Lingua Franca #5: Truth

TRACTATUS PREFACE

“This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure. 
 
“The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows:  What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. ”

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, the opening of the  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
 
***
 
LINGUA FRANCA #5: TRUTH
 
Well, here is an important topic – and a challenging one. Truth .
 
Most people don’t think too much about what’s true – we kind of sort of think what we know is true, and we either know things or don’t know things, and we go about life like that.
 
It causes us a lot of harm, and just a little bit of thinking on this topic – this word truth  in particular, and the general concept of truth  – this can be very profitable. It can make us into better thinkers, more effective doers, and lead us to more thriving lives.
 
But the topic presents some serious challenges for me, the author.
 
Well, some of the chapter was obvious enough – right away, when I was sure I’d write on Truth , I knew I’d reference a few sources – we’d get at Wittgenstein and the Tractatus , we’d look at Laozai’s Taoteching , and we’d look at Tetlock’s method of forecasting and calibration.
 
All of these are some very useful tools for thought, and they make a person into a stronger and clearer thinker.
 
But for the rest of Lingua Franca , we’d contrasted how a word is used in common usage, and the concepts underlying it.
 
So I was left with a hard question – who would take the opposite side of this exploration? Who or what would we pick on for a very loose and sloppy definition of truth?
 
Malcolm Gladwell? I opened up Outliers  and leafed through it again. It would work. But arraying Gladwell against Wittgenstein, Laozi, and Tetlock seems downright unfair; something like bringing a gatling gun to a knife fight.
 
Would we pick some religious leader who made some silly denouncements of science and logic, perhaps a Pope that was against Galileo or Spinoza or some such? That would work, and feels more fair in the grand scheme of things, but it wouldn’t be particularly relevant . The example wouldn’t resonate . Nobody reading this believes the Earth is the center of the universe with a religious zeal.
 
Thomas Jefferson?  That’d be both relevant and a fair fight – what would Wittgenstein say about the Declaration of Independence? Right away, it starts with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” – and any semi-diligent student of Wittgenstein can tell you what Ludwig would have said about Jefferson.

But again , it would miss the mark. The Declaration of Independence was intended to largely be a declaration of revolutionary war – it wasn’t aimed at truth  the way Wittgenstein aimed at truth; it was aimed at mobilization of the population for war.  And the document got its job done.
 
So at the end of the day, perhaps there’s no enemies of truth to be arrayed against in battle lines – and we’ll just have to be content with a little practical scholarship to sharpen our own mental tools somewhat, arraying our efforts against our own sloppy thinking – and surely, if we can take aim at our sloppy thinking, that should be enough.
 
***
 
LAOZI: THE SAGE’S AWARENESS OF CONTRASTS
 
Obviously the records from the 6th century BC are a little spotty; we don’t know if there was a single “Laozi” that wrote the Taoteching in two days, as is told in the historical fable, or if it was the work of multiple scholars over many generations before finally coming to its final form in the 3rd century AD.
 
Nevertheless, Laozi drives at very similar points that Wittgenstein would drive at, some 2,500 years later at Cambridge.
 
Both scholars were aware that words were often faulty and the cause of a lot of problems .
 
Our first lesson for this chapter, then –
 
Often, when we think we’re describing an object, we’re actually describing ourselves.
 
Now, this is not at all a mystical statement or a religious statement; it will become very clear what it means in a moment.
 
Laozi and Wittgenstein both wrote in a very terse style and it takes diligent and slow study of their works to get at what they’re trying to say. I tried to read the  Taoteching  a few times, and failed each time, until eventually I found a hyper-modern casual translation, a side-by-side set of eight literal translations, and a long commentary on the work and read them all together. To really “get it,” you need to flip back and forth between multiple translations and interpret. The Chinese language has undergone at least three major sets of changes since Laozi wrote, so even modern Chinese scholars have a hard time translating Laozi into modern Chinese – let alone English, a very different language.
 
But if you’re willing to work at it, there’s some lessons that come through clear as day.
 
Wing-tsit Chan’s translation of the Taoteching , Chapter 2 –
 
“When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, there arises the recognition of ugliness.
When they all know the good as good, there arises the recognition of evil.
Therefore:
Being and non-being produce each other;
Difficult and easy complete each other;
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low distinguish each other;
Front and back follow each other.”
 
What Laozi is saying is that many judgments automatically create the contrast of them . When we describe some work as “difficult,” we’re automatically creating a concept of work that’s “easy.”
 
Laozi doesn’t say to refrain from such judgments, but rather to be aware that you’re making them –
 
“When such comparisons are made by a sage, that is a person who is in harmony with the Tao, that person is aware of making a judgement, and that judgements are relative to the person who makes them, and to the situation in which they are made, as much as they are relative to that which is judged.”
 
-- Stan Rosenthal,  The Tao Te Ching: An Introduction
 
To put it into a very simple example, a Norwegian might describe a man as “short” whereas a Japanese person might describe the same person as “tall” – you can measure the height of a person in centimeters, and that’s the same everywhere, but “tall” or “short” says something about you the speaker  rather than about the person you’re describing.
 
Likewise, when you describe a person as “good” or “evil” – you’re saying more about yourself  than you are about the person.
 
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it – but that you should be aware of doing it.
 
It might be true that a man’s height is measured 170 centimeters – but that doesn’t make him tall  or short ; those judgments say much more about you  than about the man.
 
Likewise, saying “math is hard” doesn’t say anything about the math  – and everything about how you relate to and judge the math.
 
***
 
WITTGENSTEIN
 
I didn’t understand Wittgenstein very well for a long time – and there’s still a lot of it that I don’t the formal technical training to understand – but reading Wittgenstein’s war diaries were a revelation for me.
 
The Tractatus  was written for a very knowledgeable audience – we quoted him above by saying the work would be a success if a single person understood the book and read it with pleasure  – and the work was very terse. It doesn’t explain or define a lot of its technical terms; it assumes you know them already and moves forwards.
 
But his war journals are something else. They’re certainly an inspiration on how to live – we discussed this back in  Uncommon Virtues #9: The Great and the Sublime , marveling over how incredible it was that he was writing one of the most important works of philosophy while serving in incredibly dangerous situations in World War I.
 
But more than that, they trace his thinking. He writes out his frustrations, sketches out ideas, looks for an angle to attack the problem. They clarify his later and more terse work very well.
 
From John Preston’s  Wittgenstein Chronology  –
 
“Tuesday 29th September, 1914: In his diary, LW mentions that this morning a corporal who is sick with dysentery was brought to the hospital, and that there are now many cases. He notes that he himself did some (philosophical) work, but without success: ‘I’m still not clear and have no overview. I see details, without knowing how they [something – one word illegible here] are likely to fit into a whole’. In an entry whose text is incomplete and heavily scratched over, he then records that ‘every problem is the main problem’. He urges himself not to be fainthearted, but to take courage. In the evening, he records, he worked, not without success (GT1, S.31). 
 
The notebook entry corresponding to this not unsuccessful work begins by declaring that ‘The general concept of the proposition carries with it a quite general concept of the co-ordination of proposition and situation: The solution to all my questions must be extremely simple’. 
 
He then has the insight arising from the Paris law court scenario he had recently read about (in August): the idea of propositions as models (Potter 2009, pp.226-7; Monk, p.118; Sterrett, pp.xvii, xx, 16, 212). In a proposition it is as if a world is put together experimentally. This, he thinks, must straight away yield the nature of truth. 
 
[Editor’s note from SM: the Paris law court was trying to figure out liability in an automobile accident, and couldn’t understand it from verbal arguments, so they asked for the accident to be re-created with small model cars to show it happened. This caused something of a breakthrough in Wittgenstein’s thinking.]
 
He then considers hieroglyphic writing, in which ‘each word is a representation of what it stands for’, as well as the fact that pictures of situations can be right or wrong. 
 
He sketches two people, A and B, swordfighting, and explains how this sketch might assert ‘A is fencing with B’ by virtue of one stick-figure representing A and the other representing B. In this picture-writing form, the proposition can be true or false, and its sense is independent of its truth or falsehood. LW declares that ‘It must be possible to demonstrate everything essential by considering this case’. 
 
While we cannot be certain that all situations can be pictured, nevertheless we can be certain that all logical properties of situations can be portrayed in a two-dimensional script. 
 
He finishes by noting that ‘This is still very much on the surface, but we are on good ground’ (NB, p.7).”
 
I find that entry and summation of Wittgenstein’s diary incredibly informative – he often writes in technical language and explores very precise things around an “object”, attributes of an object like “color”, and so on in the Tractatus. It can be somewhat confusing for a layman.
 
But that journal entry makes the point well – when language was hieroglyphics like in Ancient Egypt, there might be a drawing of a shepherd with ten sheep on a wall.
 
You can sense what the drawing is trying to say  – “there is a shepherd with ten sheep” – and it is independent of whether there actually are ten sheep with the shepherd.
 
That is, you can make statements in language  which make sense , but which are not true .
 
If a statement makes sense, it also corresponds to reality – and may be true  or false .
 
***
 
AND THAT’S IT
 
I’ve heard Wittgenstein sometimes being described as “throwing a hand-grenade into traditional philosophy” – and that might not be a bad metaphor.
 
Wittgenstein summarizes the Tractatus as,
 
“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. ”

He’s arguing that all things that can be said – “the shepherd has ten sheep” – can be said clearly, whether as an actual picture in hieroglyphics, or in modern alphabets which attempt to use words to paint a picture in one’s mind.
 
But for anything that can’t be said clearly – hope, love, justice, and so on – we must be silent.  That is, we can’t speak truthfully  about them.
 
They’re critically important – Wittgenstein believes they’re critically important – but it’s impossible to paint a picture of them and see if that picture corresponds with reality.
 
I remember as soon as I “got” this argument, much murky and cloudy thinking of mine disappeared into clear thought.
 
“Oh. We can’t say anything about  that  truthfully .”
 
He might be wrong – I don’t entirely believe it, obviously, as any student of Wittgenstein could tell from my word choices. But for Wittgenstein, truth  is very clear and easy to express in pictures and words, and everything that cannot be clearly expressed clearly in pictures and words is not strictly true.
 
With that, he resigned from philosophy and left Cambridge University.
 
***
 
PROBABILITY
 
Of course, Wittgenstein came back to philosophy later, rebuking even his original work – but that’s beyond the scope of this chapter.
 
Rather, I’d like to look at one final aspect of truth  that’s in Wittgenstein’s work but often neglected in discussions about him – probability.
 
From the Tractatus, section 4 –
 
“Tautology leaves to reality the whole infinite logical space; contradiction fills the whole logical space and leaves no point to reality. Neither of them, therefore, can in any way determine reality.
 
“The truth of tautology is certain, of propositions possible, of contradiction impossible.  (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have an indication of that gradation which we need in the theory of probability.) ”
 
Wittgenstein and Laozi both build on tautologies,  which are things are definitionally true .
 
Something like, “Everything that is, is.”
 
In fact, I translate the concept of “Tao” as roughly “the totality of the universe” – when Laozi says that “Tao is everything,” he’s making a (I believe) a tautological statement. 
 
When Laozi says “Tao is simple and complex,” he means that reality isn’t complicated or clever – it’s all just happening – but when we try to understand it, we often get led astray by our words and concepts, by unclear thinking.

To get smarter – remove unclear thinking. Delete ambiguous concepts that aren’t true  nor false  from one’s thinking. That’s one of Laozi’s core messages, and one of Wittgenstein’s.
 
And yet, what of things that might be true?  What if we’re unsure exactly how many sheep the shepherd has in his flock? 
 
One final tool will help us immensely.
 
***
 
CALIBRATION
 
A final thinker to address is Professor Philip Tetlock – his work is critically important, and I suspect he’ll later be recognized as one of the greatest minds of this era.
 
For over 30 years, he’s done something that’s very simple on the surface, but had never happened in history beforehand – he asked a large variety of people to make very concrete predictions of the world.
 
The questions were all in binary format, and all were dated. Questions like, “Will North Korea detonate a nuclear device by the end of the year?” and “In the next year, will any country withdraw from the Eurozone?”
 
The people who participated in Tetlock’s experiments answered with their best guess – yes  or no  – but also added how confident  they were in their predictions.
 
If you had no idea at all, and guessed randomly, you’d say you were 50% confident in your answer. But if you looked at the current state of North Korean science, the North Korean military program, and its foreign policy, you could probably do better than guess randomly. You would take in all the facts, study the problem, and come up with your best prediction while also assigning your confidence to it.
 
You might say, then, “I think there’s a 90% chance North Korea won’t  detonate a nuclear device by the end of the year.”
 
While that might sound like a very specific point, Tetlock asked thousands of these questions – and many of them have very practical implications. If a new program of vaccinations was being administered in a country, you could predict whether the rate of new births would go up or go down within two years. If one’s children were less likely to die of infant mortality, does that mean parents would have more children or less children?
 
You could analyze any pattern of policies for what you suspect the long range cause-and-effect might be. If sanctions were placed on a country like Russia, will that increase or decrease the leading political party’s support in the next election?
 
Again, the value isn’t solely in the prediction – not at all – but with the accompanying confidence level  in the forecast.

Tetlock, from his excellent book  Superforecasting  –

“We cannot rerun history so we cannot judge one probabilistic forecast — but everything changes when we have many probabilistic forecasts. If a meteorologist says there is a 70% chance of rain tomorrow, that forecast cannot be judged, but if she predicts the weather tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, for months, her forecasts can be tabulated and her track record determined. If her forecasting is perfect, rain happens 70% of the time when she says there is a 70% chance of rain, 30% of the time when she says there is a 30% chance of rain, and so on. This is called calibration. It can be plotted on a simple chart.
 
“If the meteorologist’s curve is far above the line, she is under confident — so things she says are 20% likely actually happen 50% of the time. If her curve is under the line, she is overconfident — so things she says are 80% likely only happen 50% of the time."
 
One of the single greatest strengths I’ve gotten personally is to start assigning confidence levels to the facts I believe to be true.
 
“Nothing can move faster than the speed of light” – yes, with 98% confidence.
 
But this all seems so eccentric … who cares?
 
Well,
 
“The venture capitalist who said they’re interested and asked us for due diligence documents will invest in our next fundraising round within 3 months” – yes or no? What confidence?
 
“I’ll be given a job offer within two weeks at the company I did two rounds of interviews already” – yes or no? What confidence?
 
You can assign confidence levels to all the basic facts you believe, as well as predictions made about the future.
 
This can be on issues as polarizing as global warming –
 
“The Earth is getting warmer every year” – yes or no? What confidence?
 
“Over 90% of the Earth’s warming is human-caused from Co2 gases, and if Co2 production stopped, the Earth would get warmer at 10% or less of the current pace” – yes or no? What confidence?
 
Or it can be applied to the most simple issues, like how you think gravity and chemistry work. As a personal convention, I typically assign only 99% confidence max to understandings even as fundamentally established as those, to leave myself open to changing my mind. In theory, a single 100% confidence item being proven wrong would set your calibration to infinitely incorrect  – but that’s a technical point; you could read Tetlock if you wanted the nuance of how a 99% confidence level is double  the confidence level of 98%, though it sounds counterintuitive at first. (And 100% is infinitely higher than 99%.)
 
It’s obvious how you gain analytical power and thinking ability by assigning confidence levels to one’s future predictions – am I going to be offered the job? Are we going to get the contract? Will the VC invest in us? – but I also believe that assigning confidence levels to your understanding of facts  leads to a much more correct understanding of how sure you are of truth , and which of your beliefs need more research and synthesis to increase your confidence .
 
It’s an eccentric concept – not many people know it – but incredibly powerful. Everyone I know who thinks in probabilities and confidence levels makes broadly better decisions than those who do not, across the board.
 
***
 
CONCLUDING
 
I’ve not tried to get at what truth is  in this chapter, but I’ve hopefully given you a few tools to sharpen your understanding of truth .
 
Notably,
 
Often, when we think we’re describing an object, we’re actually describing ourselves.  Though height is measurable and can be true, “tall” and “short” say more about you than about a person you’re describing. This becomes very valuable when you start to re-think things like, “Is this work hard ?”
 
It’s interesting to consider the argument that  what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.  I don’t believe it – and yet, it gives us a power to dismiss all sorts of so-called “deep questions” that cannot be true in the basic sense of the word true .
 
But what if we want to speak of the benefits or downsides of a new policy? Shouldn’t we do something about global warming? In those cases, “We need to do something about global warming” cannot be said to be true or false, but  we can make predictions about what will happen, and assign confidence levels to them .
 
The more our confidence levels match what actually happens, the better we are predicting things – which has obvious, immense practical value when applied to basic questions about one’s life. (If I get a Masters degree, I’ll be able to get a job paying at least 40% higher than I have right now in two years. Yes or no? What confidence?)
 
You can also assign a confidence level to your understanding of basic facts and concepts.  This final point is perhaps the hardest to synthesize – it’s a very highly unusual and uncommon way of thinking  – but when you ask yourself, “How sure am I that that’s true ?” – and then you put a percentage on it, you can work towards gaining a greater mastery of the world.