Interlude:

The Facts about Truth

Perhaps one of the most infuriating things about the First New Commandment is that those who don't subscribe to it--that is, those who think that there is such a thing as the objective truth, and that words mean things other than the agenda you're supposedly trying to promote--are at a tremendous disadvantage when engaged in a debate with a New Moralist. He has no qualms about saying what is out-and-out false, as far as the objective situation is concerned; and you're stuck with the facts, which he impugns and ridicules, because he knows that you don't mean them and you're just trying to put something over on him.

We all know the story. During the impeachment hearings, all you heard was, "It's just lying about sex, and that's his private life, not something impeachable, for God's sake!" when all the time it was lying in court to avoid a sexual harassment suit--hardly one's private life. Then, when Dick Cheney was picked as George W. Bush's vice presidential candidate, the Democrats "examined" his record, among other things saying he voted to keep Nelson Mandela in prison, when what he voted against (along with Democrats the President campaigned for) was special aid to a Communist organization. And so on. The list is endless. And how do you answer it? The well is poisoned, because your answer will be taken as proof that the charge is false. Why? Because Republicans are liars just because they're Republicans.

But you'll notice that the New Moralists always have to come up with some obfuscation that sounds plausible, which means that in the back of their minds they know that what they say has some relation to what's actually happening; so they don't really believe what they seem to believe. For instance, when President Clinton was asked whether Bob Bennett, his lawyer, was telling the truth when he said "There is no sex here of any way, shape, or form" or words to that effect, the President answered with the famous, "That depends on what the definition of 'is' is. If it means 'right now there is no sex,' then it's true; if it means 'there never has been,' then of course it's not true."

That is a beautiful example of what the English call a "Jesuitical" reply. There is a possible way of construing the sentence such that it agrees with the actual situation, if you take a meaning that couldn't possibly be the one looked for by the question. (What conceivable reason could the questioner have for asking "Are you now, as you sit before me in that chair, engaging in any kind of sexual activity with Monica Lewinsky?") But what it reveals is that the New Moralist can't really, even in his own mind, totally divorce what he says from the objective situation. How could he? How can it be a fact that there are no facts at all?

The epistemological problem.

But I think we need to go a little deeper into this. Modern thought has been bamboozled, as I said, by what is called "the epistemological problem"; and while it might think that Immanuel Kant hasn't had the last word on it (the last word seems to be Derrida's), he certainly set up the problem clearly; and it seems there's no way out of it. Let me show you exactly what the problem is, and then show you the way between the horns of the dilemma. And when I do, we'll be on the same page as to what facts are, and what the truth is. Then I'll say a little about why science works, and what it's trying to do; because what scientists often say they're doing isn't what they're doing. Finally, I'll show you what goodness and badness are, and why truth is fundamentally objective, and goodness is fundamentally subjective.

This is going to be somewhat rough going, so put on your thinking-cap.

You can see the problem of objective knowledge if I set it up this way: White light hits a molecule of green paint on the wall; this knocks an electron into an excited state, and as it falls back into its ground state, it emits light in the green part of the spectrum. This light travels through space and hits your eye, where the electromagnetic energy is translated (by a chemical process) into electrical nerve-impulses, which travel up to the visual centers of the brain, and stimulate the nerves there by which you have the green-seeing kind of sensation (which itself isn't exactly the same as the electrical output of the nerve, though it's not divorced from it). Now what right do you have to say that this green-seeing sensation is a copy of the infra-molecular resonance of the paint? None at all. But if your only contact with the real world is the sensation in your brain (which isn't even the same kind of energy), then how is it possible to know things as they actually are "out there"?

As I say, there's got to be a way, or the sun really turns red at sunset, and we know it doesn't. Let me show you the way out by an analogy. Call the light a message that a man over in France is sending in French: "Allons, enfants de la Patrie . . ." Now what the molecule does corresponds to his sending this message (let us assume, in a code of his own devising, not Morse) using dots and dashes on a telegraph key. The radiation corresponds to the radio signal with these dots and dashes. Your eyes are a computer here in the U. S. that's programmed to receive telegraph signals, but translates the dots and dashes into electrical impulses--and as if they were Morse code. The ASCII characters are now sent by a wire to your computer, which then prints out the message, "Fourscore and seven years ago . . ."

Problem: You can't get across the ocean to find out what the original message was. How can you know anything about it? The "internal consistency" theory of truth gives up and says, "You can't."

Ah, but you can know something about it. First of all, if the message appears on the screen without your typing anything into the keyboard, you know that you are receiving a message of some sort. That may sound trivial, but it's important. Since we can (generally) distinguish perceiving (receiving information) from imagining (fooling around with stored information from past perceptions), then we can know whether we're being acted on by something "out there" or not. Even Kant admitted this (though others after him didn't see why he had to say it). What Kant said, however, is that you can't know anything whatever about the contents of the original message.

But not even that is true. Suppose our Frenchman now sends, "Les sanglots longs/des violons d'automne . . ." and so on, and keys it in, and our computer translates it, and we get, "Whose woods these are I think I know . . ." Once again the message received is not at all like the message sent, and it might seem that we're no farther along.

The solution.

But you'll see the solution as soon as the Frenchman again sends "Allons, enfants . . ." What's going to happen? All other things being equal, your computer is going to print out, "Fourscore and seven . . ." again. Voilà! (I seem to be in a French mood). I may not know what Messages 1 and 3 were, but I know this much about them: whatever they were, they were the same message. Similarly, I know that Message 1 and Message 2 as sent were different from each other, because the messages received are different.

--All other things being equal, and of course they aren't, always. If there's a thunderstorm, for instance, it might be that Message 3 as received is "Fo*&s$o#@4 and *&xecy . . ." (You get the picture.) So I would conclude that the original messages were different when they were the same. All this shows is that we can make mistakes, if something interferes with the transmission of the data from the original source to our senses. Well of course we can. But I'll tackle how we handle that in a minute. But on the assumption that our senses are reasonably constant, we can be pretty confident that based on the relation between sensations, we can argue to the relation between the causes of the sensations.

And that is what a fact is: it is a relation between things "out there"; it isn't itself a thing. And a mistake occurs when the relation as I understand it (the relation between the messages as received) is not the

same relation as the fact (the relation between the messages as sent). Conversely, the truth means that the relation I understand matches the relation "out there" which is the fact.

So there is a matching in truth; but it's not the matching of the percept with the object, but the matching of the relationship between the objects as understood with the relation that actually obtains. This slight complication has created four hundred years of controversy.

But you might wonder how, if the basis of my understanding is my private sensations, you and I can agree on what the facts are, since there's no guarantee that my sensations match yours. That is, the actual sensation I have when confronted with grass might be the same as the one you have when confronted with rubies. Each of us could then get objective knowledge; but it would be different, wouldn't it?

Nope. Consider the analogy. When "Allons, enfants . . ." is sent, I, as I said, receive "Fourscore and seven . . ." Let us assume that your computer is different, and the message you receive is "When in the course of human events . . ." Clearly, the message you get is nothing like mine, nor is it like the message sent.

But then when "Les sanglots . . ." is sent, I get "Whose woods . . ." and let's say you get, "Let us go then, you and I . . ." Again, there's no similarity with your message, nor with the message sent. But in both cases, the messages received are different when the sent messages are different.

And, of course, if "Allons . . ." is sent again, I get, "Fourscore . . ." again, and again you get "When . . ." So when the messages sent are the same as each other, the messages received by each receiver will be the same as each other, even though your messages are different from mine.

Thus, though I don't know what's going on in your head, or what the "thing in itself" actually is, I know the relations between the "things-in-themselves," and so do you, and we both agree on what these relations are.

So when I say, "The grass is green," I mean "The grass has something in it that affects my eyes the same way emeralds and go-lights do," you will agree that this is the case, whether or not the actual sensation you have matches mine. Our objective knowledge extends beyond our own minds, because it doesn't deal with what's in our minds. The process of understanding relationships bypasses the subjectivity of our minds, and zeros in on the one objective characteristic involved in the situation: the relationship itself.

So yes, we can get objective knowledge about facts "out there," and also knowledge that we can all agree on; we are not locked into the subjectivity of our own impressions.

Mistakes.

But what about mistakes? And more importantly, how can we recognize them and correct them? Again, the basic answer is pretty simple, though of course in many cases the actual working out of it can be very complicated.

Take a person who is red-green colorblind. How does he recognize that there's something wrong with the way he sees, and learn not to trust his vision when it's a question of red and green? He has the first clue when he makes a remark like "Wasn't it stupid of them to make the stop light and the go light the same color, so that we have to remember which is on top?" His friend looks at him in astonishment and says, "What are you talking about? They're completely different colors." "Well, they look the same to me." "Well, they're not. Ask anybody."

What's happened here is that because of a defect in the retina of the eye, the color-as-seen is the same both times; so the relation as received is not the same as the relation between the sending objects; it is as if one person in our analogy received "Fourscore and seven . . ." all three times. Now the colorblind person is faced with a dilemma. Either he understands the objective situation correctly, or he's making a mistake because of something wrong with his sight.

So he asks other people. Why? Because if practically everybody else tells him the colors look different, then either (a) they're lying and in a conspiracy to deceive him, (b) they've all got some special peculiarity of their eyes that records the same energy as if it were different, or (c) he's the one that has something wrong with him. Since the first two alternatives are unreasonable, he adopts the third, and learns not to trust himself when it comes to red and green.

So this shows how we can make mistakes, and one way we can learn of them and correct them. But there's another, and this is the transition into science. I mentioned that when you see the sun's light and feel its heat, the two sensations (the messages as received) are entirely different, while the energy (the message sent) is basically only different degrees of the same kind of energy. But how do we know this?

Obviously, you can't know it by asking anyone else, since our receiving instruments (eyes and heat sensors) are basically similar among all human beings--similar enough, at any rate, so that everyone will agree that the two energies are different. But it was discovered that spectrometers that are built to react only to electromagnetic radiation (the stuff that affects our eyes) react to both light and (radiant) heat, though to different degrees. So now we have a different receiver that says both are the same, and we're faced with a dilemma analogous to the one the colorblind person faced. Which is right? Our senses or the instrument? Well, the more reasonable conclusion is that, since we have different sense organs, they need not be responding to different kinds of acts, but only different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; and so a difference in degree might reasonably show up as a qualitative difference due to the qualitative difference in the sensing organs.

Note here that there's no magic in the instrument, making it receive a "copy" of the original energy; it doesn't "know things as they really are" any more than we do. And instruments aren't necessarily more accurate than our senses, either. Ask anyone who knits and has made the mistake of buying yarn of the same color from different dye lots. They look exactly the same when you see the two balls of yarn, but when you look at the sweater, there's this line where you began the second ball, because our eyes are extremely accurate at noting differences in adjacent color-masses. No, instruments' usefulness is not that they're "truer" or "more accurate," really, it's that they're a different receiving-system, and we can "ask" them how they "see" things (i.e. what the relation is between their readouts) and compare this with the relations in our minds--and so eliminate a source of mistakes about relationships that are actually "out there."

What science is doing.

But science, basically, is doing more than just supplying instruments, and it's useful to know this so that you know where you can trust science without worshiping it.

First of all, when scientists say that all they talk about is what is observable, and they don't deal with unobservable things, they're talking nonsense. No one ever observed a dinosaur, because dinosaurs were extinct long before humans ever existed; but no paleontologist believes that dinosaurs are "mere mental constructs." There were such things--or if you want to get picky, animals very like them. Even more telling, no scientist ever observed radio waves, and no scientist or anyone else ever will; they're in principle unobservable (because, according to quantum mechanics, the attempt to do so would alter them in ways I don't have to bother you with). When scientists say they're "observing" radio radiation, what they're observing, of course, is either sounds coming out of the speaker, or needles on a dial, or a printout, not the radiation itself.

So science does talk about the unobservable. But how can it do this, if all we've got to go on is our sensations? Once again, the answer is simple. On the assumption that the impossible doesn't happen, then when what I observe is impossible unless something unobserved is a fact, then I know that the unobserved something is a fact.

Why do we know that there were dinosaurs? Because no known animal has the type of bones we find in places like the La Brea tar pits. But since bones don't grow on trees, it's impossible (for practical purposes) for there to be bones unless they're bones of some animal. Therefore, if there's no known animal now that has bones like these, then there was an animal with these bones. And based on characteristics of the bones, we can know characteristics of the animal. For instance, it couldn't have been a herbivore with "tearing" teeth like this, and so it must have been carnivorous--and so on.

Now it's thinkable that there might have been some little men on Mars who said one day, "Let's fool these earthlings into thinking that weird animals roamed the earth," whereupon they got their bone-factory humming and made a bunch of enormous bones that they then buried in strategic places for us to find. It's thinkable, but that kind of "solution" makes even less sense than saying that the bones "jus' growed."

Similarly, when Peter Jennings in the studio says certain things into the microphone and my speaker picks it up, then (even though there's no observable connection between them) there has to be some connection, or it's just coincidence that my speaker happened to be making the same kind of noises that he's making into the microphone. But this coincidence is so great as to be for practical purposes impossible. Therefore, there's radio radiation, which connects the two. There has to be.

So science is not just an arranging of the observed data into neat little patterns. What makes science exciting is that it is the discovery of new and unobserved, and sometimes unobservable, facts based on the fact that the facts we do observe sometimes make no sense unless there are these unobserved facts. The observed "nonsense-unless" facts, of course, are called "effects," and the "fact that makes sense out of them" is called the "cause." Science looks for causes of observed effects.

Now all this in practice is very tricky, because, first of all, it's easy to misread the data and think that something doesn't make sense when it's just your approach to it that doesn't. To take a homely example, you might try to find out how your keys got out of your pocket ("They didn't just walk out, you know."), and then find out that the "problem" was that you didn't put them there this morning in the first place. That's why science has to observe. It has to find out (a) that there's real evidence that something in-itself-impossible is going on, and (b) exactly what it is about it that doesn't make sense.

But the other tricky thing is that for any problem like this, there are an infinity of possible solutions; that is, for any effect, there are an infinity of possible causes--and you want the one that actually did the job. We saw this above with the green men on mars and the bones. Another possibility here would be that the soil was such that it took ordinary cow bones, say, and distorted them so that they looked like what we call T. Rex. And so on. How do you distinguish the cause (the right explanation) from all these possibilities?

Here's what makes science science and not just speculation. Any "cause" you dream up will turn out to have logical implications beyond what you've so far observed. If it really is the cause, then it's a fact, and if you can show that this means that something else must also be a fact, then that something else will be a fact too.

This is "prediction." Any--well, practically any--scientific theory will predict hitherto unobserved (but observable) "facts." So you "verify" the theory by seeing if these are facts. If they aren't, you throw the theory out, because it can't be the real explanation; it doesn't make sense.

For instance, the original atomic theory of matter supposed that atoms were the ultimate particles (atomon in Greek means "uncuttable"), which would predict that there couldn't be any splitting of the atom. We know to our sorrow that this prediction was falsified, and so the atomic theory now has atoms that are complex systems of subatomic particles. Newton's theory of gravitation fell when it turned out that its prediction of where Mercury had to be--I won't bore you with the details--turned out to be a mile or two off, a fact not discovered until we had the sophisticated instruments of this century. Now physicists have switched to Einstein's theory (actually, theories) of relativity, which make sense out of all that Newton did, plus certain facts his theory can't explain.

The relevance of all this.

Now what has all this got to do the New Morality and the First Great Commandment? Several things. First of all, it shows how we can get at objective knowledge, knowledge of more than trivial tautologies, and knowledge that is valid for all of us. Facts are facts, and we can find out what they are.

Note this: Facts don't depend on our knowledge of them; it's the other way round. Still less do they depend on our "perception" of them; and so there aren't "facts for you" that are different from "facts for me." There aren't "black facts" or "white facts" or "Democrat facts" or "Republican facts," there are just facts: relations between what is "out there." If something is a "fact for you" and not a "fact for me," all this means is that at least one of us is mistaken about what the actual fact is. The "fact for me" is not a fact; it is my (possibly mistaken) understanding of a fact.

Secondly, science shows us how we can get at facts we don't directly observe, when the ones we do directly observe don't make sense by themselves. We can then argue to what the causes of these effects are, if we're careful.

And thirdly, we know how we can test these theories about what the unobserved facts are. We can make predictions from them, about what must logically be true if they are true, and find out whether the predictions come true or not. If they don't, then the theory is false.

And we don't have to do physics or chemistry to be able to use this. We can apply a version of scientific method to anything someone comes up with as an explanation of (a theory about) anything.

For instance, the theory that no one can really know what the facts are has to be a false theory, because it predicts that if it's true (if it's a fact), it can't be known. But supposedly the people who hold it claim to know it. The theory that the only facts we know are things we directly observe has to be a false theory, because that predicts that you don't know (a) that you ever fell asleep (how could you observe your unconscious state?), (b) that you've got a brain (have you ever seen it?), (c) that you had great-great-great grandparents, (d) that what you remember happening yesterday actually happened (you can't go back there and observe it all over again), and on and on and on.

And since the First New Commandment, that there's no absolute truth, predicts the absolute truth that there's no absolute truth, we can safely disobey this Commandment and look for what the facts really, objectively are. And we're now in a position to tackle the Second New Commandment, and find out whether it makes sense to say that morality is a purely personal matter, and there are no moral absolutes. Does that theory predict its own opposite too?

A corollary about goodness and badness.

But before we do this, I'm going to draw a conclusion that'll probably shock the conservatives who are reading this. While truth and error are fundamentally objective, goodness and badness aren't. There's no such fact "out there" that's the objective goodness of something.

To still their beating hearts, let me hasten to say that this does not mean that right and wrong aren't objective. As we'll see (be patient), good and bad are not the same as right and wrong.

We say something's "bad" when the facts don't match what we think the facts "ought" to be; as when we see a blind man, and we say, "But human beings are the kind thing that can see, and he can't see; as human he ought to be able to see." We don't want to call him non-human, and we don't want to give up the idea that humans can see. What do we have eyes for, if not to see? And he's got them; they just don't work.

Now there's been a ton of theories over the centuries about where the "ideal" comes from that we use to measure whether something's good or bad. Most say it's because we can "intuit the nature" of things, and know that men "by nature" can see; and so the blind man is in an objectively unnatural condition. But the only objective knowledge we have is of the relationships between things, and this "nature" that we objectively know is basically a relationship--which obviously doesn't obtain in all cases, or there wouldn't be blind people.

To make a very long story very short, what's going on here is that we observe people seeing with their eyes, and form the reasonable theory that eyes have sight as their property; and therefore, we predict that what has eyes can see. We find a blind man; but since the theory has so much going for it, we don't want to just throw it out; so we say, "Well sure, but sight involves a very complex mechanism, and he might still be a seeing-type-thing and have something wrong with the mechanism he uses to see." So we reattach his retina, for instance, and lo and behold, he sees again--which verifies that we were right in our theory. So then when we see another blind man, we say he ought to be able to see: meaning that "reason tells us that deep down, he's a seeing thing."

So badness occurs when some factual situation seems to contradict a well-established theory we have, and we don't want to give up the theory. In other words, we have constructed an ideal, for one reason or another, using the data that's already in our heads, which we want the facts to agree with.

So what we're doing in goodness and badness as opposed to truth and error is looking at the truth/error relation backwards. In the truth/error relation, we take the fact (the relation "out there") as the "independent variable," and adjust the relationship as understood until it agrees with the fact; in the good/bad relation, we take the ideal (the subjectively constructed situation--what's "in here") as the standard, and want the facts (what's "out there") to agree with it.

But since this ideal is in the last analysis subjectively constructed, it can have more or less of a foundation in fact. You might think that everyone ought to be able to see, or you might think that everyone ought to be able to afford a Ferrari; you might think that everybody ought to love everybody else, or that everybody ought to be able to do just as he pleases. But no matter how much foundation the ideal has in fact, as you conceive it it doesn't exist. You want it to exist, because you'd like the world to make sense in this way; but no matter how much you'd like the world to be different, it is what it is, because facts are facts.

Now all this business of evaluation and of ideals and goodness and badness would be a total waste of time if facts were totally inflexible and couldn't change. But we know very well that if we do certain things, we can change what the facts will be, often in the direction of some ideal we have.

And thus, we can turn ideals into goals. We say, "I know that you can't see, but I know what's the matter with your eyes, and I'll fix them so that you will be able to see." And if you know what you're doing, and the person's eyes actually can be fixed in the way you intend to fix them, then the goal is reached, and the result is good (because the fact now matches your ideal--and also true, of course, because your idea now matches the fact).

But there's a twofold problem here: (1) Not all ideals are even in principle reachable, because they might involve some contradiction. For instance, you can't make a TV set belong to you just by taking it--because you know that when someone steals something from you, it still belongs to you. (2) What you're dealing with simply might not in fact have the power to get to the goal you've set for it, even if there's no contradiction involved. Many is the person who trains for the Olympics and doesn't get the gold medal, because he just doesn't have the potential.

But followers of the First New Commandment don't see this. Since facts are "facts for" them, they think they can make something be true just by declaring it, or by having it as a goal. "Make love, not war. We can solve all problems if we just talk them out." Oh yes? A nice goal, but will it work? Remember the old song, which epitomized this New Morality wishful thinking? "Everyone knows an ant/can't/move a rubber-tree plant . . . . Whoops, there goes another rubber tree plant!" All well and good in the dreams of LSD and the Age of Aquarius, but it doesn't work in the real world.

The New Morality is fond of trying things that "ought" to work, and when they don't, they say, "But that's because we haven't tried enough of it"--whereupon, they demand more money, rather than sitting back and figuring out why you can't get there by this road. It's all part of the First New Commandment. Because they have the right goal, and because facts for them are what they want them to be, then don't bother them with your mean-spirited "practicality"--they know what your agenda is.

But what about this business that good and bad aren't the same as right and wrong? How can you take a theory of goodness like this and construct an objective morality out of it? That's what we'll be doing in the next couple of chapters.

But for now, if you've followed me so far, then pat yourself on the back. You now know more than practically all the greatest minds that ever lived, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. But it's not because you and I are all that bright; it's because we've been able to build on theories that have been tested over the centuries.