Introduction
Words have many uses. One is to assert that such-and-such is what is, or is not. For example:
1. Water can be liquid.
2. Ice is not a form of water.
3. Presently (March, 2024) Donald Trump is campaigning to be the GOP’s presidential candidate for the 2024 elections
4. Presently (March,2024) Donald Trump is the President of the United States
5. Odysseus was married to Penelope.
6. The sum of the interior angles of a triangle is exactly 180 degrees.
7. Parallel lines can intersect.
8. The earth and seven other planets revolve around the sun.
9. The planet Mercury has several moons.
As they appear here these assertions are entities[1] in social reality, as are the words that are used to construct them. Some of these words reference entities in physical reality, e.g., 'water', 'planet'; some reference entities in social reality, e.g., 'triangle', 'line'; some reference entities that have a connected existence in both physical and social reality, e.g., 'Donald Trump', 'election'. Since a major focus of this blog is the future of human civilization, I will not be much concerned with statements that refer to entities like novels or geometries that exist only in social reality (e.g., 5, 6, 7 above). As you read the other assertions you form or recall entities in your own subjective reality. All of the other assertions are generally accepted truths. They are making claims about the existence and attributes of entities in objective reality.
Sentient beings are aware only of the mental entities in their minds. A few savants still argue that this is all there is. In the light of all the evidence we now have about our brain/minds, I completely reject this position. I maintain that except for the entities that we imagine, all the entries in our minds either correspond to, or are abstracted from entities in objective reality. In our minds we create models about entities. In order to have useful models[2] of objective reality our minds view all assertions as either mostly true or mostly false. I my mind I consider an assertion about objective reality as mostly true if and only if (a) I have direct and trustworthy sensory evidence that what it purports is actually so, or (b) it is logically compatible with other assertions I accept as mostly true, or (c) it is an assertion in social reality that several others whom I trust, using conditions (a) and (b) accept as mostly true.
This blog aims to host earnest dialogues that attempt to circumscribe truths. My vision is that participants will do this either by citing evidence or by valid argument. A statement citing evidence should purport to be true either by observation or by valid argument from other statements that have been accepted as true. A valid argument is one which adheres to accepted applications of logic. In this blog I will try to use fact as a synonym for evidence.
Humans appear to be so constructed that they emotionally prefer certainty over any sort of uncertainty. Classical logic supports this propensity. However, as we currently understand the universe, certainty exists only in the human imagination. Our dialogues should reflect this. Since I will attempt to avoid imaginary worlds where truth can be certain, the best we can do is circumscribe truths or describe various versions of truth. Emotionally this is always difficult.[3] For some people it appears to be impossible. We should just do the best we can, and campaign that our society's socialization processes attempt to prepare us to deal with this handicap.
The future of humanity will be largely determined by the actions individuals or groups take vis-a-vis objective reality.[4] Every action results in a change in physical reality. When I flip a light switch in my house I make a tiny, tiny change in physical reality. When I posted this piece I made a change in both physical and social reality since the content of this post is then available to be perceived by other minds. Changes in social reality are always accompanied by changes in physical reality since to be perceived a social reality entity must have at least one physical instantiation.
Physical Reality
Initially humankind's truths about physical reality were concrete and related directly to individual’s well-being and reproductive opportunities. An early foray into abstract truths occurred with the development of numbers. An early example is Eratosthenes' estimate of the circumference of the earth as being 250,000 stades (46,250 km).[5] Major advances in developing truths about physical reality came with the invention of the telescope[6] and microscope. These inventions expanded human vision in the large and the small by orders of magnitude. Many truths were developed to account for these new visual experiences. With more inventions that extended humankind's ability to observe physical reality, we have today many models of physical reality whose truth appears to be certain. For example, most of us accept as an absolute truth that we live on a planet that orbits a star.
Physical reality truths are established by observation, experience, and analysis. In general, the observation or experience must be made by several people before it becomes accepted as a truth.
Social Reality
From anthropological observations of hunter-gatherer societies, and primatologist observations of chimpanzee and bonobo societies, the creation and continual elaboration of social reality appears to be a uniquely human phenomenon. Most humans today are primarily concerned with social reality. Most people, most of the time, deal with physical reality in a nearly unconscious manner. What really matters to most people most of the time is what's happening in social reality, and in the subjective realities of other people.
Truths about entities in social reality are quite different from truths about entities in physical reality. Truths about social reality entities appear to be just logical implications of what some human or group of humans has imagined/decided to be desirable. Action affects physical reality, but often what people say about the action is more important.[7] For example consider the assertion:
Propaganda is detrimental to democracy.
To begin: 'propaganda' and 'democracy' refer to social reality entities. 'detrimental' refers to a relationship between entities in which properties of the subject inhibit properties of the object that the speaker considers desirable. Is this assertion true?
The truth or falsity of an assertion about physical reality entities can be ascertained by various entirely objective means. At least many people consider them entirely objective. If there are similar entirely objective means for assertions about social reality entities I don't know of them. The first problem is definition. What is propaganda? What is democracy? I can define these terms and 'detrimental' in such a way that that I can create a logically valid argument in which this assertion is true. I believe these terms could be defined in such a way that this assertion is logically false.
Regardless of how 'propaganda' is defined, it appears to be the case that it exists in the social reality of any modern human society, so any society which considers itself to be democratic must either ignore the existence of propaganda or deal with it in some way. One way to do this is to consider what history has to say about the relationship between propaganda and democracy, and to set policy and take action based on some sort of consensus process. No certain predictions can be made, so continuous trial, evaluation, and revision must be used.
Conclusion
In this post I have tried to enunciate a few of the fundamentals of my thinking. I don't assume my thoughts are totally novel. I'm not particularly conversant with the philosophical literature. I would appreciate any comments on how what I have expressed here relates to what others have said. Also, any commentator will have different mental fundamentals. In our attempt to circumscribe truths it will help if commentators attempt to describe their own fundamentals.
Notes:
[1] I will be using "entity" as a technical term. In common speech all nouns name an entity. Presently I am assuming that any statement that addresses anything refers to an entity. In common parlance the word "thing" is a close approximation to my use of "entity", For me an entity is anything to which attributes can be attributed. For me, feelings, thoughts, dreams, etc. are entities.
[2] Models are more complex mental constructions that entities. They knit together many assertions to give a more complete, coordinated view of some aspect of objective reality.
[3] I maintain that although they may be deep in the background, emotions are always associated with any assertion a person proposes.
[4] Individual thoughts can affect the future, but only when such thoughts are placed in social reality where they can influence action.
[5] The Big Bang, p13, Simon Singh, 2004
[6] The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler, 1959.
[7] "say" is used here in a general sense. Posting a video on the web is saying something. Just privately verbalizing a thought is not saying anything
This is largely what is called a 'correspondence theory of truth', which was an approach pioneered by Bertrand Russell, and also G.E. Moore, who were at Cambridge together at the start of the twentieth century. There is still a thriving trade in correspondence theories, but it must be noticed that the very existence of a thriving trade in them is a sign that these have not managed to 'win out' in any serious way over competing approaches. Indeed, I think part of the situation that distinguishes the twentieth from the twenty first century in these terms is that the very idea of one theory 'winning out' has been largely abandoned, with reasons both good and bad.
I am intrigued by your suggestion "all the entries in our minds either correspond to, or are abstracted from entities in objective reality" - consider the 'snark' in a game of 'snark hunt', in which folks are taken on a hunt for an animal that in fact does not exist in any conventional sense. Do you want to say the 'snark' is abstracted from entities in objective reality...?
Your chosen approach here softens some of the corners of correspondence theories in ways that most proponents of such approaches usually want to avoid, but I find your approach (and others like it) intriguing, and it brings to mind also remarks in David Hume 1739 book A Treatise on Human Nature:
"All our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent."
I continue to ponder that claim - it is decidedly non-trivial.
However, I would caution you against using 'fact' as a synonym for 'evidence', as what is claimed as a 'fact' and what the evidence actually consists of are two radically different things. Nowhere is this clearer than when you get into the use of p-values in statistics, and a variety of related forms of mathematical sorcery that obfuscate what is the case. Evidently there is a way to make 'facts' and 'evidence' align, but the common usage of 'fact' slips wildly away from 'evidence' - and this is especially so wherever statistics are the most common toolset.
For instance, a pharmaceutical company claims has an experiment that shows that the unvaccinated suffer more deleterious effects than those that received their vaccine candidate. They claim this shows their candidate is 'safe and effective' (as a fact, and as another way of reporting this specific evidence). But the experimental design treats a person as 'unvaccinated' until two weeks after the administration of the candidate. So any adverse reactions within two weeks are attributed to 'unvaccinated' subjects, who in fact have received a dose but not yet had two weeks pass. This is not a hypothetical, this rather scurrilous methodology has indeed been used - even though it could show saline solution to be a 'safe and effective' treatment for just about anything! (This is because any time your methodology assigns different timespans to two arms, the longer time span arm has more background events e.g. heart attacks.)This is just one example of how 'fact' and 'evidence' can become blurred in ways that are not helpful.
Another issue to consider: the attempt to corral 'social reality' from 'physical reality' runs into problems when you start to recognise the overlaps between entities in social reality and the claims made about physical reality. This, I'd say, has been a recurrent theme in recent philosophy of science. A good example here is the electron - because what do we mean when we say 'electron'...? And does the electron 'exist'? Is it part of physical reality? Your correspondence theory allows for us to say that the electron is 'abstracted from' physical reality. This is weak sauce as far as such theories go, but it seems to me a fair way of approaching the issue, and it is certainly hard to do better with this kind of entity, which is as much an artefact of our experimental histories as anything else.
But this leads to another issue, a thought experiment if you will. Imagine a form of consciousness that exists encoded in a gravimetric field. What form of social reality does such a being experience...? You say "most of us accept as an absolute truth that we live on a planet that orbits a star" - I would suggest that this isn't true for this hypothetical gravity-being, for which planets and stars are indistinguishable, although they can 'feel' stars and gas giants more prominently than most planets.
This is an absurd example, but I think it is helpful to consider this case before considering whether, for instance, a tribesperson living in the Amazon accepts 'that we live on a planet that orbits a star', which is, ultimately, a construction of our social imaginary, and does not have quite the necessity that you perhaps intend here. This is a can of worms, to be sure, but it teases at the risks involved in going down these kinds of path.
Lastly, because I cannot resist, I want to say that "The earth and seven other planets revolve around the sun" is a false statement unless qualified. One must first accept the lazily evoked shortcut preferred by contemporary astronomers that 'a dwarf planet is not a planet', which is rather questionable. In no way is it necessary to accept this, and I flatly reject it. With my astrophysicist hat on I would say, rather, "The earth and three other terrestrial planets, four jovian planets, and at least eight dwarf planets orbit our sun".
There is no prima facie reason to exclude dwarf planets from being planets *except* the desire to claim that we know how many planets there are. This, I would suggest, is the only reason the International Astronomical Union chose this otherwise indefensible formulation. But the truth is: we do not know how many planets there are in our solar system. And it will be a long, long time before we do. That for me is a more wonderful, more accurate, and more humble way of approaching astronomy than the 'finger in a dyke' approach of saying dwarf planets are arbitrarily not planets, for which no experiment, no evidence, and no facts exist - nor could they exist, because ultimately it is pure hermeneutics, that is, social reality.
This is more than just game-playing on my part (although it is also this!) - it is a sign that this neat division into 'social reality' and 'physical reality' is intimately intricated and involuted in ways that do not tease apart to the degree that folks preferring correspondence theories tend to prefer. For these, and other reasons, I do not personally come at these problems in this way. But that doesn't mean you cannot. For where you are coming from, I would suggest you would be much happier with a correspondence theory. Just be aware that, as with so much in life, your epistemic mileage may vary.
All the very best,
Chris.