Truth and Language

In my posts lately I’ve been engaging Susan R. on the nature of truth and language.  

As always, she has good things to say in the comments: here, she and Daisy (another outstanding contributor, from a more fundamentalist but still open-minded point of view) provoke my thoughts.

I’ve broken it down into three parts, because it’s kinda long.

PART 1: TRUTH AND CONSENSUS

Also sprach Soozin:

I was particularly pleased by the beginning you made in differentiating between the various ways we speak about fact and truth: scientific fact (very amenable to proof but extremely narrow in scope), historical truth (much broader in scope but correspondingly less amenable to proof), performative language, and poetic truth. But it feels like there are large gaps there, still. There has to be a category for truth that exists by common consensus, for example. (“The capital of Louisiana is Baton Rouge.”) And is there room in our understanding of truth for divine revelation? Is there a hierarchy of truth?

First of all, I think that all “truth propositions” are rooted in some sort of consensus.

That is, there are no claims you can make about true things that don’t depend on some agreement on definitions, use of language, admissible evidence and so on.  No truth-claim is so obvious (“My son is sixteen years old”) that does not rest on layers of agreement, many of which are thankfully opaque in the sense that we don’t have to endlessly re-define what “sixteen years old” means, or to whom the phrase “my son” refers.

The capital of Louisiana is Baton Rouge because we agree it is so, and we have performative language (a statute on the books in Louisiana) that makes it so.  

Similarly, we agree that if we take about six-tenths of a penny’s worth of fiber and stamp it with the proper symbols, it becomes worth $100 in goods and services.  The hundred dollar bill is itself worthless without that agreement, that shared imagination that it will be worth something.   Indeed, when that imagination breaks down, we say “the dollar is devalued.”  Right enough: for on the day when very few people agree, then it is “no longer true” that Baton Rouge is the capital, and no longer true that a Benjamin is worth a lot more than the paper it’s printed on.

So maybe the best answer to your questions is, all acknowledged truth-claims (even implicit ones) are by consensus, though perhaps not all truths are.  How rigorously that consensus can or should be achieved is really the question, I think.

For science (and logical positivism, its hanger-on), truth-claims are literally meaningless if they cannot be falsified.   Thus, it doesn’t even really allow the dignity of a real truth-claim to the idea that there is a god situated outside observable reality: if you can’t prove it false, you got nothin’.

For the rest of us (I’m not a logical positivist), we may be glad of science’s methods when we fly in a jet or cook in a microwave or go under anesthesia.  But we don’t need to practice such rigor over breakfast.

But my feeling is that the more intrusive your claim (“There are invisible fairy giraffes with butterfly wings and you owe them your worship”) the more you kind of owe us some respect for consensus.

And your question about the role of revelation is essential here: because special revelation of the thus-saith-Yahweh variety specifically does an end-run around around consensus.  No matter what the rest of us agree on, This Is The Truth.  No matter what you see, This Is The Truth.  No matter what reason tells you, This Is The Truth.

Revelation’s a perfectly acceptable (to me) category of “truth,” but it has the distinct disadvantage of being persuasive only to the converted, unless it appeals to truths that are open to more general consensus.

You can see this in prophecy most clearly: when prophecy unambiguously “comes true,” well and good: anybody listening will have to agree that a prophet nailed it.   But when it doesn’t come true, or only comes true ambiguously, your faithful are put in a really awkward position: they have to “reinterpret” the prophecy based not on consensus about the meanings of things, but on “private” meanings.  Thus, Hosea 1:8-11 boldly proclaims the reunification of the Northern and Southern kingdoms under one banner, a prophecy resoundingly denied a few short years later in 722 B.C. when the Assyrians crushed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and put its people to the sword and to flight.

One can surely reinterpret the verses to reflect something besides their obvious meaning, but where’s the “revelation” in this, exactly?  Certainly not in the obvious meaning: if it’s “revealed,” it’s a puzzle unless it’s accurate unambiguous prophecy.  And while I like a puzzle well enough, I’m not sure there’s any text from Nostredamus to the National Enquirer that can’t be reinterpreted until it makes some sort of sense.  That’s just bad method.

A digression: This is why the “argument from prophecy” is such a shaky foundation to rest Christian faith on: I have seen and heard accurate, bonafide prophecy, real prediction and insight that runs dead to the mark and which the prophet has no business knowing.  When you see it, it can freak you out.  But I mean the Christian apologetic argument that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy so completely that reasonable observers should have faith in the gospel claims.  The Old Testament prophecies are highly poetic, and the gospels are specifically written “that you might believe” with the explicit strategy of showing how Jesus fulfilled those prophecies.  In other words, the gospel writers write with their sources about Jesus in one hand but the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) open on the table in front of them, mining prophecies that were traditionally thought to be “messianic,” and writing the story of Jesus with those in view.  And in every other case where an agenda and a fairly unrigorous method (prophecy and the interpretation of fulfillment) meet, I would tend to be cautious in accepting testimony at face value.  The problem is compounded by the variations within the gospels: in any other case, if my four chief witnesses (five if you count St. Paul, and I do) have significant variation in details, I do think that the “factual claims” (Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy) come in for questioning: the writers have demonstrated a frank interest in “shaping” the story, which is fine.  But it moves the stories a bit to the left of “factual discourse.”

But to return to my main point, the in-group and the out-group are largely determined by who participates in which consensus: to not affirm the Resurrection places you outside the Christian consensus… that is, you acknowledge different truths than the Christians do.  If all reasonable humans acknowledge a truth, we say it’s a fact.

 
PART 2: POETIC TRUTH-CLAIMS ARE NOT “OPINIONS” 

Also, how does the truth imbedded in poetry differ from opinion? If Brent says of his best girl, Roxy, “My love is a red, red rose”, but Bob comes back with, “Your love is a big, dumb cow” can we know anything about Roxy from the exchange, or have we merely been enlightened about Brent and Bob’s feelings? Huge difference.

I think that we have to make a distinction between “truth” and “a truth-claim.”  When Brent says “My love is a red, red rose,” we know (or ought to know: not everybody does) that the nature of his claim is about a subjective state.  That’s not precisely the same as an opinion, which might be stated without any ambiguity or any metaphor at all: “Roxy is foxy.”  We might not agree with a bare opinion.  But it differs from his poetic statement at least insofar as the poetic statement is designed to offer an invitation into, not a statement about, the writer’s (unverifiable) internal state.

And in that sense it’s more like a religion or myth than it is like an “opinion.”  Poems and poetic language invite the audience in to participate in that subjective state rather than assuming a potentially hostile reception.  Poetry and religion speak to faith, not to the hostile, the unwashed, or the uninitiated.  It creates emotional reactions and responses in the audience, and creates (the poet hopes) a new configuration of reality, one in which his brain and his beloved’s are not quantum-locked against each other, but flow in the same channel.

And history seems to suggest it works from time to time.

Hell, that’s what religion really is: a poem that integrates the hearer into its own movement, joining minds that were previously much more distinct, and joining them in some rather intriguing ways. 

PART 3: BUBBLE-WRAPPING UNVERIFIABLE TRUTHS

 I don’t worry overmuch about always couching my unverifiable truth claims in a bubble-wrap of “I believe”, “I think”, etc.—it’s tiresome and poor style. Similarly, I’m probably willing to give the definition of fact more latitude than you are. (Rabbit trail: I’ve become interested enough in the origin and usage of “fact” to haul out my OED—and find the little magnifying glass to go with it. Apparently its earliest denotations in the 16th century revolved around the idea of an action done or performed, similar to a “feat.”) Conventionally, a fact can be defined as something that is generally acknowledged to be true, and while the resurrection has never been overwhelmingly acknowledged to be true, it has been regarded as true within a large chunk of the population for a couple millennia, so I’d cut your buddies some slack there, maybe.

Sure.  I don’t think it’s wieldy to go around saying “I believe” every time you reference the Resurrection.  On the other hand, it’s depressing if you’re challenged on this point and you don’t immediately perceive your position.

I think the difficulty is that Christians have a habit of using the word “fact” equivocally.  I seriously doubt that any evangelical would say, “Oh, yes, I mean that the Resurrection is a fact in the sense of ‘something generally acknowledged to be true.’”  They might fall back on that definition when they’re challenged, but it’s so they can clutch at the status of “fact.”  Their reason for doing so is that “fact” is, for most of us, the gold-standard of truth.  It’s something not only claimed, but proven.  It’s survived falsifiability. 

I don’t blame them for that.  But it’s playing fast and loose with the word. 

If you start off a conversation by disdaining a belief in space aliens, you’re presumably doing so because your experiences or information don’t confirm that belief in aliens.

Fair enough.  No matter how many people might privately believe in aliens, and no matter how much we might be obligated to belief in the probability of extra-terrestrial life in this enormous cosmos, the evidence for alien abductions and close encounters of humans is slim and approaching nil.

If you immediately turn around and claim the highest status of truth-claim (that is, “fact,” which has purchase on every reasonable person invited to give or withhold consensus) for the Resurrection, you have some confusion about your method.   If you then plead, “Well, people have acknowledged it as true for millenia,” you’re not doing your case much good.  Far longer than they’ve acknowledged a Resurrection, they’ve acknowledged the “fact” of Zeus and the importance of sacrifice to ensure a good harvest.

Comments

[Susan]

Thanks much, Otter. I especially enjoyed the section on “poetic truth,” and Part 3 brought me much closer to understanding where you’re coming from on the “fact” issue.

Regarding

I seriously doubt that any evangelical would say, "Oh, yes, I mean that the Resurrection is a fact in the sense of 'something generally acknowledged to be true.'"

I’m sure you’re correct. I do think that some evangelical subcultures are insular enough, however, that they have come to regard the Resurrection as something generally acknowledged to be true among all right-thinking people, and when reminded that that is not the case in the larger culture, they experience the surge of fear/hostility that gives rise to defensiveness.

Speaking as a believer who has some interactions across several different subcultures, it is a bit perplexing to know how to speak clearly and succinctly on these issues. A lot of chaos ensues (has ensued, will ensue) when a community recites, “On the third day [Jesus Christ] rose again” in unison every Sunday and some folks mean it literally and some symbolically. In that context, I think using “fact” en re the Resurrection is not so much a clutching at a gold-standard for truth, but shorthand for “they killed him good and dead, but later the tomb was empty, Thomas tickled his ribs, he had a seafood brunch with buddies, and a whole mess of people saw him walking and talking and breathing out the Breath of Life.” That’s what I mean when I recite the creeds, and if someone were to ask, “Susan, would you say the Resurrection of Jesus a fact?” I’d probably just blurt out “Yes!” without slowing down enough to ask the speaker to define his terms. And I would--modestly :)--assert that that's not due so much to fuzzy thinking as it is to nodding to conventional usage.

[Otter]

Yes. And you mean it. ;)

More power to you.

If anybody accuses you of being thoughtless, send 'em to me: I'll set 'em straight.