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Why We Should Reject the Conceit of “Objective Truth”
Tracking, mapping, understanding, and life’s role in the greater evolution of nonlife
Commonsense tells us that philosophers are merely impudent in questioning the standard conception of truth.
Whether they’re skeptics, idealists, or pragmatists, their insistence that there isn’t a real world of facts out there that we can make true or false statements about seems like an extravagant case of self-deception. Of course, statements can be true in lining up with the facts!
How else, for example, could NASA have first landed astronauts on the moon in 1969? How much knowledge must scientists, engineers, and administrators have had to succeed in that mission? Their success is a fact since astronauts walked on the moon. That means the process of getting to that point was a fact, too, and expert knowledge must have been part of that process. And you can’t have knowledge without accurate beliefs which agree with some facts.
Therefore, doubts about whether there’s such a thing as the plain truth are belied by the fact that there’s evidently success or failure in life. We tend to succeed when we know what we’re doing, which means our beliefs can line up with the facts. And that alignment we call “truth.”
But it turns out things aren’t so straightforward.
Tracking and Understanding
To see why, we need to distinguish between tracking something and understanding it. Tracking is largely a perceptual matter of labeling something in the environment so that whenever that thing appears, so does your label. Our primary labels are our mental representations such as our concepts, which act like mental baskets in which we put instances of a type, such as cats or dogs, or apples or oranges, to organize our thoughts.
But to get a sense of how tracking works, notice how wildlife conservationists track the animals they study. They fasten a tracking device to the animal, such as a collar around its neck, so that wherever the animal goes, the tracker pings the receiver. The conservationist gives the animal a name or a number and tracks its whereabouts in the wild.
