Truth and Relativsm

"Truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." Albus Dumbledore

- J.K. Rowling 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'-

Though many may think differently, truth is a really complex and problematic term. It is a word used in daily basis in diverse contexts: it can be used to name the coherence between what it is said and what it is thought, as an adjective, as an undeniable preposition... During the last classes, we have been learning about this concept. 

There are three main types of truth: 

• Necessary Truths: they cannot be argued with.
• Analytic Prepositions: they predicate about and object contained in the subject.
• Synthetic Prepositions: predicate about concepts not included in the subject.

It is hard to know whether a truth is 'real' or not, and that is why it is a difficult topic to discuss. Before this class I used to think, just as ancient Greek philosophers, that there existed one universal truth, but we still had to find it. During the past classes, I have been thinking about it and I've realized that it is not possible. There is always the possibility of having more than one truth, as all humans think differently and have grown up in different environments and cultures. What I see as something true, could be a complete falsity for another person. There are many kinds of people living in this planet, and everyone of them has their own way of being and thinking. And because of this diversity of thought, there are many different truths; like in the case of the Bible and the Koran  does anyone of them contain the truth in its pages? Does only one of them include the truth? Are they both correct? We do not know. Every person can have his/her own ideas of life, and those will be their truths. Who are we to say which truths are correct? 

The idea of each person having his/her own truth is called relativism. It may be a really convenient idea, as it promotes the believe of everyone being different and about diversity. However, this idea is dangerous. If everyone had their own truth, then laws wouldn't apply to everyone, and people cold violate other person's not negotiable rights (the right to life, freedom in speech...). It is not a viable way of applying truth to our now a days society, it would destroy the order created by the law. Nevertheless, relativism does exist in terms of a country's law, depending on the culture they practice, they have different laws that fit with their own ideas about truth.

Truth is dangerous, in some cases, terrible, it can cause lots of harm if it is not treated with caution. By believing in relative truth, we can cause much harm to others. In order to avoid this, we should always have in mind the not negotiable rights of humans. No matter how relativist a person is or in what culture they grew up, truths that cause real harm to others cannot be accepted.

Humans As Machines

I tend to think of humans as machines, it is strange as machines are actually designed after humans. A photographic camera, for example, is an imitation of the human eye. Nevertheless, I think it is a really successful way of understanding how humans "work". When I think about inductive reasoning this image comes to my mind:

Classification

Classification is defined as the arrangement of a group of things in classes that share some specific characteristics. We, humans, tend to instinctively classify everything around us, but why do we do it? I think the main reason for this to happen is that we are naturally curious, we have a need of knowing everything around us, and classification is an useful element we have been provided with to understand the world. So when we come across something new, we are able to have some sort of instinctive knowledge of it. For example, if we come across an unknown animal, we could have some sort of knowledge about it just by classifying it as an animal. However, there is a problem with classification, and it is that we assume it provides reliable previous knowledge that led us to prejudices and making stereotypes in the same way inductive knowledge does. An example could be when being introduced to a person we have never seen before. Even if it is in a subconscious way, we will classify this person and probably be induced to make some judgements that are not necessarily true before we even get to know the person.

During our Friday seminary on this topic, we were divided into groups consisting of either girls or boys. Each group was given some post-its and we were asked to write down adjectives describing men and women separately. Then we all pasted our descriptions on the board and we discussed them. I personally, thought that we were definitely not going to be able to successfully describe men and women. When my group was working, I really did not know what to write down, it is not that easy to classify such big groups as men and women are, there are too many of them and each is different from another, there is always an exception to the rule. At the end I think we all just wrote down what stereotypes had defined for each gender: women being nice, teary, caring, 'soft', hypocrite; and men being strong, brusque, athletic, funny. I did not feel identified with many of the characteristics my group wrote down nor with the ones written by my classmates, and I think, several of them thought the same I did. 

At the end of the lesson, we all concluded that the classification we had made was nothing else but pure stereotyping. So here is the problem with classification, it can led us to judge incorrectly someone or something without enough evidence and it can facilitate the creation of stereotypes.

Reason

There are two main types of reasoning, these are deductive and inductive reasoning. The first one is based on the logical validity of three premises (A is B. B is C. Then A is C), the second one is based in the gathering of evidence to arrive to a generalization. Both of them are used in our daily lives and both of them are necessary for use to understand the world, but they have several failures. The problem with deductive reasoning is that no matter how logical an argument can be, it could still be false. We can say:

a) Caterpillars have legs.

b) I have legs.

c) Then, I'm a caterpillar.

This argument is logical, but it is not true.

The problem with inductive reasoning, is that no matter how much evidence we gather, there will always be missing evidence. There is always the chance that our generalization is not correct. Also, there is the problem that this reasoning tends to predict something involving the future. For example: We have observed for a 'long' period of time that the sun comes out everyday, then we could assume that it will continue to come out tomorrow and the day after that. But the thing is there is no way to be sure of our predictions until it happens, and so the evidence will never be complete. Finally, there is another problem with inductive reasoning and it is its tendency of causing the creation of stereotypes. Nevertheless, I believe this is the more reliable type of reasoning. We just have to take into account that we will never reach absolute certainty of anything through this method and that we should not make hasty generalizations.

Swearing

When we entered the classroom to receive this TOK lesson, we heard our teacher using a word I think none of us would ever expect to hear from him during school time. Words are just sound combinations, someone, somewhere mixed up some phonemes and gave the resulting mixture a meaning that others decided to accept. They have the meaning we chose to give them, so it seems curious to me how people react to words. Our teacher said one simple word consisting of four letters: fuck, and that was enough to make silence in the room and cause us to stare at him unbelievingly.

When he explained we were going to have a class on swearing everything made more sense and we were able to relax and think of how funny our reaction had been towards the mention of a simple word. During class, we took turns to read aloud a text about the origins of swearing, the text obviously contained several swear words and it stroke me as rather strange the fact that some people found funny hearing these words being said out loud, as their functions is to allow people to express their frustration or to insult others. I also thought it was weird to see how people acted when they had to read a swear word, some began to laugh and others blushed.

I know that words affect us as much as they do because of society, we have learned their meaning and we have grown up seeing how others react towards sound combinations, but it is still strange to think that people, having the power of giving words their meaning, have decided to provide our vocabulary with words that make them so uneasy, what was their purpose with it? Why do we need swear words? If we want to express frustration or anger we have a vast extension of words to do so without using these, but then, what makes them different? If there are other words that mean the same things why do these ones make people feel so uneasy?

Emotions

Most of us have once wished to get rid of any type of feeling, thinking that losing our emotions would be a fair price to avoid ever being sad or disgraceful again or with the idea that losing them would make us wiser. But if this became true, we would not only lose our capability of being happy or sad, feelings are more complex than that. Getting rid of them would also have a negative effect in our relations with other people and a part of us would be forever gone. Plato once said wisdom and passion were two horses pulling a chariot in different directions, but he seemed to be quite wrong. They are not as separated as some of use believe them to be and we, definitely, cannot choose only one of them. Recent discoveries have shown that our reasoning is greatly affected by our emotions.

During this TOK lesson, we learned about the case of a man, Phineas Gage, who had had an accident when working in a mine and his frontal lobe had been greatly damaged. His memory and reasoning capabilities had not been affected in any way, but he lost all type of emotion. According to the ones who knew him, even though his rational part was unaffected, he stopped being the same person. His personality had changed drastically and his way of acting towards people was completely different. The lack of emotion prevented him from knowing how a person would react to whatever he said or did. Apparently, emotions are crucial to access rational decisions and without them it is impossible for us to entirely understand the world.

I had never thought of any of this before, I knew that if someone lost his/her emotional capabilities they would change in some way, but before this lesson, I had always overlooked emotions. I thought they were important, though not as important as reason is. 

Learning through our senses

Lately, we have been learning about how humans learn through their senses in TOK classes. We had a lecture about senses our teacher talked to us about them for some time, she said that we, humans, rely almost completely on them and she showed us an example in which two people were having a conversation about an earthquake. Person “a” said that it had reached the cost of certain island and person “b” said that it was not probable, because scientists had said the earthquake didn’t have the magnitude needed to reach that island, however when person “a” affirmed that he had been there and he had actually felt the floor move, person “b” didn’t contradict him and immediately believed what he was being told. Then the teacher asked us why we are so happy to believe the information we gain through our senses. Some people said that it is because other people can confirm the knowledge we gain through them, for they gain the same information. Others said that it is because our senses are the most direct interaction we have with the world we live in.

  
I believe that the first reason can be valid to certain degree. It is true that some of the things we perceive can be confirmed by other humans, like when you hear a noise and you ask the person next to you if she also heard it, but the truth is that you don’t know if the information they are receiving is exactly the same as yours, there is no way to be sure if you hear the same sounds, see the same shapes or the same colours. In fact I have wondered a lot of this last one. Are the colours that I see the same ones others do? Maybe other people see in colours that would be absolutely unknown for you if you saw them. But you cannot know it, because there is not a way, at least for now, to enter other person’s head and see what they are seeing. This is the reason why I believe the second argument is the most valid one, after all, the closest thing we have to what we call reality are our senses, and we have to rely on them and on what others tell us to try to understand our world.

We also made an exercise in which we were shown a painting by Picasso. Our teacher asked us to look in detail to the image for a few seconds and then she made some questions. When we shared the answers, we saw that there were small variations of them depending on who had answered them, and we realized that being exposed to the same piece of information doesn’t necessarily mean that we all gain the same knowledge. People don’t always focus on the same elements when they are exposed to a piece of information.

After this, we saw a diagram that showed the small range of colours and sounds that humans can see compared to the ones that other animals see and to the ones that we know that exist. It was shocking to realize that there’s so much we cannot see or hear. Those colours and sounds are there, but our senses are limited and even though they exist, even though others can perceive them and are used to doing so, we cannot. It is frustrating to be aware of all these and know there is nothing that can be done for the moment. The connection between what is “really” there and what we perceive is far from being true. Nevertheless, this does not mean it is incorrect. Our vision is correct, it’s just too incomplete.

But of all the things we learned, the one that interested me the most was synesthesia. They are people with a condition which causes them a “confusion of their senses”, their modalities (touch, taste, sight, and hearing) are crossed. This means that they can, for example, not only see colours, but also taste them, or they both see and smell words. There are different theories to explain why it happens. One theory suggests that it is a normal state of a baby’s developing brain and that synesthetic people do not grow out of it. Another theory says that we all have some kind of synesthesia, but we haven’t noticed. Before this class, I had already heard about this condition and I found it really interesting. Again, it is socking to realize there’s so much most of us cannot perceive. 

In addition, we learned that lots of people talk about “what scientists say” as something truer than what people sense, but in reality, scientists depend on their senses to obtain data from what their measuring tools obtain. All these ideas have made me think that maybe all what I have been learning for the past years is not completely true. And not only in sciences like biology, but also in knowledge areas as history. Actually, I remember that some years before, I was learning about the Inquisition both in History and in Religion class. Each teacher taught it in an entirely different way. The funny thing was that while my religion teacher was really catholic and defended the church in every aspect, my history teacher was an atheist and she critiqued the Church a lot. Then, all what we learn from other people differs from reality depending on the way they see the world, their experience and their knowledge. 

Martin, Victoria. "What Causes Cross Modality in  Synesthesia?" eHow.com

<http://www.ehow.com/info_8558839_causes-cross-modality-synesthesia.html?ref=Track2&utm_source=ask>

Images taken from:

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/openFITS/overview.html

http://simplificate.es/2011/09/30/sonar-por-ultrasonidos-dyp-m007/

First TOK Lesson

In our first TOK lesson we had a brief introduction to the subject and we discussed about the meanining some images of a world map had and about what did the different maps represent. These were the images:

There were several opinions regarding both questions. Some people said that all three world maps represented our home; as Earth is the only place in the Universe the great majority of humans has ever visited and it's the only known planet in which the human race can survive. Others said the change of orientation and content of the different maps represented the existence of different perspectives and points of view, or that the maps represented the cultural and ethnic diversity of our world. Someone also said that the upside down maps made him/her think of how would the world be if the southern part of the world was the northern and all the way round, as the north has always been the one containing the richest, most advanced and powerful countries, how it would be if, instead of the U.S. or Russia, South Africa had been a world power?

In my opinion all the world map images showed the same place, only from different perspectives. The images, specially the one showing the countries’ boundaries, made me think of how limited humans are. Our planet is less than a speck of dust compared to the immensity of the Universe, and still, most of us will never get out of it, nor visit more than a small part of it. We are limited, because we cannot travel freely across our small world and directly know all the existing cultures. Every time we want to visit another country, if we are lucky, we will only have to show our passports and maybe pay a small fortune for a plane ticket. But if we were born in a country like Colombia, we would probably have to pay for a visa and go through the long process of getting it, knowing that it could be given or not to us.

At the end of the class, we watched a video related to the idea of the world being flat as an intelligent one and we had a small reflection on the topic. One of the things told in the video that made me think the most, was what the author said about the fact that the cultures that reached the conclusion of the world being flat at least took the time to think about it, while other simply didn’t care. I think the reason those cultures didn’t care about the world being flat or not was that the just didn’t have time to sit down and think of something beyond their daily survival, while other cultures like the Greek one, had such good and stable economies they could take the time to think about this issues without having much else to worry about.

This first lesson was really interesting and it made me consider things I had never given a thought to before, I hope the next lessons are as good as this one.