My grandfather was taking me out to dinner again. He’s old and retired, a former geologist, and he acts like a cornball most of the time. He pushes the crosswalk button as many times as he can before the light changes, likes to swing a cane in some special way (which he once tried to teach me), and takes a little longer to decide his order when an attractive waitress is taking it down. For as long as I can remember, this has been my grandfather.
However, many people have told me that he was once a competent professional. I’ve seen pictures of him as a young man, and he looks like one of the whiz kids, like a man who knows what he’s doing. On the Kodachrome slides his hair is cut short, in the style of the times, and he’s always wearing a nice suit. There’s determination in his eyes, but innocence also.
My first question is the classic, and boring, question of identity. Are these the same people, old grandpa and young grandpa? More importantly, am I the same person as younger me? Is there a quick and easy way to do this?
At the restaurant we met a friend, a schoolteacher. The place was busy, so we got to talking while we waited for our food, and then as we waited longer we got to arguing. As this schoolteacher was years ago in charge of a lunchtime philosophy class at her high-school, I had tried to introduce my recent difficulties in amateur philosophy with self-referencing definitions and the Münchhausen Trilemma.
“See, if I say ‘The truth is what works’, and then I ask whether that statement is itself true, what criteria can I use? It’s circular logic if I say ‘(The truth is what works) is true because it is what works’. And that’s bad because if we accept that then any self-supporting truth definition is to be considered true, even nonsensical ones like ‘All statements beginning with the letter A are true.’ It’s a paradox if I say that it’s untrue for the same reason. If I say that ‘the truth is what works’ is a definition and therefore has no truth value, then you could again define truth to be anything. The same goes for deciding how to decide, it’s so damned frustrating it makes my head explode.”
That’s the gist of what I was trying to get across anyway. My grandfather was baffled. In his defense, I was fairly baffled myself when trying to find the words to tell the problem in the first place, so the mumbo-jumbo I spewed was probably pretty incomprehensible. I have definitely cleaned it up as much as I could for the gentle reader’s benefit.
Now, we were not arguing yet. Our teacher friend first told me how horrible some of the students at her school were, particularly those in that philosophy class I mentioned. She then used that opportunity to segue into the subjects of corporal punishment and the failure of our school system due to a lack of power in teacher's hands. This is where it became an argument. The verbal volleys exchanged are mostly irrelevant. What's important is that at one point she said something along the lines of “You don't know what I know so your arguments cannot sway me.”
To what degree do two people need shared experiences to be able to agree on something? Is it enough just to be living in the same universe? Do we also need to be working with the same rules of reasoning, deciding, truth? Do we also need to know all of the information that originally lead us to the positions we held before coming to agree? Or just some of that information? Is there a systematic way by which information can be shared in an ideal way to produce agreement (least effort, highest opinion stability, and best preservation truth)?
If all truth is absolutely relative and subjective, why then do we have discussions? To what degree is reality shared between people?
Is it possible to show someone operating on a different rule-set that they should be using yours? If I believe that the truth is whatever is most manly, what avenues do you have to show me I’m wrong?