The Problem of Truth

by Herbert Wildon Carr

CHAPTER VIII
THE PROBLEM OF ERROR

In the Theætetus of Plato, Socrates has been discussing with Theætetus what knowledge is, and when at last agreement seems to be reached in the definition that knowledge is true opinion, a new difficulty occurs to Socrates:

"There is a point which often troubles me and is a great perplexity to me both in regard to myself and to others. I cannot make out the nature or origin of the mental experience to which I refer. How there can be false opinion—that difficulty still troubles the eye of my mind. Do we not speak of false opinion, and say that one man holds a false and another a true opinion, as though there were some natural distinction between them? All things and everything are either known or not known. He who knows, cannot but know; and he who does not know, cannot know.... Where, then, is false opinion? For if all things are either known or unknown, there can be no opinion which is not comprehended under this alternative, and so false opinion is excluded."

This difficulty may appear at first sight purely verbal, and we shall perhaps be inclined to see the answer to it in the double use that we make of the word knowledge. We use the word in two senses, in one of which it includes all and everything that is or can be present to the mind in thinking, and in another and narrower sense the word knowledge means truth. It was in the narrow sense of the word that whatever is not true is not knowledge that Socrates interpreted the meaning of the Delphic oracle that had declared him the wisest of men. His wisdom must be, he said, that whereas other men seemed to be wise and to know something, he knew that he knew nothing. All men have opinion, but opinion is not knowledge, though easily and generally mistaken for it. His perplexity was to understand what actually this false opinion could be which passed for knowledge. It could not be nothing at all, for then it would simply mean ignorance; but in false opinion some object is present to the mind. Everything that the mind thinks of has being. A thing may have being that does not exist if by existence is meant the particular existence of an event in time, for most of the things we think about are timeless—they are ideas, such as whiteness, goodness, numbers and the properties of numbers, faith, love, and such-like. All such ideas are called universals, because their reality does not mean that they exist at one particular moment and no other, but they are real, they have being. How, then, can there be anything intermediate between being and not being, anything that is and also is not, for this is what false opinion or error seems to be?

There is, then, a problem of error, and it is quite distinct from the problem of truth. The problem of truth is to know by what criterion we can test the agreement of our ideas with reality; the problem of error is to know how there can be false opinion. There is false opinion, of this no one needs to be convinced; but where its place is in the fundamental scheme of the mental process, in what precisely it consists, whether it is purely a negation or whether it has a positive nature of its own, this is the problem we have now to consider.

There is an important distinction in logic between what is contradictory and what is contrary. Of two contradictory propositions one must be true, the other must be false; but of two contrary propositions one must be false, but both may be false. Of contradictory propositions one is always a pure negation, one declares the non-existence of what the other affirms the existence; but of contrary propositions each has a positive content, and both may be false. A true proposition may be based on a false opinion, and it is very important to have a clear idea of what we intend by false opinion. We do not mean by false opinion such plainly false propositions as that two and two are five or that there may be no corners in a square—such propositions are false, because they contradict propositions that are self-evident. If anyone should seriously affirm them, we should not, I think, say that such a one had a false opinion, but that he failed, perhaps through some illusion, to understand the meaning of the terms he was using. An example of what would now, I suppose, be unquestionably regarded by everyone as error is that whole body of opinion that found expression in the theory and practice of witchcraft. This was once almost universally accepted, and though probably at no period nor in any country was there not some one who doubted or disbelieved, still the reasons of such doubt or disbelief would probably be very different from those reasons which lead us to reject it to-day. For witchcraft was grounded on a general belief that spiritual agencies, beneficent and malign, were the cause of material well-being or evil. This conception has now given place to the mechanistic or naturalistic theory on which our modern physical science is based. We interpret all physical occurrences as caused by material agency. But this belief, quite as much as the belief in spiritual agencies, is opinion, not knowledge, and it may be false. It is conceivable that future generations will reject our scientific notions, self-evident though they seem to us, as completely as we reject the notions of the dark ages. It is even conceivable that the whole of our modern science may come to appear to mankind as not even an approximation to knowledge. Error, like illusion, may be universal. No one whose opinion counts as a rational belief now holds that sickness may be caused by the malign influence of the evil eye, and that this influence may be neutralised by making the sign of the cross; some, but very few, believe that a sick man may be healed by the prayers and anointing of righteous men; many believe that material disease, however malignant, may be expelled from the body by faith; while the majority of rational men, whatever independent religious views they hold, regard sickness and disease as material in the ordinary sense, and expect them to yield to drugs and treatment. Now, of these various opinions some must be false, while all may be false. Let us add some illustrations from philosophy. Some philosophers hold, in common with general opinion, that sense experience is caused by physical objects; others hold that there are no physical objects, but that consciousness is the one and only reality; and there are others who think that the reality that gives rise to our sense experience is neither physical in the sense of a material thing, nor mental in the sense of consciousness or thought, but is movement or change—change that requires no support and is absolute. All these are opinions, and may be false, and our belief that any one of them is true does not depend on immediate experience, but on reasons. The best that can be said in favour of any belief is that there is no reason for supposing it false, and the worst that can be said against any belief is that there is no reason for supposing it true. Our problem, then, is to know what constitutes the nature of error in any one of these examples if it is, as each one may be, false?

The instances we have given are all of them propositions or judgments, or else conceptions formed out of propositions or judgments, the purpose of which is to interpret experience. The actual experience itself, in so far as it consists of the actual presence of the object to the mind aware of it, is, as we have seen, neither truth nor error; it simply is what it is. It is the conceptions by which we interpret this experience that are true or false. And our problem is that the meaning or content of a conception, that which is present to the mind when we make a judgment, is precisely the same whether the conception is true or false, there is no distinctive mark or feature by which we can know that in the one case the object of thought is a real or actual fact, in the other an opinion to which no reality corresponds. And, further, it seems exceedingly difficult to understand in what way a non-reality can be present to the mind at all.

Let us now examine some attempts to solve this problem, and first of all let us take the pragmatist solution. Pragmatism claims that it has no difficulty in explaining error, because, as we have already seen, it acknowledges no other test or criterion of truth except a pragmatic one. Every proposition or judgment that we make must, in order to have any meaning whatever, be relevant to some human purpose; every such proposition is a truth-claim; and every truth-claim is tested by its workability. Consequently, error is simply the failure of a proposition to establish its claim by the practical test of working. Propositions marked by such failure are errors. As there is no truth independent of time, place, and circumstance, no irrelevant truth, no truth independent of the conditions under which its claim is put forward, there is no truth that may not become error. No judgment, according to pragmatism, is an error pure and simple—that is to say, it cannot come into existence as error, for it comes claiming truth, and maintaining that claim until challenged; it becomes an error in retrospect only, and always in relation to another judgment which corrects it. Error does not characterise a class of judgments; it is something that happens to a judgment, it is a judgment whose truth-claim is rejected in reference to another judgment which succeeds. The essential thing in the pragmatist doctrine of error is that in claiming to be true a judgment is not challenging comparison with some independent reality, nor is it claiming to belong to a timeless order of existence—to be eternal; it is claiming to fulfil the particular purpose for which it has been called forth, whether that purpose be practical or theoretical.

Let us now consider the explanation of error offered by the idealist philosophy. In this view only the whole truth is wholly true; the Absolute, as a perfect, concrete, individual system, is the ideal, and all that falls short of it can only possess a degree of truth—a degree which is greater or less according as it approximates to the ideal. The degrees of truth are not quantitative, not a mixture of truth and error, but a nearer or more distant approach to the ideal. There can be no absolute error, because if truth is the whole, error, if it exists at all, must in some way be included in truth. Clearly error cannot as such be truth, and therefore it must follow that, in the whole, error loses its character of error, and finds reconciliation of its contradiction to truth. Error, then, if it is something, and not a pure negation, is partial or incomplete truth; the perplexity and contradiction that it gives rise to are incidental to our partial view. Knowledge, it must seem to us, can exist only for omniscience. Unless we know everything, we know nothing.