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Dear Dr. Adler,

I find it hard to define what truth is. Some of my friends say that truth is what most people think is so. But that does not make sense to me, because sometimes the majority is wrong. Even what everyone thinks is so may not be the truth. There must be some better definition of truth. What is it?

Allan Newall

You are quite right to feel dissatisfied. Your friends did not arrive at a definition of truth, but at one of the signs of truth. In certain cases the fact that the majority holds something to be true is an indication that it is probably true. But this is only one of the signs of truth, and by no means the best one. And it does not answer your question or Pilate's --"What is truth?"

It may help you to understand the nature of truth to consider what is involved in telling a lie. If a man tells a woman "I love you" when he does not, he is telling a lie. When a child who has raided the cookie jar tells his mother "I didn't", he is lying. Lying consists in saying the opposite of what you know, think, or feel. It is distinct from honest error, such as that of the umpire who calls a man "out" when he is "safe", or vice versa.

Josiah Royce, a great American philosopher at the beginning of this century, defined a liar as a man who willfully misplaces his ontological predicates; that is, a man who says "is" when he means "is not", or "is not" when he means "is". Royce's definition of a liar leads us quickly to the most famous of all philosophical definitions of truth. It was given by Plato and Aristotle almost twenty-five centuries ago; it has been repeated in various ways ever since, and seldom been improved upon.

Plato and Aristotle say that the opinions we hold are true when they assert that that which is, is, or that that which is not, is not; and that our opinions are false when they assert that that which is, is not, or that that which is not, is.

When the "is" in a statement we make agrees with the way things are, then our statement is true, and its truth consists in its corresponding to the existent facts of nature and reality. When we think that something exists or has happened which does not exist or did not happen, then we are mistaken and what we think is false.

So, as you see, truth is very easy to define, and the definition is not very hard to understand. Perhaps impatient Pilate would have waited for the answer if he had known that it could be given so briefly. But maybe he was thinking of another question, "How can we tell whether a statement is true or false?" This, by the way, is the question you and your friends ended up by answering.

To this question there are three main types of answer. The first insists that some statements are self-evidently true, such as, "The whole is greater than the part." Such statements reveal their truth to us directly by the fact that we find it impossible to think the opposite of them. When we understand what a whole is and what a part is, we cannot think that a part is greater than the whole to which it belongs. That is how we know immediately the truth of the statement that the whole is greater than any of its parts.

Another type of answer says that the truth of statements can be tested by our experience or observations. If a man says that it did not rain in Chicago a single day last month, we can check the truth of his statement by looking up the official weather records. Or we can stick a foot into a swimming pool to see if the water is as warm as a friend says it is. Similarly, a scientific generalization is considered true only as long as no contrary facts are observed.

The third type of answer has to do with statements that are neither self-evidently true nor capable of being checked by direct appeal to observed facts. It may be a question of a person's character, what type of product is most desirable for certain purposes, or whether the favorite will win the next race. Here it is permissible to count noses and to find the consensus of a group of people or of the experts. That an opinion is held by a majority can be taken as a sign that it has some probability of being true.

This third answer was the one your friend arrived at. But the fact that it expressed the consensus of the group does not make it the right answer to the question, "What is truth?" Nor does it give the full answer to the question, "How can we tell whether a statement is true?"

Defining truth is easy; knowing whether a particular statement is true is much harder; and pursuing the truth is most difficult of all.

READING, WRITING, AND THINKING

Dear Dr. Adler:

You have probably received many, many letters of acknowledgment over the years, so probably you do not feel some readers are as ungrateful as Sir Thomas More thought they were. However, I have never thanked you for the change in my life, that reading your "How to Read a Book" has made to my reading, writing, and thinking.

Mari-Jose Amerlinck, Student - Universidad De Guadalajara, Mexico

KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT *

When I was a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago, the class was often confronted with some mathematical proposition and asked: "Is this an equation or an identity?"

It happened so often, in so many courses, that I found myself muttering: "Flip a coin." I did not see the point of the question.

In later years, I learned that this was one of the most important questions to ask, not only about economics, but also about politics, social issues and many other things that are not even expressed mathematically.

An equation is true only under certain conditions, while an identity is always true, just because of the way you define the terms. 3x = 6 is an equation that is true only when x equals 2, but 2x + 2x = 4x is an identity that is true regardless of what x equals.

Whether or not a statement is made in mathematical terms, it may be true either because it corresponds to some reality or just because of the way you define your terms. The reason this distinction is so important is that people are often convinced that they have said something that is true about the real world when, in fact, they have said nothing, but merely used words in such a way that the statement is true by definition.

Policies affecting millions of human beings can be based on a collection of words that mean nothing but imply something which is wholly unsubstantiated -- and yet cannot be refuted because of the way words are defined. A classic example are policies designed to deal with "over-population."

Vast sums of money are poured out around the world to stop "over-population," and Draconian birth control policies have been imposed on women in India and China, all in the name of this word. What does it mean to say that a country is over-populated -- and is it true in the real world or merely a matter of defining words?

Those who have seen hungry and poverty-stricken people in parts of the Third World may find it beyond any question that these countries are over-populated. Would these people not be better off if there were only half as many of them, so that they could have twice as much food per person and twice as much of other things?

It is certainly true that the same output divided by half as many people would mean twice as much real wealth per person. But that is an identity. It is true just because of the way we define the terms. It tells us nothing about the real world.

Worse yet, it may insinuate something that is not true. That is the underlying danger in tautologies that get mistaken for real statements about the real world.

When today's poverty-stricken countries in fact had half as many people, were those people better fed or otherwise more prosperous? Now we are talking about the real world, not about definitions. In the real world, most Third World countries were even poorer and even more subject to hunger and famine when their populations were half of what they are today.

Poverty and hunger are a real horror, whatever their causes. But launching a crusade based on verbal confusions is not going to help the victims, however much it may feel good to the crusaders.

Some of the most dire poverty and hunger in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population density is less than one-tenth of what it is in prosperous Japan. Other countries in dire poverty have higher population densities, but so do prosperous countries in Western Europe.

Since it is people who produce output, if poor countries had fewer people, they would produce less output, and there is no reason to arbitrarily assume that there would be more output per person. Exactly two centuries ago -- in 1798 -- Malthus succeeded in identifying poverty and over-population in the public mind, so that anyone denying over-population is regarded as denying poverty.

People are horrified when you question over-population dangers, because that suggests callousness about the hungry millions in the Third World. But if wrong theories were the answer to poverty, the Third World would be a Utopia by now.

Wealth is the answer to poverty -- producing more. This may not be as emotionally satisfying, as intellectually exciting or as politically attractive as some other notions, but it is the only thing that has, in fact, produced prosperity in countries that were once as poor as the Third World still is.

Over-population theories will probably continue to flourish, because they remain as irrefutable as other statements that are "true" by definition.

* By Thomas Sowell, Jewish World Review November 30, 1998.

-- Submitted by John Boleyn

MORTIMER ADLER'S CHAUFFEUR

Dr. Adler always traveled to his lectures in a chauffeur-driven car. One day, while in transit, the chauffeur remarked: "Dr. Adler, I've heard you deliver that lecture about 30 times. I know it by heart and bet I could give it myself."

"Well, I'll give you the chance," said Adler. "They don't know me at the next school, so when we get there I'll put on your cap, and you introduce yourself as me and give the lecture." The chauffeur delivered Adler's lecture flawlessly. When he finished, he started to leave, but one of the professors stopped him and asked him a complex question about Aristotle's concept of being and the soul. The chauffeur thought fast. "The solution to that problem is so simple," he said, "I'm surprised you have to ask me. In fact, to show you just how simple it is, I'm going to ask my chauffeur to come up here and answer your question."

UNVERIFIED OPINION?

Right off the top of my head I can think of the lack of knowledge as being disastrous. If the operator in a generating station doesn't know (knowledge) to keep the spin of the generator consistent with three phases, every electric device on the system will be in error, especially time. This calls for knowledge, not opinion. Otherwise I agree, sometimes what we think of as knowledge, is only unverified opinion.

Karl Krudop

WISDOM AND INSIGHTS ON-LINE

Dear Max Weismann,

Any little crumb of wisdom that I can glean from Dr. Adler is a priceless gift. Having Dr. Adler's insights available on-line is a remarkable blessing for which I am especially grateful in this time of Thanksgiving.

May you, Dr. Adler, and everyone affiliated with the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas have a joyous advent and Christmas season.

Yours truly,

Mark Moran

A WARNING FROM CHARLES DICKENS

"This boy is Ignorance," the spirit says,
"This girl is want. Beware of them both,
but most of all beware of this boy,
for on his brow I see that written which is doom,
unless the writing be erased,
Deny it! . . . . . And bide the end."

-- Charles Dickens; A Christmas Carol (1843)

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