The Bloj

Assertion cannot always be verbalized.

Posted on March 16th, 2007 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc., Philosophy.

We can, in broad terms, speak of two formulations of knowledge: objective and subjective. Objective truth identifies the existence of reality without human perception; subjective truth claims, vaguely speaking, that no such thing exists outside of human and social construction (constructivism).

A common refutation of this formulation of subjective truth is, loosely constructed, as follows:

1. Someone who believes knowledge is subjective claims there is no absolute truth.
2. This claim is a form of absolute truth.
3. Therefore, the person who supports subjective truth contradicts themselves.

(This is not the actual (or even logical) argument, but the framework is the same.) Essentially, the goal is typically to derive a violation of the idea of non-contradiction; that an idea P and not P cannot both be.

The difficulty, for a true relativist, is that the language in which one construct ideas–the playing field on which objective and subjective philosophers play–is fundamentally objective. A relativist, for example, does not claim there is no absolute truth; for to do so would be to venture outside the bounds of relativism. The idea that is in play here does not go down easily in words–”I think subjective truth is an interesting idea,” “I do not claim the existence of an objective truth” come to mind.

English is quite capable of expressing preference–the idea that “the theory of gravity is preferable to me in that I assert it to describe some objective reality” is shortened to “I believe in the theory of gravity.” We can choose to agree or disagree quite well with English; we can construct a verbal model of the world and claim it to be true (like the theory of gravity).

But the possibility of expressing something which is not a preference or an assertion is, given our tools, not efficient. Perhaps it can be constructed through analogy: (unrelated: no spoilers, this is the start of the book)

In Crime and Punishment, Rashkolnikov, the protagonist of the story, begins by murdering an old lady and taking her money, believing he will benefit society. There is no Rashkolnikov person in real life, so to claim that it means anything to say “Rashkolnikov lived in such and such a house” is, in a way, absurd. Nevertheless we can say it.

Is this statement true or false? It is not, in the traditional sense of the word, false; there is no Rashkolnikov to not live in the house (as opposed to having actual objects to work with, for example “last year the LA Lakers won the World Series”; where we know both the Lakers and the Series exist and can thus prove the statement false). We might as well have claimed a Zort is not a Pagromiter. Nevertheless the statement “Rashkolnikov lived in such and such a house” is somehow meriting consideration and not pointless.

We could argue, perhaps, that what we really mean to say is that “In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, he describes a character, Rashkolnikov, who lived in such and such a house” and thus claim that is what we meant to say. However, for this to work, we must remember that we did not say “Rashkolnikov lived in such and such a house” first; Dostoevsky did. This does not sink the argument by itself; we could argue that Dostoevsky, in writing his work, produced a factual statement like this:

In a story I wrote called Crime and Punishment, there was an exceptionally hot evening early in July. On this evening, in this imaginary story world, a young man came out of the garret (in this imaginary world) in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

Is this absurd or not? For a follower of objective truth, it is now necessary to talk about the existence of imagination; we are now constructing a region of the mind that perceives things that do not exist outside of the mind. This, in a twisted result, makes it viable for the relativist to be a relativist; what they think can be filed as the property of their imagination.

But if “truth is relative” is simply a thought of the imagination, much like a story, then what use is it? It cannot be used to prove anything or make claims, though “truth is objective” does not make any claims of its own. Practically, a pilot need not know the truth in gravity to use it; philosophically, a thinker who believes “truth is objective” merely goes to bed with more certainty about the possibility that their beliefs are true (though, since our ability to prove truth may not be quite up to it, we may, in the end, still not know anything). The argument about “what use” is thus, probably sophistry.

Another analogy may prove to be useful. When we talk about a painting, we no longer have recourse to the language we could normally resort to–truth and falsity. Paintings by Raphael and Rembrandt, we may argue, are constructions meant to have the same look as a scene the artist saw in real life; what, then, does a painting mean when the painting cannot be understood in this manner?

When we engage in dialogue, one of the implicit assumptions we make is that we speak of facts–things that are and things that are not. When critiquing artwork, this language can make discussion difficult and unwieldy. In contemporary, non-commercial art, the final statement is often the art itself (i.e. art qua art, and not art qua interpretative essay or money), and this statement is often nonverbal. Thus, for us to talk of “truth” at all, different language must be developed; we cannot assert Painting A over Painting B.

The past passage is the unwinding of the statement “what if ideas did not merely express themselves in truth and falsity?” One way to look at subjectivism and relativism is to consider them not antiobjectivism in nature, but rather a general sense that the realities of the world are non-verbal, much like a painting. The world, after all, simply is; the way we choose to label it is by using words and terms.

This, however, actually leaves room for objective reality to exist. A painting can be an assertion, and so can the world, even if we are not capable of expressing them linguistically; or, they can perhaps only subjectively exist, as constructed perception. I will stop here, so as not to cheapen the argument by making a judgment of truth or falsity.

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect…Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid fact. No such world is available. The closest men come to it is when they are infants or when they become insane: then, in a terrifying scene of meaningless events and senseless confusion, they are often seized with the panic of near-total insecurity. But in their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by ready-made interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and shall never meet. Yet for every man these images–provided by strangers and dead men–are the very basis of his life as a human being.

-C. Wright Mills, The Cultural Apparatus

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