I don’t buy the premise that “If truth has intrinsic value, then you should prefer Truth Seeking to Pleasure Seeking.” You state in your post that pleasure also has intrinsic value. Thus, the fact that truth has intrinsic value does not in and of itself put it above pleasure in terms of value.
You could argue that while both truth and pleasure are intrinsically valuable, truth is more valuable on balance—which your thought experiment about adultery might appear to demonstrate.
But just because truth is more valuable than pleasure in specific examples or thought experiments doesn’t mean it’s universally more valuable in all scenarios. There are various scenarios in daily life in which white lies promote the stability of a relationship or strategic deceptions protect the safety of a country, for example.
As a side note, the fact that we are able to talk about whether truth or pleasure is more important in a given scenario may indicate that our usage of the term “intrinsic value” is a bit loose, since such a comparison requires comparing their values in terms of some third measure of utility that is even more intrinsic.
Good piece. Thanks. I’m a big proponent of truth, I’m just never sure if I actually have it, or if I just have something I wish were it.
Along those lines, I think more people than you might imagine would keep their happy marriage alive at the expense of not knowing everything their spouse does that would make them seem significantly less appealing (including cheating). There’s often a lot of denial surrounding infidelity because there are so many other factors to consider in the value of such a partnership.
You may be right about what people would do to keep a happy marriage. I don’t think my fundamental point needs that specific example, though. How about this: would you want to know the truth that all your “friends” are merely pretending to be your friend because they are paid actors, or stay in ignorance? I’d want the truth, because I want real friends, not just pretend ones.
> I’d want the truth, because I want real friends, not pretend ones.
Then isn’t the truth still valued here as a means to having real friends? If having the truth didn’t give you the opportunity to go out and make genuine friends (or find a faithful spouse), would you still want it *purely in itself*?
Great read. I wonder whether you haven’t shifted the goalpost towards the end. It’s not obvious that whether it’s ‘Ok to believe’ false claims is the same question as whether one ‘has the right to’ believe them. The nature of rights, of course, raises its own philosophical questions. In your opinion, should they not have a bearing on your argument?
P.S. In the infidelity case, one might want the truth for reasons other than its intrinsic value. For instance, one might find utility in the crying, acrimony and breakup, etc. How easy is it to eliminate utility from the conceptualisation of truth?
Thanks. I didn’t want to get hung up on any theory of rights, but rather work out what’s epistemically permissible and argue that it is epistemically impermissible to believe false things. But as long as you think there is *anything* it is wrong to believe, then it is not permissible to believe whatever you want. And therefore you’re not entitled to your own opinion. In the infidelity case, I suppose someone might find utility in the suffering of a breakup. The case was meant to be an intuition pump, but there are others that would work too. As I said to Woolery, suppose your “friends” were all paid actors. I bet you’d want to find out, just because you want true friends, not convincing fake ones.
" (1) Plenty of people believe idiotic things their whole life long and never learn from their mistakes. In fact, there’s evidence that people learn less from mistakes than success."
This is what the world is for, picking up the pieces each of us miss, or even groups of us miss. Which is why so much attention is applied by culture warriors and ideologues to controlling narratives and ignoring truth. Truth just gets in the way of a narcissists need for supply.
Value of truth to a person differs from value of truth to a group or a large society. It’s scalable and becomes more important at higher levels.
It’s definitely instrumental: Truth is needed as a ground survey to see if we can build an opinion, an idea, a law on this ground without it caving in on us.
On the personal scale skipping Truth for Pleasure happens all the time. Most decisions we make are deeply emotional and logic follows mostly on the sidelines as justification.
With group decisions, we need a common language. Truth serves well for that. Distant second best is group delusion based on religion or ideology.
Good post, however I disagree with your conclusion. I think the cheating spouse is example says more about what we want to know about truth in relationships more than truth overall. Like, I don't think there's inherent value about knowing how many planets in the universe, or if there's only one other alien civilization that's across the cosmos and impossible to reach. Put simply, I think your metaphor is laced with instrumental implications (relationships).
Something might have intrinsic value and you're not interested in it anyway. That's OK; nobody is interested in everything. You might not care about how many extrasolar planets there are, and that's fine. That doesn't make the truth of the matter lack intrinsic value. Someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson might be quite interested in that topic, and of course he will want the truth about it. It's like wandering an art museum all day and knowing that there are good pieces of art in the next room but being too tired and over-stimulated to care, so you skip it.
I dunno man (and maybe I'm just being dense from work distractions so bear with me!), that sounds like another way of saying instrumental value. Re-reading how you have defined it, I think I object to this sentence "Having the truth doesn’t really matter so long as there is no downside to false belief and believing makes you happy." But I can't formulate it right now
I am really confused about your argument for intrinsic value of truth. Even if we agree people PREFER truth in specific example discussed here (which is controversial), and that preferences is not due to other instrumental reasons such as helping them to look for more fulfilling relationships (which is more controversial), there is a huge leap to conclude truth SHOULD have intrinsic value
I specifically set up that case so there was zero instrumental benefit to learning the truth. If you find that hard to imagine, I can come up with other examples, as in my response to Woolery. In any event, I wasn’t arguing that truth *should* have intrinsic value; I’m not even sure what that would mean. I was arguing that it *does* have intrinsic value, as demonstrated by the fact that people want it for its own sake.
Well, there is a very plausible evolutionary (instrumental) benefit to learning the truth in your example: the gene pool of men who are blissfully cuckolded is going to go extinct pretty fast. Knowing the truth in that example has obvious evolutionary benefits to at keast half the population
As for the SHOULD part, I just copied it from your numbered breakdown of the argument
Well, I was arguing that truth does have intrinsic value, which is why we should adopt Truth Seeking, not that truth should have intrinsic value. In any event, I take your point about the evolutionary argument, but not sure that it applies. For one thing, it could be a cheating man spreading his seed faster than is possible with fidelity to one wife. So her genes are not losing. Second, what’s of benefit to my genes may not be instrumentally beneficial to me. For example, having as many children as possible may be great for my genetic line but leaves me in penury. Third, the infidelity argument was meant to be an example of when (nearly everyone) would rather have the truth even when harmful, but it is not the only such example.
I stumbled at the same infidelity example as most of the commenters. The setup undergoes such a radical surgery that it is distracting even if turns out, after some exhaustive analysis, that it is technically correct. The obvious, extremely likely, but omitted path #3 is that you don’t know about cheating and bad things happen, from StDs to inheritance lawsuits. Truth in this scenario has plenty of instrumental value, including evolutionary considerations. I don’t have a ready replacement, but this is not it.
But this works more generally: there is a plausible evolutionary benefit to learning any true thing even if it doesn't seem useful, because you don't know what will be useful. So this seems like it should support valuing the truth generally. This could be a mechanism _by which_ we arrive at valuing truth. It doesn't explain the value away, it just explains it.
I disagree. There are certain realms of reality that there is no good reason to believe making an accurate model of them has had evolutionary benefits, such as the subject of particle physics or the social phenomena. The argument about topic of modern physics is quite straightforward. As for the social phenomena, it is very plausible that a tribal view of social phenomena is more beneficial in evolution than an unbiased, stance independent view of it.
I think you are taking me as saying adaptedness _justifies_ valuing truth qua truth. I don't think a value necessarily needs that sort of justification, once it has been identified. We can just observe that we value something. And we could debate whether people in general actually do value truth and whether, if not, we might wish they did. But whether a context-sensitive and socially mediated preference for truth is pragmatically better than a generalized preference is not the only consideration. If the latter is simpler it could still evolve, and particularly if the population it evolves in is ill-equipped to identify the difference between potentially important and clearly irrelevant teuths. And that could explain, if such an inclination exists, where it came from; but it wouldn't be the justification. The value would just be terminal: once I receive it, it is mine, and I don't actually care what it was supposed to be for.
I have to confess I really don't understand philosophical terminology and jargon. So I didn't understand your first sentence. But I think we are talking about two different topics. I am saying that we do not have the faculty to ever get to Truth with capital T, no matter how much we want or desire it. We can get to more refined models of reality but it is a very slow, collaborative process and not accessible to armchair reasoning, but rather gradual progression of science and technological advance. I do firmly believe moving toward truth is valuable, but since I believe moving toward truth is a collaborative effort, benefitting from adversarial collaboration, I disagree with this post's main point.
I have tried to elaborate on what I mean in this post, I am not sure how successful I have been, but it is more comprehensive that comments:
You express several opinions whose truth or falsity hinges on the definition of truth. By your own standard, if you do not have a true definition of truth then all your opinions are false, since you do not even know what truth means, so you cannot even aim for it, let alone know that something ‘is true’.
A ‘true definition of truth’ involves circular logic, which implies that it cannot be defined to satisfy your standard. It follows that truth is not a fundamental normative property, so you must find something more fundamental to ground your opinions.
Ironically, almost everything that everyone ever asserts in speech is not ‘known’ to be true (which requires certainty/proof) but is merely assumed, and this ‘assumption’ is the sense of ‘opinion’, which therefore does not purport to be true or false but is merely a proposition on which social deliberation may focus on, and only on the basis of propositional deliberation can ‘true/valid’ claims be accomplished. As such, your standard implicitly disallows all deliberation, since deliberation is premised on uncertainty, therefore on opinions.
but opinions are often thought to be in the domain where there's no (clear) fact of the matter. so perhaps you are entitled to your opinion because in circumstances where opinions are coin of the realm, no one definitively knows the truth. if we all thought we knew the truth, we probably would not call your dissenting view an opinion.
Opinions are beliefs, and they could be based on experimental science, wishful thinking, the pronouncements of con men, formal proof, all kinds of things. We are justified in having some of our beliefs and not others. My point was that opinions/beliefs are not due respect merely because someone has them. Our epistemic duty is to gain truth and avoid error.
I don’t buy the premise that “If truth has intrinsic value, then you should prefer Truth Seeking to Pleasure Seeking.” You state in your post that pleasure also has intrinsic value. Thus, the fact that truth has intrinsic value does not in and of itself put it above pleasure in terms of value.
You could argue that while both truth and pleasure are intrinsically valuable, truth is more valuable on balance—which your thought experiment about adultery might appear to demonstrate.
But just because truth is more valuable than pleasure in specific examples or thought experiments doesn’t mean it’s universally more valuable in all scenarios. There are various scenarios in daily life in which white lies promote the stability of a relationship or strategic deceptions protect the safety of a country, for example.
As a side note, the fact that we are able to talk about whether truth or pleasure is more important in a given scenario may indicate that our usage of the term “intrinsic value” is a bit loose, since such a comparison requires comparing their values in terms of some third measure of utility that is even more intrinsic.
Good piece. Thanks. I’m a big proponent of truth, I’m just never sure if I actually have it, or if I just have something I wish were it.
Along those lines, I think more people than you might imagine would keep their happy marriage alive at the expense of not knowing everything their spouse does that would make them seem significantly less appealing (including cheating). There’s often a lot of denial surrounding infidelity because there are so many other factors to consider in the value of such a partnership.
You may be right about what people would do to keep a happy marriage. I don’t think my fundamental point needs that specific example, though. How about this: would you want to know the truth that all your “friends” are merely pretending to be your friend because they are paid actors, or stay in ignorance? I’d want the truth, because I want real friends, not just pretend ones.
> I’d want the truth, because I want real friends, not pretend ones.
Then isn’t the truth still valued here as a means to having real friends? If having the truth didn’t give you the opportunity to go out and make genuine friends (or find a faithful spouse), would you still want it *purely in itself*?
That absolutely does the trick for me. I’ll have to think about why that distinction makes such a difference.
Great read. I wonder whether you haven’t shifted the goalpost towards the end. It’s not obvious that whether it’s ‘Ok to believe’ false claims is the same question as whether one ‘has the right to’ believe them. The nature of rights, of course, raises its own philosophical questions. In your opinion, should they not have a bearing on your argument?
P.S. In the infidelity case, one might want the truth for reasons other than its intrinsic value. For instance, one might find utility in the crying, acrimony and breakup, etc. How easy is it to eliminate utility from the conceptualisation of truth?
Thanks. I didn’t want to get hung up on any theory of rights, but rather work out what’s epistemically permissible and argue that it is epistemically impermissible to believe false things. But as long as you think there is *anything* it is wrong to believe, then it is not permissible to believe whatever you want. And therefore you’re not entitled to your own opinion. In the infidelity case, I suppose someone might find utility in the suffering of a breakup. The case was meant to be an intuition pump, but there are others that would work too. As I said to Woolery, suppose your “friends” were all paid actors. I bet you’d want to find out, just because you want true friends, not convincing fake ones.
" (1) Plenty of people believe idiotic things their whole life long and never learn from their mistakes. In fact, there’s evidence that people learn less from mistakes than success."
This is what the world is for, picking up the pieces each of us miss, or even groups of us miss. Which is why so much attention is applied by culture warriors and ideologues to controlling narratives and ignoring truth. Truth just gets in the way of a narcissists need for supply.
A lot missed, on the important topic.
Suggest full revision.
Value of truth to a person differs from value of truth to a group or a large society. It’s scalable and becomes more important at higher levels.
It’s definitely instrumental: Truth is needed as a ground survey to see if we can build an opinion, an idea, a law on this ground without it caving in on us.
On the personal scale skipping Truth for Pleasure happens all the time. Most decisions we make are deeply emotional and logic follows mostly on the sidelines as justification.
With group decisions, we need a common language. Truth serves well for that. Distant second best is group delusion based on religion or ideology.
Hope you write more on this.
Good post, however I disagree with your conclusion. I think the cheating spouse is example says more about what we want to know about truth in relationships more than truth overall. Like, I don't think there's inherent value about knowing how many planets in the universe, or if there's only one other alien civilization that's across the cosmos and impossible to reach. Put simply, I think your metaphor is laced with instrumental implications (relationships).
Something might have intrinsic value and you're not interested in it anyway. That's OK; nobody is interested in everything. You might not care about how many extrasolar planets there are, and that's fine. That doesn't make the truth of the matter lack intrinsic value. Someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson might be quite interested in that topic, and of course he will want the truth about it. It's like wandering an art museum all day and knowing that there are good pieces of art in the next room but being too tired and over-stimulated to care, so you skip it.
I dunno man (and maybe I'm just being dense from work distractions so bear with me!), that sounds like another way of saying instrumental value. Re-reading how you have defined it, I think I object to this sentence "Having the truth doesn’t really matter so long as there is no downside to false belief and believing makes you happy." But I can't formulate it right now
I am really confused about your argument for intrinsic value of truth. Even if we agree people PREFER truth in specific example discussed here (which is controversial), and that preferences is not due to other instrumental reasons such as helping them to look for more fulfilling relationships (which is more controversial), there is a huge leap to conclude truth SHOULD have intrinsic value
I specifically set up that case so there was zero instrumental benefit to learning the truth. If you find that hard to imagine, I can come up with other examples, as in my response to Woolery. In any event, I wasn’t arguing that truth *should* have intrinsic value; I’m not even sure what that would mean. I was arguing that it *does* have intrinsic value, as demonstrated by the fact that people want it for its own sake.
Well, there is a very plausible evolutionary (instrumental) benefit to learning the truth in your example: the gene pool of men who are blissfully cuckolded is going to go extinct pretty fast. Knowing the truth in that example has obvious evolutionary benefits to at keast half the population
As for the SHOULD part, I just copied it from your numbered breakdown of the argument
Well, I was arguing that truth does have intrinsic value, which is why we should adopt Truth Seeking, not that truth should have intrinsic value. In any event, I take your point about the evolutionary argument, but not sure that it applies. For one thing, it could be a cheating man spreading his seed faster than is possible with fidelity to one wife. So her genes are not losing. Second, what’s of benefit to my genes may not be instrumentally beneficial to me. For example, having as many children as possible may be great for my genetic line but leaves me in penury. Third, the infidelity argument was meant to be an example of when (nearly everyone) would rather have the truth even when harmful, but it is not the only such example.
Thank you for your elaboration, but, let's agree to disagree:)
I just wanted to add that I do not disagree with the value of truth seeking. I just don't find the argument provided here very convincing
I stumbled at the same infidelity example as most of the commenters. The setup undergoes such a radical surgery that it is distracting even if turns out, after some exhaustive analysis, that it is technically correct. The obvious, extremely likely, but omitted path #3 is that you don’t know about cheating and bad things happen, from StDs to inheritance lawsuits. Truth in this scenario has plenty of instrumental value, including evolutionary considerations. I don’t have a ready replacement, but this is not it.
But this works more generally: there is a plausible evolutionary benefit to learning any true thing even if it doesn't seem useful, because you don't know what will be useful. So this seems like it should support valuing the truth generally. This could be a mechanism _by which_ we arrive at valuing truth. It doesn't explain the value away, it just explains it.
I disagree. There are certain realms of reality that there is no good reason to believe making an accurate model of them has had evolutionary benefits, such as the subject of particle physics or the social phenomena. The argument about topic of modern physics is quite straightforward. As for the social phenomena, it is very plausible that a tribal view of social phenomena is more beneficial in evolution than an unbiased, stance independent view of it.
I think you are taking me as saying adaptedness _justifies_ valuing truth qua truth. I don't think a value necessarily needs that sort of justification, once it has been identified. We can just observe that we value something. And we could debate whether people in general actually do value truth and whether, if not, we might wish they did. But whether a context-sensitive and socially mediated preference for truth is pragmatically better than a generalized preference is not the only consideration. If the latter is simpler it could still evolve, and particularly if the population it evolves in is ill-equipped to identify the difference between potentially important and clearly irrelevant teuths. And that could explain, if such an inclination exists, where it came from; but it wouldn't be the justification. The value would just be terminal: once I receive it, it is mine, and I don't actually care what it was supposed to be for.
I have to confess I really don't understand philosophical terminology and jargon. So I didn't understand your first sentence. But I think we are talking about two different topics. I am saying that we do not have the faculty to ever get to Truth with capital T, no matter how much we want or desire it. We can get to more refined models of reality but it is a very slow, collaborative process and not accessible to armchair reasoning, but rather gradual progression of science and technological advance. I do firmly believe moving toward truth is valuable, but since I believe moving toward truth is a collaborative effort, benefitting from adversarial collaboration, I disagree with this post's main point.
I have tried to elaborate on what I mean in this post, I am not sure how successful I have been, but it is more comprehensive that comments:
https://open.substack.com/pub/turtleouttashell/p/there-are-turtles-all-the-way-down?r=43rmtd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
You express several opinions whose truth or falsity hinges on the definition of truth. By your own standard, if you do not have a true definition of truth then all your opinions are false, since you do not even know what truth means, so you cannot even aim for it, let alone know that something ‘is true’.
A ‘true definition of truth’ involves circular logic, which implies that it cannot be defined to satisfy your standard. It follows that truth is not a fundamental normative property, so you must find something more fundamental to ground your opinions.
Ironically, almost everything that everyone ever asserts in speech is not ‘known’ to be true (which requires certainty/proof) but is merely assumed, and this ‘assumption’ is the sense of ‘opinion’, which therefore does not purport to be true or false but is merely a proposition on which social deliberation may focus on, and only on the basis of propositional deliberation can ‘true/valid’ claims be accomplished. As such, your standard implicitly disallows all deliberation, since deliberation is premised on uncertainty, therefore on opinions.
but opinions are often thought to be in the domain where there's no (clear) fact of the matter. so perhaps you are entitled to your opinion because in circumstances where opinions are coin of the realm, no one definitively knows the truth. if we all thought we knew the truth, we probably would not call your dissenting view an opinion.
Opinions are beliefs, and they could be based on experimental science, wishful thinking, the pronouncements of con men, formal proof, all kinds of things. We are justified in having some of our beliefs and not others. My point was that opinions/beliefs are not due respect merely because someone has them. Our epistemic duty is to gain truth and avoid error.