The following text was posted by me in an extended discussion on the inclusion or exclusion of the words 'not truth' from WP:V. The relevant posts were dated 31 August, and 5 September 2011 at Wikipedia_talk:Verifiability/First_sentence. The text reproduced here is slightly edited and concatenated, with a view to being polished into an essay on truth at some stage.
Towards a deconstruction of truth in verifiability
editHaving arrived here by way of an RfC elsewhere, along with a suggestion to address the issue philosophically, I agree with all who argued this debate is repetitive and fractured, but not that the debate isn’t worth having. From that perspective I also agree with comments that current threads are unlikely to lead to consensus or resolution, and that a fresh start might be in order.
Epistemological and phenomenological problems
editTo that end, allow me to propose that the word ‘truth’ is an epistemological conundrum unlikely to be resolved here, particularly because it concerns centuries of philosophical debate about what ‘justifies’ a ‘belief’ as being ‘true’. Moreover, the word ‘truth’ used without a qualifier runs into the problem of phenomenological priorities – that is, the ‘direct experience’ of ‘truth’ by different people (the quote marks are mine to identify the words as intended in a philosophical sense).
From that perspective, if the word truth is to be included, it ought to be qualified in some way, perhaps along the lines of ‘perceived truth’ or ‘apparent truth’. However, these qualifiers do nothing to ameliorate the redundancy of the mention of truth in a guideline on verifiability. Truth and verifiability are taxonomically quite distinct and neither word relies on the other for their ordinary meanings.
So, for example, it is verifiable that Erich von Daeniken wrote that aliens have visited Earth, and this verifiability is independent from any values attached to the thesis, including those of truth or falsity. In that regard it is completely irrelevant whether we can say it is true that von Daeniken did propose the ancient astronauts/alien visitor theory; what matters is the verification, which can be presented without adding the value judgement that it is true. The judgement that it is true or false that von Daeniken made the claim is deferred to readers who can access the source by way of citation. This isn’t just semantics, it is entirely in keeping with the policy of maintaining a neutral point of view. All Wikipedia is thus claiming to do is to present someone else’s claims with a means of verifying that someone else made such claims, but no Wikipedia synthesis that these claims are actually true or false in any normal or special sense of those words.
Staying aloof from making value judgements about truth in this way also avoids the thorny issue of spiritual 'truths', which can never be ‘proven’ or ‘disproven’ in an encyclopaedic context.
The teleological problem
editBecause Wikipedia has stated objectives relating to building an encyclopaedia, not to defining and telling ‘truth’, the real issue appears to be how one can separate the apparently similar but actually entirely different propositions inherent in: a) citing a credible, verifiable source claiming something to be true; and b) stating on behalf of Wikipedia that the gist of a citation is true. That’s not as simple as it sounds. Consider the statement that ‘Japan lost WWII’. We may all believe this to be true, but without quoting a credible, verifiable source, this becomes a Wikipedia opinion that can come unstuck if just one other editor states as truth an opinion that the post-war economic miracle in Japan was actually a victory won by means of a military disaster. In other words, the concept of truth needs to be so heavily qualified in almost all circumstances that it appears very sound judgement by Wikipedia’s initial policy-makers to insist on verifiable, credible sources, not perceptions of truth, to present these kinds of assertions.
Semantic and semiotic problems
editIf the mention of truth were excluded from the verifiability policy, it is possible that some editors might argue some truths as self-evident regardless of verifiability. That can occur quite predictably according to differences in cultural, social and educational backgrounds that inform notions of truth, but also unpredictably according to the same criteria and some others, like personal agenda, including editors with sincere beliefs who do not understand or accept the difference between verifiability, truth and beliefs, or who may reject the existence of subjective truth as opposed to objective universal truth.
However, in the absence of a guideline making ‘truth’ an acceptable reason for making an assertion in an article, the integrity of the WP:V guideline would, in no way, be undermined if mention of ‘truth’ were omitted.
The practical policy problem
editIn order to avoid creating greater ambiguity than is presently perceived by some contributors here, it appears that minor changes to existing wordings should be avoided unless and until it can be established that the concept of truth is relevant at all to the concept of verifiability. If it is not, the words pertaining to it can be dropped without fear of losing valuable meaning.
If, however, the concept of truth is determined to be necessary to define verifiability or non-verifiability, contributors here might consider dealing with the precise definitions of truths that are to be validated/invalidated by an absence of verifiable, credible sources. That option begs the question whether a separate guideline is necessary to nail down all the common and specialised meanings of the word ‘truth’ to be either excluded or included in the concept of verifiability.
My personal two cents’ worth
editIt seems to me that no clear consensus (as opposed to statistically insignificant numbers of votes) has emerged to support any change at all. The simplest option appears to be to do nothing. But I also believe that the redundancy of mentioning truth in a guideline on verifiability logically suggests dropping any mention of truth at all. WP:V would be no less or more enforceable than it is now, and there are no guarantees that article talk page controversies would increase or decrease as a result of omitting a mention of truth.
My final comment is that anyone who seeks absolute certainty about how Wikipedia guidelines can resolve all possible conflict situations without the exercise of rationality in interpreting general guidelines by editors and administrators is looking for the kind of 'truth' and 'certainty' that doesn’t exist outside subjective belief systems. Making Wikipedia guidelines so complex that they are iron-clad isn’t worth the anticipation (but not reality) of avoiding many pointless, repeated arguments in article talk pages along the lines of ‘... but it’s true ...’.
Another philosophical departure on truth
editThe pursuit of truth as an end in itself is synonymous with faith, which has as its end only self-validation. For an individual or group to pursue truth as an end, it may be that the individual or group is seeking a sense of self-righteousness or justification for their methods of ‘attaining’ truth.
In approaching truth as an objective universal value (applicable to all, under all circumstances, in all contexts and without regard to specific circumstances), its seekers are pursuing the same quest for spiritual enlightenment as people of religious or secular faiths do.
So, for a Muslim, it may be that attaining a sense of righteous peacefulness requires coming to an understanding of what the words in the Koran ‘actually’ mean and calling that the truth. For a Marxist, it may be that a sense of fulfilment or justice comes only from finding in the words of Marx, Engels and Lenin a ‘synthesis’ that explains a contradiction and indicates a course of action (like Lenin’s What is to be Done), and declaring that as truth.
Then there’s us, the intellectually superior types who are far too smart to subscribe wholeheartedly to any such ideological or dogmatic prescriptions about what is or should be. We are not fooled by doctrine, ideology or misguided superstitions. We live by facts, certain in our knowledge and our ability to think objectively about all issues.
Except of course we don’t.
What we do is make judgements about what seems credible to us in the vast flow of information we can tap into. For those of us who are scientists, we subscribe to the thesis-test-refinement doctrine. For historians, it’s the Western doctrine of historiography, perhaps mixed up with some sociology, economics, anthropology, etc. For artists it might be a refined aesthetic sensibility that defines itself through affectation of documented artistic poses in history. And so on.
We are, of course, not at all happy to be told that our 'objectivity' is itself a political construct linked to an evolving Western consensus about what is rationality, what is deviance, and what is therefore unquestioned as ‘normal’ (or acceptable). For the mathematicians among us, this roughly resembles a bell curve, which contains a normal range and standard deviations.
The problem with consensus about statistical results defining a normal and non-normal range is that this does nothing to explain truth at all. What it does is to legitimate majority views on what truth ought to look like.
In that manner, however, our civilization has shown itself to be ‘wrong’ quite often. We did, after all, start out as feudal slaves of an aristocratic elite, denying self-determination to almost everyone, and murdering those who proposed, among other things, that the Earth is round, not flat. And every ‘advance’ in our civilization was possible only when ‘truth’ was re-defined to include some greater self-determination, personal benefit or reflection of scientific or socio-political reality that had taken place regardless of rules against it.
Today the truth may be that all people are equal under law, which is not truth at all since wealthy people able to afford batteries of lawyers will always get a greater degree of ‘justice’ from any Western legal system than less wealthy people. Tomorrow it may be that only special categories of citizens who have performed public duties are entitled to legal protection at all, or ... .
In this sense I think it is futile to argue about the nature or meaning of truth without revealing all political, social, cultural, economic and intellectual prejudices embedded in our exposition of that concept. In other words, and in contradiction to what Saint Jimbo has said about us all striving to tell the truth, we never do more than justify the embedded prejudices and biases of our own subjectivities by calling them truth.
Of course this little departure into a subjective, philosophical consideration of truth is itself beholden to received wisdom, generated in the Western academy, about how one may consider truth.
What all these words really mean is that we are kidding ourselves if we think we can arrive at a settlement on the meaning or applicability of truth. In 60,000 years we never have.
I think it would be a much more simple task to focus on verifiability, accuracy, and transparency of interpretation. I can forecast right now that if Wikipedia, through its editors, prescribes to me how I should think about truth, particularly by way of some snot-nose quoting WP:TRUTHING or some other acronyms at me, I’ll face arbitrary lynching rather than ‘obey’. It’s the same deal as rejecting claims of consensus that are based on a handful of votes that say superstition is actually science, or that you need to be a Muslim to commit Islamic terrorism, or that that it’s anti-Semitic to criticise Israeli defence policy, or that this debate is better conducted across multiple pages than in one location, or ... all of which has occurred in Wikipedia discussions.
My conclusion about all of this is to leave the word truth alone, or excise it completely from the verifiability stipulation. Let there be enough elbow room for rational argument to prevail over nonsense without imposing a formula for truth that trumps informed common sense.