 I see. You were expecting me to say something humorous? Scottish philosopher David Hume was infamous and influential for his jovial irreverent skepticism, questioning many of the foundational beliefs of his culture and even some fundamental assumptions we make in our perception and interpretation of the world. He dismantled many of the precepts previous thinkers had taken for granted, everything from causality to the existence of the supernatural. The Hume skepticism was of a distinctly different flavor than that of many other philosophers that you probably know of. Descartes, for example, was intensely preoccupied with eliminating even the most stringent grounds for doubt, questioning the veracity of his senses and the possibility of some sort of immense supernatural deception by a malicious spirit. Hume's observations about the limitations of what we might claim to know with certainty had profound implications. They questioned things like the ability to reason our way to moral truths, or our ability to draw sensical conclusions about the world through induction, as in science. But they were always grounded in a sort of shrugging practicality, never really venturing into the lofty heights of Descartes' search for capital T, truth. In an inquiry concerning human understanding, Hume suggested, be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man. Despite ranging over some extremely abstract territory and kicking out the underpinnings of just about any sort of understanding, he seems to retain some acknowledgement that at the end of the day, our philosophy has to yield to the everyday business of living as a person in the world. It's well and good to note that we can't actually see causality happening, and we might curiously entertain the notion that it's a figment of our perception rather than a feature of objective reality, but we should still probably refrain from walking out into rush hour traffic. His attitude was, in some sense, a forerunner of an early 20th century philosophical movement called pragmatism. Pragmatists were of the mind that philosophy should be pulled down off its pedestal of pointless abstraction and speculation, and wrestled into a form that was, above all else, useful. The debates and circular discussions philosophers liked to have about things like metaphysics were good fun and everything, but if they didn't provide any practical grounds for action, they could be safely stored alongside other idle diversions. We've talked about one such debate, a fair amount on thunk. Truth. In an age of deliberately fabricated news stories and world leaders with no apparent respect for veracity or facts, a fair number of people are preoccupied with truth and its myriad foils. Knowing what it is that separates statements that are true from those which are not is a big deal, and philosophers, since a long ways before Hume, have taken a number of interesting positions on the subject. The correspondence theory of truth is how most non-philosophers think about the subject. It's at least as old as Thomas Aquinas, who said, Truth is the equation of thing and intellect. The idea is essentially that what truth is, is a relationship between beliefs and the world, more or less like the relationship between a map and the physical landscape that the map is supposed to represent. When a figure on the map corresponds to a feature in the landscape, that figure is true. On the other hand, if the map says that there should be a hill in this location and there's actually a valley, it's false or errant in some way. Correspondence theory sounds fairly intuitive, but there are good reasons to be suspicious that it gives a meaningful or complete picture of what truth is and how it works. The idea of grabbing a belief and holding it up to the world to see if it matches the facts kind of sounds like the process that we use to test our beliefs, but it has some really peculiar characteristics that seem unfamiliar, if not totally bonkers. Take by belief that I'm not wearing a hat right now. If I want to know if that belief is true, I don't pull my consciousness to ask what my belief is about my wearing a hat or not, then pull my senses to report some fact regarding whether there's a hat on my head, then hold both of those items at arm's length and perform some comparative operation to see if they match, and finally conclude that yes, in fact, my belief is true. That feels like a convoluted way of thinking about the relationship between what I believe and what the facts are. Also, the supposed fact things that we're comparing our beliefs to are a little bit suspect. I'm not wearing a hat, that's a fact, but it's not like I have a specific no hat sense that lights up when I'm not wearing a hat, the way that my eyes register colors or my fingers register touch. In order to confirm my unhattedness, I necessarily rely on some interpretation of what my senses are telling me, a picture of the world that involves all sorts of prejudices and ideas about what hats are like and what it would feel like if I wasn't wearing one. The fact that I'm not wearing a hat is actually pretty close to this other thing that I'm supposedly comparing it to, a belief. If you think about it, what is it that I'm saying when I claim that something is a fact? I'm saying that I believe it. That doesn't seem like some sort of linguistic trickery. It appears as though the supposed relationship between beliefs and facts is more of a comparison between beliefs and other beliefs, which seems much dicier in operation than the correspondence theory would imply. Based with the challenges of correspondence theory, some philosophers took another stab at defining truth in a different fashion, leaning into that interesting way that facts seem to draw on and support each other in a process of interpretation. We've talked before about Quine's idea of a web of belief, a characterization of our understanding of the world as a sort of mesh of interrelated thoughts and concepts. This lands itself to an idea of truth as a sort of coherence between all parts of that web, a harmony over the entire holistic network of our beliefs. If you have a particular belief that jives with every other belief that you hold, with no conflicts or inconsistencies between them, then that belief is true. Coherence seems immediately at odds with the sort of grand notion of truth as portrayed by the correspondence theory, making it less of a wholly inerrant thing and more of an evaluation of the health of a working body of beliefs. Descartes would probably have a heart attack if he heard such a thing. After all, it's entirely possible to have a wholly self-consistent set of beliefs that are nonetheless totally wrong, right? Even if Neo had a perfectly coherent understanding of his universe, with every bit of knowledge squaring with every other, it wouldn't really be true, would it? Well, coherence theorists tend to be more skeptical about the feasibility of a Descartes sort of approach to truth. After all, we don't really have the option of forming our beliefs in a vacuum of context, like we're suddenly popping into existence in an empty void with no prior experience or preconceived notions. This stressed the need to develop our theory of truth in the midst of everything, with all our myriad cognitive baggage taken into account, and acknowledged that while it might technically be possible that our entire network of beliefs and assumptions about the world could be internally consistent and still wrong, it doesn't actually factor into how we think about or experience truth. But let's say that you're especially worried about that possibility. After all, it does seem technically feasible, and it's pretty scary to think of someone who has a coherent network of beliefs that are all totally bonkers. Well, this is where we return to the pragmatists we mentioned, the ones who take after Hume's attitude of lived-in philosophy. The pragmatists' addendum to the coherence theory of truth involves an emphasis on practical functionality, a requirement that, along with being internally consistent, a network of beliefs has to demonstrate a certain facility in interacting with the world. That is to say, it has to work to be true. That might not seem like much of a revelation, sort of a well-done thing, but it acts like a grounding rod for the coherence theory, forcing webs of belief to interface with the world in a way that's destructive for particularly weird or absurd ones, no matter how well they hang together internally. Someone who's assembled some rude Goldberg mechanism of cockamamie ideas might be able to pass their beliefs off as truth in a coherence framework if they happen to jive with each other. But with the pragmatist limitation, those ideas have to bring them some measure of success in their endeavors as well. If they don't, if, despite their consistency, they repeatedly hamper efforts to get stuff done, they're not true. It does sound a little bit weird to chalk truth up to some combination of internal consistency and overall utility. But Hume might have appreciated the grounded nature of such an approach. Students in Edinburgh rub his statue's toe on their way to finals for good luck. Viewed through this lens, that action is both inconsistent in conflict with Hume's own skepticism for the supernatural. And it's probably counterproductive as well, as time spent rubbing statues is time not spent studying. Which theory of truth sounds most true to you? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thinking.