Contentions

• Correspondence truth claims are publicly defensible judgments about individual elements of external reality.
• Coherence truth claims are aggregates of private truths that do not contradict according to whatever standard of rationality the thinker chooses to employ.
• In any conversation, we may not be able to identify the axiom or warrants persons assume in their truth claims, so we may easily discount the declarations they make.
• Correspondence claims in decreasing order of reliability depend upon empiricism, expertise, competence, undistilled experience, or authority for their warrant.
• Coherence claims rely upon the virtual circle, whose sole criterion is non-contradiction.

Try this. The next time a friend makes some simple declarative comment, ask her this simple question: “How do you know?” Now this exercise should be enlightening for you as well as your friend if you take a moment to examine it. First, you might ask yourself why you picked this particular declaration to challenge. Next, you might pay attention to the tone of your friend’s response. Finally, notice its content. All three observations should prove educational.

As to the first, it seems a peculiarity of our nature that we never notice a need to justify our truth claims unless we find them challenged. Did you disagree with the remark you chose to question? The odds are that you did, and that propensity reveals something about our desire for consensus and civility that is at one level very positive. Unless there’s something wrong with us, we don’t wish to be confrontational, annoying, and fractious. We typically don’t seek out discord. Our alarm bells don’t go off when conversations either confirm or fail to challenge our worldview., the complex of mutually supportive truth and goodness claims that make sense of our world. On the down side of this inclination, our failure to interrogate allows us an unjustified conviction that our way of seeing things is the correct one, meaning the single accurate understanding of what reality really is. Our reluctance to challenge others and ourselves could be a social survival mechanism or mental indolence. I am convinced that we have a little unconscious mental calculator that clicks off all the positive reinforcements we receive for our own views of the true and the good. Perhaps this consensus gentium helps us to sustain them. In any case, why would we want to ruffle feathers and disrupt our own placidity by seeking justification to declarations we find congenial?

Of course, we and those we converse with could be wrong. We could be wrong as we think the 9-11 hijackers were when they discussed the pleasures of the afterlife as they steered their Boeing 767 into the World Trade Center. Wrong as Germans who cheered the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, or the Papal Court at the trial of Galileo, or the defenders of Jim Crow in the American South in the 1950’s. Social consensus is hardly proof or justification, though it moves mores and conventions (see “Cultural Consensus“). It seems reasonable to consider it a kind of authority, and in a world of many different cultures, it must inevitably face an erosion of the trust that is its only warrant when it faces dissent. It is a very poor kind of justification for our truth and goodness claims (see “Authority, Trust, and Knowledge”). It fails as soon as it faces serious challenge. Allow me to be clear. Its failure in no way disproves the truth it asserts. The collapse of consensus is a consequence of disagreement, and when authorities disagree, they inevitably erode trust, in part because they have no means to reinforce it once it begins to fade. Credible challenge dissolves authority. Some other warrant must be sought if its claim is to be defended. Your asking the simple question, “How do you know?” is exactly the kind of challenge authority fears if only because it opens the door to disagreement.

But the question may strike quite a different nerve from another source entirely. Notice the tone of your friend’s response to this simple question. If it hints at some defensiveness, you might back off. But why would she object to a simple request to explain why she thinks something to be true? After all, she put it out there, making the truth claim, stating the declaration, staking out the position, structuring a sentence so as to say “this is true” or “this is good” or even “this is beautiful.” If you agree, wouldn’t it be interesting to gather more proof for your own judgment, and if you don’t, wouldn’t it be even more interesting to understand why someone thinks differently, perhaps with enough rationale to help you get closer to the truth? So you asked, and since she bruited the truth claim to begin with, isn’t she under some obligation to respond?

You would think so, but perhaps you might back off a bit if you also consider that her justification might very quickly veer into very personal territory. Oddly, that depends not at all on the nature of the declaration itself but rather on the nature of the justification she uses in her own mind to make sense of it, to convince herself that what she said to you, what she really thinks, reflects some truth. Should her warrant fall into the realm of correspondence, she might reference an article she read or a comment made by her podiatrist or mechanic, or maybe an experience she had that she feels no hesitation to relate. These kinds of warrants are innocent and will likely produce an enlightening back and forth. That is the way correspondentist justifications go. They are external, singular, and collaborative, so if you then reply with a conflicting kind of warrant provided by an article you read, an expert you consulted, or an experience you had, the two of you will find further conversation fruitful as you compare the strength of the warrants you used in your truth claims. But perhaps the response to your question will be different. Your friend pauses as she searches for the right language to express an entirely different kind of thought, one far more personal and less easily communicated. In this case she justifies her declaration not by some correspondentist warrant but by a coherentist one. Support for her declaration is not something external but something deeply personal, composed of the entirety of her experiences and reflections on them: in short, her values and her world view. For you to ask her to justify her truth claim is synonymous with asking her to justify herself and her understanding of her world. What is more, if she should attempt such a feat, how should any real conflict in your viewpoints be reconciled? What is most certain about her coherentist virtual circle is that it is different from yours (see “What Is the Virtual Circle?“). How could it not be? She has had a lifetime of different experiences and the lessons they teach to build it, and if she relies on her personal truths with any regularity, she is likely to regard the logical rigor with which she has constructed her world view to be also a matter of personal preference. To challenge her claim is to challenge everything that makes sense of her world and the means she’s used to build that sense.

And that brings us to the third point. What do you, her sympathetic listener, do with her declaration? On what grounds do you, can you, respond? Should you find her warrant to be correspondentist, you may without fear proceed to a discussion of the merits of the claim itself. You may offer supporting or challenging evidence to further or dispute her position with every confidence that such a discussion will not imperil your friendship and perhaps will improve your mutual understanding of the issue under discussion. But should you see her argument as coherentist, you must tread more lightly. For a supporting argument adds no heft to hers. As it is based on a virtual circle and therefore personalized warrant, the addition of another from an infinity of private warrants will do little to add support to her argument unless, of course, she treasures that little consensus calculator I mentioned earlier. And should you disagree, what of it? The same reality ensues. She can not only discount your argument as simply a variation of experience, as she should, but may also find you challenging her entire world view and the intellectual or emotional means she employs to structure it, for to find an anomaly in one part of the virtual circle is to introduce anomaly into its entirety. And your innocent interrogation of her warrant will force her either to dismiss your objection as inapplicable to her life or reexamine everything that is applicable. You are not merely challenging a truth claim, it seems, but also the entire identity of the person who made it. No wonder our disagreements are often so corrosive! If she seriously entertains the anomaly you introduced, what can she do? You have taken a metaphorical pickaxe to her entire epistemic foundation, and now she must either rebuild her entire virtual circle in light of your objection or attempt to patch up the cracks you have hammered into it. Either way, you now can see why she might be resistant even to think through your point, for she may more easily smooth out the rough corners of her virtual circle by ignoring it than by accepting its possible truth. After all, everybody’s experience is different, right?

But on the off chance that she might consider your declaration to be true, she will find it far less threatening to her self-concept to view it as a correspondence claim rather than coherentist one, for accepting it will require only that she revise the single truth claim that was in dispute. How will she know when to make the switch from a virtual circle to a correspondence view? She will have to consider how the claim is warranted. To put it plainly, correspondence arguments must be based on one of five justifications.

Empirical (scientific) warrants are the strongest simply because they make use of techniques designed to minimize the errors our reasoning is most prone to. First, they limit themselves intentionally to a very narrow range of perceptual experiences. Even within that narrow range, they further limit the quantity of specific experiences under review. They attempt to replicate those experiences to eliminate variance. They use precise language to explain what the experience has taught, which is why science is fond of the only infinitely precise language available: mathematics and the statistical methods it employs. They build explanatory hypothesis on closely examined experience rather than attempting to force experience to mirror preconceived opinions. The edifice of science over the last two centuries has been built on this knowledge foundation. But such efforts are severely limited in scope. Natural science can only address those kinds of experiences amenable to its methodology of repeatability, elimination of variables, quantification, and theoretical plausibility. Unfortunately for contemporary societies who stand in awe of its powers, true science can only probe a very narrow range of truth issues. Worse, it cannot begin to resolve even the most basic questions of goodness (see “What Do We Mean by ‘Good’?“). Science can resolve goodness issues of immediate utility—it can tell us the best materials to use in constructing an elevator cable. But even such a simple finding must first be plugged into the empirical process; it cannot derive from it. Materials science can only design that cable once architects decide an elevator of a certain weight and volume would be useful in a building’s design, and that decision depends on many prior ones, each arbitrated by some designer’s sense of what purpose the building will serve. Given these limitations, it must be apparent that natural science simply cannot speak to issues of quality or morality or beauty because its methods require perceptual and measurable data (see “The Limits of Empirical Science“).

As experiences are so variable, we often rely on expertise to give us correspondence justification. The careful application of universal reasoning to varied experience may produce judgments about truth and goodness that are admittedly less reliable than empirical judgments because they take into account the variability of experience but that still apply a universal logical filter to these experiences derived from careful analysis. This application works on some experiences and not on others. The kinds that produce expertise are easy to identify: they must be different enough to allow thoughtful analysis to reveal distinctions but similar enough to distill the essence of the thing being studied. And there must be many of them. I was pleased to see Malcolm Gladwell addressing this requirement in Outliers, though his standard of ten thousand hours of practice and study seems a bit rigid for a warrant that allows so many kinds of activities. Though it may require that much time to become an expert programmer, perhaps something less might be asked of a short order cook, though the same sort of mental effort might be required to perfect skill and technique. It goes without saying that experts only speak with a strong warrant in their own field (see “Expertise“).

If expertise can be seen as a kind of empiricism light, then competence must be seen as lighter still. Empiricism succeeds purely because it limits the variability of experience by repetition, minimizing variables, controlling conditions, and employing precise analytic language: all efforts to maximize reasoning while minimizing the variability and privacy of experience (see “The Tyranny of Rationality”). Expertise faces less control and more variations. Still, the expert masters a wider range of experiences than the scientist, though at some cost to precision and justifiability. Drop down still further and see competence at work in an environment in which experiences are quite variable and their influences illimitable, yet reasoned analysis is still fruitful because some categorical and conceptual essentials can still be derived from them. By applying thoughtful analysis to varying experience over time, persons can develop competence in a very wide range of endeavors. But because it must always be colored by unknowable, experiential factors, competence must always be open to a wide range of disagreement as practitioners continually attempt to move their knowledge closer to expertise. But unless they find a way to limit the scope or vastly increase the similarities of their experiences, even the most competent actors will not reach it.

Even more spindly is undistilled experience, the weakest kind of correspondence support, yet the one used most frequently by ordinary persons to support their truth claims. It is the weakest because it posits its conclusions on a clear falsehood: that some present experience can be understood in light of some past one. The context of each experience must be different even if the experience proves similar to a prior one. But even if the context of some singular experience should prove identical—say the thirty-fifth tossing of a coin—one difference remains: time. No two experiences can ever be identical for that reason alone– time changes context– so the conclusions we draw from prior experiences applied to present ones must always be suspect. Still, despite this fatal flaw, we all use undistilled experience promiscuously simply because it is often all we have to go on in the supersonic whizz of preferences about truth and goodness that face us each day (see “Our Freedom Fetish“).

Failing in such efforts to examine experience, we fall upon a final and quite different kind of justification: authority, the kind of cultural or traditional support excoriated above. It offers several unique strengths as a warrant for correspondence claims. First, it is easily accessible. We are all familiar with its power, for we were all children asked to accept the truth and goodness claims of parents, teachers, and other adults. Their warrant was our trust in their persons or the institutions that placed them in our path. We accepted their declarations not because we had proof by a preponderance of the evidence but because they had demonstrated their reliability in earlier claims. But as any parent of a first child knows, that trust is often undeserved, at least in the beginning. For authorities are not necessarily experts and are not asked to prove their competence. A strange extension of this kind of warrant might be termed cultural authority, the kind of diffused assurance that “everyone thinks so, and so it must be true.” As mentioned above, this kind of trust in the culture is ridiculously easy to call into question, for history has shown it to be as insubstantial as the music of the spheres.

A correspondentist faces further challenges as she approaches the frontiers of her knowledge, that hazy landscape where her means of warrant are insufficient to provide truth as correspondence must define it: knowledge by a preponderance of the evidence. This is the wild frontier where the trail of knowledge disappears into a maze of possible pathways for preference. This is the domain of belief. It is at this frontier where correspondence knowledge becomes impossible to warrant that the coherence virtual circle begins to mesh with a solid foundation of knowledge. While a dispassionate and ratiocinative effort steers one’s knowledge, the options for belief seem greater because the known truths that frame them are so sparse. Choosing a pathway into belief is as much construction as conclusion, as much creation as discovery. For belief is composed of judgment steered by desire (see “Can Belief Be Knowledge?“). The etymology of “belief” gives away its flaw when asserted as truth: it signifies an attachment or preference quite at odds with the dispassionate judgment required to advance claims to truth, goodness, or beauty. Properly applied belief uses the bases of knowledge to project logically consistent guesses about those subjects we cannot know: do aliens exist, how did material reality come to be, what happens after death, etc. Even in this hazy uncertainty, we may find resorting to reason raising the odds of finding truth, though by the nature of belief we can never know that we have found it. We can, however, know when we surely haven’t, rendering some beliefs impermissible to reason. Some beliefs loiter near the borderland to knowledge: unknowable but rationally entailed to what can be known . Because belief is commonly used to structure religious morality, it is frequently mistaken for knowledge, and that has produced a toxic contention (see “Religious Knowledge as Mobius Strip“).

Belief is an insoluble problem when proffered as a warrant in public life in part because it is so closely aligned with religious authority, which is a correspondence warrant, though a weak one in contemporary life (see “Belief in the Public Square“).  So in terms of justification, religious authority and religious belief are quite different and claim entirely different kinds of justifications (see “Knowledge, Trust, and Belief”). That does not prevent religious nostalgists from seeking to resurrect religious authority or futilely defend religious belief as a source of public morality if for no other reason than the force of their desire that for beliefs be true and for others to share them (see “Tao and the Myth of Religious Return”).

It is, of course, possible to reject these five correspondentist arguments in favor of a single coherentist one, finding justification in the logical concordance of any and all perceptions granted credence by the thinker. This virtual circle of coherent truth claims is far more comprehensive yet also more personalized than any single correspondence claim. It may include any number of conveyances of putative truth and perceived goodness: experiences, emotions, beliefs, imagination, intuition, and whatever else the coherentist chooses to value as a pathway to meaning. She gets to decide for herself what degree of rigor to bring to her efforts to harmonize her own beliefs, values, and truths. In this attempt, her sole limitation and thus her sole warrant is the principle of non-contradiction, a recognition that something cannot be both true and untrue simultaneously. The truth limit to her declarations is set at whatever degree of rigor she determines as appropriate, and at that limit she must be consistent in the kinds of claims she makes about truth, goodness and beauty. If she is logically insistent, she might even extend her compositional arrangement by an appeal to logical entailment, accepting not only those claims that might be consistent with her virtual circle, her personalized reality, but also all claims that might be consistent with whatever standard of rigor she finds useful. She may find any number of inputs congenial to such an effort to stabilize her claims. No one may gainsay her efforts or critique the fastidiousness of her construction. Even the logic she brings to her sole means of justification is beyond the critical reach of another, for “it makes sense to me” is as much the credo of the coherentist as “it is true for me.” Her reality is her perception and both are of her own creation. She writes her own narrative, tells her own story, speaks her own truth. Of course, such flexibility comes at a price. The coherentist can never critique another’s virtual circle, so she must be entirely open to disagreement. Should you assert a conflicting declaration, she is obligated by the principle of non-contradiction to reply with a polite recitation of her own views, no matter how they might privately dispute yours. She must make no attempt at challenge or reconciliation, for non-contradiction demands that she ask no more inspection of your virtual circle than you may demand of hers. Such conversational discretion, a hallmark of postmodernism, would be guaranteed to be congenial if unenlightening (see “Postmodernism’s Unsettling Disagreements“). I will leave it to you, reader, to decide if such conversations are worth having.