I Want Truths, Not Facts! (But Sometimes Truths are Facts?)
Sep 24th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 3 Comments |
Do you ever wonder how good or bad you really are at something, and think, “If I only knew how good or bad other people were at the same thing, I’d know how good or bad I am?”
We philosophers tend to like standards and whatnot to be “a priori.” (”A priori” means the same thing as, “knowable before experience/observation.”)
In other words, we tend to prefer “The Way Things Are” to not have to be discovered by surveys and polls and questionnaires and field studies and lab tests, etc.
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You remember Indiana Jones in Last Crusade?
Archaeology is the search for fact . . . not truth. If it’s truth you’re looking for, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.
So, for example, we tend to prefer truths like, “Two contradictory statements can’t both be true,” rather than facts like, “X% of Americans think John McCain is a great guy.”
The truths are what you can know “ahead of time.” Facts are what you can only know after making a lot of phone calls (or after wearing white lab coats and pouring steaming green liquids out of beakers into vials and then putting the vials into mass spectrometers so that when Grissom walks in you’ll have a printout of the results which you can cryptically tell him about rather than just handing him the printout and not wasting his time by making him wait for you to get around to your point).
The former don’t change. The latter do.
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I’m working on my dissertation at the moment, as you know. I’ll be starting work on another draft of one of its various parts soon, and am wondering, “Am I ahead of the game or behind it? Am I doing well (objectively speaking) or doing poorly?”
And it seems to me the only way to know that is to know how other Ph.D. candidates do (on average?) when writing their dissertations.
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So I’m either doing well objectively, or doing poorly objectively. And what’s a good or bad performance on a disseration shouldn’t really change over time. That is, I’m either meeting an Objective Standard (which standard should be an a priori truth), or I’m not.
And yet the only way to know what the Objective Standard is, I’d have to do a survey.
Or ask my dissertation director. (In other words, I can’t know it a priori.)
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But it’s the principle of the thing. Truths shouldn’t be like facts.
If “The Way Things Are” is empirical (i.e., something you can only discover through experience/experiment) it should be contingent (i.e., changeable, not necessarily the way it happens to be at the moment).
And if it’s absolute it should be a priori.
You shouldn’t have to ask about truths like you do about facts. You should be able to “just know.”
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Oh, The Way Things Are. How thou dost not live up to mine expectations!
I can’t contribute to the discussion (I have no defensible opinion either way), but this does remind me of one of my favorite quotes, so I thought I’d pass it on.
“In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.”
- Thoreau
“You shouldn’t have to ask about truths like you do about facts. You should be able to ‘just know.’”
See…perfect example of why you’re awesome. I’ve been trying to say this for like 2 years…and you just said it. Just like that. Plain and simple.
Sigh. Good one.
After thinking about this for a couple days, I have one question/objection and one observation:
Question/objection:
Would knowing how the average student does actually provide an objective barometer to how you are currently doing? Even if every thesis topic was equally difficult, even if every panel of advisors was equally rigid, even if the other circumstances in the life of a student were equally difficult, would it really matter how you compare to these other students?
If I were you in your shoes I’d be more interested in knowing how close I was to be doing done. This seems to me to be a bit more objective.
Observation:
I think maybe facts are isolated things about the universe that we build up into truth, through wisdom or interpretation. Facts are like lincoln logs. They are answers to trivia pursuit questions. A well-built log cabin results from putting them together in the right way.