Law & Society Blog

A number of readers criticized my argument in Claims of Truth and Webs of Belief as overly pessimistic. One reader wrote that there is no reason to deny the existence of an external, mind-independent reality and that the progress of science would be a miracle if things didn’t exist ontologically. Underlying this and other reactions is a visceral unease with my claim that truth, in practice, is largely replaced by interpersonal trust. Another reader criticized my argument from a practical point of view: Isn’t saying that truth claims, no matter how well founded or absurd, ultimately rest on nothing but various measures of coherence, lending support to the creationism crowd and other enemies of reason? I am not dismissing any of these criticisms, and I specifically share the latter concern, but I would like to explain the philosophical backdrop of my argument a bit more in detail.

My starting point is the constructivist position that we actively construct our world rather than its being determined by a mind-independent reality. Cognition is instrumental. It serves the organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of an ontological reality. Truth is what works, not what is. That position is not based on a transcendental armchair argument, even though the modern constructivist project owes a huge debt of gratitude to Kant. Rather, it is based on the neurobiology of cognition and is naturalistic. The fundamental postulate of constructivism is that the mind is operationally closed. Only a change in the state of one neuron leads to a change in another. Unless a neuron changes its state, there can be no change in the cognitive system. Moreover, “the response of a nerve cell does not encode the physical nature of the agents that caused its response. Encoded is only ‘how much’ at this point on my body, but not ‘what.’” (H. v. Foerster) As a result of that principle of undifferentiated encoding, any perception of and any information about the world must be a product of the mind. If that statement is true (which I think it is), then any correspondence theory of reality must be false. It follows that we can neither deny nor confirm the existence of a mind-independent reality. Note that I am not denying the existence of an outside world; it would be shocking if it didn’t exist in some way, shape, or form. My claim is simply that cognition is not a process of mapping ontological entities onto cognitive structures, but rather a process of responding to, organizing, and finally making conscious sense of changes that are internal to the cognitive system. (One could say that the nervous system observes the body by connecting one electric charge to another, and that the mind observes the nervous system by connecting one thought to another. Both systems are structurally coupled - no thought without neural activity - but remain operationally closed.)

Thus I disagree with Popper’s critical rationalism and its corollary that our internal models will over time ever more accurately represent the properties of “the real world.” Rather, knowledge lives in the cavities of a real world that will forever remain beyond the horizon of possible experience. Our position can be compared to that of a crew born into a windowless WW II submarine (with a secret, limitless power supply) that pilots the boat solely by reading the dials, gauges, and instruments. Of course, the crew will, over time, come up with a model of the world “out there,” a model that allows the captain to pilot the boat without crashing into reefs or exposing it to unsustainable pressure. But would that model resemble the way that we see the sea and the boat from the outside? I don’t think so!

Accepting the postulate of the mind as a closed system has a number of important implications.

• First, we can no longer appeal to a mind-independent reality as a truth criterion. What we perceive as a mind-independent reality is a construct of the mind. That doesn’t mean that the construct is arbitrary, it most certainly isn’t. But no one can claim that his or her position is true because it corresponds to an ontological reality. We can claim, however, that one position is better - truer ǃ - than another if it produces more favorable results. Bottom line is that since we can’t leave our own minds, the only criteria for truth are viability, coherence, and consistency.
• Second, speech does not transmit meaning. Language is an activity, it is a highly sophisticated recursive coordination of behavior that triggers cognitive responses within the participating entities. (H. Maturana calls it “languaging”). Language doesn’t change the fact that our minds are semantically closed. Since you can’t (yet!) hook up your neurons to mine, I can only connect to my own thoughts, not to yours.
• Third, the goal of science is not to explain but to make predictions, to bring order to our perceptions, and to enable us to act successfully in ever more creative ways.
• Fourth, for most everyday actions, the delusion of ontological objectivity is a useful shorthand. But once the presence of the observer cannot be ignored, for example, in quantum physics but also in questions of ethics, we need to abandon our simplifying assumptions and take the limitations of our cognitive apparatus into account.

On a more speculative note, the persistence of the “subject perceives object” approach to cognition may well be explained by the fact that both subject and object are creations of our mind. At that basic level, they are thus commensurable. The correspondence theory of truth is therefore, in a sense, an adequate description of what’s going on in our minds. We, as “subject-subjects” perceive that the “object-subject” (i.e., what we think of as I) perceives an “object,” either correctly or incorrectly. Of course, both the object-subject and the object are constructs of our mind. If they weren’t we would have no way of knowing whether the subject-object’s claims about the object are true or false.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.