Karl Popper on Truth vs.
Certainty and the Dangers of Relativism
“I dream of a world where the truth is what
shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson lamented. Nearly half a century earlier, Hannah Arendt captured
the crux of the problem in her incisive reflection on thinking
vs. knoing, in which she wrote: “The need of
reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning.”
This distinction between truth and meaning is
vital, especially today, as political propaganda and the “alternative facts”
establishment manipulate a public that would rather know than think, preying on
the desire for the certitude of ready-made meaning among those unwilling to
engage in the work of critical thinking necessary for arriving at truth — truth
measured by its correspondence with reality and not by its correspondence with
one’s personal agendas, comfort zones, and preexisting beliefs.
This essential discipline of differentiating
between truth and certitude is what the influential Austrian-British
philosopher Karl Popper (July 28, 1902–September 17, 1994)
examined at the end of his long life throughout In
Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years .
Popper writes:
All things living
are in search of a better world. Men, animals, plants, even unicellular
organisms
are constantly
active. They are trying to improve their situation, or at least to avoid its
deterioration… Every organism is constantly preoccupied with the task of
solving problems. These problems arise from its own assessments of its
condition and of its environment; conditions which the organism seeks to
improve… We can see that life — even at the level of the unicellular organism —
brings something completely new into the world, something that did not
previously exist: problems and active attempts to solve them; assessments,
values; trial and error.
Popper argues that because the identification
of error is so central to the problem-solving process, its corrective — that
is, truth — is a core component of our quest for betterment:
The search for truth … no doubt counts
among the best and greatest things that life has created in the course of its
long search for a better world.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Carl
Sagan’s insistence on science’s
essential role in democracy, Popper adds:
We have made great mistakes — all
living creatures make mistakes. It is indeed impossible to foresee all the
unintended consequences of our actions. Here science is our greatest hope: its
method is the correction of error.
Looking back on the sometimes troubled but
ultimately exponential reach for a better world that had unfolded over the
eighty-seven years of his life — “a time of two senseless world wars and of
criminal dictatorships” — Popper writes:
In spite of everything, and although we
have had so many failures, we, the citizens of the western democracies, live in
a social order which is better (because more favourably disposed to reform) and
more just than any other in recorded history. Further improvements are of the
greatest urgency. (Yet improvements that increase the power of the state often
bring about the opposite of what we are seeking.)
What often warps and frustrates our quest for
betterment, Popper notes in a 1982 lecture included in the volume, is our
failure to distinguish between the search for truth and the assertion of
certainty:
Knowledge consists in the search for
truth — the search for objectively true, explanatory theories.
It is not the search for certainty. To err is
human. All human knowledge is fallible and therefore uncertain. It follows that
we must distinguish sharply between truth and certainty. That to err is human
means not only that we must constantly struggle against error, but also that,
even when we have taken the greatest care, we cannot be completely certain that
we have not made a mistake… To combat the mistake, the error, means therefore
to search for objective truth and to do everything possible to discover and
eliminate falsehoods. This is the task of scientific activity. Hence we can
say: our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting
truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty.
[…]
Since we can never
know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it
is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for
mistakes, so that we can correct them.
In a sentiment of piercing pertinence today,
as a litany of “alternative facts” attempts to gaslight an uncritical public,
Popper offers a definition and admonition of elegant acuity:
A theory or a statement is true, if
what it says corresponds to reality.
[..]
Truth and
certainty must be sharply distinguished.
Condemning relativistic approaches to truth —
ones that regard truth as “what is accepted; or what is put forward by society;
or by the majority; or by my interest group; or perhaps by television” — he
cautions:
The philosophical relativism that hides
behind [Kant’s] “old and famous question” “What is truth?” may open the way to
evil things, such as a propaganda of lies inciting men to hatred.
[…]
Relativism … is a
betrayal of reason and of humanity.
It is useful here to revisit Arendt’s distinction
between truth and meaning, for where truth is
absolute — a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects
reality or does not — meaning can be relative; it is shaped by one’s subjective
interpretation, which is contingent upon beliefs and can be manipulated.
Certainty lives in the realm of meaning, not of truth. The very notion of an
“alternative fact,” which manipulates certainty at the expense of truth, is
therefore the sort of criminal relativism against which Popper so rigorously cautions
— something that, as he puts it, “results from mixing-up the notions of truth
and certainty.” All propaganda is in the business of manipulating certainty,
but it can never manipulate truth. Arendt had articulated this brilliantly a
decade earlier in her timely treatise on defactualization in politics: “No
matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer,
it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of factuality.”
Popper argues that the ability to discern
truth by testing our theories against reality using critical reasoning is a
distinctly human faculty — no other animal does this. A generation before him,
Bertrand Russell — perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest patron saint of
reason — called this ability “the
will to doubt” and extolled it as our greatest
self-defense against propaganda. The cultural evolution of our species, Popper
notes, was propelled by the necessity of honing that ability — we developed a
language that contains true and false statements, which gave rise to criticism,
which in turn catalyzed a new phase of selection. He writes:
Natural selection is amplified and
partially overtaken by critical, cultural selection. The latter permits us a
conscious and critical pursuit of our errors: we can consciously find and
eradicate our errors, and we can consciously judge one theory as inferior to another…
There is no knowledge without rational criticism, criticism in the service of
the search for truth.
But this rational criticism, Popper notes,
should also be applied to science itself. Cautioning that the antidote to relativism
isn’t scientism — a form of certitude equally corrosive to truth — he writes:
Despite my admiration for scientific
knowledge, I am not an adherent of scientism. For scientism dogmatically
asserts the authority of scientific knowledge; whereas I do not believe in any
authority and have always resisted dogmatism; and I continue to resist it,
especially in science. I am opposed to the thesis that the scientist must
believe in his theory. As far as I am concerned “I do not believe in belief,”
as E. M. Forster says; and I especially do not believe in belief in science. I
believe at most that belief has a place in ethics, and even here only in a few
instances. I believe, for example, that objective truth is a value — that is,
an ethical value, perhaps the greatest value there is — and that cruelty is the
greatest evil.
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