Excerpt from Chapter seven of the book ‘BEYOND SCIENCE’ False Doctrine, objective understanding and consensus by Robert Priddy

FALSE DOCTRINE, OBJECTIVE UNDERSTANDING AND CONSENSUS

Everyone is subject to some network of thought and emotion, some personal variant of one or more systems of ideas, assumption, beliefs and ideals. These systems have been more or less crystallised into doctrines, operating at various levels of life and for any number of purposes. Where the major questions of life are concerned - the most vital and determining judgements and decisions - the question therefore arises; is it better awarely to study and develop a doctrine to test it through practice than to leave everything more or less to circumstance or chance?

Most Western people become eclectics, at least for some period of their lives, if for no other reason than that they often find themselves subjected to a cross-fire of dogmas, doctrines and theories. However, eclecticism is not the solution to important questions of truth. Nor is it the best solution to how best to live, for by its very indeterminate nature it engenders frequent dilemmas and confusions. The urge towards the truth within us insists that some explanations must be false, while there must always be a true explanation. The sense of truth and truthfulness is thought either to be inherent to the structure of the human mind or else only developed through experience. The truth of the matter probably lies somewhere in between, as with the image on the photo negative that is unseen at first and is gradually brought to light. Unity in understanding or ‘knowing as a whole’ is a goal that no seeker of truth can give up, and this goal has been sought since time immemorial. However, there are very good reasons for the view that there are questions upon which we can never reach an unambiguous, complete and clearly expressed truth. Despite this, mankind necessarily continues to seek the truth both in worldly and otherworldly matters. Since much good or ill evidently depends upon whether one has a true or a false understanding, one cannot just give up truth seeking simply because human understanding has certain limits.

So human reason essentially requires that there must be a true answer to any question. That is why moral and cultural relativism does not and cannot work as serious philosophy, however beneficial it may seem as a means of dealing with cultural diversity and the problems that arise from the clashes of differing peoples and religions.

Even false beliefs and misguided doctrines contain some truth and good. There is always a modicum of the proverbial ‘method even in madness’. Logic even demonstrates indisputably that a true conclusion can follow from two entirely false premises! The task of unifying understanding is to extract the grains of truth from the biassed account and the distorted theory and to discard the husks. Knowledge proceeds largely by the clash of ideas or viewpoints and their subsequent mutual interaction… a process of dialectic. Progress comes by gleaning what remains whole and consistent after the clash of these or after the analytical picking-apart of theoretical systems of error. The truth content has continually to be extracted and given new expressive form suitable to the changing world, without losing the universal essence of that truth. That is the aim for unity in understanding at the intellectual level, while on that of inter-global understanding the aim is mutual respect and gradual reconciliation in the best interests of everyone.

It is quite logical to our minds that a truth must always remain the same if it is to be truth. The ancient issue of truth is whether it is something that can be known as an unchanging idea, quality or essence. If so, then comes the question as to whether it can be established objectively, that is - so as to be demonstrable for the benefit of everyone who wishes to know it and test it.

I may believe in the existence of objective truth, such as in moral questions and I have conviction that sometimes I do find evidence of there being a genuine supra-personal answer to what is ‘truly right’ in some matters. But this belief does not allow me to say that I know it with certainty. This being the case, there is no more reason to lay emphasis on the truth than on the good or any of the values connected with it. That I cannot be certain that any given assertion expresses an unchanging truth does not invalidate the ideal of truth as something to be sought and approached. This is a necessary and constant ideal of all good science, philosophy or meta-science and spirituality.

What we call ‘certainty’ is a subjective condition, sometimes a widely shared or ‘inter-subjective’ condition. But there is no full guarantee that there must be a corresponding objective condition. This insight underpins the scientific emphasis on observation as the first and last requirement of accepting any hypothesis. At the same time, all of any empirical observer’s perceptions, judgements and conclusions are always themselves subjective.

It is only by agreement on what is or is not observable that science proceeds. Further, this consensus depends upon all having adopted much the same viewpoint and (scientific) interpretations as each other. Such inter-subjective verification is often haphazard, however. It is almost never arrived at by formal procedures such as electing authorities or voting on what is to be taken as established knowledge. Understanding is not achieved simply by consensus among professionally interested parties, though nor does it of course have to be excluded thereby. However widely based, inter-subjective agreement cannot guarantee objectivity. The history of scientific discovery teems with instances where established opinion, with its various self-perpetuating interests and other blindnesses, was the greatest hindrance to newly-discovered truths. The very incoherence of meaning eventually found in flawed intellectual products leaves gaps for the creative understanding to cause dogmas to collapse and discover new truth. So validation of ideas through inter-subjective observation simply adds another kind of evidence, though sometimes very telling or decisive, to all that is to be considered in drawing conclusions from theoretical-empirical research.

Even among the leading exponents of an ‘exact’ natural science, say in physics or astronomy, there is seldom general consensus as to which new hypotheses are true or which are the most likely to be so, though nearly all may agree on the basics of well-tried theories (like relativity and even quantum theory). In summary, inter-subjective consensus is not in itself a sufficient criterion of truth, and even in our most advanced fields of science, truth remains ‘an uncertain quantity’.

Scientific truth is really only the knowledge of a hierarchy of facts, generalised in theory. Judicial truth is similar, for it seeks to know what is or is not the case. Both these disciplines judge only statements that either do or do not hold up upon close observation of the relevant state of affairs. This is an important enough standard for any sort of judicial or scientific-technological work, but the decisive test is whether general consensus is reached, usually among experts and subsequently in the wider society.

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has shown in detail how this is so, asserting that consensus arrived at by a proper process of discourse is truth, and vice-versa. To this I remark that this can surely only at best be the closest approximation to truth one has managed to reach in a given society at any time. Who is included in the debate that leads to consensus differs with cultures, societies and eras and often depends on how specialised the subjects are.

One main problem of worldly truth is to know what is a correct inter-subjective process of dialogue that leads to it. I have gone to some length to point out that what is commonly accepted as the truth is not always true, far from it. Nor is what is accepted by those who may been emancipated from the duress of censorious force, traditional views or subtly entrenched false ideologies necessarily true. Authority in the matter of human understanding, and even in problems of specialised knowledge, is fallible and cannot be trusted blindly. This danger is much increased by errors and misunderstandings arising from the excessive reliance of our complex social systems on information systems working at a second, third or further remove from its original source. What applies in one context or situation, once abstracted and made generally available, can be interpreted under other circumstances and form the basis of compound misinformation and even entrenched myth.