| | Ed Thompson quoted Peikoff as a justification for the view that an arbitrary statement is neither true nor false: An arbitrary claim has no cognitive status whatever. According to Objectivism, such a claim is not to be regarded as true or as false. If it is arbitrary, it is entitled to no epistemological assessment at all; it is simply to be dismissed as though it hadn’t come up . . . . The truth is established by reference to a body of evidence and within a context; the false is pronounced false because it contradicts the evidence. The arbitrary, however, has no relation to evidence, facts, or context. It is the human equivalent of [noises produced by] a parrot .. . . . I addressed this issue in a previous article, as follows:
Can an Arbitrary Proposition Be True?
It should be understood that a sentence that does not form a meaningful proposition in someone's mind can be neither true nor false. As Peikoff states:A relationship between conceptual content and reality is a relationship between man's consciousness and reality. There can be no "correspondence" . . . without the mind that corresponds . . . . If a wind blows the sand on a desert island into configurations spelling out "A is A," this does not make the wind a superior metaphysician. The wind did not achieve any conformity to reality; it did not produce any truth, but merely shapes in the sand.
Similarly, if a parrot is trained to squawk "2 + 2 = 4," this does not make it a mathematician. The parrot's consciousness did not attain thereby any contact with reality or any relation to it, positive or negative . . . ; what it created was not truth or falsehood, but merely sounds. Sounds that are not the vehicle of conceptual awareness have no cognitive status. (OPAR, 165) Unfortunately, Peikoff then draws the following conclusion: An arbitrary claim emitted by a human mind is analogous to the shapes made by the wind or to the sounds of the parrot. Such a claim has no cognitive relationship to reality, positive or negative. The true is identified by reference to a body of evidence; it is pronounced “true” because it can be integrated without contradiction into a total context. The false is identified by the same means; it is pronounced “false” because it contradicts the evidence and/or some aspect of the wider context. The arbitrary, however, has no relation to evidence or context; neither term, therefore – “true” or “false” – can be applied to it. (pp. 165, 166) Contrary to Peikoff, however, an arbitrary claim, which expresses a meaningful proposition, is not “analogous to the shapes made by the wind or to the sounds of the parrot,” for such a proposition either does or does not correspond to reality, and is therefore either true or false. To put it another way, whereas the shapes made by the wind or the sounds of a parrot are not a meaningful proposition (to the wind or parrot), an arbitrary claim understood by a human being is a meaningful proposition to the human being. That is the difference, and that is why a meaningful proposition, however, arbitrary, can be true or false, whereas meaningless shapes and sounds cannot.
For example, suppose I say, quite arbitrarily, “There is life on Venus.” If I know what I am saying – namely, that there is life on the second planet from the sun – then even though I offer no evidence of life on Venus, I have still uttered a meaningful statement, which is either true or false. Either there is life on Venus or there is not. If there is, then my statement corresponds to reality, and is true. If there is not, then it does not correspond to reality, and is false.
This is not to say that one can identify an arbitrary claim as true or as false if one has no way of knowing whether or not it corresponds to reality. It is only to say that as a meaningful statement, it is either true or false -– either does or does not correspond to reality. Nor is it to say that the claim deserves serious consideration in the absence of any supporting evidence. Clearly, it does not.
Peikoff is certainly correct when he says that a claim is identified as true only because (in corresponding to reality) it is capable of being “integrated without contradiction into a total context,” for reality is a non-contradictory whole. But that does not mean that the claim must already have been integrated in order to be true. Obviously, if one has not integrated it –- if the claim contradicts other propositions that one accepts as true -– then one cannot know that the claim is true, because knowledge is a non-contradictory whole. But just as a fact of reality doesn’t depend on anyone’s knowledge of its existence, neither does the correspondence of a proposition to a fact of reality depend on anyone’s knowledge of its correspondence. To claim otherwise is to endorse a primacy-of-consciousness metaphysics.
Peikoff is also correct that insofar as an arbitrary claim has no relation, either positive or negative, to (actual) evidence or context, neither the term “true” nor the term “false” can be applied to it, because in the absence of sufficient evidence, pro or con, one cannot know whether the claim is true or false. But that’s different from saying that an arbitrary claim has no relation, positive or negative, to reality. It’s different from saying that an arbitrary claim cannot be true or false. Clearly, it can.
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