Philosophy For Dummies. Tom Morris
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jolt their students into a deeper grasp of what is at stake in making truth claims. It is meant to be a rhetorical challenge to the natural childhood feelings most people have that what they believe about anything important is surely the absolute truth. In philosophy, everything can be challenged. But some views can meet the challenge and stand firm. A professor who introduces the claims of relativism in the classroom may actually want her students to see through or refute the relativist challenge, and so understand truth more deeply. Or she may seek to introduce the notion of limited perspectives to urge on her students a little more intellectual humility. But too many of them come away grasping just enough of the challenge, while failing to see its fatal flaws, that they themselves begin espousing relativism in the dorm or back at home with the family. Relativism too often is nothing more than a fancy last gasp of adolescent rebellion. And when the young relativists go on to become politicians, or business people, or novelists, they may bring a glib version of that relativism into what they write or say without fully understanding its inadequacy. As William James, the great 19th century psychology and philosophy professor at Harvard once reminded us, “There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.” It’s true that people have different perspectives on many difficult issues, it’s also true that we should examine the adequacy of our own perspectives on issues, plus, it’s true that we ought to respect others even when their views diverge from our own, but that does not mean there is no truth to be had beyond and behind the reality of alternative perspectives.
But some serious mature adults can fall into relativism, too, and a number of very smart people have found it tempting. So it’s useful to grasp what could possibly attract them to a logically inconsistent position. First, it may be surprising, but it’s true that relativism can serve as a very persuasive intellectual excuse for bad behavior. If there is no absolute truth, there is no absolute moral truth and people can get away with anything they want. Some individuals are relativists because it’s a wonderful form of self-deception, licensing anything they may want to do, despite the disapproval of others. And it’s a view they can use speciously to attempt to convince otherwise good and sensible people to join them in their shenanigans.
There is a second path to adult relativism that is certainly more respectable, however wrong it nonetheless also is. Many sensible people in our time have wanted to promote the virtue of tolerance, and even an intellectual broadmindedness, or cognitive inclusivity in our pluralistic world, and have wrongly thought that relativism is the royal road to cultivating a firm and resilient openness to other people’s beliefs. But the sort of tolerance that is indeed a virtue is best grounded in genuine respect, and it’s not showing respect for any point of view to say that no points of view can possibly capture reality the way that it is.
These simple remarks are meant to apply to any utterly general relativism. That’s what is self-defeating and logically incoherent. There are, certainly, small areas regarding issues of personal taste and comfort where a very limited restriction of truth to perspectives seems appropriate. The statement “This ice cream is good!” might be an apt example. It could be true for you — from your perspective, given your tastes — but not for me. But that is very different from the statement, “This ice cream is three years old!” which is a standard truth claim and is not subject to relativistic restriction. Compare the difference between “It’s too hot in here” and “It’s over 90 degrees in this room.” It is the latter statement that is a better example of standard claims about reality. And it is either true or false. No relativity of perspective muddies the water.
Truth is your intellectual and existential tie to the world. Believing a truth, or stating a truth, is like hitting a target. Falsehood misses the mark. Truth anchors you to reality. Falsehood cuts your connection to the way things really are. People need truth like they need air, or food, or water. Falsehood, by contrast, damages, diminishes, and even kills. Something can seem “true for me” but really be false. Nothing can be true for me unless it’s true of me, or about me, or just simply and objectively true. Truth is ultimately an accurate correspondence with reality. And yes, sometimes it’s hard to determine, and the most we can do is to judge it in connection with our best efforts, the preponderance of the evidence available, or in connection with testing the most advanced theories we currently have available. Yet, as good old common sense tells us, truth is ultimately a matter of representing reality about things outside the confines of our own perspectives.
The complete definition of knowledge
One necessary condition for knowledge is belief. (See the earlier section “Understanding Belief.”) A second is truth (as it is explained in the immediately preceding section). Knowledge is built on true belief. But these two conditions are not alone sufficient for knowledge. I can believe something, and my belief can be true without my actually knowing the thing believed. More is needed.
Suppose that you were somehow to conjure up for yourself right now the belief that, at this very moment, the world’s richest man is brushing his teeth. Imagine you actually make yourself believe this, by sheer force of will, or you are hypnotized into believing it. And suppose further that, by extraordinary coincidence alone, the richest man in the world happens at this very moment to be polishing those shiny molars, nearly ready to rinse and spit. You have the belief. And the belief happens to be true. But you have no evidence of its truth. No proper connections have conveyed the truth to you. Imagine you just got lucky and happened to hold the belief at a rare moment when something was going on that made it true. Philosophers will deny that you had real knowledge of the fact stated. You did not know that the man in question was brushing. A wildly lucky coincidence of correspondence is not the appropriate attainment. Seneca (the practical Roman Stoic philosopher) pointed out a parallel situation by declaring that, “luck never made a man wise.” Luck can’t confer knowledge either. An amazing coincidence is not a connection sufficient to create something as solid as knowledge is meant to be.
Philosophers insist that, in order for a state of belief to qualify as knowledge, there must be a real link, a proper connection, a tie of some sort like a causal chain, between your mental state of affirmation and the state of reality which makes that affirmation true. Furthermore, this link must be of the right sort to properly justify my having that belief. If I see my cat Mollie on the bed and that visual perception has caused me in normal ways to form the belief that “Mollie is on the bed,” then most philosophers will grant that my belief counts as knowledge. I don’t just believe she is on the bed; I know it.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS: A RANDOM SAMPLE
The difference between truth and falsehood can indeed be the difference between life and death. Consider the following statements, which, if false, in the right (or wrong) circumstances could be your last:
“This is not as dangerous as it looks.”
“We’re not that close to the edge.”
“I’m sober enough. Come on, it’ll be fine.”
“No, this is how you connect the wires.”
“If it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
My point? There is an absolute difference between truth and falsehood. And it matters!
Knowledge is properly justified true belief. If you were looking at a live broadcast on CNN of the world’s richest man, properly identified as such, leaning over his bathroom sink, brushing his teeth, your resultant true belief that “The world’s richest man is now brushing his teeth” would then have been properly justified and could have counted as real knowledge. You could also use that link to defend your claim to know that the man in question was brushing away. The question “How do you know?” would then be suitably answered by the response, “I’m seeing it right now live on CNN.”
What exactly is proper justification? What counts as a sufficient