Language

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Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος

—John, 1:1

St. John understood Sapir Whorf nearly two thousand years before Sapir or Whorf did. It’s all about the metaphor.

“People of every age seem to be in a sort of post-truth scenario here, where I get to pick my own facts. There are a lot of facts out of there, I get to pick the ones that I like, and I can go with those, and nobody can really tell me that those aren’t the facts because it’s my truth. Those are my facts, and don’t tell me they’re not.”

— Robert Prentice

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings do that.

—Richard Rorty

All the lies I told to you:
Some of them came true.

— Chris Isaak, Move Along

Things and propositions about things

Most conspiracy theories contain a grain of truth. Critical theory’s, ironically, is “there is no such thing as a grain of truth” The concept of “objective truth” makes no sense on its own terms. It is not wrong, so much as incoherent. We are captives of language. “Truth” being a propositional property of a sentence, exists within language and cannot transcend it. “Objective reality” — referentially a property of “the world out there” independent of language, itself is captive of language. There can be no “objective” truth the same way there can’t be a square triangle. It is a category error.

“Things” — rocks, wristwatches, aeroplanes — are artefacts in the external universe. We presume they have temporal continuity, whether we see them or not, and whether we talk about them or not. They are independent of us.

“Truths” are statements: linguistic propositions about external things. Propositions put things into a relationship with each other: “the cat sat on the mat”. “Gordon is a moron”. Sentences do not exist independently of us. They are not properties of the universe, but of our language: prisoners of the vocabulary and grammatical rules of the language in which they are articulated.

Beyond that language they are only marks on a page. Presuming for a moment, dear reader you do not have Persian, consider the following:

“گربه روی تشک نشست”

Unless you do have Persian that is not a sentence, but a string of elegant but unintelligible symbols on a page. (As far as JC knows, it says, “the cat sat on the mat.”)

Thus, “things” aren’t true or false: only “propositions about things” are. We owe this to a beautifully clear exposition by the late philosopher Richard Rorty.

That is your best shot, JC?

This does not go very far towards undermining the materialist tenets of western European philosophy, I grant you. But it is far enough.

This argument used to play out between Christians and Atheists. It was fun, and — since the conclusion of the Spanish Inquisition, at least — no-one took it too seriously. Now the critical theorists are involved it is less fun because they tend to be humourless, so we will pretend the protagonists are still Christians and Atheists. Damnation for all eternity I can handle: cancellation by the woke mind virus is a bridge too far.

Airborne relativists

At this point two self-refuting mythological creatures are cast into the ring: “atheists in foxholes”, and “postmodernists on aeroplanes”. Neither, according to the other, exists.

“Show me,” Richard Dawkins huffs, “a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite”.

By the fact that he takes his argument no further, we expect Dawkins believes he has won it, quod erat demonstrandum. There are objective truths, everyone knows it, and this postmodernist blather to the contrary is all a posture. Because — aeroplanes.

But Dawkins misreads consensus for truth, and he mistakes observation for explanation.

Nor is it clear to which “transcendent truth” he appeals. It does not seem to be “the veracity of modern aerodynamics” — the finer points of which were not worked out when Richard Pearse took his first flight and are in any case quite lost on birds — so that kind of truth is not needed to take a flight. It may be nothing more than the simple statement that “planes seem to go up and come down reliably enough that I am prepared to get in one”.

One can have any number of reasons for believing that planes fly: “scientists are clever and they figured it out”, “it’s magic!”, “St. Christopher watches over all travellers” or just, “a cursory glance at the statistics tells me the probability of planes falling randomly out of the sky has declined markedly since the nineteen-sixties, and there is now less than a one-in-a-million chance I’ll die on a passenger flight. I care not why.”

The statistics were not always as good. We imagine fewer would have volunteered for a backsie on Pearse’s Improved Aerial Flying Machine in April 1903 than would be prepared to ride in an Airbus now — though maybe not a 737 MAX — and this has nothing to do with changes in the laws of aerodynamics.

Put it another way:

Show me a Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science who is not prepared to jump off the Eiger in a wingsuit, and I’ll show you a hypocrite.

In any case, the important belief here is that “this particular plane won’t fall out of the sky in the immediate future”, and — inductive fallacy again — until that immediate future becomes the past and it turns out not to have, no one knows for sure whether the statement will turn out to be true.

It may fall out of the sky for reasons quite unrelated to aerodynamics. An air passenger takes an awful lot of things, over and above aerodynamics, on trust: that the ground-crew remembered to fill the tank and replace the petrol cap. That there are no undetected stress fractures in the fuselage. That no surface-to-air-missiles are launched at the plane. That airline has not secretly changed the aircraft’s flight path without telling the pilot — and so on. Experience tells us none of these things are a certainty.

The fact, if we have to talk about facts, is this: millions of people get aboard giant compressed tubes and catapult themselves across the planet each year because they have blind trust that everything will be okay if they do, and not because of their considered opinions of the plane’s aerodynamic design.

A cultural relativist does not need faith in the objective truth of aerodynamics but only its regularity. We do not board planes at 30,000 feet but on the ground. An aeroplane that could not fly would not get off the ground, and so would have a hard time falling back onto it. Some aerodynamic principle must be at play to get a plane into the air. To the average punter it does not matter what that principle is, nor even whether the aeroplane’s designer was mistaken about it, as long as it keeps working until the flight is over.

And our cultural relativist might even be an aircraft engineer with a degree in advanced aerodynamics and good grounds for believing the plane’s design to be an excellent based on known data. She just needs to hold her opinions provisionally, recognising that, as with all knowledge arrived at through induction it cannot be proven, and is by nature subject to revision.

After all, Science’s history is of astounding hypotheticals that up-end the previously-settled wisdom of the world’s cleverest scientists. And for all Professor Dawkins’s grumbling, JC is not aware of any university physics department that has closed yet on account of mission completion.

It isn’t like we need truth, after all. All relativism asks is that when we talk about “knowledge” we don’t overstate our case: that we downgrade unjustifiable statements about Platonic forms to pragmatic statements of present fitness. These are matters of consensus, not truth. Truth is a platonic, static forever that we are stuck with, for better or worse. We can tinker about with consensus.

Relegating ourselves to consensus is no great concession.

Sociological quibbles

In any case, generalised observations about the typical behaviour of physical objects at the human scale of interaction are not the sorts of things postmodernists tend to disagree about. As Professor Dawkins observes, relativists do get on planes. Even if you could establish aerodynamics were true — as per the above, you can’t — it would not establish anything about the sorts of things post modernists do disagree about.

These tend to have a human cast to them: they hail from social and not physical sciences. They are about history, sociology, psychology, politics, ethics, morality. And it is not just post modernists who disagree about these things. Everyone does.

Indeed, in much of economic theory, disagreement is not just possible but imperative. Economic system cannot function without differing evaluations of the same goods.

So when social commentators exasperatedly blame post modernism, or relativism for some failure to see the world in the plane terms it should be seen, we should hear alarms at once.

Analytic and synthetic and propositions

Bear with me for a brief technical interlude:it won’t take long. There are two kinds of propositions: analytic and synthetic ones. “Analytic” propositions are true by definition. Synthetic propositions tell us about the world beyond the language they are expressed in. Analytical propositions are mathematical statements; synthetic propositions as scientific statements.

A square is a regular polygon having four sides of equal length that are joined at right angles.

This is analytically “true” because, in the language of Euclidean geometry, a polygon that does not meet those criteria is not a square.

The cat is sitting on the dog’s mat.

The “truth” of this proposition, if it has one, depends upon the world beyond the logical axioms of the language in which it is expressed. If the cat is not sitting on the mat, or it is not the dog’s mat, the proposition is false.

It is, of course, trivially true that mathematical truths are true. When we talk about “objective truths”, we are talking about synthetic — scientific —propositions only.

Objective truths

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Aeroplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Aeroplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don’t.

—Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (1995)

When commentators like Richard Dawkins exasperate about the post-truth world, the “clinchers” they come up with tend to be these kinds of basic propositions concerning the physics of inert objects.

We will note, but leave aside for now, that cultural relativists tend not to disagree about the behaviour of inert objects. They tend, rather, to dispute social, cultural, economic, historical and political truths. These are truths of an entirely different category, so even if Dawkins could make out his claim about aeroplanes — and I don’t think he can — it would hardly win the argument.

But he’s raised this example, so let’s address it. His indubitable factual proposition could be one of three. If he can make any of them out he wins the argument.

1. Aeroplanes work (they reliably fly);
2. Aeroplanes are built according to scientific principles, or
3. The scientific principles by which aeroplanes are built truthfully describe the universe.

Let

“Transcendent truth”

A truth cannot “transcend” the language it is expressed in, because that language gives the proposition meaning. It doesn’t make sense for the truth to transcend it's medium. There is the further difficulty that “language” itself is an indeterminate, incomplete, unbounded thing; no two individuals share exactly the same vocabulary, let alone the same cultural experiences to map to that vocabulary, let alone the same metaphorical schemes. It is what James P. Carse would describe as “dramatic” and not “theatrical”. This makes the business of acquiring and communicating in a language — where meaning does not reside in the textual marks, but in the indeterminate cultural milieu in which the communication occurred — all the more mysterious. That we call it “communication”; that we infer from that a lossless transmission of information from one mind, is a deep well of mortal frustration.

This is its debt to post-modernism, and it is a proposition that contemporary rationalists find hard to accept, whether hailing from the right — see Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds for an articulate example — or the left — see Helen Pluckrose’s patient and detailed examination in Cynical Theories.

The problem, all seem to agree, is this post-modern rejection of truth. And it isn’t by any means limited to the critical theorists: it lives in Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”, in Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, and the generally relaxed attitude to rigorous fact-checking of the populist right.

At the same time we lament the death of “authenticity” — is it the same thing as truth? Is it what we mean by “truth”? — and with it, the terminal defection of logic from the mechanical operation of the world.

We think: what have we done? Have we syllogised truth away altogether? Have we passed a point of no return? Some kind of event horizon between truth and post truth; an invisible force-field from the outside in a collection of received veracities, which once you permeate it, once you cross its threshold all reality dissolves and it is suddenly the only visible truth that remains, in a twisting kaleidoscope of unfathomable nonsense — truth is no longer possible?

Nowhere is this more evident than the blockchain, and its two most startling, and contradictory creations: bitcoin on one hand: the utter rejection of any underlying reality: bitcoin unashamedly represents “value” as a totally abstracted essence; a theoretical quality, disconnected from our ugly Platonic cave, floating free of any messy, ugly corporeal, earthly extension that might taint it with mortal frailty; the non-fungible token on the other, a means vouchsafed by that very same essential abstraction from the earthen shores, of achieving unimpeachable authenticity. A non-fungible token cannot be replicated, it can’t be cloned, copied or imitated: it is immutably, eternally, digitally unique

The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical theory itself has bootstrapped itself into assembling a new set of of objective truths, which happened to be different to the conventional enlightenment ones.

The deep problem that critical theory has, all agree (from Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Helen Pluckrose, Douglas Murray and recently Matthew Syed) is that something things — physical sciences are a favourite example — just are true. No amount of identifying with an alternative theory of gravity will stop you from hitting the ground if you throw yourself out of a window.

On the other hand Jacob Howland made the interesting assertion recently that so completely has critical theory escape its postmodern origins, that it has become captured by, of all people the high modernists who inhabit an intellectual world that seeks to solve all problems by top-down taxonomies and computation.

An illiberal alliance of technological corporatism and progressivism is rapidly turning universities into a “talent pipeline” for the digital age. When fully constructed, this pipeline will deliver a large and steady flow of human capital, packaged in certifiable skill sets and monetised in social-impact or “pay-for-success” bonds. But the strongly particular or eccentric shapes of mind, character, and taste that make human beings, as John Stuart Mill says, “a noble and beautiful object of contemplation” would clog the talent pipeline.

Critical theory has escaped its usual confines in the liberal arts faculties of universities and is now inhabiting the management and human resource departments of corporations, and who are using their rationalist framework to advance what is a fairly radical political agenda. Critical theory is not an alternative narrative by which we can puncture the arrogant assumptions of the capitalist class: it has displaced them altogether and is making its own arrogant assumptions in their place.

That’s not altogether a bad thing — although the practical effects of the updated dogma seem more pronounced the further from the executive suite you go — but it seems to me to substitute one set of bad ideas with another.

The idea of transcendent truth — a truth that holds regardless of language, culture or power structure in which it is articulated — is not false (that would be a paradox right?) So much as incoherent. It is incoherent because, as Richard Rorty pointed out, truth is a property of a sentence about the world, not the world itself. Truth depends on language.

And languages are intrinsically ambiguous. This is the tragedy and the triumph of the human condition.

The statement there is no truth is not an article of postmodern faith, by the way: you can trace it back as far as David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I know, I know: all old, dead, white, men. And Nancy Cartwright.

If you accept the proposition that truth is a function of a sentence and therefore the language of that sentence, for there to be a transcendent truth the language in which it was uttered would necessarily need to be complete, comprehensive, and itself true. The nearest linguistic structures that we have to to complete languages are those of mathematics. Yet we know that mathematics is a necessarily incomplete language: from that we know that any natural language is necessarily incomplete; and in the case of science we know with certainty that science is not what a complete and comprehensive statement of the laws of the physical universe.

We haven’t solved the universe yet. There are large fundamental unknowns; dark matter; dark energy; the incommensurability of quantum mechanics and and special relativity. Even if the concept of transcendent truth were coherent we would have nothing like enough information to access it. In the same way that the fielder does not have enough physical information to calculate the trajectory of a cricket ball, and therefore pragmatically approximates it, so we do not have anything like enough information to confidently predict the scientific performance of the universe and therefore we pragmatically approximate it.

Pragmatic approximations, being provisional, contingent, and subject to revision at any time are are more tolerant, plural and liberal than concrete scientific calculations.

The lack of a a coherent concept of transcendent truth is a a roadmap to tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism. It obliges us to treat as contingent anything we know, to expect things to change and to be prepared for new and more effective ways of looking at the world. All it requires is that we substitute a certainty about how we view the world and ash that we see it as true with a pragmatism about how we view the world, seeing it as effective.

See also

• The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - because it’s just such a good book.