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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:03.13)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Michael Patrick Lynch, the Provost Professor of the Humanities and the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UConn, University of Connecticut. And we're here today to talk about his book, The Nature of Truth. I have here the first edition, second edition that came out in 2021 has been suitably updated for the last 20 years of literature. Dr. Lynch, wonderful to have you on today.
Michael Lynch (00:29.904)
Well, thanks so much for having me.
PJ (00:32.73)
Dr. Lynch, what is the goal of an anthology that covers this much ground? As you said earlier when we were talking, focused on Western philosophy, but what was your goal in creating this anthology?
Michael Lynch (00:48.976)
Well, I think the goal in creating this anthology is that the question of truth, what is truth, as Pilate famously said, is the very paradigm of a philosophical question, right? It is both perplexing, it is sometimes even so perplexing, the question of truth, that we tend to treat it as rhetorical as Pilate did, right? What is truth, we'll say, with a shrug.
On the other hand, we all know, and especially nowadays in our current cultural climate and our current technological climate, we know the question of what truth is matters. It matters because we think truth is valuable, but you can't understand how something is valuable if you don't understand what it is. And so this anthology is an attempt to give a sort of guided tour of the hits of the literature, so to speak.
PJ (01:37.594)
Heheheheh
Michael Lynch (01:45.68)
in Western philosophy about this question of what is truth, concentrating mostly on the 20th and the second edition 21st centuries, but also including literature from the arc of Western philosophy.
PJ (02:07.914)
And what are some common misconceptions at a popular level about the debates around truth? If we can start there, maybe, yeah.
Michael Lynch (02:15.92)
Sure, absolutely. So I think, you know, when people are first thinking about truth, they sometimes tend to, you know, like all of us do with big topics like truth or beauty or justice, right? We can easily start throwing lots of different questions into the box of truth. We can, you know, one question that you might ask about truth is how do we know truth? How do we know what's true?
That's the central question of the field of philosophy known as epistemology, right? And it deals with the question of figuring out what propositions are true. There are also questions about truth's relationship to things like democratic practice, democratic politics. There's questions about how truth is distorted, questions about fake news and...
and deep fakes and those sorts of questions, all extremely important. All those sort of fall under the banner of questions about truth. But in this book, we try to, you know, what I've tried to do is narrow it down to the question that I was saying earlier really lies behind all those other questions. And that is the question of what do we mean when we're talking about propositions.
or beliefs or statements being true or false in the first place. I mean, it's one question to think about how do we know whether a proposition is true or false. It's another question to say what it means to think that a proposition is true or false in the first place. And that really fundamental question, which is a question in metaphysics and semantics, that question is the question that this book is devoted to. And part of what I'm trying to do here,
PJ (03:57.754)
Yeah.
Michael Lynch (04:09.776)
is to just note that we don't want to get that question necessarily mixed up with these other, albeit related, but still distinct questions.
PJ (04:17.114)
Yeah, right, right. It's yeah. It's really easy to start jumping off because people start having they have come with specific problems in mind, right? And then they're like, well, I want to answer this problem. And you're like, well, that's not actually the problem we're talking about then. We're talking about a different problem. And of course, your own work has dealt a lot with what you're talking about with this cultural context, the importance of these kind of deep fake questions, for instance.
Michael Lynch (04:27.472)
Sure.
Michael Lynch (04:33.328)
Yes.
PJ (04:46.618)
I mean, that's your latest book is the Know It All Society, right? So I want to make sure I plug that as well. Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture and definitely feels timely, feels like it's only accelerating.
Michael Lynch (05:02.192)
Sadly, yes.
PJ (05:03.706)
So when you talk about metaphysics and semantics, and when I look at this book, that seems to cover most of it. How do you bridge that gap as you're weaving in between those two fields?
Michael Lynch (05:18.416)
Well, good question. So when we think about the metaphysical question of truth is the question of.
Michael Lynch (05:33.04)
What is the nature of the property, truth and falsehood? So we can, if any, that's the sort of chief metaphysical question. So when philosophers are concerned about truth, mostly, not universally, but in the West, they've mostly been concerned with the question of, as I said,
Either, what does it mean, that's the semantic question, to say that a proposition is true or false. That's a question about the meaning of the word true. And even more fundamentally, they've been concerned about, well, if the word true expresses a property or a characteristic or a feature that some propositions have when they're true and others lack.
like when they're not true, what is that property? What is it, to put it in a different way, makes a proposition true when it is true? That's the metaphysical question. And it's metaphysical in the same way as other metaphysical questions that philosophers ask, mysterious questions like, what makes it the case that the Michael Lynch you're talking to now is identical to,
the Michael Lynch that his mother referred to when she talked about Michael Lynch, get in this house right now when I was five, right? We look very different. What makes us the same, if anything? That's a question about the relation of identity. And you can ask that question about the nature of truth too. What is this property? And philosophers have had tremendous amounts, differing answers to that. And we'll get into those questions, I'm sure.
Question about semantics, as I said, is this related question of what does the word mean? And how do you bridge that? Good question. Well, a natural bridge is just the idea, this sort of naive way of thinking about the relation between those two questions, is that if we ask, what does the word mean? And we say, well, it means or refers at least to the property, truth, then that property is part of what's giving the word its meaning.
Michael Lynch (07:50.928)
right, and what it stands for. So if you could answer the metaphysical question, it seems like you should be able to answer the semantic question. Where it gets tricky, as we'll find out, is that some philosophers think that there really isn't anything to the metaphysics of truth. Maybe there even isn't a property of truth. And then, of course, it gets a little tricky to say, well, what does the word mean then? I mean, what is it doing in our language if it isn't picking out some feature of our propositions that we believe that
They have when they are true. So what is it? You know, so then the semantic question becomes looms larger the less metaphysical you get about the about truth itself
PJ (08:34.842)
You mentioned kind of this idea of mystery. What is the value of acknowledging kind of the mysteriousness of this question?
Michael Lynch (08:48.816)
I think the value of realizing that the question is mysterious is, I think, a good way of first showing due reverence to the hard work that philosophers have put in and trying to climb this mountain, construct theories throughout the centuries, try to say what truth really is.
often perhaps, according to at least many other philosophers, failing. So there is, you know, in the same sense in which, you know, we think the question's about.
whether God exists or what constitutes identity or did the universe have a beginning or these, the question, you know, what is justice? Question, what is truth has that air of importance, of gravitas, but also, you know, as a result, you know, sort of enduring mystery. Now, one of the things that we'll find out, I'll talk about,
can say right now is that there are other reasons it's worth talking about mystery here is because there is a movement in analytic philosophy over the last hundred years, roughly, amongst people that work on truth for a living, so to speak, that maintains that, well, actually,
The reason people think truth is mysterious is because they become confused and have been caught in a, like a fly in a fly bottle, as Wittgenstein would put it. They become confused about the meaning of the word and its function in our language. And actually, once you really understand that, its meaning and its function, say these philosophers, you'll see that its function is really quite...
Michael Lynch (10:49.392)
simple, perhaps even trivial, and you'll be dispelled. The mystery will be dispelled. There will be no longer any need to explain, give a grand metaphysical theory of the nature of truth, because no such theory is needed. And I can explain a lot more about that if you wish.
PJ (11:09.626)
Is that more of a semantic answer, it seems like?
Michael Lynch (11:12.272)
Yeah, it is. And that's the sort of position that I would call deflationism. So there's a family of theories that have received a ton of attention in the last, especially in the last 50 years. Family of theories about truth called deflationism. And these theories are different in various ways, but they're all sort of united by, as the name suggests, feeling that the pretensions of traditional theories of truth.
should be deflated. The idea that bubble should be popped. At the end of the day, we don't need a grand theory of truth. We just need, as you said, a proper understanding of its semantic role or its function, the concepts function, or the meaning of the words function in our language and our thought. And once we do that, we'll see that there's no real need to say anything more.
That's according to the deflationist. I myself think the matter is still more complicated. I think the deflationist have something to, they're actually right about certain things. But I still think that we do still need to give a metaphysical theory of truth.
PJ (12:30.702)
So before... There's so many threads left hanging here that I want to jump on to, but I feel like the next best place to go would be to ask you, because I think a lot of the movements you choose to include here are in response to or have as one of their dialogue partners the correspondence theory.
Michael Lynch (12:35.536)
Thank you.
PJ (12:58.586)
Can you give us a quick account of the correspondence theory? While some people might think that it's perfectly fine, what are some of the problems that other people see? What are some of the common critiques of correspondence theory?
Michael Lynch (13:12.176)
Sure. So the correspondence theory of truth is perhaps the best known theory of truth in Western philosophy. Its origins are obscure, although many of its advocates will credit Aristotle's remark that to say what is, that it is, and to say of what is not, that it is not, is to speak truly.
There, Aristotle is linking, it seems, saying something true with the way the world is. And the root intuition behind the correspondence theory is that, is just that idea that what makes a proposition true is its relationship to the way the world really is. That that proposition, as it were, depicts
the world being a certain way, like if the proposition grass is green, says of the world that grass is green. And if it corresponds to how the world really is, to, as some correspondence theorists put it, the facts, then that's what makes it true. And that's all that makes it true. So the correspondence theory is the best known version of what we might call realism about truth.
Realism in this way, in this use, is not realistic necessarily. It means that truth is a real property that which attaches to our propositions because of the relation to or the real world. In this sense, the correspondence theory captures the intuition that what makes our propositions that you say or think true,
or false, doesn't have anything to do with what you hope is true, what you hope is true, what you fear is true, what other people say are true, what everybody says is true. I mean, according to the correspondence theory, what matters is that the proposition corresponds to the facts. And everybody else might not, it may be that everybody agrees that grass is purple, but if it's green, then it's green.
Michael Lynch (15:34.608)
So because that's the way the world is. And so this is a, you know, it's a simple idea. It really is at one level, the correspondence theory is a sort of platitude. And indeed, many of its critics will acknowledge that sure, sure, you know, in some banal sense, truth is about the way the world is. And in that sense, it's a platitude that nobody's going to deny.
that propositions are true when they correspond to reality or to the facts. So when does it get to be a theory? Well, it gets to be a theory when, as Bertrand Russell and his contribution to this book does, when you try to actually explain what this correspondence relationship actually is and what facts are. So you have correspondence, you've got three things to explain. You've got to explain...
Well, what is it that's true? Let's say propositions. Russell said beliefs, but we can interpret them as thinking about believed propositions. Then you've got to say, well, what the facts are, what makes something a fact? And then that doesn't just end up being that a fact is what's true, because then you don't got a theory, it's just vacuous, right? So your theory of what facts are has to be independent.
right, you know, an account. And then you got to explain what this correspondence relationship is, right? And that's hard to do. All those things are hard to do. And the theories of correspondence tend to, according to their critics, collapse or run into trouble because they can't give sufficiently detailed
PJ (17:13.146)
Yeah.
Michael Lynch (17:29.232)
or plausible answers to these questions, particularly the question of the relationship and what facts are. So,
Some correspondence relation theorists will say that a fact, to talk about a fact is to talk about, let's say, a actual state of affairs. They'll say, well, there are states of affairs. Now the question is, what are those? Well, one possibility is that states of affairs are just sort of elemental features of the world. They're sort of somewhat like.
proposition -shaped features of the world. And there could be actual states of affairs and there could be possible states of affairs. So on this account, you know, so there's a possible state of affairs that...
I suppose a possible state of affairs that Napoleon won the bottle of water, right? That's a possible state of affairs. And we understand roughly what that means. It means that, well, there's a possible world in which Napoleon won the bottle of water. And we can say, well, but that's not an actual state of affairs. So it's not a fact. So on this understanding of facts, facts aren't the things that we can prove. Right? There could be on this account, right? There's a state of affairs.
PJ (18:55.034)
Hmm.
Michael Lynch (18:58.)
actual or possible of Caesar having crossed the Rubicon and stubbed his toe on a rock while he was doing it. Right? Right. So that could be a fact. Right? That could be a fact. If it is a fact, suppose it is a fact. Let's just imagine it's a fact that Caesar stubbed his toe on a rock as he crossed the Rubicon. Now, will we ever know that to be true? No, no.
But according to this account, right? It is, it could be a fact. It's a possible state of affairs that could be actual. So what I'm trying to emphasize here is that for most correspondence theorists, facts are like this. They're not what we can prove. So they're not saying that true propositions correspond to the propositions we can prove, because there's a use of the word fact, right? Like that we use in journalism, like in detective stories where
PJ (19:56.634)
Just the facts, man. Yeah.
Michael Lynch (19:56.688)
give me the facts. In other words, give me the evidence, right? But yeah, just the facts. But when we talk about facts in this context, we're talking about those states of affairs that obtain or are actual, whether or not we know them. And the correspondence theory wants to say that, look, what's true or false depends on what corresponds, you know, what facts there are that our propositions correspond to.
And those facts could outrun our knowledge. So here's another example. The correspondence theorist will say, could say, is committed actually to saying something like, the number of the stars in the universe right now is either even or odd. That seems true. We'll never know that because of course,
by the time that the light from, even if we could count from our low light conditions, right? By the time the light gets to us, right? Right now, the stars we're seeing right now, half of, you know, not half, but a large, you know, significant portion of them are already burnt out, right? By the time that the light reaches us. So, right?
PJ (20:59.13)
Right, Conan?
PJ (21:16.826)
This is such a weird and wonderful example, thank you. I will definitely steal that. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Michael Lynch (21:19.344)
Yes, right. The number of stars in the universe. So, yeah, if you ever want an example of something that is a fact about the physical universe, like it's not a mysterious fact. It's just a fact about numbers in the physical universe. Like there is an answer to that question. Are we ever going to know? No, no humans are going to know that answer. Even if we could travel the speed of light, which we can't, we still wouldn't be able to do it. because of how the distance is involved. Right.
PJ (21:32.57)
Yeah. No, it's not.
PJ (21:41.402)
Hahaha!
Michael Lynch (21:46.832)
So because of the millions of light years involved. So what that means is that what I'm trying to emphasize is the correspondence theorist account of facts. That's still what I'm talking about is an account that holds the world is as it is independently of our inability to know it. And so they're going to say, look, you know, suppose I say I get gripped by some, I don't know, weird intuitive belief that.
It's actually even. The number of stars right now is even. It's even, damn it. It's even. And you're like, OK, that sounds cool. And but I, well, if that's true, if it turns out I'm lucky, right. And it's true. It's because it's corresponding to that state of affairs that is out in the world. OK, so that's roughly what they're trying to get on about with facts. So the problem with that account of facts is in some sense, it makes
intuitive sense. But when we start asking about what these facts and states of affairs are, notice that they, as I said at one point, they seem sort of proposition shaped, right? We say the fact that grass is green. And I said that's an actual state of affairs. We understand what we're talking about, but that's, it still sounds really close to saying, well, you know, the true proposition that grass is green.
In other words, it's not really clear how, as in the book, the famous philosopher P .F. Strassen says, that the problem with talk of facts is that they seem like mere shadows of true statements, right? They really haven't said much, all that interesting about them. We've got an idea, but it's still not clear that...
they deserve some sort of special status in our ontology. I mean, there's grass, definitely. There's the color green. But then there's this other thing, the fact that grass is green. And it's supposed to be out in the world. Notice what I said, right? It's independent of us and our knowledge. So what is that thing? Like, and in Russell's theory, he actually goes to some great lengths to try to think about, well, facts are gonna be like objects that are in relations.
Michael Lynch (24:09.84)
And then there's like a glue, not, he doesn't use the word glue, but there's something that's sort of holding those things together. And Wittgenstein, the early Wittgenstein and Russell back over a hundred years ago, were really obsessed with trying to figure out what that was. And nobody really thinks they ever answered that question very well, including Wittgenstein later gave up on the whole theory. So, yeah.
PJ (24:32.474)
Right. If you don't mind, when I was talking to a fellow student, and I don't remember, I want to say it came out of a discussion of Heidegger, but you end up with a correspondence to a correspondence. That's generally, this idea of like, we just created just an additional layer to explain what we're not actually attaching to the actual thing. If that's another way, if I'm tracking with you.
Michael Lynch (24:57.492)
Yes. Yeah. That's another way of thinking about the problem with trying to explain what these facts are. But the problem of trying to explain what facts are almost pales in comparison to the problem of trying to explain what the correspondence relationship is. I'll speak very generally. The early modern thinkers like Locke, for example, seem to have a
a related idea, the idea of correspondence theory of truth. At least you can read some of Leibniz and Locke and others as advocating for such a theory. And in Locke's case, for example, the correspondence might be some sort of resemblance relation, right, where the proposition, true proposition, resembles the facts.
But that seems sort of hopeless, right? Because it's not really, unless we're thinking of true propositions like little pictures or beliefs as little pictures, which they're not. So that doesn't seem right. So another account, another possibility that was popular, and Russell can sometimes be seen as advocating a view like this, is to think of correspondence as a...
kind of structural isomorphism. And that's a fancy way of talking about, it's a good idea actually, it's an interesting idea, structural isomorphism is a sort of fancy way of talking about the ways in which things with structure can fit into each other. So here's an example, a lock and key, right? A lock has a structure to it, right? And the key has a,
isomorphic structure. That is, it's a structure that bears a one -to -one relationship with things within the pins and tumblers, and notches in the key bear a certain relationship with each other, which could be technically known as being isomorphic. And such that the lock fits into the key just right, and just so, and only that key fits into the lock. So,
Michael Lynch (27:18.608)
You might think of another example of this, and this is like, this'll, you know, here's like, let's go real old school and talk about something that maybe in much of your audience have only vaguely heard about, which is ideas of records, old fashioned records on turntables. Yes, they existed, these things. And what was the relationship of the records, the grooves, so these things for you people at home, for the kids at home.
These vinyl discs had grooves in them of varying depths and thickness. And those grooves had a relation to the sounds that are produced when there's a needle is yada yada going around on the disc. One -to -one correspondence. So there is a way when you talk about it, I said more like relationships. I mean, it's...
PJ (28:09.274)
A one -to -one correspondence. Yes.
Michael Lynch (28:17.904)
There are such things, right? Tree rings are another example, right? So you can, like they're all over nature. And so you could say that, and some philosophers have, that the correspondence relationship is like that. Now that's a more promising idea, I think, right? That the relationship between the true proposition, grass is green, and the state of affairs of grass being green is some sort of isomorphic relationship, right? And it might be an abstract metaphysical logical relationship.
But in some sense, the relationship, I mean, if you really think about it, I'm guessing some sense, the relationship between those little grooves on the vinyl and the sounds we hear, that's pretty freaking abstract, right? When you really think about it, you're like, whoa, how does that even happen? Right? These grooves and their physical properties have this relationship. Well, you might think, well, something like that is going on here, except even more abstract, right? So that's, you know, so then the...
PJ (28:58.042)
You
Yeah
Michael Lynch (29:17.104)
The problem, again, however, is that we might want to know more details about the nature of this isomorphism. And it's been hard for correspondence theorists to give those details. Now, some of them think that that's fine, that there's a certain level of, in theories, there's a certain level of detail that you get to and you can't give any more. And that's fair enough. But I'll just wind on. We can talk about this for a while, so I'll wind it up real quickly. But I think.
big picture, there are two big problems with the correspondence theory that people have had. And one is, so there's, I've mentioned two technical ones, because you were encouraging me to go to dive a little deep. And so the first technical one just to review was what are facts? Second technical one is what is the correspondence relation? And now just talk about two bigger picture problems that I think are actually the problems that most have driven most philosophers away from the correspondence theory. And here they are.
PJ (29:56.634)
Yeah!
Michael Lynch (30:16.336)
First big picture problem is the theory of correspondence theory of truth seems to invite a terrifyingly difficult kind of skepticism into the philosophical arena. So if you think, if you think roughly speaking, I'm really simplifying that truth is a matter of correspondence between the mind and the world, between propositions and the way things are.
and you think you can outstrip all of our knowledge, then it's easy for somebody to ask, well, how do you know that something corresponds to the way the world is? How do you know that? You can't, I mean, any attempt to seem to step out of our skins and check to see whether there's a correspondence, like, let's just check the structure, I'll find some morphism here, right? Like, I'll just peer out of my head and see, yeah, it matches up, cool. Right?
PJ (31:08.73)
Yeah.
Michael Lynch (31:11.792)
I've got the right key for this lock. But we can't do that. We can't step out of ourselves and check whether our thoughts are corresponding to the way the world is. And so skeptics, skeptical philosophers, have long thought, well, that's a problem. And one way of responding to that problem is to say, well, the problem is in the correspondence theory of truth. We've set ourselves up for a problem simply by endorsing the correspondence theory.
So that's big picture issue number one. I'm not saying everybody has been convinced by that argument. Lots of correspondence theorists think they have skepticism can be answered, or it's not that big of a problem, or the wrong way to answer it is to give up your theory of truth. Nonetheless, lots of philosophers have been worried about that. Second big picture problem, which I find particularly pressing and is important in my own work, is this, that the correspondence theory of truth,
At least in its contemporary formulations, which I haven't yet talked about.
But in really in any of its formulations seems to work best when you're talking about what J .L. Austin called middle sized dry goods. That is, you know, what?
PJ (32:31.642)
channel awesome I've never seen it but that is such all right so good
Michael Lynch (32:34.352)
All right, so it seems like you might, it seems like, in other words, I mean, think of examples I get, right? Grass is green. Like, I haven't used anything controversial. I didn't say anything, you know, I didn't, you know, it seems like it's very tempting to think that when we come to like, there's a chair in the room, you're wearing headphones, those, you know, I'm not, those sorts of questions about, you know, those.
PJ (32:43.994)
Right! Yes.
Michael Lynch (33:02.736)
observations about the physical world. Those seem plausible. Maybe there is some structural isomorphism there, right? And there it does seem as if, in some sense, to use a word I haven't yet used, but I think is important, you might think the mind is representing the world as it is. Our mind there is functioning like a representation machine, right? How many cars are parked outside? Well, five.
Well, we're representing, how do you know that? Well, I looked, there was a representation that I have that's true, right? So there the correspondence theory seems really tempting, right? It seems like this seems, maybe it's hard to answer the questions about what representation is or correspondence is, but at least it does seem to me, I think many other plausible in that domain. The problem is, is one of scope.
The correspondence theory traditionally says that anything that's true is true because it corresponds. But now let's think about what about propositions and ethics? What about propositions in politics? Murder is wrong. Well, is there a property of wrongness out in the world? Keep philosophical question. Correspondence theory seems to have to require that there is, that there's a state of affairs out there of murder being wrong. Same with political questions.
There we even get more dodgy questions about, suppose somebody says, well, the US government should, the right political decision is to lower federal taxes or raise federal taxes or tax this income bracket in a different way. Those sorts of claims, are there states of affairs of these shoulds out in the world? What about numbers? Propositions about numbers, are there?
Are those states of effects? Plato thought so. Everybody's a little worried about it. Otherwise, because how does our mind get in contact with numbers? Like, what do we call them up or what do we do, right? So, can I text the number one? So these sorts of questions get people worried that the correspondence theory works in some areas, might not work across the board.
Michael Lynch (35:24.4)
And that sort of sets people up for a dilemma. Either you say, correspondence theory works across the board. And so that, in that case, it seems like in morality, there isn't going to be correspondence with an objective reality. So I guess that just means that there are no truths or falsehoods in morality. Maybe same with numbers. I mean, Hartree Field, famous philosopher, early in his career, wrote a whole book called Science Without Numbers. Why?
because he was attracted to the idea that there's a correspondence theory of truth, but there probably weren't any such things called numbers out in the world. So you had to have a whole theory to explain how you could do science without the numbers existing. Right? So notice the correspondence theory, in other words, opens up all of these problems. Like it makes life easier in one area, like middle sized dry goods, or as I should say, middle sized dry goods.
PJ (36:11.45)
Yeah.
PJ (36:21.402)
Yes.
Michael Lynch (36:22.064)
And it makes life harder in all these other domains. So there's my riff on the correspondence theory.
PJ (36:34.938)
Yeah, if you don't mind, I just want to clarify and make sure I'm on the same track with you. Even the grass is green, you run into some weird problems when you don't take it at face value. Like, well, what does green mean? Right? And like, all of a sudden it's all sorts of different types of green. And it's like, so does it all have to be, does the grass have to be green down to the roots? Does it, you know, there's all sorts of like, this blade of grass has a little bit of brown in it. So can I say the whole thing is green? My,
Michael Lynch (36:57.008)
Right.
PJ (37:04.058)
My dad runs a really annoying version of this with my kids where he goes, I'll give you $5 so you can tell me how many fingers I'm holding up. And they'll say, they'll say five. He's like, no, it's four and a thumb. And if they say, no, it's four and a thumb, he's like, no, it's five. He'll just change. And at some point someone had to define that, right? That's where the semantic and metaphysics get into it. Is that a fair way to, yeah.
Michael Lynch (37:15.472)
huh.
Michael Lynch (37:22.576)
Thank you.
Michael Lynch (37:29.616)
Absolutely. And you raise an important point, as does your dad, which is that, you know, when we talk about truth, a real problem with talking, and this is actually not just, it's a problem for the correspondence theory, without a doubt, but it turns out to be a problem for everyone. Which is that vagueness and ambiguity, which are different things, right? But so sometimes people use the word
PJ (37:46.586)
yeah.
Michael Lynch (37:57.776)
vagueness in a way that's ambiguous, that's a word. But when we talk about vagueness, right, there's different kinds of vagueness. So let's not go down that rabbit hole for now. But hopefully the listeners can understand that, yeah, a lot of our language that we use is not particularly precise. And even if it is precise, it can be sometimes interpreted in different precise ways.
And it's sometimes unclear in context what somebody is expressing. In other cases, as you said, it's, you know, I mean, in a lot of cases, you know, it is precise enough. You know, so if we're working, you know, the landscape crew is, you know, like, hey, how's the grass on the other side of the field? Is it, are we good? And somebody comes back and says, yeah, it's green, right? Meaning we don't have to water that, right?
That's like nobody, you know, if they would, you know, the folks on the, the guys on the landscaping crew would not be amused if you said, if somebody said, well, maybe they'd be amused, but they would only take it as a joke. If somebody said, well, what do you mean by, right? I mean, they know what they mean. So obviously, you know, our language is vague and imprecise and rife with ambiguity, but it amazingly enough does.
PJ (39:07.546)
Right.
Michael Lynch (39:24.048)
perfectly good job in most situations because of facts about context. But vagueness, of course, does provide a problem for every theory of truth because you're going to have, you know, there's also this thing called degree vagueness or the paradox of the heap, right? Which is that suppose I, you know, you know, I am bald, but there are, there was a time when maybe it was indeterminate whether I was bald or not, right? I was balding, right? Well, yeah, you know, so.
We say if some person that's like that, that person is bald. Well, what makes them bald? I mean, are they like one hair over the line or like four? So those sorts of propositions are propositions for truth, are problems for truth theories too, and actually provide a particular problem. Vagueness is a...
PJ (40:02.746)
Hehehe
Michael Lynch (40:23.92)
very hard problem for deflationists to deal with. But yes, you're right, it's a problem for everyone.
PJ (40:27.418)
Mmm.
PJ (40:33.786)
So.
So many questions. So many. I mean, it's a huge book. It's covering so much area. And if you don't mind, what is a particular movement that you like their account? Because I don't think we have time to go through all of it. Which is totally fair, right? Yeah, yeah. What's one that you feel drawn to?
Michael Lynch (40:55.632)
No. No, fair enough.
Okay, so I'm an advocate of, throughout my career, of a kind of theory called pluralism about truth. And you can see I was already, in a sense, you'll see in a second that I was already setting folks up to think about this. Because notice what I said about the correspondence theory. It works great in some areas, or at least seems plausible, and in other areas, it seems like...
not really the idea that truth is correspondence with mind -independent facts seems implausible. So that suggests to me that maybe we should stop looking for a theory that explains the metaphysics of truth for all kinds of propositions, as if we have to give one answer to that question. You know, another kind of answer, you know, is the sorts of answers that pragmatists...
and coherent his supply, which is roughly speaking, if you think of the metaphor, the map, the correspondence theorist is like, truth is like a map, to use another analogy, right? Maps are also isomorphic with the things that they map, right? They represent, they correspond to the coastline or what have you. That's the correspondence theory. Another theory metaphor is that truth is more like a workable narrative. It's like a workable narrative. It's an explanation that works. So true propositions are those that.
sort of explain things in a workable way. They're good narratives. They make sense of things. So true propositions are those that are sort of part of an explanation that makes sense of the world. That idea, sometimes versions of it are adopted by pragmatists and other version by what's called coherence theorists. That idea makes sense of things like morality, right? There can be true propositions because murder being wrong,
Michael Lynch (42:54.992)
is an idea that collect together with other ideas about morality makes a lot of sense to most people and It's coherent we think the same with no propositions about numbers. I mean, what's more coherent than basic mathematics? It's a it's a workable system
The problem with those theories is if you take those theories, the idea that the metaphor of truth is a workable narrative and you go run too far with it, you get the same problem as with correspondence. Because look, you know, when we talk about propositions about stars, about rocks, about trees, about chairs, physical things in the world, it doesn't really seem plausible to say there that what we're doing is just giving a workable narrative. There it seems like, no, really, there are rocks. Like there are bullets, right?
To say that bullets, you know, getting shot by bullets kills people and that's, you know, that, that's, or, or I can't fly, right? That is true. I can't fly by flapping my arms, right? You might not say, well, yeah, that's true because it's a workable narrative. No, no, it's true because, you know, I can't, I really can't fly, right? That's a state of affairs of the world. So you can see there corresponding though. So they seem to, these theories, right?
PJ (44:03.514)
workable narrative.
Michael Lynch (44:16.848)
They're plausible in some areas, but like typical philosophers, philosophers overgeneralize. They say, so this is what truth is in this area that I care about. So it must be the explanation for everything, right? And I would pluralist people like myself, Crispin Wright, Doug Edwards, Nikolai Peterson, other people, they will share in some of our moods. What pluralists like myself want to say is, well, look, the question of what is truth is a deep, important question, but it doesn't have necessarily.
single answer. In some areas of our life, truth can be a workable narrative. In other areas of our life, it could be something like correspondence. And that's a more plausible approach, we want to say. One that allows us to get out of the problems associated that I talked about before, at least some of them. For example, if you say that truth in morality, just the property that makes propositions true in morality is
not correspondence, but something else, then you can still say that moral propositions are true or false, which I think is important, right? To be able to say, look, some things are just wrong. It might be difficult to know what the right thing to do is, but we definitely can say that it's true that certain things are wrong. And certainly, we want to say that there are truths or falsity in mathematics. I mean, so what we need is theories that allow us to make sense of our intuitions there. And I think the pluralists give us the possibility of doing that.
And that's why I'm attracted to that position.
PJ (45:47.13)
Hmm. Forgive me. It was, I know it was a throwaway comment, but did you say Michelle Sharon in some of her moods?
Michael Lynch (45:56.08)
No, Gillesher. Yeah, Gillesher, she's a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego. I was just giving props to the other people, sort of, right on this time.
PJ (45:57.466)
Giles Cher and some of her moods.
PJ (46:05.018)
Yeah, so yeah, I have to ask and if you're uncomfortable with this question, we don't have to go there, but what do you mean by in some of her moods?
Michael Lynch (46:15.088)
well, Gila is a correspondence theorist who thinks that correspondence comes in different kinds. So, she's a moralist, right? You see the move? See the move? The move is like, no, it's not that truth has more, question of truth has more than one answer. It's that the question of what is correspondence has more than one answer. But,
PJ (46:20.347)
Okay, okay. Yes, yes.
PJ (46:33.658)
That makes sense. And you said in some of her moves.
Michael Lynch (46:38.576)
I said in some of her moods, meaning that various times, I just meant that as a throwaway line, meaning that some of her writings, she emphasizes the pluralism. In other other writings, she emphasizes that she's a correspondence theorist. Both are correct. It's just a version of, it could be understood as a version of correspondence theory or a version of pluralism. It's an interesting position one way or the other.
PJ (46:41.882)
Yes. Yes. Yes! Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's really...
PJ (46:55.706)
Yes.
PJ (47:04.634)
It is, yeah, I'm glad I asked because I know it's a throwaway line, but I could tell there was something there. That's a really, that's an interesting way to answer some of the underlying issues for correspondence.
And I'd love to turn here to some of your own personal work. What is the value of these discussions? How does this help us move into the political climate? And as you said, moral statements matter, right? Their truth matters.
Why do we need these kinds of discussions when we address our political and cultural climate today?
Michael Lynch (47:50.32)
Great question. So as it happens, I have just finished a book which will be coming out next year from Princeton University Press. And the title of the book might suggest to you what my answer to your question is. And that is, the book is entitled, On Truth in Politics, Why Democracy Demands It. And that's what I think really fundamentally the answer to your
excellent question is. I think that there's a certain kind of politics, call it democratic politics with a small D, the kind of politics that we aspire to have in this country and many others around the world, but rarely achieved. And that sort of politics sees political life as a collaborative attempt through reasoned and deliberative dialogue.
to try to solve the problems that society faces. It's an inclusive, deliberative conception of how we should reason politically together. It's a conception that I think a lot of people think is a core democratic ideal, that democracies, and I think this, when they flourish, when they're doing things the way they should, whether that's at your local, your New Englander,
me, right, and local New England politics at the town count, you know, the budget meetings that villages have, right, when they go well, they actually are examples of that, right? When they don't, they don't, and they aren't. But, you know, we all, I think, understand that that sort of way of thinking about politics, that vision of democracy is under threat right now. And...
We may disagree, people may disagree of why, what the threats are, but I think a lot of people do rightly sense that there's a crisis of confidence around the world, not just in the United States, in the very idea of democracy, in that sense that I described, this way of engaging in political life. And I think a lot of us see, I think, that crisis of confidence is related to another crisis of confidence, which is lack of confidence in the value of truth.
Michael Lynch (50:16.175)
I mean, we're certainly at a time, right? We're both, we're having this conversation at a time in which, you know, the reality of climate change is widely denied. The reality of COVID has been denied and continues to be denied. That didn't happen. The idea of the earth is flat is back in vogue. I mean, that's not a joke, right?
It's back in, it used to be the sort of a thing that I would throw off as an obvious example that we'd all agree is a false idea, right? Well, can't do that anymore. There are, and the same with all sorts of things, right? There is, right now there's, the internet is rife with all sorts of conspiracies and thoughts and attempts by political actors and otherwise to undermine people's confidence in what seems to be obviously true.
Those two crisis of confidence go together and they show us that really, I think, or they suggest to me, and I'm gonna provide an argument for this in the book, that in order to have democratic politics, in order for democracies to flourish, they really have got to protect and promote our best ways of trying to pursue what's true or false. That democracies and the pursuit of truth are values that go together.
And when we start to not value pursuing truth, it's not going to be a surprise if we start, we find the democracy or democratic politics that I described it less valuable too. So democracy demands valuing truth. It demands the idea of truth in politics, but here's the rub. Here's the thing. And this is how it relates to what we talked about today. If it turns out there is no such thing as truth in politics.
If that's just a mirage, right, then it may turn out that democracy itself doesn't make much sense. That's a problem. So you need an answer to the question of what would it be for a political judgment, a judgment of how, you know, what roughly is a judgment about what society ought to do in the face of some collective problem, right? We make these judgments all the time. We vote on these judgments, like what we ought to do.
Michael Lynch (52:42.832)
Who should we elect? If there is no answer to that sort of question, if there's no truth out there about those questions, if it's all power all the way down, then what's the point really of engaging in rational, deliberative discussion about them if there aren't answers? Why bother talking to each other about it? I mean, typically, right?
to things that we really don't think have answers that are completely subjective. Serious minded folks don't spend a lot of time outside of bars talking about them. I mean, yeah, you might, is Michael Jordan really the best basketball player of all time? In a serious frame, we're like, that really probably doesn't have an answer. But have a few beers, people will talk about it anyway.
PJ (53:34.202)
Yeah.
Michael Lynch (53:39.344)
But later on, they might say, well, yeah, I mean, I was just bullshitting. Because there's nothing really serious there, right? I'm sure people will get upset with me for saying that that maybe it is. Maybe I'm just giving you an example. Another example might be, is this or that funny? Well, I don't know. Some people laugh, some people don't. But we typically, do we really want to say politics is like that? I don't want to say that.
PJ (53:47.77)
Yeah, yeah.
Michael Lynch (54:08.848)
I want to say that justice matters, that there's ways that better or worse ways of trying to solve our collective problems. So we better have a theory of truth in politics, hence the title of the book. So we better, and so how do we do that? Well, I think I have an answer of what truth is in politics. And it rests on the idea that truth, this pluralism that I talked about, that it turns out that truth in politics, what politics,
what makes political judgments true, I think is gonna, when we're talking about what questions about what society ought to do, often what matters there is coming up with workable narratives. But those narratives have to sit on some facts. The correspondence theory has to be also applicable to certain kinds of claims, claims that are not on their face political, but become politicized, like climate change is real, right?
that claim, a scientist, my scientist friends, will be like, you know, that's not a political claim. That's just like, you know, that's where the evidence points, people, right? But in our cultural context, you know, really it is a political claim. It's become politicized. That sort of claim, though, I want to say that sort of judgment is more true or false in virtue of the way the world is. So.
By being a pluralist, I think I can account for how truth can enter into our political discussions in a variety of different ways. But that's why one reason, one among many, that thinking about the nature of truth really does matter for issues that are not abstract at all in some sense, but are as real and as existential as anything we face in our lives.
PJ (56:03.29)
Dr. Lynch, first off, what an incredible way to summarize and kind of end today with a clear so what answer. And so thank you for that. And it definitely sounds too like a return visit for when your book comes out, but we'll see about that. Thank you again for coming on the show. It's been a real joy.
Michael Lynch (56:26.608)
Thank you for having me. I love the conversation. Take care.