Part Two
Falsification and Motives
The natural tension between true and false sets a simple example of the necessity of an external absolute to which non-absolutes have their reference. Truth, in both descriptive and prescriptive realities, is the straightforward and obvious standard. We always strive to get at the truth of things. Popper’s philosophy of scientific falsification is the use of falsity to find truth.
I see no reasonable arguments that can be sufficiently mounted against the idea that truth itself, in both moral and factual realms, is the single, simple absolute standard toward which all activity should aim.
That truth is power is easily verifiable. Fill out last year’s tax returns using entirely falsehoods. Name, earnings, dependents—fill in all the blanks with counterfeit information. Try living a day in which you freely substitute falsehoods with truths. Treat red lights as green, resolve that the brick wall you face is made of marshmallows and pound your head against it, pretend the Affordable Care Act works on every level promised and provides the absolute pinnacle of health care to every American; praise its perfection to everyone you meet. Spend your day inserting falsehoods into truths at home, work and in social settings and see how your day goes. One should pretty quickly concede the idea that value—both truth and falsity—as latent force has merit. These forces, sometimes antithetical, sometimes unifying, emerge in the interactions of intellectual agents with value-forces in external existence to shape opinions, affiliations, standards, belief systems—and eventually, societies and cultures. The medical technician examines blood and tissue samples under a microscope to gather health information about a patient. The impropriety of inserting false information into her report on the samples is so obvious that further discussion on the matter is unnecessary. Most of us take truth—the force that provides our primary directional beacon for every aim of life, work, play, relationships, etc.—wholly for granted.
Cognitive Bias is a sociological term for defects in thinking. Focus here will be on two forms of value-influenced bias, what will be called Cognitive Sedition[CS] and Cognitive Obscurity[CO]. CS is a term for the aforementioned resistance caused by the t¬f relation in mental processing. The force of this mental property is exclusively directed to prescriptive matters. In particular, its cause—the fragmental falsification of human information or essence, affecting cognition—is naturally the corruption of a perfection because the nature of the true is set up by and proceeds from its attributes: unity, suitability, harmony, perfection, accord, good, organization, propriety, etc. with the perfection of life as arguably the greatest good and truth. Conversely, the false is associated naturally with discord, inadequacy, inferiority, dissension, evil, chaos, death, etc. Obviously, these opposites repel. CS plays out in three distinct cognitive reactions:
A. The tt[/i] union
B. The t¬f opposition
C. The ff[/i] union
Before getting into how these play out in prescriptive matters the CO function needs attention. CO, as name implies, is the quality of indistinctness in the cogitative powers, a cognitive destabilization of the tt[/i] union by the admittance of fragmental falsity into the mind’s informational matrix, impairing its ability to form numerically sufficient tt[i/] bonds in the patterning of mental content to effect the perfection of reason and knowing. CS and CO are closely related but not identical. While both are caused by the true-false antagonism, CS produces a robust enmity in prescriptive matters while CO is a general distortion of intellectual operation for all matters of deliberation and attention, prescriptive or descriptive.
Definitions for the three possible value configurations provided above should help demonstrate the role value fragmentation plays in moral motives, accumulation of beliefs and responses to moral propositions. While the function for all three would apply to information ascribed to any material function, the information of intellectual operation as mental content in connection with external actual and propositional information.
A. The qualitative condition or force between true information states producing attraction to true idea(s), the proper and appropriate function in an exchange or transaction between the information of perceiver and information perceived, with respect to this relation’s ability to produce true meaning.
B. The qualitative condition or force between true and false information states producing repulsion and resistance to true idea(s), a corrupted transaction between the information of perceiver and information perceived, with respect to this relation’s ability to produce true meaning.
C. The qualitative condition or force between false information states producing attraction to false idea(s), producing dissonance between the false idea(s) held with respect to this relation’s ability to produce true meaning.
The above provide interesting outcomes for a variety of topics: motives behind the prescriptive beliefs one holds, the nature of moral beliefs, how the above would factor into reasons internalism and externalism, how this might play out in the identification of moral properties, etc. I find “C” most interesting: one who holds a falsehood then must expend effort gathering true propositions (arguments) to “prove” her false belief. No one uses false propositions to prove a false belief.
As a theist, the above (assuming theistic belief is fundamentally, if not precisely, true) is interesting because it seems to provide—with some degree of analytical reliability—an explanation for not only the great moral divide throughout the various philosophical frameworks in history, but offers a coherent account for how and why persons accumulate both theistic/moral and anti-theistic/anti-moral beliefs and offers a basis for why they adhere.
Thoughts?