Does truth lie in eye of the beholder?

Part 2 of a 3 part series exploring the nature of truth.

So what is truth?

The word truth has a variety of meanings, from honesty, good faith, and sincerity in general, to agreement with fact or reality in particular.

In fact according to WIKI there are no less than 14 different theories on truth.

For the sake of this blog I will use the most common, the Correspondence theory. Correspondence theory states that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs. So we can say that there is a “fact” of matters or events. The ball is red. The sky is blue. Night is dark. We can all agree on the fact of these things. But what about questions like, will Obama fix the economy? That question is amazingly more complex then it seems on the surface. Republicans say no, democrats say yes. But why the confusion? 200 years from now we could look back and say, yes or no to that question with some authority, just as we can now say who won the civil war. So there is a fact of things, a truth to them, separate of opinion. With our bias, our opinions, and our faulty senses, how do we come to this truth?

Science and critical thinking my dear friends…

So what is this “Critical thinking”? Critical thinking is purposeful and reflective judgment about what to believe or what to do in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments. It is a way to process the data that we receive from our senses in order to come to a truth.

What about science? Why the hub bub about that? It is defined as systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation. In other words it is a method of determining facts or truth by utilizing tools such as critical thinking and the scientific method. At its most basic form it is:

1. Use your experience: Consider the problem and try to make sense of it. Look for previous explanations. If this is a new problem to you, then move to step 2.
2. Form a conjecture: When nothing else is yet known, try to state an explanation, to someone else, or to your notebook.
3. Deduce a prediction from that explanation: If you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow?
4. Test: Look for the opposite of each consequence in order to disprove 2. It is a logical error to seek 3 directly as proof of 2.

Let’s say we have a ball, we are trying to determine the color of this ball. Let us also suppose that in this case the ball is red.
First of we observe the ball, we believe it is the color blue. We look at other balls, their labels, their characteristics. We form the hypothesis, “I think the ball is blue because my perception tells me it is blue”. We deduce “all persons must see this ball as blue”. And we create a test to determine this. So how to do that? Well, we would want this test to be independent of or senses and opinions, we would want it repeatable, and we would want our peers to look at it for mistakes. So we create a test. We take ten people, and ask them to write down what color they think the ball is. We also take another ball, a white one and ask ten more people to write down what color they think it is. This is the control group. It is there to make sure that the data we get is not skewed by something we may have missed. In addition we will be publishing our results in the magazine “Ball weekly” the premiere ball color magazine in the world for the public to review.

So what were our results? Well, our study showed that 10 out of the ten persons said that our ball was red not blue. What about our control? They all said that their ball was white, so their perception was not skewed in any way. In addition we published and our “ball enthusiast” public all also agreed that our ball is red not blue.

Our hypothesis was wrong. We run the study again, this time with the assumption that the ball is red, and our results verify our hypothesis. At this point we can call out hypothesis a theory. A theory is the highest level any answer can attain in science. Do not mistake it with the common use of the word. A theory states within 99.99999999999999999% accuracy that the data fits the theory, consistently.

In contrast faith and psudo science say that the ball is blue, because god, the bible, some divine being, some ancient wisdom, tell us it is so. This is despite the evidence, despite our study. As much as we would distort the word blue, rationalize the point, the ball would still remain factually red, not blue.

So how accurate is this wacky thing you call science? Well it depends on just how complicated a system is and how much we know about it. For example, we can predict the movement of the planets and eclipses to extraordinary accuracy. We can measure the distance to the moon to within millimeters, which is the width of a pencil lead. We can predict an eclipse to within nano seconds. In fact almost all science theory is accurate to this level. Even the Theory of evolution accurately predicted that we would find the fossils that we have, and found them and at what time in the past they would have lived. Without this accuracy in science your computer, car, phone, lights, air conditioning, stove, microwave, radio, cd player, dvd’s would not exist. If you are older than 33 you would also most likely be dead as the life expectancy has risen from 33 to 79 in just over 200 years! This is due to Science.

So thus is the power of truth.

"If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in
thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth,
which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in
self-delusion and ignorance which does harm."
[Marcus Aurelius]