Article 26 | deewilsoncon

Valuing Truth

This is part four in our series "Dimensions of the Spirit"

Other articles include “The Portal of Beauty,” “Expanding the Circle of Moral Concern,” and “Imagination, Belief and Experience in Response to the Sacred,” parts 1 &2. The underlying premise of this series is that all human experience is infused with values, i.e., has positive or negative valence, and that experiences of beauty, truth and goodness, and of the sacred, are primary means of realizing the positive values of humanity.

By Dee Wilson

In common usage, truth has multiple meanings and functions: a) telling the truth vs. lying; b) describing the world and its limitless elements as they are rather than as we imagine or wish them to be; c) the truth of interpretation, e.g., “the truth about a low-fat diet is that ….”; d) the truth of a scientific theory, e.g., general relativity, that has been confirmed by experiments; e) mathematical or logical truth; f) the truth regarding rule governed moves/actions in various games; g) spiritual truth, e.g., the biblical passage, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

There are also uncommon but cogent appeals to the truth of art, literature and music. For example, in an article published in the March 1, 2026 New York Times, “To Find a Dose of Truth, Head to a Concert Hall,” Jonathan Bliss, a concert pianist, asserts that “The performing arts … have much to teach us about the notion of truth. There is no great performance – not even a theatrical one whose surface is by design artifice – that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life work. “

Bliss asks, “What is truthful performance? The answer comes in two parts. The first part is that a truthful performance must be sincere,” which requires “openness and vulnerability which are compromised by the very human desire to be admired, … to tell the truth on that stage you must leave your vanity in the green room.” And (second part),” For a performance to be truthful it must reveal not just the performer’s truth but the truth of the material being played. … Truth comes only when the inner life of the performer meets the inner life of the art.” And: “Art has the power to show us what the truth looks like. It is complex and elusive. The search for it is where true beauty and moral strength lie.” Bliss asserts that the truth of a great piece of music is its internal logic which the performer must seek and reflect. Technical virtuosity is not enough.

Contrast this version of artistic truth with the perspective of some modern analytic philosophers that truth and falsity refer to sentences which assert something that can in principle be known to be true or false: “that a statement cannot be true unless it is in principle capable of being known to be true.” (Dummett, pp. 23-24,1978) Discussions of and debates about truth among philosophers with this perspective revolve around standards for deciding that a statement is possibly true or false, i.e., about what it means to say that knowledge of a statement’s truth is possible.

The idea that truth can only be expressed in language or mathematical notation is in stark contrast to the idea that language can never be a substitute for experience. For example, is the best answer to the question, “What is pain?” a statement about the neurological correlates of pain, or pain itself? Perhaps the answer depends on the context and purpose for asking the question; still, it is often the case that a good (or best) answer to a spoken or written question is an experience, not a sentence or other type of statement.

Antonio Damasio maintains that feelings represent the status of, i.e., the truth about, homeostasis in multicellular organisms: “Feelings provide organisms with experiences of their own life. Specifically, they provide the owner organism with a scaled assessment of its relative success at living, a natural examination grade that comes in the form of a quality – pleasant or unpleasant, light or intense. This is precious and novel information …” And: “Feeling provides us with knowledge of life in the body …” (Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, 2021)

Damasio compares feelings to music: “Feelings perform the equivalent of a musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions.” (p. 79) Positive feelings reward flourishing: “The alignment of homeostasis, efficiency and well-being was signed in heaven, in the language of feeling and it was made popular by natural selection. Nervous systems officiated.” (p. 82)

The regard for truth

Truth does not have a single unequivocal meaning. In some contexts, truth refers to alleged facts, or theories, and in others to a power that will ultimately prevail, a reality that has been hidden, denied, suppressed, concealed, distorted or punished. Consider the following famous sayings about truth:

“Devotion to truth is the sole justification for our existence.” (Ghandi)
“The trouble with man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.” (Rebecca West)
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self- evident.” (Schopenhauer)
“Truth is a very different thing than fact. … Truth in the inner parts is a power, not an opinion.” (George MacDonald)
“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth.” (Confucius)
“The highest truth cannot be put into words.” (Laozi)
“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t going way.” (Elvis Presley)
“The truth. It is a beautiful, terrible thing and must, therefore, be treated with great caution.” (J.K. Rowling)

There is also a skeptical perspective: “There is no truth. There is only perception.” (Flaubert)

When truth is highly regarded, it is viewed as revealing a reality that is powerful, implacable and which demands respect and veneration. In this worldview, the commitment to truth is a source of grounding, sanity and balance even when the truth is grim. Denying the truth, or avoiding it’s telling, leads to mischief and misfortune, crazy making at best, frequently disastrous.

Obstacles to truth seeking

Daniel Kahneman’s discussion of cognitive psychology in Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) indicates that there are serious obstacles to arriving at even mundane truths. Kahneman views mental processes as an interaction between two “systems,” System 1, automatic thinking and System 2, deliberate thinking.

System 1 is:

Always on when a person is awake; has boundless energy
Quick, intuitive and emotional
Headstrong and self-confident; rarely stumped or in doubt
Radically indifferent to the quantity and quality of information; imaginatively fills in the blanks as needed
Likes stories that connect the dots
Poor at statistics

System 2 is:

Slow, analytical
Lazy, has limited energy
Vain regarding its capacity to control System 1, which is possible but rarely occurs
Usually follows the goals and prompts of System 1

According to Kahneman, System 1 runs automatically and many of its tendencies are involuntary. It is prone to jump to conclusions based on limited information. Kahneman refers to “our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and of the uncertainty of the world we live in.” (pp. 13-14)

Furthermore, Kahneman asserts, both System 1 and 2 make use of twenty largely unexamined heuristic biases, i.e., cognitive shortcuts, that systematically lead to error. One of the most powerful heuristic biases is confirmation bias, which leads people to seek out information that confirms their beliefs and ignore or dismiss evidence that conflicts with beliefs. Biased persons are usually convinced that their beliefs are strongly supported by evidence which they have sought out from sources that agree with their views. However, they are likely to have ignored, minimized, or ridiculed opposing views.

Everyone, regardless of IQ, is susceptible to confirmation bias, the result of which is to strengthen both true and false beliefs. Every person who is serious about truth must develop ways of combating confirmation bias, which, in my view, cannot be done absent a social context in which civil differences of opinion are possible and valued. Even then, beliefs which have become part of a person’s social identity, or which have been stated and defended in a way that affects reputation, are extremely difficult to change.

Humans are rarely, if ever, neutral arbiters of truth; rather people have more or less strong attachments to beliefs and to ideas they encounter, i.e., there is often a strong predisposition to accept or reject alleged factual statements, ideas, research, theories, philosophies. In addition, emotions and allegiances shape initial impressions and beliefs in obvious and obscure ways., e.g., during sporting events, elections, contests and rivalries of all types. For this reason, the habit of self- reflection is crucial to critical thinking. It is impossible to think clearly and dispassionately about controversial subjects absent self-awareness regarding emotional allegiances that affect both thinking and judgment.

Daniel Khaneman was a model of how to engage with scholars who strongly opposed his views. In Chapter 22 of Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman comments: “My most satisfying and productive adversarial collaboration was with Gary Klein, the intellectual leader of scholars and practitioners who do not like the kind of work I do.” Klein was a proponent of naturalistic decision making, the subject of his outstanding book, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (1999). Klein and like-minded scholars and practitioners “adamantly reject the focus on biases in the heuristics and biases approach. … They are deeply skeptical about the value of using rigid algorithms to replace human judgment,” in part because of studies that have found experts in a number of professions rely on intuition to an extraordinary degree. Kahneman comments: “This is hardly the basis for a beautiful friendship,” yet Kahneman admired Klein’s studies in Sources of Power.

Kahneman states: “I invited him to join in an effort to map the boundary that separates the marvels of intuition from its flaws.” Klein agreed to the project which resulted in a civil and stimulating exchange of opinion, some of which was published in scientific journals. They eventually published a joint article, “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.” Kahneman adds: “Indeed, we did not encounter real issues on which we disagreed – but we did not really agree.” (p. 235)

However, they did reach agreement on the conditions in which intuition has the potential to be the source of expertise rather than premature judgment and bias, i.e., vast experience with pattern recognition. “… “expertise” usually takes a long time to develop,” (p. 236) Kahneman states.

Contrast Kahneman’s response to Gary Klein’s critiques with what often occurs when a famous scholar with a worldwide reputation is challenged by an unknown or a less prestigious scholar (or scholars). The famous scholar skewers and ridicules his lower status opponent(s) in prestigious journals, while those who disagree with him are either unable to publish their views or can publish only in journals rarely read by colleagues. Kahneman had the intellectual integrity to engage with Klein’s argument, and in doing so, expanded his understanding of intuition and of expertise.

Denial, projection and appropriation

Humans have active and effective psychological defenses against painful truth, e.g., denial and projection, two defense mechanisms employed by everyone to some extent. Denial involves a refusal to acknowledge uncomfortable truth. It is associated with, but different, from lying and pretending and often becomes stronger when challenged. Drug addicts often deny their addiction or insist that a drug which has had devastating effects on their health is less harmful that it appears. One of my relatives who smoked most of his life died of lung cancer after having emphysema that almost killed him on more than one occasion. He denied that smoking cigarettes was harmful to health until the end of his life even after he had given up smoking for years.

There are well educated deniers of climate change, some of whom live in Houston, Texas, California, Hawaii and other area of the world that have experienced multiple extreme weather events in recent years. Climate change deniers rarely read scientific reports or studies and for the most part depend on all-purpose rationalizations such as climate variability to defend their beliefs. However, climate change denial can take more nuanced forms such as insisting that nothing can be done or that it’s too late to do anything about global warming, or that the economic costs of eliminating fossil fuels far outweigh the minimal benefits of transitioning to renewable sources of energy. Denial is resourceful, sturdy and determined when defending deeply felt commitments. It can only be overcome by acknowledgement of its emotional roots and by patient “chipping away” at its intellectual rationalizations.

The Webster’s New World Dictionary defines the psychiatric meaning of projection as “the unconscious act or process of ascribing to others one’s own ideas, impulses or emotions.” Paranoia is a projection. However, projection is frequently utilized by people who are not mentally ill, especially in response to anxiety, longing, sexual desire or hostility that is not socially acceptable. One form projection takes is to make people hypersensitive to the traits, behaviors or even physical characteristics of others that they dislike in themselves. Arrogant persons notice and make much of the arrogance of others. Aggressive people are quick to take offense and assume bad motives when others assert themselves. Projection often acts like an unflattering mirror.

There is another less obvious type of projection which, when fully developed, shields persons from the powerful reality of others very different from themselves. It is sometimes evident in literary criticism and historical writing in which a literary work and/ or author, or historical subject, is appropriated and transformed into a figment of another’s imagination. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pale Fire, is a brilliant comic depiction of this process.

Pale Fire begins with a Forward by a literary scholar, Charles Kinbote, that explains how he came to possess, edit and publish with lengthy commentary a poem an elderly poet, John Shade, a poem composed during the last weeks of the poet’s life. The Forward is followed by the poem, 999 lines, that begins with the lines:

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane…”

Those were prophetic lines given the fate of the poem.

The poem of about 40 pages is followed by Kinbote’s ( which rhymes with “crackpot”) bizarre 230-page commentary in which the poem largely vanishes in lengthy digressions on Kinbote’s fictional native land’s, (Zembla) history, culture and politics, as well as descriptions of how he stalked and spied on Shade and his wife, and pestered the poet to transform his poem, “Pale Fire,” into the story of the King of Zembla, i.e., himself, in his demented imagination.

Kinbote opines in the Forward: “the reader is advised to consult them (the notes of the commentary) first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them… as he goes through the text, and perhaps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture. … Let me state without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all.” And, while he admits Shade would not agree, “it is the commentator who has the last word.”

For his future, Kinbote imagines: “I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who attempts to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments.”

Pale Fire is a parody of literary criticism that despite its comic brilliance and literary genius (the 999-line poem, a mediation on love and death, is worth reading several times) may be dismissed as a grotesque satire on the fate of famous poets and novelists. This would be a mistake. In his recent novel, What We Can Know, Ian McEwan has a scholar who specializes in literature of the period 1990-2030 state the following, “For more than a hundred years, it had been accepted practice in the humanities to address not the matter under discussion, but the idea of the matter, how it was represented in the mind of others, and how that spectre flitted and danced across the decades.” In this perspective, literary works are an occasion for criticism and discussion viewed as essential to their understanding. Literary works are merely the raw material of the scholarly profession, which adjudicates their meaning and worth.

Historians of various subjects develop their perspectives as much in response to prior histories as to the subject itself. Movie directors often include references to famous movies in their methods and content. There is, Nabokov understood, a tendency for the interpretation of art to supplant the art itself. There is always a possibility to take a fresh look at literary works and perceive the work in a way unmediated by prior interpretations. Ditto for the writing and reading of history and for the understanding of religious texts. A great writer might believe, “I am the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure” of the window pane of interpretation.

Truth seeking in science is a social enterprise

Given the psychological vulnerability to illusion, overconfidence in intuition and judgement, confirmation bias and other heuristic biases discussed in Thinking Fast and Slow, as well as the emotional attachment to beliefs, it is important to develop social rules for truth seeking and for the assessment of truth claims. Science is a vast social enterprise that depends on such rules, e.g. a) that ideas must be tested through observation and experiment; b) methods be clearly described; c) hypotheses must be falsifiable, at least in principle, though not necessarily by a specific experiment; d) experimental results must be replicable; e) data that support evidentiary claims must be made public; f) the limitations of a research study must be acknowledged in published research; g) research must recognize and build on accepted science; h) ad hominem attacks on persons and motives are not acceptable.

This is an idealized set of some of the key rules of scientific inquiry. However, it is not difficult in the history of science to find instances where one of more of these rules has been egregiously violated, e.g., in the response of scientific authorities to germ theory (see So Very Small by Thomas Levenson). Scientists are subject to the same psychological vulnerabilities to bias and overconfidence as non-scientists, and just as given to insult and ridicule of opponents in scientific debate. Nevertheless, science has a rule structure that reigns in these vulnerabilities to some extent, e.g., in peer reviewed journals, and allows fierce competition to occur within a well-defined framework of rules and norms.

What is remarkable about science is that explicit rules of the game and implicit norms regarding how the struggle for recognition ought to be conducted manage to motivate and coordinate – without central direction – world-wide scientific inquiry regarding specific scientific challenges. In The Wisdom of Crowds (2005), James Surowiecki comments:

“… good science requires a degree of trust among scientists that even as they compete, they will also cooperate by playing fair with their data. Second, and more important science depends not only on an ever- replenishing pool of common knowledge, but also on an implicit faith in the collective wisdom of the scientific community to distinguish between those hypotheses that are trustworthy and those that are not.” (p. 170)

Surowiecki points out the flaw in this idealized picture of scientific truth seeking: “most scientific work never gets noticed.” The research of famous scientists receives the lion’s share of attention, with the result that innovative work by unknown scientists may be completely ignored for lengthy periods of time. When famous or high-status scientists are mistaken about the direction of scientific discovery, science can remain stuck for years or decades because the perspective with which they disagree receives little or no attention, while their mistaken ideas are published in widely read journals.

The idea that science depends on developing and adapting scientific consensus in response to new research leads some thinkers to the curious idea that scientific truth depends on widespread agreement among scientists. Surowiecki quotes Robert K. Merton, “There is no such thing as a scientific truth believed by one person and disbelieved by the rest of the scientific community; an idea becomes a truth only when a vast majority of scientists accept it without question.” (p. 169) According to this perspective, scientific truth is a social convention that indicates the agreement of scientists, not a true description or explanation of natural phenomena. Germ theory was opposed by the great majority of medical experts for almost two centuries after microbes were discovered by Antoine van Leeuwenhoek in 1676. During some of this period, some cities such as Vienna had a single main proponent, e.g. Ignaz Semmelweis, who was mocked, ridiculed and persecuted for declaring that physicians in hospitals were spreading puerperal fever through inadequate hygienic practices. (see So Very Small by Thomas Levenson) Semmelweis was right and his persecutors who reflected the scientific consensus at the time were wrong. Was germ theory not scientific truth until it was recognized as such by the large majority of medical experts in Europe?

Social rules and norms for truth seeking and assessing truth claims are important in everyday social interactions and in practical endeavors or weakly influenced by established science. Social interactions implicitly confirm or disconfirm beliefs about the world usually taken for granted, i.e. sensory perceptions, special and temporal relationships, as well as the cultural meaning of actions and interpersonal relationships. The idea that informs most AI versions of empathetic relationships, i.e., that empathy is characterized by repeated affirmation of fantasies, aspirations, impulses, feelings and behavior, is a recipe for how to produce delusions and destructive or self-destructive behavior. The maintenance of sanity often requires negative feedback from family members, friends, co- workers, etc. When corrective feedback is systematically eliminated through AI and in other ways, crazy ideas and mass delusions spread like blackberry bushes allowed to run amok.

Truth is often provisional, uncertain in principle

Will Kinney’s, An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe (2025) begins with the following:

“There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the physicist, Neils Bohr and famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum physics. Bohr was known to assert that in public lectures that the complementarity under the uncertainty relation between position and momentum in quantum physics – increasing precision in one results in more uncertain knowledge of the other – applies to everything. Everything in the world, according to Bohr, has a quantum complement. As the story goes, a member of the audience at one of his lectures asked him afterward, 'Professor Bohr, if everything has a complement, then what is the complement of truth?' Without missing a beat, Bohr replied, “Clarity.”

A story in the September 1&8, 2025 The New Yorker, ”Vaunted: How this magazine gets its facts straight,” by Zach Helfand, suggests that the complement of fact checking is greater uncertainty about the accuracy of factual statements. Many allegedly historical facts are assertions and stories that have been repeated by numerous historians and other writers based on a questionable or impossible to verify original source. The New Yorker’s fact checkers do not use books as sources, according to Helfand, because so many books are not fact checked. “But reference works help, and end notes are a gold mine.” Fact checkers at The New Yorker “talk to virtually all sources in a piece, named and unnamed … (but) “don’t read out quotes.” They then engage in a prolonged discussion with the author and editor of the piece regarding contested points, a process that irritates some authors who resent being nitpicked or questioned about minor points or questions of style.

Helfand states that humorists often have a strong reaction to being fact checked, given that exaggeration and outrageous comments are often what makes a piece funny. David Sedaris has complained, “Checking is like being fucked in the ass by a hot thermos,” to which a checker replied, “If the thermos works, the outside wouldn’t be hot.”

It’s far from clear what constitutes a fact as opposed to an opinion, a theory, or interpretation. I often encounter statements such as “evolution is a fact,” or “quantum entanglement is a fact.” However, asserting that a statement is true is not the same as stating that it’s a fact. For the purposes of The New Yorker, “Dates are facts, clothes are facts, actions are facts. Quotes are facts and they include them (i.e. facts). Helfant asserts: “Checking is a practice. It’s not omniscience.” He asks, “How do you confirm a fact? You ask, over and over. … Sometimes one source is enough. Sometimes ten aren’t.” And: “The longer you check, the more you doubt what you think you know.” Uncertainty is the complement of assiduous fact checking at The New Yorker, at least from Helfand’s perspective.

Helfand asserts: “… checking tends to alter the way you think. … This is the checker’s paradox … The more you know, the more you know that there is more you don’t know … You either let this drive you crazy or you adjust your ruler size.”

Regarding the current social and political culture, Helfand states: “There’s this strange disappearance of humility before the incredible complexity of the world. It’s sort of an epidemic. The deep value of checking is just a confirmation of how hard it is to know stuff.” A commitment to truth is likely to lead to lessons in humility.

Fact checking often depends on human memory, which is inherently fallible. Memory, like perception, is shaped by values and emotions and is pruned during sleep. Some memories are discarded. Others are strengthened through repetition, including internal talk. The idea that the past is a fixed something consisting of facts does not take account of how the meaning of past events can be reshaped in response to life experience, and changes in cultural values or allegiances. In addition, the idea that there can be rational certainty regarding events that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago is naïve. It is often difficult to come to a well informed and a widely accepted version of events that occurred a few months or years ago, much less accurately determine the history of ancient civilizations. The truth of history is provisional to an alarming degree, always open to reinterpretation based on newly discovered sources or a better understanding of the dynamics of historical change.

Truth: prosaic or powerful?

Some analytic philosophers have done their best to deflate the grandiosity of discussions of truth through careful analysis of the logic of sentences and parts of sentences (e.g., counterfactuals, sentences about intention, adverbs, “attributive adjectives;” etc., see Davidson, Inquiries into truth and interpretation, 2001). This approach, influenced by Wittgenstein’s theory of language in his later work, led to the insistence that many truth claims are trivial. Dummett states, “Wittgenstein himself never displayed any interest in the form of question, ‘What, in general, makes a statement of such-and-such a kind true; on the contrary, his usual reaction to such a question is to dismiss it by appealing to the redundancy theory of truth, that is , by returning a trivial answer to the question; for instance to say that what renders ‘John is in pain” true is John’s being in pain.” (Truth and other enigmas, p. xxxiv). On first reading this sounds like a parody of philosophy, but it’s a perspective that has an important point to make: adding “it’s true that” to sentences such as “snow is white” or “the sun rises in the east” adds nothing of importance to the sentence. It is a redundant statement of the obvious.

Compare statements of the obvious to statements about contested issues, e.g., “bacteria evolve through lateral gene transfer between organisms as well as through mutations that occur during reproduction,” a scientific hypothesis that at one time was hotly debated before being confirmed by experiments. When ideas are contested, the statement “it’s true that” may be a prelude to the presentation of evidence supporting this idea. In this context, “it’s true that” means “available evidence indicates that …”, followed by a discussion of the evidence or the implications of the evidence. If not, mention of truth in discussion of contested ideas is redundant rhetoric.

Philosophers who seek the meaning of truth through analysis of the logical structure of sentences have been hard pressed to articulate a criterion of truth for statements about the world. Dummett states:

“Baffled by the attempt to describe in general the relation between language and reality, we have nowadays abandoned the correspondence theory of truth, and justify doing so on the score that it was an attempt to state a criterion of truth in the sense in which this cannot be done.” (p. 14)

Nevertheless, Dummett adds that “the correspondence theory expresses one important feature of the concept of truth … “that a statement is true only if there is something in the world in virtue of which it is true,” i.e., “we retain in our thinking a fundamentally realist conception of truth.” (p.14) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines the correspondence theory of truth as “the view that truth is the correspondence to, or with, a fact … But the label is usually applied more broadly, to any view embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality.” What Dummitt appears to be saying is that the truth of statements about the world cannot be based solely on logic, or refer to a speaker’s or writer’s correct use of a language.

In Inquiries into truth and interpretation, Donald Davidson advances a revised correspondence theory of truth, a bold argument given that his likely readers were analytically minded philosophers. He asserts: “I think truth can be explained by appeal to a relation between language and the world.” And: “It is simplest just to view truth as a relation between a sentence, a person and a time” (p. 34), a perspective that suggests that truth in many instances applies to speech acts rather than sentences. It is a perspective that does not do justice to statements of scientific truth, the point of which is that they are true regardless of the speaker or writer.

According to Davidson: “The chief difficulty is in finding a notion of fact that explains anything … that does not lapse, when spelled out, into the trivial or the empty.” (p. 37) Analytic philosophers, according to Dummett, cannot make use of psychological knowledge: “Only with Frege was the proper subject of philosophy firmly established: namely, first, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought, secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological process of thinking, and, finally, that the only proper method for analyzing thought consists in the analysis of language.” (p. 458)

Dummett’s Truth and other enigmas was published in 1978. After almost fifty years, it is worth asking: “What major breakthrough in the understanding of thought, or of truth, has any analytic philosopher achieved? Meanwhile, Daniel Kahneman published Thinking Fast and Slow in 2011, a summary of decades of research in cognitive psychology, which is an important step forward to understanding numerous obstacles to truth seeking. I am not aware of a comparable achievement in the understanding of truth by any philosopher since the publication of Dummett’s 1978 statement of the goal of philosophy. Perhaps a reader of this article will set me straight regarding more recent achievements of analytic philosophy.

The philosophical school of thought that has come closest to explaining the power of truth is pragmatism. Wikipedia defines pragmatism: “a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving and action, rather than describing, representing or mirroring reality.” Donald Davidson and his mentor, W.V. Quine, utilized analytic methods to reach substantive conclusions about language and truth often described as a version of pragmatism. According to Peter Godrey-Smith, Quine denied that he was influenced by American pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey or Charles Pierce. Nevertheless, Quine’s conception of scientific truth was pragmatic.

In” Quine and Pragmatism,” (2013) Godrey-Smith asserts, "A few crucially placed remarks (that) helped change the weighting of pragmatists’ themes -- were attention to theoretical flexibility, less attention to action – as they exited the context of classical pragmatism and extended into the era of analytic philosophy.” Quine also emphasized enhanced power of prediction as a main goal of scientific discovery. He acknowledged the importance of explanation in scientific theories, but was skeptical about the idea of arriving at a single true theory of a scientific subject. Theories, he maintained, were inherently provisional, always subject to new discoveries. The purpose of scientific theories is to explain available observations or experimental data, not to “mirror reality.”

William James’ pragmatic theory of truth has been vociferously attacked by philosophers from every direction, but it nevertheless suggests why truth is a potent ideal among persons who lack any interest in philosophy: “Those thoughts are true which guide us to BENEFICIENT INTERACTION with sensible particulars as they occur,” James states in The Meaning of Truth. Truth is powerful because it is a guide to effective action. If this were not the case, theories of truth would not be emotionally charged.

Dummett and other analytic philosophers would likely object that “a guide to effective action” is a psychological criterion of truth, not a philosophical definition. Still, much of what has been written about truth from multiple sources for many centuries only makes sense with this definition in mind. ‘Effective action’ means something different in science than in public policy or interpersonal relationships, but there is a common thread: truth matters when humans are strongly committed to specific goals and the means to achieve those goals are uncertain. The close link between the truth of ideas and effective action is fundamental.

Valuing Truth

The value of truth is more likely to be honored in the breach than in most social interactions. It is common to conflate a strong specific belief with a commitment to truth because strength of conviction is widely (and wrongly) viewed as an indicator of truth. However, the acid test of a commitment to truth is when a deeply held conviction is challenged by conflicting evidence. Valuing truth must include a commitment to respecting standards of evidence and a willingness to admit error and change one’s mind in response to new information.

This article has touched on several other themes related to truth seeking that bear repeating:

Humans are highly vulnerable to error, in part due to the influence of heuristic biases such as confirmation bias. For this reason, jumping to conclusions based on intuition is a source of errors in judgment difficult to correct.
“Truth” has a number of different meanings and uses. Consequently, there is not a single valid account of truth.
Humans, per Daniel Kahneman, are overconfident regarding their understanding of the world, and this includes experts whose ability to predict the future is much overrated.
Humans have strong emotional attachments to beliefs; these attachments influence judgment and decision making. Self-reflection and self-awareness regarding emotional reactions to ideas are important virtues in truth seeking.
Absent a social milieu that supports expression of civil differences of opinion, delusions spread in a society like out-of-control weeds.
AI systems are employing a flawed idea of empathy that in some cases facilitates the development of delusions and self-harm.
A regard for truth leads to humility about the limits of human understanding rather than to intellectual arrogance.
Humans employ two main defense mechanisms, i.e., denial and projection, to defend against painful or socially unacceptable truth.
There is also a form of projection that reflects an intent to assimilate and misconstrue literary and historical works as versions of oneself or one’s culture.
Facts and truth are not the same; facts are a subset of true statements that purport to offer exact and incontrovertible accounts of events or conditions.
The more one knows about alleged facts that depend on the historical record and/or memory, the greater the room for doubt.
Experience, including feeling, is a kind of truth that cannot be reduced to sentences or speech acts.
It is possible to use the language of truth in a way that is trivial and redundant.
The regard for the power of truth is based on the widespread understanding that truth is an essential guide to effective action.
Truth in science and in practical affairs is provisional; it is never the end of inquiry.

In past years, when I was engaged in child welfare training, or when I was part of an audience listening to a presentation about a subject I cared about, I noticed that participants in training and other groups became still and immediately attuned whenever a speaker began to speak the truth as they understood it. The experience of listening to or intuiting truth is powerful. Listening to truth as one understands it wakes the mind. It is a bracing experience. ©

References

Bliss, J. “To Find a Dose of Truth, Head to a Concert Hall,” The New York Times, March 1, 2026.

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