TRUTH (TESTIMONY)
The Testimony We Call “Truth”
The Decidability of Testimony
—“We evolved to negotiate pragmatically not testify truthfully. The reason we need Truth is because it’s counter-intuitive – it provides decidability independent of opinion or value – and so it’s often undesirable.” —
Deflating the word “True”.
|Testimony| > Dishonesty(bias, deceit) > Error (ignorance, error) >
… Meaningful (intuitionistic) > Honesty(rational) >
… … Truthfulness(by due diligence) > Scientific (Testifiable) >
… … … Ideal Truth (imaginary) >
… … … … Analytic Truth (logical) >
… … … … … Tautological Truth (linguistic).
The etymology of the word “True” is Testimony:
Truth (n.)
Old English triewð (West Saxon), treowð (Mercian) “faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty; veracity, quality of being true; pledge, covenant,” from Germanic abstract noun *treuwitho, from Proto-Germanic treuwaz “having or characterized by good faith,” from PIE *drew-o-, a suffixed form of the root *deru- “be firm, solid, steadfast.”, “oak” “Strong as an oak”.
True (adj.)
Old English triewe (West Saxon), treowe (Mercian) “faithful, trustworthy, honest, steady in adhering to promises, friends, etc.,” from Proto-Germanic *treuwaz “having or characterized by good faith” (source also of Old Frisian triuwi, Dutch getrouw, Old High German gatriuwu, German treu, Old Norse tryggr, Danish tryg, Gothic triggws “faithful, trusty”), from PIE *drew-o-, a suffixed form of the root *deru- “be firm, solid, steadfast.”
Sense of “consistent with fact” first recorded c. 1200; that of “real, genuine, not counterfeit” is from late 14c.; that of “conformable to a certain standard” (as true north) is from c. 1550. Of artifacts, “accurately fitted or shaped” it is recorded from late 15c. True-love (n.) is Old English treowlufu. True-born (adj.) first attested 1590s. True-false (adj.) as a type of test question is recorded from 1923. To come true (of dreams, etc.) is from 1819.
True (v.)
Sense of correspondence. “make true in position, form, or adjustment,” 1841, from true (adj.) in the sense “agreeing with a certain standard.” Related: Trued; truing.
(source: from the online etymology dictionary)
An Action (Verb): We Lack a Primary Verb for “Speaking the Truth”
While we have admittedly fuzzy definitions for true and truth, one of the frailties of English and most other IE languages is that they do not have a primary verb for “speak the truth,” as a contrast to lie and lying (v.). As we will observe repeatedly over the course of this book, the lack of a primary verb for Speaking the Truth is but one of many apparent confusions that are cause us so many problems of grammar and vocabulary.
In order to solve the problem of the ‘missing term’ we will use the terms “truthful”, “truthfulness”. For example: ‘He lies’, vs. ‘He speaks truthfully’. I’m not adventurous enough with terminology to suggest we use truths and truth as in ‘He truths’, and ‘That’s a truth’, even if it’s not uncommon for us to use “True” and less frequently “Truth” as statements of agreement.
A Term of Promise: All Statements are Promissory, With Varying Degrees of Contingency
If I say ‘it’s raining’, I am saying “I promise it is raining”. I might say “I think/believe it is raining” which expresses contingency. I might also say “isn’t it raining?” Or “maybe it is raining” to suggest a possibility rather than state a contingency or a promise. Yet we seek to avoid that accountability.
The Term Testimony Instead of Promise: ‘Testimonial Truth’
In philosophical discourse the terms ‘promissory’ or ‘performative’ truth are used for similar purposes. But because we are working in the context of law not norm and because we want to distinguish our work from prior authors, we will use the term “Testimony” and “Testimonial Truth”.
Only the Conscious (Humans) can Testify or Promise
Only those capable of speech (testimony), possessing sentience (feeling) consciousness (reason) and agency (cognitive independence from intuitionistic interference) are cable of making such promises. And not all individuals are possessed of sufficient agency (knowledge, skill, ability) to make such promises – and unfortunately we are not ourselves aware of our own limits. For this reason honestly is insufficient for truth claims. Instead we must perform due diligence against our limitations in order to make truth claims. And to guard against deception we must demand warranty (Or as Taleb argues, ‘skin in the game’.) Not simply because people are deceptive, but because they often lack the agency to speak truthfully having performed due diligence against their frailties.
The Degree of Promise in Testimony
So when we make a truth claim or state a truth proposition, we are constructing an intersection of three axes;
– The demand for decidability given the context of the question we decide
– The decidability of the testimony necessary to fulfill that demand
– The degree of warranty of due diligence that such testimony is sufficient for decidability, and demand for infallibility
Our testimony is sufficiently decidable and warrantied for the degree of decidability or not.
A Term of Agreement
In English grammar we refer to yes and no as a subtype of word we call ‘Agreement’, as in |Word| Noun > Verb > Relation > Agreement. We also use ‘true’ and ‘false’ as methods of ‘agreement’, but agreement on the correspondence of testimony (speech) with reality (existence). So when we say ‘That is true’, we mean ‘I agree with your testimony’. Or less supportively ‘I consent to your testimony’. Or “I promise you will agree with my testimony”, or ‘I cannot disagree with your testimony’. In this sense yes and no, true and false, good and bad are statements of agreement.
|Agreement| Agree, True, Good < Undecidable > Disagree, False, Bad
A Point of View
We habitually conflate (a) the words uttered by the speaker, with (b) the audience’s judgment of the correspondence of those words with reality, (c) the incentives of the speaker that bias his speech with (d) the sufficiency of decidability for the speaker, (e) the sufficiency of decidability of the audience who may or may not possess the skill, and (f) sufficiency of decidability for the judge who may or must possess such a skill to do so. And in doing so we conflate point of view (speaker, audience, judge), even though those points of view possess different information and different incentives, and different objectives.
The audience and the judge must ask, what demand for sufficient decidability is required to answer this question? What degree of due diligence is necessary to claim an answer is honest, truthful, or true – and is it warrantable? And is that degree of honesty, truthfulness or truth sufficient to provide the decidability demanded by the question? In other words, is the testimony decidable true, and is the question decidable given that degree of truth? If not then what is the scale of possible consequence (harm), and what is the possibility of restitution (correction of the error)?
|Point of View| Speaker (Producer)(Hypothesis) < >
Audience (Market)(Theory) > Judge (Court)(Finding of Law)
So a speaker (voice), author (text), or craftsman (symbols or illustrations), produces a product (hypothesis), that is tested by an audience (market), and negotiated (recursively), and either agreed with (purchased), or disagreed with (boycotted – exited), or submitted to a court (fraud).
The Act of Testimony: Copying, Describing, and Reconstructing
Speaking Truthfully requires accurately copying (reporting on) existential reality and then representing that copy in thoughts, words, displays, and actions or other symbols, where the audience’s use of those thoughts, words, and symbols reconstructs the same perception of reality as the speaker.
Cheers
-CD