Continuing this tutorial series of posts on Epistemology, from defining knowledge and belief, we shall consider the ascendant qualifier for knowledge of belief, being true.
This one is quite a bit stickier a wicket. This stickiness, the controversy over it, not only in Philosophy, but, often, in daily life, has many causes. One notable reason is that we tend to assume that what we believe, whatever idea we consider or feel to be true, to actually be the truth. Worse yet, we tend to dislike testing whether a belief is actually true or not.
So, then, let me give a working definition of truth: it is the quality of an idea of being an accurate description of reality. In other words, a concept is true if its content agrees with what actually is, what actually happens.
And this introduces another reason for controversy, because we really don’t comprehend reality directly. We form in our brains models of reality, as our senses or thoughts modify it. We can even measure the time lag between aspects of vision, such as form, movement, color, details, etc. as our mental models are updated.
Many people say that we can be fooled by our senses. However, this “observation” is not accurate. Our senses are mere stimuli to our brains. It is the processing of these stimuli that can go awry. Taking our minds as “ourselves”, it is we who fool ourselves, who misinterpret our sense data. It is considerable that we activate the regions of our brains that process our senses when we imagine, or dream, and can confuse those with sensory indication of reality. Yet even more striking is that, with the introduction of a wide variety of chemicals, we can distort or even over-ride our sensory input. Certain mental illnesses can produce these effects, also.
Another complication in the perception of reality is occasional over-active pattern matching, a tendency to select among visual models, some from memory, some from imagination, and some from imagined variations of memories, to match with signals perceived from our environments. When we “see” shapes in clouds, when we “see” faces in tiles on a floor, and when we first imagine a dog lying in the road, but it’s really a burlap bag, this pattern-matching is at work.
So, it being that we can fool ourselves as to what is real, or not, we have quite a challenge testing our concepts of reality, checking to see if what we think is true, is actually true. However, the first thing to bear in mind is, that without a certain level of accuracy in our mental models of reality, we could not successfully function. We can have some confidence both in our evaluations of truth, and in our endeavors to test our comprehensions of it.
We can have some faith in our perceptions, especially in contexts similar to the environs our ancestors survived. The farther away from those contexts, the more vigilant we ought to be to exercise critical thinking, the asking “what may be wrong with this?”, and work to test our interpretations.
I’ll continue with methods of testing true in the next post, and hope to deal with ramifications of the above definitions, such as the universality of truth, and cognitive biases that affect our comprehension, and modification thereof, of truth.
Changelog:
2018-9-21 Added links, a description of a complication in perception, and some examples, and an expansion from an evolutionary view. Added a changelog. Added tags.
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