vol 3: Development
cap 1: Epistemology
page 4: Truth
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Truth
Truth, correlation and communication
Science seeks the truth. To know truth is to know that a thing and a mind are in some way equal to one another. Aquinas asks 'Is god truth?' and replies
As said above, truth is found in the intellect according as it apprehends a thing as it is; and in things according as they have being conformable to an intellect. This is to the greatest degree found in God. For His being is not only conformed to His intellect, but it is the very act of His intellect; and His act of understanding is the measure and cause of every other being and of every other intellect, and He Himself is His own existence and act of understanding. Whence it follows not only that truth is in Him, but that He is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth. Aquinas 103 | Original text
If truth is to have a non-trivial meaning, it must apply to more than strict identity, since to know the truth of an identity is simply to know that I, for instance, am identical to myself. This tells us very little. The simplicity of god, as conceived by Aquinas and many before and after him, makes god impregnable to us. An alternative route to god may be available.
Truth exists when two distinct parts of the universe are correlated with one another, like the kitchen in front of me and the image on my retina. The lens of my eye may be said to perform a truth preserving transformation of the scene in front of me. This is equivalent to communication, since the effect of communication is to correlate a receiver of information with a transmitter of information. Truth is a relationship created and tested by communication.
Abstraction
In the classical model of god, idea and thing are effectively identical. This is not so in human knowledge. The image on my retina, although it is a faithful representation of my kitchen, it is nowhere near as complex as the original. It is abstract, ignoring for instance atomic detail and elements of the scene that are obscured by objects in my foreground. When we seek truth, we seek true abstract representations of real things. So when I say that nn is an honest person, I am compressing a lifetime of experience in complex real world situations into a few words.
The contents of communication are also abstract. It is true that I am hungry, but the sentence 'I am hungry' contains only a minuscule fraction of the complex states within my body that correspond to the feeling of hunger.
The mathematical theory of communication
Since truth is intimately related to communication, the mathematical theory of communication helps us to understanding and acquire truth. Khinchin This theory deals with the problem of transmitting a message, encoded in symbols, from one point to another. It tells us the conditions necessary to achieve this transmission without error, that is without the receiver receiving a string of symbols different from that transmitted.
Meaning
The mathematical theory of communication is an abstract 'local' theory. Like special relativity, it applies to every communication at every point in the universe. We move from the local to more general communication through meaning. The hardware of the internet moves physical symbols around the world without error, but it does not know what they mean. Only the users know that.
Meaning comes from relationships, and relationships are non-local - they cover a distance, from me to you, for instance, or from point a to point b.
This relativity means that any particular set of transmitted symbols is only meaningful to particular users of the net. In the case of this text, for instance, the meaning is only available to we who know the English language, and are interested in and familiar with the history of these ideas.
The mathematical theory of communication shows us that the mechanism of error prevention and correction in communication revolves around coding and decoding. Meaning is also a matter of coding and decoding. Meaning and coding are central issues for this whole project, and we will return to them frequently.
The evolution of meaning
We may gain some insight into this issue by watching how our children acquire language. When they are very small, all their communications are encoded in looks, inarticulate sounds and body language. Later they begin to acquire words, then phrases and sentences. We are aware that an enormous amount of unconscious learning is required before one becomes an articulate speaker of any language. All this learning enables us to encode our thoughts and feelings into various languages and to understand the thoughts and feelings of others from the messages they send to us.
Many further years of education are required before we become skilled at reading, writing and arithmetic, which are themselves encoding and decoding operations, moving back and forth between more or less abstract representations of the world. In other words, because meanings are non-local, spread over space and time, they take time to assimilate. The more complex the meaning, the bigger it is, and we tend to come to it later in life.
As with the development of an individual mind, the evolution of the universe may also be seen as the evolution of an ability to encode and decode endlessly complex meaning. It is through meaning that distinct entities in the world are able to communicate with and influence one another. Much of the nature of the world is constrained by the properties of communication and meaning, as we shall see.
The fluidity of meaning makes often makes truth very difficult to discern. The waters are further muddies by the widespread and natural use of deception to gain advantage in all walks of life. Error, on the other hand, is relatively easy to detect: it reveals itself by the inconsistency of transmitted and received messages. If I do not hear what you are saying, our relationship is tending to break down.
(revised 17 November 2007)
...sicut dictum est, veritas invenitur in intellectu secundum quod apprehendit rem ut est, et in re secundum quod habit esse conformabile intellectui. Hoc autem maxime invenitur in Deo. Nam esse suum non solum est conforme suo intellectui, sed etiam est ipsum suum intelligere; et suum intelligere est mensura et causa omnis alterius esse, et omnis alterius intellectus; et ipse est suum esse et intelligere. Unde sequitur quod non solum in ipso sit veritas, sed quod ipse sit ipsa summa et prima veritas. back
Further reading
Books
| Hofstadter, Douglas R, Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic/Harvester 1979 An illustrated essay on the philosophy of mathematics. Formal systems, recursion, self reference and meaning explored with a dazzling array of examples in music, dialogue, text and graphics. Amazon back |
| Hofstadter, Douglas R, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, Basic Books, HarperCollins Publishers Inc 1997 Amazon: 'In the fall of 1537, a child was confined to bed for some time. The French poet Clément Marot wrote her a get-well poem, 28 lines long, each line a scant three syllables. In the mid-1980s, the outrageously gifted Douglas R. Hofstadter- il miglior fabbro of Godel, Escher, Bach - first attempted to translate this "sweet, old, small elegant French poem into English." He was later to challenge friends, relations, and colleagues to do the same. The results were exceptional, and are now contained in Le Ton Beau De Marot, a sunny exploration of scholarly and linguistic play and love's infinity. Less sunny, however, is the tragedy that hangs over Hofstadter's book, the sudden death of his wife, Carol, from a brain tumor. (Her translation is among the book's finest.) Amazon back |
| Khinchin, A I, Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory (translated by P A Silvermann and M D Friedman), Dover 1957 Jacket: 'The first comprehensive introduction to information theory, this book places the work begun by Shannon and continued by McMillan, Feinstein and Khinchin on a rigorous mathematical basis. For the first time, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, cyberneticists and communications engineers are offered a lucid, comprehensive introduction to this rapidly growing field.' Amazon back |
| O'Sullivan, Tim, and Danny Saunders, John Fiske (eds), Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, 1994 Jacket: '... a book to help you come to terms with the terms. It is a multi-disciplinary glossary of the concepts you are most likely to encounter throughout the study of communications and culture. ... Each entry consists of a brief introductory definition, followed by a more detailed discussion which covers origins, usage and controversies. All are cross referenced and supported by a full bibliography.' Amazon back |
| Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press 1949 'Before this there was no universal way of measuring the complexities of messages or the capabilities of circuits to transmit them. Shannon gave us a mathematical way...invaluable...to scientists and engineers the world over." Scientific American http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0252725484/tnrp">Amazon back |
| Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press 1996 The classic founding text of cybernetics. Amazon back |
Links
| Alfred Tarski The semantic concept of truth and the foundation of semantics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944). Originally published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4(1994). 'Our discussion will be centered around the notion of truth. The main problem is that of giving a satisfactory definition of this notion, i.e. a definition that is materially adequate and formally correct. ... ' back |
| Aquinas 103 Whether god is truth 'I answer that, ... it follows not only that truth is in Him, butthat He is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth.' back |
| Aquinas 99 Whether truth resides only in the intellect? 'I answer that, As the good denotes that towards which the appetite tends, so the true denotes that towards which the intellect tends. ... the term of the intellect, namely true, is in the intellect itself.' back |
Click on an "Amazon" link in the booklist at the foot of the page to buy the book, see more details or search for similar items
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