Love and Truth

Great Debates
1

From here:

In responding to this, it occured to me that the potential for semantical gamesmanship is extremely high. Continuing to discuss it there likely would have hijacked Mines’ thread. (You see? Even old dogs like me can learn new things. ;))

The semantics involves making substitutions in Monavis’ claim, thus: Without love, truth is not truth. Only love can stand alone. Love is what is; whether it is expressed or not.

Without the exercise of philosophical discipline, it becomes a chicken/egg question. And the first philosophical discipline is to define terms. In the post to which Monavis responded, I defined love as the facilitation of goodness, and by facilitation, of course, I mean the removal of every possible obstacle.

That definition puts a stop to any disingenuous and pretentious semantical game because it diffentiates love, as an aesthetical expression, from truth, as an epistemic claim. One is something you do or don’t do based on what is valuable; the other is something you know or don’t know based on what is true.

The line between us is now clear. For Monavis, truth is uber alles, and for me, love is uber alles. I would say that without love, there can be no truth, and doubtless he would say that without truth, there can be no love. But given our definitions, we can examine the two claims.

Let us say that there exists truth without love. There exists, therefore, something known or not known, but without any value. It seems to me difficult to hold the argument that something worthless even matters, let alone is above all else.

Now, let us say that there exists love without truth. There exists, therefore, something valuable, but not knowable. Is it necessary for something to be known for it to be good? One counter-example is sufficient to make the point, of course, but there are in fact many. The comatose patient who is receiving care without any knowledge of what people are doing on his behalf. The recipient of charity who does not know his benefactor. The earthbound creature who does not comprehend just how good God is. And so on.

The conclusion, therefore, is inescapapable: love is above truth.

2

Truth and Love are such big, abstract, indefinable concepts, it’s really hard to treat them like beach balls that can be compared in terms of size, color, weight, position, and opacity.

3

Your argument is simply a bunch of handwaving to disguise that you simply define truth to have no value and then use that unsupported definition to conclude it is worthless.

4

It seems you’ve confused me with Monavis. I used his definition as he gave it: something known or not known. Do you have some other definition of truth that you prefer?

5

A conclusion you reached without the benefit of any logic whatsoever. Let us review what this conclusion is based on:

All of your support for this conclusion is based on your own personal universe, which I find completely escapable. All I have to do is simply disagree, and poof your whole thesis evaporates, unless you also believe that your opinions are of intrinsically greater value than mine.

6

An interesting question, even if I don’t go along with your definition of love. From a (non-Platonic) cognitive scientific standpoint, both “love” and “truth” are outputs of this incredible offal device in our skull (an eliminativist might call them mere labels of “folk psychology”, but let’s stick with them for the sake of argument). Assuming you’re talking about agape love rather than eros (which is rather more easily characterised in terms of cognitive modules which evolved as a means of judging a mate and obsessing on the best-judged individual), I’d argue that agape considerations form a specific subset of outputs from the general all-purpose truth-outputting mechanisms, namely those which relate to the consequences of one’s actions and intentions for the whole of mankind.

The ventromedial frontal cortex is largely concerned with consequences, planning and “self monitoring”. Patients with damage to this region are sometimes literally unable to do right (ie. “facilitate goodness”). However, they might perform as well as before on IQ tests or other tests of the truth-preserving mechanism in human cognition (whatever the heck that is! - I opt for a messy jumble of connectionism and syntactically-driven ‘computation proper’ myself), which are associated with the lateral prefrontal cortex. This suggests that, as you say, “love” and “truth” are not quite the same thing.

However, thinking about how one would go about exploring the relative significance (ie. an output of the amygdala and the temporal lobes - a long way away from the frontal lobes, neuroanatomically speaking) of these two types of activity (ie good/bad calculations vs. true/false calculations) is enough to give me quite a headache, so I think I’ll leave you to it.

7

One hesitates to use the words “category error” - the philosophical equivalent of “racist” in political debates - but I’m afraid they appear to be appropriate here.

Truth is a property of statements. Whether a particular statement always has the same truth-value, whether all statements have a truth-value or not, whether there are truth-values other than “True” and “False”, are all useful and debatable questions, but they all require us to accept the essential quality of truth as applying to statements only.

Love is a property of actions. Your definition of love is a good one, and a good starting point for a discussion on whether or not actions which demonstrate Love are superior to all others, but I don’t think it’s legitimate to compare it with Truth. Actions can’t be “true” or “false”, and statements can’t, of themselves, be “loving” or “hateful” - the effect that someone intends a statement to have on its audience, may be, by your definition, to “facilitate goodness”, but the statement by itself, in vacuo, can’t facilitate or hinder anything.

Perhaps the original question might better be phrased as - “Is it better to be truthful, or to be loving?” It then condenses to the well-rehearsed moral question - “Is lying ever justified? If so, when?” - without us having to engage in the futile exercise of comparing terms, which aren’t really comparable in the first place, on the ill-defined grounds of “greatness”.

8

It goes without saying that you may disagree with a premise and thereby discard a conclusion. That does not mean, however, that the argument with which you disagree is illogical.

9

At the very least, I appreciate your bothering to make an actual contribution. And as always, I am willing to concede the validity of your physicalist views. It is interesting to me that even in discarding my definition of love in favor of defining it as emotion, there still is a fundamental difference between it and truth. That is, your treatment achieves the same end as mine: putting to rest any semantical obfuscation.

10

A rather off-axis point, but do you regard “truth” to be as dependent on psychology as “love” is? I agree that love wouldn’t exist (if it exists at all in the first place) in the absence of a being with a suitably complex set of mental faculties, but does the same apply to truth? If all rational beings were eliminated from the universe, would the statement “2 + 2 = 4” stop being true, just because there was nobody left who could say “This is true”?

11

Excellent and on-point observations, thank you!

Without the appropriate clarifications, it would indeed a category error, which is part of the point made. As I said, what I hope to avoid is the eventual semantic reduction to: “love is truth and truth is love”. That’s why I labored to differentiate them.

Now, it is not a category error to compare otherwise unrelated things through a reference frame that includes both — say, one that is Euclidean. In this case, the reference frame is philosophy itself, since one has to do with aesthetics and the other with epistemology. (Note that by defining love as we have, we have moved the question of good/bad from ethics to aesthetics.)

Therefore, I like the question as originally posed: which is more essential, love or truth? Which, if either, can exist without the other? In other words, was it indeed necessary for Monavis to add to the comment I made in the other thread?

(I’m not sure why you raise the issue of “greatness” unless it was in response to what Fear said.)

12

Rational mental faculties are not required to love in this sense. What is required is an essential aesthetic — treasuring goodness (holding it to be valuable). Plenty of rather dull-witted people are kind and charitable, whereas plenty of geniuses are mean as hell.

13

Love is just an emotion, no different than hunger or curiosity or anger. It has nothing to do with truth, nor is it good or bad. You might as well claim there can be no truth without lust or no truth without hatred.

14

Love is a frequently abused word. “I love the White Stripes.” “I love sushi.” Even “I love you all!” shouted by a celebrity to a crowd which has gratified the celebrity’s need for attention. To me, at it’s highest love is the state where one cares for something else so deeply that it’s well being is as important to the lover as the lover’s own. This, to me, is true love. Typically love is felt for persons, but not always. Their are animal lovers who truly do love their animals. Their are patriots who truly do love their countries. Their are even sports fans who truly love their teams, bizarre as that seems. To me* the question is “what would you truly die for?” Those are the things you love.

Truth is both simpler and more difficult to pin down. Most of us have a simple correspondance theory of truth. A statement is true if it corresponds to a state of affairs which is the case. The more philosophically astute of you will dobtless be raising a host of objections right now. For one thing the statement appears tautological. “A statement is true if it is true.” It isn’t tautological, it only seems that way because we’re using language to discuss language. The correspondance theory of truth relates a statement or concept to an actual state of affairs. “The cat is on the mat” is true only if their is a real cat sitting on a real mat. The statement “Paris is the capital of France” is true only if Paris fits several legal and political criteria. I realize their are other subtler objections to the correspondance idea, but I’m sticking with it because it seems to me that it’s the idea 99% of people hold.

Where love and truth intersect was pretty much laid out by Tevildo in his (?) last paragraph. Should our love for another trump our love for the truth. In certain circumstances, yes. What these circumstances are is impossible to state in broad sweeping terms. They require judgement to discern, and most of us will make mistakes discerning them.

  • I realize that by saying “to me” three times I’m running afoul of the objection Fear Itself raised to the OP. Nonetheless I think its a good definition. It’s certainly not original to me.
15

Yes, I suggest that truth is not “out there” in a Platonic sense, but is a psychological entity. But hold on - I’m not suggesting some ultra-relativist position in which we can all say what we like and it’s as true as our differing opinions on a given painting.

I favour the embodied mind model of mathematics, based squarely on cognitive science, and strongly recommend this book. The central proposition is that the basis of maths and logic comes from the world around us, notably the mutual exclusivity of certain real-life situations. For example, an object can’t be simultaneously inside a bounded region and outside it, and it is from this kind of fact about the world that the abstract concept that “A and NOT A is absurd” arises.

Furthermore, “collecting groups of objects” is what arithmetic is, and objects collected into groups throughout those billions of years in which no thinking machine was around to label groups of a certain size with a certain shape. Thus, yes, (GroupSize “2”)(operator “+”)(GroupSize “2”)(truly mind-bogglingly abstract symbol “=”)(Groupsize 4) was not a labelling process which any entity performed over those 13.7 billion years (although now that it has, it can cleverly be applied to groups in the past), and so could not be said to be “true” without such complex apparatus around.

16

You know, people can discuss “force” as a legal term: the force of law. Or “force” as an ethics term: defensive force. Or “force” as a physics term: mass times acceleration. Or “force” as a baseball term: a force play. With “love” same same.

Just because a word has more than one definition — which nearly every word has — does not mean that it has to be abused. I gave a cogent definition of love that I would like to work with here. If you want to discuss love as an emotion, please feel free to open a thread.

17

I think that’s compatible with the definition I offered: the facilition of goodness (with goodness being an aesthetic; i.e., something you value.)

18

Ahh, I see what you mean. Presumably, essential to “being good”, or at least to achieving some sort of standard of aesthetic virtue? So:

Is love essential to being good? As you define love (with which definition I don’t disagree), yes.
Is truth essential to being good? Not always, unless we take an over-literal Kantian attitude to truth.

It might be possible to quibble along the lines that your definition of love makes this a simple analytic proposition, but I can now see how your argument works, and don’t have any objections to raise to it.

It was in response to your use of the word “above” in the last line of your post. Would “height” have been better? :slight_smile:

19
  • nods * - We can generalise over the vast number of instances of regularity in the natural world to come up with the single concept, “Truth”, and our ability to do that is part of our psycholgical makeup. Truth, as a concept, wouldn’t exist without minds capable of holding concepts in the first place.

Hope this isn’t too far off-base. :slight_smile:

20

:smack: I can see why, as a formalist, you got confused. I meant simply to negate Monavis’ proposition that “without truth, love is not love”. The prepositions are intended to reference degrees of essence, and not ontological degrees of greatness.