Do Truths Exist in a Hierarchy?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Presumably, many things are true. Tokyo is the capital of Japan. There are over 30,000 species of fish. My aunt is married to my uncle.

But are all these truths equal? Let’s take a simple comparison. On the one hand, we have the truth: “All life forms are made of matter, and all matter exists in space.” On the other hand, we have the truth: “The phone number to 5 Dogs hot dog stand in Brisbane ends in a multiple of 106.” [Yes, I looked this up.]

Are these truths equally important? Are they equally helpful for learning? Are they equally useful, assuming you don’t have an obsession with the number 106?

Apparently not.

Well, if they’re not equal, we have a hierarchy, or perhaps multiple hierarchies. Which leads us to the question, what does this hierarchy look like?

I tend to think of all truths and all concepts as arranged in a relation of logical dependence to one another. For example, a human is a species of mammal, mammal is a type of animal, animal is a kind of organism, organisms are the subject of biology, biology is a natural science, natural science is a form of science, and science is an academic discipline. You can get a sense for these kinds of relations by looking at Wikipedia categories, where millions of topics are related to each other as sub-categories and parent categories. The only problem is, some of these relationships become circular - for example, academic discipline might be put in education, education could be put in society, and society could be put in humans again, in which case we would be back where we started and have a circle. There are many such circles in the Wikipedia category system. I know, because I’ve been mind-mapping it. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to account for them all, and make a comprehensive tree of ideas that is internally consistent.

But even if you don’t accept my “some ideas are logically related to others in a hierarchy” idea, there are at least two other kinds of hierarchies you could have. A hierarchy in terms of research utility, and a hierarchy in terms of practical utility.

A research hierarchy proposes an answer to the question, “What are the first truths we need to know before we can go on to learn other truths?”
So we would probably want to know about research methodology, about the nature of inquiry, about logic and mathematics, about fundamental philosophical and ethical questions, etc., before going on to learn facts about, I don’t know, dung beetles in the Jurassic period. I’m relying on this research hierarchy to tell me epistemology, logic, metaphysics, metaphilosophy, ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of mind are all very fundamental topics.

A hierarchy in terms of practical utility is simple. I have a goal. Let’s say it’s, earn $20,000 by investing in crypto-currency. What do I need to learn to achieve this goal? Unlike the other hierarchies, probably not philosophy. Probably something to do with economics and computers. Even a fundamental scientific truth like, “Matter and energy can be converted into one another”, is probably of no use whatsoever to me. Which says something about why people tend to be incurious about fundamental truths.

Of course, all reasonable people get their goals from reflection on ethics. But that’s a topic for another time!

What do you think of these various hierarchy ideas and the thoughts I have laid out? How would you build a particular hierarchy?

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This sounds much like the early Wittgenstein. He later on said something to the extent of, this may be analytically true, but the truths that can be arranged like that aren’t the relevant ones in terms of our lives. I think that’s what he said. At least he dropped his holistic systematization of truths in favor of some radical avant la lettre poststructuralism bordering on psychedelic poetry that no one read.

An interesting change took place with Francis Bacon, who reversed this hierarchy completely with respect to the Aristotelean tradition, which flowed into the ecclesiastical one and held that truths can be derived from purely logically derivable principles, from pure metaphysics.

Bacon noticed that general truths of nature can actually not be derived this way, from the top (“God” “The Idea” “Fundamental Categories” etc) down but that they must be inferred from the peculiar particularities that we can only discover by experiment, and relentless consistency in follow up experiments. So he brought into being the scientific method.

Is the scientific method ‘a truth’? Or is perhaps ‘method’ superior to truth, in the hierarchy of occurrence? Consistent method, if not truth, is at least a truthfulness, a form of integrity.

Anyway good topic. Food for thought.

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The way I think about it is, you need to do enough fundamental conceptual and metaphysical analysis to derive all the principles of the scientific method, and once you’ve done that, you can in theory derive everything else you can possibly learn from experiment. But if you don’t know, for example, whether induction is valid, whether other people can be reliable sources of information, or whether you have reason to believe in the external world, then science doesn’t get off the ground. Science is built on a set of principles; a set of beliefs. Very common-sense beliefs, but beliefs nonetheless.

You’re the second person to mention studying Francis Bacon today. I’ll get there eventually… I’m just getting back into philosophy after years, and am starting with epistemology.

I think that’s very plausible. In order to learn something important, you have to get into the nitty-gritty of things, not just endlessly map out generalities. It’s more important, for instance, to actually try to write a horror fiction book than to make a system of all fiction genres and themes and how they relate to each other.

I don’t see why, though, with today’s internet, we couldn’t have a comprehensive structured and consistent mind map of every single topic in the world and see how they all relate. It might not be that important, but I think it would be cool.

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Thats an interesting point - because I think the scientific method is the phenomenon par excellence that is capable of justifying itself, regardless of a priori knowledge.

Since the method produces tangible results, i.e. a verifiable, objective increase in power over our environment, we don’t need to bother with questions like whether or not induction is valid (apparently it is valid enough to produce results), whether people are reliable (some are, some aren’t - the results can be judge of which ones are and aren’t) and the external world is confirmed at least in the sense that it responds consistently to consistent operations. Whether or not all of this is absolutely metaphysically solid or part of an illusion is not determinative of its truth value, what matters is that we know that, within the paradigm we are working in, the method produces results, from which we may derive truths that pertain to that paradigm.

So, the method separates definite truths as well as definite untruths from ideas that may or nay not be true.

A question I once asked: of what kind of reality is the scientific method conductive? Despite or perhaps even because of the hard consistency of its results, it might be that not all off reality falls under its scope. Just that which can be isolated and repeated.

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I think the question “What is the best possible method for discovering truth?” could be a lot easier to answer than the question “What is the exact hierarchy of all possible truths?”

And much more practical and pragmatic.

Right now I’m curious about the latter though..

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Right. I was tempted to suggest that the answer to the former might be a truth itself and therefore at the top of the hierarchy, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Depends whether or not a method is a truth, and on your criterium for ranking.

My suggestion would be that the ‘truth that there is truth’ is a contender for being at the top.

“What is Truth? It is absurd to attempt to define it, for when we say that S is P, rather than S is Q or S is R, we assume that we already know the meaning of Truth. This is really why all the discussions as to whether Truth depends on external correspondence, internal coherence, or what not, neither produce conviction, nor withstand analysis. Briefly, Truth is an idea of a supra-rational order” - Crowley

Hierarchy: If the criterion is not origin of knowledge truth, then I suspect you won’t escape having to subjectively choosing a criterion, by value judgment. What is the value of this/that truth, and thus by implication, what is the value of truth itself? You have to determine that before you can prioritize certain truths over others, before a hierarchy can be shaped.

I may be stating the obvious. Truth as a concept unto itself, ‘truth as such’ always ends up boggling my mind.

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I think that “there is truth” - along with existence, meaning, logic, and thinking - can be known a priori, because its negation is self-refuting. I argued for this in my post “A Message for Extreme Skeptics and Relativists”. So I agree with you, it’s a big one.

I accept foundationalism - that all our knowledge is built on basic beliefs. This would imply a logical hierarchy - analytic a priori statements known by direct rational insight, from which synthetic statements can be deduced (like all of mathematics founded on true axioms), and a posteriori truths describing direct experience, and all scientific truths that are inferred from them, and inferred from what is inferred from them, and so on. That would be the form of the logical hierarchy: insights into logic, mathematics, metaphysics, and perhaps ethics, as well as scientific investigation into the world around us and thereby inferring physical laws.

The research hierarchy would be arranged according to topics. I feel like epistemology, logic, and metaphysics and possibly metaphilosophy are at the foundation of all topics. Without epistemology and logic you have no account of what you’re doing when you’re trying to learn or of how to learn or form any conclusions. Without metaphysics you have no account of what exists. It’s also worth saying in order to do anything you need to assume some answer to the axiological question: What is it that is valuable? So this question is fundamental also, and would imply the importance of ethics as well.

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There’s a difference between what is descriptive and factual. Even what is deemed factual can be based on completely fictional circumstances, but most of human civilization is like that.

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Come to think of it, there’s a case to be made that the most fundamental field of all is logic.

Without good or bad reasons for making claims, nothing can be decided one way or another, or even strictly defined one way rather than another.

In my studies of epistemology, logic was always implicitly relied upon in order to answer questions such as: What is knowledge? How is justification possible? Are there synthetic a priori truths? Are there good reasons to counter skepticism?

In fact, whenever philosophers make arguments, on any topic at all - even meta-logic itself - they are using logic.

Even people who are opposed to rationalism, people who think something else other than reason is the source of truth: faith, revelation, experience, intuition, nature, feelings, etc… in order to advocate for this position, they must use logic.

Otherwise, they have no grounds for asserting what they do, rather than the exact opposite - since to deny the use of logic is to deny any reasons for thinking one way or another.

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This is in keeping with logic at the foundation.

All logic really requires is the supposition that there is some truth (or more broadly, validity), and that there is a distinction (without necessarily saying in what it consists) between statements which align with that truth and statements that do not align with it.

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Interesting distinction though, between truth and validity. As truth can easier be seen to imply value-neutral, use-neutral, subject-neutral, even object-neutral? existence, whereas validity must means that something applies - which means that something else must also apply, be valid. A validity thus cant be singular. Something is valid to something else.

Basic accepted validity: “A”=“A” -

The philosopher Parodites, whose work Im only still beginning to partially understand and never fully will, challenged this with “A” >< “A”, which I took to mean that an instance of identity “A” is equal in difference to nothing as the next instance of identity “A”, but that they can’t be directly equated. Note that this is just my take on something he never that I know of elaborated on.

I understand that categorizing and equating are manipulations. And iterations of the same are still separate iterations.

Practically, we may equate electrons to each other in all kinds of useful senses, but no electron is absolutely identical to another one. As each exists in a different context, each is a different iteration of the same charge and mass and spin and whatever an electron is.

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So: truth that there is truth becomes the validity of there being a validity: It is valid that something is valid…which is a less absolute seeming and more alive statement. It means as much as saying that there are always interests at play. Valid to whom? In what context? In what argument? In which situation? With which goal in mind?

This is how one may arrive at something like ‘this world is will to power and nothing besides’ - there must always be a goal for something to be valid. And if the goal is knowledge of truth? Is knowledge of truth just another form of (feeling of) power?

“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” - Oppenheimer

Generalizing: because a thing it is true, it is bound to be discovered. The inquisitive mind then as a function of truth…
I heard an interesting thing recently: that even when equipped with knowledge of sign language, apes never ask questions.

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I asked google for the relation between validity and value. It came up with this:

“Validity is the extent to which the estimated value matches the true value , or, the extent to which a method measures what it is supposed to measure. Estimated Value = True Value + Total Error.”

Value has power
Truth has power
Power is value
Power is truth?

Is power the truth underlying every situation?
From the power-value of the atomic nucleus to the power relations in a state to the power of scientific validity.

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The “reason” I made this distinction is because, though truth is really important in classical logic, I read that non-classical logics (which I don’t know much about at this stage) sometimes don’t make any claims about truth-values. But they do, I think, claim validity - and, to your point that validity is relational, they claim the possibility of premises and conclusions and rules of inference to get from one to the other. There might be some cutting-edge stuff that challenges this view, but as I understand it these things are essential to what it is to be “a logic”.

Challenging the law of identity is normal enough in non-classical logic, I think. It looks like you and I are brushing against the limits of our understanding and have some homework to do if we choose to accept it - which is great!

I would say there must be a goal for us to value anything or move towards anything, even truth or validity or knowledge. So even the study of logic cannot be conducted without some axiological - value-based - assumption/conclusion, i.e., that validity is valuable, or that the “power”, if you will, of having knowledge or understanding or truth is worth pursuing.

But it is not necessary to the nature of logic, and logical validity, itself that it is value-laden in an ethical sense. To see this, understand that there are many moral nihilists, who think all moral claims are meaningless and there is no proper distinction between right and wrong, and yet they still cogently use logic. The fact that you can argue for a position like moral nihilism, to me, suggests that logic is prior to ethics.

Is logic prior to power? This seems like a Platonist vs. Nietzschean question. Is power prior to knowledge? But then how can we know anything about power?

I have already shamefully admitted on this forum that I lack the education level to comprehend post-structuralism, and I’m afraid the same holds for postmodernism. I will have to lean on the old, absolutist conception of truth and knowledge for a while, until one day I may find a way to transcend it with social, historical, biological, anthropological or psychological context.

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And the test of this, the criterion for whether these things do in fact follow from each other in a valid way, the test for the validity of the argument or formula, has to be power. Its power to have a hand in reality.

This is why string theory remains without real value (it has speculative value and is interesting in that), it has no power because it is untestable in the actual universe.

I know enough to know I know little. I know that formal logic is debated, but the only positivistic piece of knowledge that isn’t deep mathematics which I will never be able to learn, is this formula by Parodites. I think it’s pertinent: An iteration of “A”, be it strictly analytical or symbolic of concrete entity, is different from zero to the same degree that the next iteration of “A” is different from zero. It is pertinent because it devalues pure analytics, flat analytics application in real world situations. It also could be pertinent in understanding quantum computing, I realize, as these work with actual uncertainties arranged in a pattern.

Both, yes. Different sides of a coin. Truth as value vs the value of truth.

But that begs the question, doesn’t it. Are they real nihilists? But certainly easily discernible ethical values have no value monopoly in logical consistency; however, is not logical consistency itself an ethical value? Logical consistency is structural integrity, structural integrity as a standard, equally in truth, value and power. Also in knowledge. Knowledge of truth as structure; vs any hypothetical structure of ‘reality unto itself’; Wittgensteins problem again. The truth of uncertainty is not an inferior one one.

Relation is prior to power; power must be a property that something has over something else. (Hence wby “A” and “A” can never be flatly equal). Logic is the abstract form of relation. Abstract relation is not prior to power, I’d say. Abstraction is power exerted over relation.

Parodites, on such things as the difference between positivism (Platonism) and relativism=>poststructuralism (and how ethical values can mix with logic-structural values:

Aside: Validity of unknown truth vs known truth and the nature of the event of coming to know truth, the event which is consciousness. Facts: forces (uncertainties) that have imprinted themselves on forms, as forms (certainties). Collapsed vs uncollapsed consciousness.

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If by “test” you mean empirical test, and that is a form of power, then sure. But logic itself is prior even to (knowledge of) empirical reality, I would say. You don’t get knowledge of science without philosophy of science, and you don’t get knowledge of philosophy of science without knowledge of (or assumptions about) logic, epistemology, and metaphysics. To argue in favour of the scientific method, or against it, is to use, and imply, logic. This is the “hierarchical”, “realist” framework of my perspective.

The only sense I could make of this at first is the fact that in arithmetic, two numbers can be equally distant from zero, and not be equal to each other, only if one is positive and one is negative. You would then have exactly two values that are equal in difference but not equal to each other.

After reading a little, I found there can be infinitely many points that are equidistant from 0, for example the points on a sphere, when its centre is 0.

It’s reasonable to question whether they are really nihilists if you notice that their behaviour still shows a preference for acting one way rather than another. But what I am noticing is that there is a distinction to be made between ethical value and epistemic value. Ethical value exists in the context of morality, which is what goals we should choose, and epistemic value exists in the context of epistemic virtue, which is strictly aimed at knowledge. We can make sense of what is effective or ineffective at gaining knowledge, or validity, in a conceptual way, without assuming anything about shoulds or oughts. Our behaviour may show that we have an ought, but that ought is not baked in to the concept of validity, as the logical coherence of arguing for moral nihilism shows.

My claim is that you can divorce concepts of science, or the physical world, or being a human being, or the nature of the mind, or what moral truth consists in, or even the precise nature of what exists, and situate all of that within the framework provided by (meta)logic, which is the possibility of making good or bad arguments for any position whatsoever. And I am studying and choosing which topics to go to first and thinking about truth hierarchies from that understanding, that some concepts provide the ground for and are more fundamental than others.

If you want to call it a kind of “intellectual power”, that is provided by thinking, that makes sense to me. But power in the social or political sense seems to be pushing it because logic itself doesn’t even necessarily presume there is a social or political realm.

I read this a few times and I’m not surprised this author is hard to even partially understand. If I tried to engage with this, I would be better off asking questions and doing independent research than trying to say anything. I don’t have the education to make a substantive contribution to that kind of conversation. Why is Hegel of such “prophetic” significance to the Right? Isn’t it possible to disagree with both Hegel and Marx and still follow Plato? Doesn’t the “equal legitimacy of all interpretation” swallow its own opposite and so come to embrace the Right as well as the Left? If all our concepts are “arbitrarily constructed”, why should we believe in “phantasies of power” over any other characterization? My questions define the extent of my ignorance.

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“Ultimate skepticism.—What then are ultimately the truths of man?—They are the irrefutable errors of man.” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, aphorism 265 whole, my translation.)

“Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Kaufmann edition, section 493 whole.)

Things like the phone number of a taco place are “facts”, not “truths”; the underlying “truth” of whether a number is a multiple of another number is the “ultimate human truth”, i.e. the humanly irrefutable error, of logic, i.e. the law of identity etc. And the underlying “truth” of logic, in turn, is the will to power:

“[E]ither no will—the hypothesis of science—or free will. The latter assumption the dominant feeling from which we cannot get loose, even if the scientific hypothesis were proved true.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 667, translation Kaufmann.)

“Toward an understanding of logic:
the will to equality is the will to power—the belief that something is thus and thus (the essence of judgment) is the consequence of a will that as much as possible shall be equal.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Kaufmann edition, section 511.)

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…different context can still be same substance.

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Some more of a good healthy dose of Nietzsche’s cleverness to oppose my hideous Apollonianism, and to which I will not respond flippantly:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms… truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), §1

The demand for logical certainty is a religious one. The Will to Power, §516 (notebook entry, 1887)

Logic is the attempt to understand the actual world according to a scheme of being and permanence; yet the actual world is a world of becoming. The Will to Power, §517

We have no categories except those that come from our logic—but logic is not nature; it is our invention. Nachlass 1886–1887, 5 [53]

Instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence. Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” §3

The finest instinct is destroyed when we begin to analyze it. The Gay Science, §332

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. Human, All Too Human, §2

Socrates is the turning point in world history: he is the first great symbol of rational decadence. The Birth of Tragedy, §13

He who has merely reason and intellect, and lacks instincts, is like someone who would build only with rubble and not with stone. The Antichrist, §5

The will to system is a lack of integrity. Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” §26

The falseness of a judgment is not necessarily an objection to a judgment. […] The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. Beyond Good and Evil, §4

Every great philosophy so far has been the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir. Beyond Good and Evil, §6

Socrates is the prototype of the dialectician, of the man who trusts reason alone… but life is not captured by concepts. The Birth of Tragedy, §13–14

There are no facts, only interpretations. The Will to Power, §481

All our categories of reason are of anthropomorphic origin; we do not see things in themselves, but as humans do. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

The great reason is unconscious reason: the one that speaks from your body. You call it ‘spirit,’ but it is your stomach. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Despisers of the Body”

It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified. The Birth of Tragedy, §5

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Yes, very good. In particular, I want to zoom in on this one:

I don’t think it necessarily speaks against reason and intellect and for instincts that the former is rather loose whereas the latter is more firm. The latter is also more stupid, more rigid, more set in its ways. And why need the philosopher qua philosopher build?.. Well, with this question we arrive at another one of your quotes:

As he says somewhere in his notebooks, behind it there has always been its author’s will to power, and that will be no different for Nietzsche himself! Instead, the difference is that what Nietzsche “builds” in his mind and in his writings is the great philosophy of the will to power itself: he wills the world to be the will to power and nothing besides, and even this is only because the presumed will is “the dominant feeling from which we cannot get loose”…

“Willing[:] a pressing feeling[,] very agreeable! It is the accompaniment [Begleit-Erscheinung, ‘escort appearance’] of every eradiation [Ausströmen, “streaming-out”] of force.” (Nietzsche, workbook Spring-Summer 1883 7 [226], my translations.)

“The victorious concept ‘force’, by means of which our physicists have created God and the world [cf. BGE 9], still needs to be completed: an inner world must be ascribed to it, which I designate as ‘will to power’, i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest[!] power; or as the employment and exercise[!] of power, as a creative drive, etc.” (WP 619 (1885), Kaufmann ed., with my correction (“world”).)