XXX note that fallibility is mentioned in the fallibility section and also the section on people confusing social constructions with real things
In a discussion recently, I saw someone say (slightly edited for readability and formatting):
The truth? Engage in discussion in a productive way? These really don’t seem to be my things. ... I’m not interested in discussing things with people who believe in the truth (or that they know it). ... In my opinion, truth is being established between people, within communities. Truth is not a given, it does not exist outside of a social context and it certainly does not inhabit any discussion before common ground is found.
I want to emphasize that this is not a straw man; it is a literal transcript of something that someone actually said to me, improbable as it sounds. Therefore I think it is worthwhile to clearly explain why it is untrue.
It struck me as a particularly clear statement of a malignant doctrine, a collective variant of metaphysical solipsism, that I’ve often seen in a more covert form. It’s a hopelessly confused metaphysical doctrine which eliminates both the possibility of rational action and the possibility of any basis for agreement, other than submission or compromise; scholars call it “global alethic relativism”.
First, though, let me explain what is true about this view.
There are many statements that people commonly accept as “true” that are in fact socially constructed rather than objectively true in any sense: my property extends up to such-and-such a line; masturbating in public is unacceptable; The Da Vinci Code is not yet out of copyright; saying that someone is “nice” is saying that they treat others well. Clearly the community could change its collective mind about where the property line is drawn, what sorts of behavior are acceptable and unacceptable, what causes bizarre human behaviors, the terms of copyright, and the definitions of words.
People nearly always act as if things like national boundaries, corporations, ghosts, demonic possessions, marriages, and land tenure rights exist in the same objective, material sense that stone walls or puppies do. This is very practically useful: you cannot run through a stone wall by disbelieving in it, and in the same way you cannot run through a heavily armed international border by disbelieving in it — even though the border is socially constructed, the armaments and the border guards wielding them are objectively, materially real.
But, in fact, when it comes to such things, there is indeed no such thing as the truth; the truth of a marriage, a corporation, a national border, or a law is established between people, within communities. It does not exist outside of a social context and does not “inhabit any discussion before common ground is found.” It is a shared opinion, not a fact about the material world.
The relevant difference is that if the border guards stop believing in the national boundary, or can be tricked about where it is, then you can cross it without changing anything in the material world other than people’s beliefs and expectations. This does not work with stone walls.
Everyone has had the experience of being wrong about things, and dialogue with other people is usually the way we find out we are wrong — in cases like land tenure rights and national boundaries, some sort of communication with other people is the only way to find out, because those things don’t physically exist in the material world, except as beliefs in people’s minds. Everyone has also had the experience of encountering someone who is unwilling to consider the possibility that they are wrong.
Everyone has also had the experience of having beliefs that they thought were objective truth, which turned out to only be opinions — usually because they met someone with different opinions.
Given this background of experience, how can we justify any belief at all in the truth, or a truth that exists outside of any social context? How do we know that we aren’t just confusing ourselves again, switching from one set of beliefs to a more popular one, without ever making any contact with objective reality?
A different aspect of this proposition is that people are not mentally equipped to grapple directly with the immense mass of brute facts in the objective world, so they retreat to what Walter Lippmann terms “fictions”:
Now in any society that is not completely self-contained in its interests and so small that everyone can know all about everything that happens, ideas deal with events that are out of sight and hard to grasp. Miss Sherwin of Gopher Prairie is aware that a war is raging in France and tries to conceive it. She has never been to France, and certainly she has never been along what is now the battlefront.
Pictures of French and German soldiers she has seen, but it is impossible for her to imagine three million men. No one, in fact, can imagine them, and the professionals do not try. They think of them as, say, two hundred divisions. But Miss Sherwin has no access to the order of battle maps, and so if she is to think about the war, she fastens upon Joffre and the Kaiser as if they were engaged in a personal duel. Perhaps if you could see what she sees with her mind’s eye, the image in its composition might be not unlike an Eighteenth Century engraving of a great soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures winding off into the landscape behind.
...
In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor. It is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response. But because it is behavior, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the real environment where action eventuates. If the behavior is not a practical act, but what we call roughly thought and emotion, it may be a long time before there is any noticeable break in the texture of the fictitious world. But when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact results in action on things or other people, contradiction soon develops. Then comes the sensation of butting one’s head against a stone wall, of learning by experience, and witnessing Herbert Spencer’s tragedy of the murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts, the discomfort in short of a maladjustment. For certainly, at the level of social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions.
By fictions I do not mean lies. I mean a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself. The range of fiction extends all the way from complete hallucination to the scientists’ perfectly self-conscious use of a schematic model, or his decision that for his particular problem accuracy beyond a certain number of decimal places is not important. A work of fiction may have almost any degree of fidelity, and so long as the degree of fidelity can be taken into account, fiction is not misleading. In fact, human culture is very largely the selection, the rearrangement, the tracing of patterns upon, and the stylizing of, what William James called “the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas.” [Footnote: James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 638] The alternative to the use of fictions is direct exposure to the ebb and flow of sensation. That is not a real alternative, for however refreshing it is to see at times with a perfectly innocent eye, innocence itself is not wisdom, though a source and corrective of wisdom. For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.
So these “fictions” or “pseudo-environments” are products of social contexts and evolve from the interplay and negotiation between people. Lippmann’s “fictions”, however, have “degrees of fidelity”: they are referred to an underlying environment, and may be better or worse at it, so they can be more or less true in ways that have nothing to do with social consensus.
But this extremist form of relativism does not stop at pointing out that people commonly accept social constructions as facts, are fallible, and understand their environment in a way that is profoundly altered and simplified by their social context; it calls into question even propositions such as whether there is a stone wall in front of you, the commutativity of integer multiplication, or whether Elvis Presley is still alive.
At first glance it would seem to foreclose only the possibility of any basis for agreement other than mere popularity. It entails that geocentrism was actually true until Copernicus and Galileo made it unpopular, and heliocentrism was false, because the community of the Catholic Church had established the truth of geocentrism. It argues that whether there is or is not a stone wall in front of you is a truth that can only exist inside of a social context, established between people, within communities; the right social context would allow you to run through the stone wall as easily as you can run across a state line in the US. It entails that exterminating sparrows and deep plowing in the Great Leap Forward was to result in abundance rather than famine, because the social context had established that it would. It asserts that the only difference between truth and lies is that people disbelieve lies.
That is, it cannot distinguish between truth and collective ignorance or self-delusion.
But, in fact, the problem goes much deeper! According to this radical form of relativism, it isn’t even objectively true that the Catholic Church was preaching geocentrism, or that the Inquisition put Galileo under house arrest for teaching heliocentrism, or for that matter that our own community subscribes to heliocentrism. If saying that some proposition X is true means only that some community has accepted X as true, then it would be equally valid for the following “truths” to “exist” by “being established” within a different community or social context:
The Catholic Church was teaching heliocentrism and Galileo, who was never put under house arrest, was teaching geocentrism. Nowadays most people accept geocentrism. The Great Leap Forward did not promote exterminating sparrows or deep plowing.
That is, the question of what a given community establishes, or established, as truth, is itself a question of objective fact, so relativists are in some sense smuggling in a hidden dependency on
In an ontological sense, this is incoherent, in a way shown by Plato; the SEP summarizes his argument as follows:
Most people believe that Protagoras’s doctrine is false.
Protagoras, on the other hand, believes his doctrine to be true.
By his own doctrine, Protagoras must believe that his opponents’ view is true.
Therefore, Protagoras must believe that his own doctrine is false.
Plato’s version of this argument is considerably lengthier and is quoted in full at the end of this note; as the SEP notes, though, this argument begs the question, implicitly relying on a notion of absolute rather than relative truth. Protagoras must believe that his opponents’ view is true for them.
This argument is contingent on what the actual social consensus is; in a world where everyone agreed with Protagoras, it would lose its force. Nevertheless, we do not live in such a world. People routinely make factual assertions based on an evident belief that some statements are true and others are false in a fashion that is independent of people’s opinions.
Borges, in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius writes (my translation below):
Siglos y siglos de idealismo no han dejado de influir en la realidad. No es infrecuente, en las regiones más antiguas de Tlön, la duplicación de objetos perdidos. Dos personas buscan un lápiz; la primera lo encuentra y no dice nada; la segunda encuentra un segundo lápiz no menos real, pero más ajustado a su expectativa. Esos objetos secundarios se llaman hrönir y son, aunque de forma desairada, un poco más largos. Hasta hace poco los hrönir fueron hijos casuales de la distracción y el olvido. Parece mentira que su metódica producción cuente apenas cien años, pero así lo declara el Onceno Tomo. Los primeros intentos fueron estériles. El modus operandi, sin embargo, merece recordación. El director de una de las cárceles del estado comunicó a los presos que en el antiguo lecho de un río había ciertos sepulcros y prometió la libertad a quienes trajeran un hallazgo importante. Durante los meses que precedieron a la excavación les mostraron láminas fotográficas de lo que iban a hallar. Ese primer intento probó que la esperanza y la avidez pueden inhibir; una semana de trabajo con la pala y el pico no logró exhumar otro hrön que una rueda herrumbrada, de fecha posterior al experimento. Éste se mantuvo secreto y se repitió después en cuatro colegios. En tres fue casi total el fracaso; en el cuarto (cuyo director murió casualmente durante las primeras excavaciones) los discípulos exhumaron —o produjeron— una máscara de oro, una espada arcaica, dos o tres ánforas de barro y el verdinoso y mutilado torso de un rey con una inscripción en el pecho que no se ha logrado aún descifrar. Así se descubrió la improcedencia de testigos que conocieran la naturaleza experimental de la busca... Las investigaciones en masa producen objetos contradictorios; ahora se prefiere los trabajos individuales y casi improvisados. La metódica elaboración de hrönir (dice el Onceno Tomo) ha prestado servicios prodigiosos a los arqueólogos. Ha permitido interrogar y hasta modificar el pasado, que ahora no es menos plástico y menos dócil que el porvenir. Hecho curioso: los hrönir de segundo y de tercer grado —los hrönir derivados de otro hrön, los hrönir derivados del hrön de un hrön— exageran las aberraciones del inicial; los de quinto son casi uniformes; los de noveno se confunden con los de segundo; en los de undécimo hay una pureza de líneas que los originales no tienen. El proceso es periódico: el hrön de duodécimo grado ya empieza a decaer. Más extraño y más puro que todo hrön es a veces el ur, la cosa producida por sugestión, el objeto educido por la esperanza. La gran máscara de oro que he mencionado es un ilustre ejemplo.
Centuries and centuries of idealism have not ceased to influence reality. Not infrequently, in the oldest regions of Tlön, lost objects are duplicated. Two people seek a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil no less real, but more in keeping with their expectations. These secondary objects are called hrönir and are, though only slightly, somewhat longer. Until recently the hrönir were accidental children of distraction and forgetfulness. Incredibly, their methodical production is only a hundred years old, so the Eleventh Volume says. The first attempts were fruitless. The modus operandi, however, is worthy of note. The director of one of the state prisons told the prisoners that in the riverbed were certain sepulchres, promising liberty to whoever should bring him a significant find. During the months preceding the excavation, they were shown photographic slides of what they were to find. This first attempt showed that hope and greed can inhibit; a week of labor with shovels and picks failed to exhume any hrön but a rusty wheel, of a date later than the experiment. This was kept secret and repeated in four workshops. In three the failure was nearly total; in the fourth (whose director died coincidentally during the first excavations) the disciples exhumed — or produced — a golden mask, an archaic sword, two or three amphoras of mud, and the greenish and mutilated torso of a king with a still undeciphered inscription on his chest. Thus they discovered the uselessness of witnesses who understood the experimental nature of the search... Mass research produces contradictory objects; now preference is given to individual and almost improvisational experiments. The methodical production of hrönir (says the Eleventh Volume) has provided prodigious benefits to archaeologists. It has permitted the interrogation and even modification of the past, which is now no less flexible and docile than the future. Curious fact: the hrönir of second and third degree — the hrönir derived from another hrön — exaggerate the aberrations of the first; those of the fifth degree are almost uniform; those of the ninth degree are confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line that the originals lack. The process is periodic: the hrön of twelfth degree begins to decay. Stranger and purer than any hrön is, at times, the ur, the thing produced by suggestion, the object educed by hope. The great mask of gold I have mentioned is an illustrious example.
Along the same satirical lines, Douglas Adams writes, in Life, the Universe, and Everything:
“Recreational Impossibilities” was a heading which caught Trillian’s eye when, a short while later, she sat down to flip through the Guide again, and as the Heart of Gold rushed at improbable speeds in an indeterminate direction, she sipped a cup of something undrinkable from the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser and read about how to fly.
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying.
There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.
The first part is easy.
All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.
That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground.
Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it’s the second point, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people’s failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.
If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phylum and/or personal inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.
This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration.
Bob and float, float and bob.
Ignore all considerations of your own weight and simply let yourself waft higher.
Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.
They are most likely to say something along the lines of, “Good God, you can’t possibly be flying!”
It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.
Waft higher and higher.
Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly.
Do not wave at anybody.
When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of distraction rapidly becomes easier and easier to achieve.
You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your flight, your speed, your manoeuvrability, and the trick usually lies in not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do, but just allowing it to happen as if it was going to anyway.
You will also learn how to land properly, which is something you will almost certainly cock up, and cock up badly, on your first attempt.
There are private flying clubs you can join which help you achieve the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or explain them at the crucial moments. Few genuine hitchhikers will be able to afford to join these clubs, but some may be able to get temporary employment at them.
Trillian read this longingly, but reluctantly decided that Zaphod wasn’t really in the right frame of mind for attempting to fly, or for walking through mountains or for trying to get the Brantisvogan Civil Service to acknowledge a change-of-address card, which were the other things listed under the heading “Recreational Impossibilities”.
Such Wile E. Coyote techniques do not work in our world, individually or in groups, so we can conclude that alethic relativism is false; that there exists a truth, an objective reality, independent of our communities, outside of a social context, even before common ground is found.
Of course, this too begs the question — it relies on the presumption that it is objectively true that such events do not happen in our world, while a relativist might argue that for us they do not happen, while for them such events do happen. I have not yet met a relativist who has dared to make such an argument, but in this way alethic relativism could insulate itself from all possible disproof, just as ordinary solipsism does.
As the Wikipedia article on social constructionism complains, “It has been objected that strong social constructionism undermines the foundation of science as the pursuit of objectivity and, as a theory, defies any attempt at falsifying it.”
So what? Why is it worth talking about? Many people believe many false and incoherent things, but we don’t spend all our time constructing detailed refutations of each of them. What makes this doctrine so “malignant” it’s worth our attention?
I have two major concerns with this sort of willful blindness to objective reality, which accepts popularity contests as superior to empirical evidence or logical reasoning: it is guaranteed to render disagreements unresolvable, and it makes rational action impossible. It’s a collective variant of solipsism in the sense that, rather than proposing that I am alone in the universe, it proposes that we are alone in the universe; every other fact is taken to be merely a social consensus, only “true” relative to the community that established it, possibly “false” relative to other communities. By deluding its adherents into rejecting the universe, it tempts them to “establish truths” by collective partisan violence rather than by logic and evidence, violence that ultimately ends in self-destruction.
As Borges writes:
Este monismo o idealismo total invalida la ciencia. Explicar (o juzgar) un hecho es unirlo a otro; esa vinculación, en Tlön, es un estado posterior del sujeto, que no puede afectar o iluminar el estado anterior. Todo estado mental es irreductible: el mero hecho de nombrarlo -id est, de clasificarlo- importa un falseo. De ello cabría deducir que no hay ciencias en Tlön -ni siquiera razonamientos. La paradójica verdad es que existen, en casi innumerable número. ... El hecho de que toda filosofía sea de antemano un juego dialéctico, una Philosophie des Als Ob, ha contribuido a multiplicarlas. Abundan los sistemas increíbles, pero de arquitectura agradable o de tipo sensacional. Los metafísicos de Tlön no buscan la verdad ni siquiera la verosimilitud: buscan el asombro. Juzgan que la metafísica es una rama de la literatura fantástica.
My translation:
This monism or total idealism invalidates science. Explaining (or judging) a fact is uniting it to another; this linking, in Tlön, is a posterior state of the subject, which cannot affect or illuminate its prior state. Every mental state is irreducible: the mere fact of naming it — that is, of classifying it — imports a falsehood. From this one could deduce that there are no sciences in Tlön — not even reasoning. The paradoxical truth is that they do exist, in an almost uncountable number. ... The fact that all philosophy is from the beginning a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has contributed to multiplying them. Incredible systems abound, but of agreeable architecture or of a sensational type. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek the truth or even plausibility: they seek surprise. They consider metaphysics to be a branch of fantasy literature.
Of course, people commonly disagree on empirical questions like whether Elvis Presley is still alive or not, as well as logical or mathematical questions like whether it is true that every even whole number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers, for example due to access to differing evidence or due to limitations in their reasoning.
And people commonly differ in their interpretation of language; one person may interpret a sentence as a proposition that is true, while another interprets it as a diiferent proposition that is false. For example, the sentence “every even whole number is the sum of two prime numbers” depends on the definition of “prime number”; it is trivially false according to our modern definition (in which 1 is not a prime number), because 2 is a example, but when Euler originally stated Goldbach’s conjecture, he stated it that way because he was using a definition of “prime numbers” (or rather, “prīmī”, using a Latin word) that included 1 as a “prime”. Thus our interpretation of a sentence, for example in English, German, or Latin, depends on the socially constructed meanings of the words in it. (“Nice” used to mean “insignificant”, too.)
But these sorts of disagreement presuppose the existence of an objective reality that could, in principle, resolve them. Alethic relativism, by contrast, claims that it is merely a matter of social consensus — opinion — whether Elvis is alive or dead, or whether 2 + 2 = 4. It claims that there is no objective sense in which Elvis is dead or alive, or in which 2 + 2 = 4, so there is no point in talking about it except to establish social consensus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29
This version is somewhat more long-winded than the SEP version I quoted above:
Socrates Let us then get the agreement in as concise a form as possible, not through others, but from his [Protagoras’s] own statement.
Theodorus How?
Socrates In this way: He says, does he not? “that which appears to each person really is to him to whom it appears.”
Theodorus Yes, that is what he says.
Socrates Well then, Protagoras, we also utter the opinions of a man, or rather, of all men, and we say that there is no one who does not think himself wiser than others in some respects and others wiser than himself in other respects; for instance, in times of greatest danger, when people are distressed in war or by diseases or at sea, they regard their commanders as gods and expect them to be their saviors, though they excel them in nothing except knowledge. And all the world of men is, I dare say, full of people seeking teachers and rulers for themselves and the animals and for human activities, and, on the other hand, of people who consider themselves qualified to teach and qualified to rule. And in all these instances we must say that men themselves believe that wisdom and ignorance exist in the world of men, must we not?
Theodorus Yes, we must.
Socrates And therefore they think that wisdom is true thinking and ignorance false opinion, do they not?
Theodorus Of course.
Socrates Well then, Protagoras, what shall we do about the doctrine? Shall we say that the opinions which men have are always true, or sometimes true and sometimes false? For the result of either statement is that their opinions are not always true, but may be either true or false. Just think, Theodorus, would any follower of Protagoras, or you yourself care to contend that no person thinks that another is ignorant and has false opinions?
Theodorus No, that is incredible, Socrates.
Socrates And yet this is the predicament to which the doctrine that man is the measure of all things inevitably leads.
Theodorus How so?
Socrates When you have come to a decision in your own mind about something, and declare your opinion to me, this opinion is, according to his doctrine, true to you; let us grant that; but may not the rest of us sit in judgement on your decision, or do we always judge that your opinion is true? Do not myriads of men on each occasion oppose their opinions to yours, believing that your judgement and belief are false?
Theodorus Yes, by Zeus, Socrates, countless myriads in truth, as Homer says, and they give me all the trouble in the world.
Socrates Well then, shall we say that in such a case your opinion is true to you but false to the myriads?
Theodorus That seems to be the inevitable deduction.
Socrates And what of Protagoras himself? If neither he himself thought, nor people in general think, as indeed they do not, that man is the measure of all things, is it not inevitable that the “truth” which he wrote is true to no one? But if he himself thought it was true, and people in general do not agree with him, in the first place you know that it is just so much more false than true as the number of those who do not believe it is greater than the number of those who do.
Theodorus Necessarily, if it is to be true or false according to each individual opinion.
Socrates Secondly, it involves this, which is a very pretty result; he concedes about his own opinion the truth of the opinion of those who disagree with him and think that his opinion is false, since he grants that the opinions of all men are true.
Theodorus Certainly.
Socrates Then would he not be conceding that his own opinion is false, if he grants that the opinion of those who think he is in error is true?
Theodorus Necessarily.
Socrates But the others do not concede that they are in error, do they?
Theodorus No, they do not.
Socrates And he, in turn, according to his writings, grants that this opinion also is true.
Theodorus Evidently.
Socrates Then all men, beginning with Protagoras, will dispute—or rather, he will grant, after he once concedes that the opinion of the man who holds the opposite view is true—even Protagoras himself, I say, will concede that neither a dog nor any casual man is a measure of anything whatsoever that he has not learned. Is not that the case?
Theodorus Yes.
Socrates Then since the “truth” of Protagoras is disputed by all, it would be true to nobody, neither to anyone else nor to him.
Protagoras’s argument doesn’t become any more coherent when applied to communities rather than individuals.