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Peikoff says on 173-174 that “truth” is an epistemological concept pertaining to a relationship between consciousness and reality, and that something is true if it logically integrates into your contextual knowledge of reality (correct me if I’m wrongly paraphrasing). In his example, the belief that Type-A blood is always compatible with Type-A blood was true in the context of knowledge preceding the discovery of the RH factor, because knowledge of the incompatibility caused by RH wasn’t yet available and would require omniscience without the preceding contextual discovery of the basic blood types.
This seems to create a situation in which a piece of knowledge (“Type-A blood is compatible with people who have Type-A blood”) is at once true and not true. It’s “true” in Peikoff’s epistemological sense, as in “a valid conclusion in context,” but it’s untrue in the popular sense of the word “true”, meaning it actually accords with reality – some Type-A blood is not compatible with some Type-A blood.
I always thought the concept “true” existed to identify something’s correspondence to actual reality, not one’s temporary contextual understanding of it. Do we need two separate concepts for these things? What’s the difference between “valid” and “true” in Peikoff’s usage? Are we seriously saying that knowledge later proved incorrect was “true” while we didn’t have the disproving information, or have I badly misunderstood Peikoff’s point here?
Piekoff refers to the original statement as a generalization. “A bloods are compatible.” Later they discovered an exception to that generalization.
To this day, “a bloods are compatible” is a true statement, corresponding to actual reality, but it’s a generalization – a low resolution statement. To clarify it, we would have to say “a bloods are compatible except…” or “a bloods are compatible unless…” or “a bloods are compatible on the condition that…”
The original generalization becomes a lot more bomb proof if it’s worded as “a bloods have compatibility” but in either wording it is a generalization corresponding to reality.
The child’s first discovery of a helium balloon does not invalidate his generalization that “things fall down.” Things do fall down. A bloods are compatible.
Piekoff’s point here does not amount to divorcing truth from reality. Knowledge proved incorrect was always incorrect. Knowledge proved incomplete was not necessarily wrong.
I don’t think we need an additional concept. I believe the key is that, as you point out, “truth” is an epistemological concept in that it is always based on the context of all that is known at the time. At one time, all known facts supported that all type A blood was compatible with other type A blood and thus it was true in the context of those facts.Later, based on the discovery of additional facts, the truth had to be qualified as you stated.All true statements must be understood as being qualified by “based on what we know at this time” since, as Peikoff noted, all truth is contextual. To demand that some truths be without such a context is to require a base of omniscience which is an impossibility.In the Ayn Rand Lexicon “truth” is defined as “the recognition of reality” meaning it is a relationship between a human mind and reality.
Tom, think about the discovery of the relevance of RH as an addition to the file folder containing our knowledge of blood compatibility. In order to grasp it, we first need knowledge of blood type compatibility. Only because we know that A bloods are compatible can we discover an additional causal factor. If no other relevant causal factors existed, then simply knowing that “A bloods are compatible” would be sufficient for our purposes of blood transfusions (and the like). But our knowledge that A bloods are compatible is not an “out-of-context absolute.” We never (properly) hit upon knowledge and then decide, “I now know everything causally relevant here.” Rather, we must acknowledge that we know what we know, but that other things may be causally relevant. Discovering those things adds detail to our knowledge, but it does not contradict it.
I’ve heard (but haven’t independently researched) that the Alexander Wiener, who discovered RH factor, was one of the scientists who also discovered blood type. Apparently, he wasn’t stopped in his tracks by the new discovery. It further clarified the causal knowledge he’d already attained.
I’m still struggling with this, on two fronts:
Firstly, I’d [hesitantly] disagree with Seamus that the statement “A blood is compatible with A blood” is still true, with exceptions/conditions. Rather, I’d say the statement “Some A blood is compatible with some A blood” is true. The previous belief that all A blood is compatible was simply false. It’s not akin to the balloon example. “Things fall down” is only a true statement if you interpret “things” to mean “some things” not “all things.” The actual fact is “things which are heavier than air fall down in the absence of another force”—this is and will always be true on any body with mass and an atmosphere. “Things fall down” is an imprecise generalization, a partial identification of truth, but “some things fall down” is an accurate statement in context and always will be. Both are fully true lower-level understandings of the fact that gravity attracts all matter and that attraction can be resisted by sufficient force (e.g. buoyancy in air or water, thrust, lift, molecular cohesion, etc.). To my mind, a thought is only “true” if it is “a recognition of reality,” that is, a recognition of what is actually the case, not a misidentification of it as in the A blood example.
Secondly, I’m not sure LP is even right to treat “truth” as a purely epistemological concept. Did Rand ever do that? Rand’s definition seems to treat “truth” as the mind identifying actual facts of reality—a mixture of epistemology and metaphysics—not merely statements which appear true in a given context of knowledge. Truth is contextual insofar as a given fact will only be true in a given context—things won’t fall down when they’re on the ground or in orbit around a body—but they don’t become true just because you lack the knowledge necessary to see why they’re untrue. This is one of a couple of instances in which I think Peikoff’s definitions in this book drift away from Rand’s ideas, and where I suspect she would’ve red-lined the hell out of his drafts.
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