Note that concepts such
as redness, truth, and so forth, would be as they are even if no one existed to think of them.
This is just another way of putting the point that concepts are neither ideas nor words.

Another crucial point to keep in mind when thinking about philosophical issues is the
distinction among believing something to be the case, knowing that it’s the case and its actually
being the case. Believing that something is the case merely involves thinking that it’s the case.
For example, at one time many people believed that the earth is flat. They believed it, but they
didn’t know it and it’s not the case. Knowing that something is the case involves believed that
something is the case on the basis of good reasons that establish it to be true. Thus, we know
that the earth is not flat because we have based our belief on good reasons to believe it’s not
flat (for instance, we’ve seen pictures indicating that the earth is a globe). Finally, something
may be the case even ifwe do not know about it. Something is the case if it’s actually the way
the world is. Thus, it actually was the case that the earth was not flat even when one knew this
to be the case or even when no one knew this to be the case or even believed it to be the case.
When philosophers address philosophical questions, they are concerned to discover what
actually the case is. When philosophers address philosophical questions, they are concerned to
discover what is actually the case, not just what people believe to be the case. The latter task is
the aim of those who conduct public opinion polls, not philosophers.

When thinking about philosophical issues, one must always keep in mind the concepts that are
at issue. The philosopher mark woodhouse has put it, “what catches about the philosopher’s
eye concerning the statement “Ralph told the truth” is not the potential issue of whether Ralph
actually told the truth. Instead, the philosopher’s curiosity is aroused by the challenge of
determine the standard that any sentence in principle must meet in order to merit the label
‘truth’ – that is, inquiring into the meaning of the concept of truth”

The key features of concepts that are often the focus of philosophical discussion are their
logical relations to other concepts. These logical relations are deductive. For example, take the
concept of being a cat. By logical deduction, we can infer that anything that is a cat is an animal,
because part of the concept of being a cat includes the concept of being an animal. Thus, the
two concepts of being a cat and being an animal bear this logical relation to each other. By
contrast, being a cat does not logically imply being a dog. A complete and conceptual analysis
of something’s being a cat would have to include everything being a cat logically implies and
nothing else.

Of course, philosopher doesn’t usually try to provide conceptual analyses of being a cat. Cats
are interesting, but not that interesting. Instead, philosophers attempt to offer conceptual
analyses of concepts that will help us resolve philosophical problems. For example, what about
the concept of having a right to life? If a creature has a right to life, what else does it have to
have? Obviously, for anything to have a right to life, it has to be alive. But this can’t be the
whole story: plants are alive, but they certainly do not have a right to life!

Perhaps a better analysis of the concept of having a right to life would include being alive and
having a human genetic code. But there are a couple of problems with this analysis also. First,
our individual skin and muscle cells alive and have a complete human genetic code, but they
obviously don’t have a right to life! Surely we are not guilty of murder whenever we scrub our
hands and kill a few skin cells. A second problem with this analysis is that it seems clear there
could be creatures that don’t have a human genetic code, but nonetheless be alive and have a
right to life. For example, there could in some distant galaxy be creatures like Spock, or
Klingons, or Superman or the Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and we would certainly want
to say that they each have a right to life even if their genetic code is not human. Now, a natural
reaction to these kinds of sci-fi examples is “We have no reason to believe that Klingons exist,
and a good reason to believe they don’t given that someone just made them up to tell a story!”
The key to understanding why such examples may be relevant is that we are concerned here
with the conceptual analysis of what it is to have a right to life. Keep in mind that concepts are
things that would exist even if humans did not – concepts are not just ideas or words. Thus, our
concepts of redness would not change even if there were no humans or even if it turned out that
Klingons really existed. If Mars is red, it’s going to be red whether or not Klingons, humans or
even Spock exists. Similarly for any concept (that does not include certain sorts of references
to such beings), including the concept of having a right to life. So the fact that such beings do
not actually exist shouldn’t be relevant to our analysis of concepts.

In fact, there is just one limitation on what can count as relevant to the analysis of a concept:
anything that contains a self-contradiction is irrelevant to the analysis of a concept. A self-
contradiction is a statement that in effect says “Both p and not p” where p is any statement. For
example, it would be self-contradictory to assert that something is both a dog and not a dog.
Since the concept of being a Klingon doesn’t contain a self-contradiction, appeal to examples
involving them may be perfectly legitimate where we are concerned with conceptual analysis.
Finally, you shouldn’t get the impression that absolutely anything counts when analyzing a
concept. As we saw with the above attempts to analyze the concept of having a right to life, we
can evaluate conceptual analyses and find them inadequate.

Often the primary aim in the writings of contemporary philosophers is to analyze, and thus
better understand a philosophically interesting concept. For example a complete and correct
analysis of what it is to what have a right to life would help us greatly in understanding and
resolving disputes about the morality of abortion or euthanasia. More importantly, such an
analysis would tell us something very important about ourselves, namely why we are the sorts
of creatures that have moral rights.

I hope this discussion of conceptual analysis hasn’t left you completely bewildered. We’ve
been talking about one of the most fundamental, yet most difficult to understand, aspects of
philosophical method. But if you understand why examples involving Klingons and such may
be relevant rather than ridiculous, then you will have come quite a long way towards
understanding what philosophy is all about. If you’re still a little bewildered about this business
of conceptual analysis, don’t worry too much about it. As you do more philosophy, it will
become easier to see how philosophy works and why such examples may be important.