Truth Counts

Much confusion persists about cultures and their origin in the fantasies produced by human minds.  The most dangerous?  

• all knowledge is relative, often expressed as one of the following -- 
• everyone has their own point of view based on their unique life trajectory and accumulated experiences and, because all points of view rest on assumption, all count as equally valid -- no one can be better than another.
• all cultures count as equally valid -- no one culture can be better than another.

Franz Boas, a founder of American anthropology, proposed the relativity concept as a methods principle. If you want to understand another person, or other ways of living, you must aim to see the world through their eyes.  That requires you to treat seriously the accounts that other people give you about what they experience and the meanings they use to make sense of their experience.   Common confusions like those stated above transform a principle critical to our attempt to understand other people into obviously silly claims.  Everyone knows that some ways produce better -- sometimes dramatically better -- results than others.  Our sheltered lives, however, allow us to pretend equal output from different sets of ideas without having to deal with the consequences, which may include -- for others -- poverty, disease, and death.  

Intelligent information processing produces new ideas (h/t Homer Barnett and William Calvin) that our Interpreter (h/t Michael Gazzaniga) uses to speculate about the nature of the world and to reason about what those postulates imply about moral (aka “fair”) behavior. Evolved cognitive biases (h/t more-people-than-we-can-shake-a-stick-at) quicken our ability to make choices based on experience with opportunities and dangers and to weight most heavily the consensus of ideas and behavioral responses of the people who constitute our community. The cognitive bias that weights the risk of choice alternatives (h/t Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman) in ways that force us to hate losing more than we love winning produces sharp behavioral differences. Treatment judged fair elicits commitment to that community and the coordinated (teamwork) behavior that allows us to achieve orders of reality that individuals cannot. Treatment judged unfair elicits defensive action that changes cultures.

Human minds thus can't acquire perfect knowledge. Everything we "know" rests on a true-by-definition statement. Hence we all make mistakes and all things we "know" contain errors.   Rather then denying the existence of Truth, the errors that human understanding contain actually heighten its importance.  Claims like "Truth doesn't exist" or that "we cannot know Truth" illustrate pedestrian logical errors.

‬"Science" is one name for these procedures to find out where we're wrong.   The physicist Richard Feynman concisely describes the essentials here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw

• we guess
• we work out the implications of our guess
• we compare those implications to the world of experience

Another name?  "Critical Thinking."  ‬  "Opinions" about Truth rest solely on personal fantasy.  "Arguments," by contrast, rest on evidence.  Evidence comes from application of explicit logical rules to observations about the correspondence of one thing with another.  Most importantly, simple correlations mean nothing.  Arguments must rest on co-relationships that exist even after we control for other possible explanations.

What's the Point?

Human minds evolved to create cultures.  These force individuals to make choices consistent with the moral vision embedded in that culture.  The outcome?  Teamwork, which allows us to reach goals otherwise unattainable.  Find details and documentation here --  https://www.routledge.com/products/9781598746785.

This blog explores implications of this finding for understanding ourselves and the world in which we live.  Like --

• all human behavior comes from cultures, not "free will" or "rational choice" neither of which our minds allow.
• different cultural assumptions produce different cultures.
• cultural assumptions create moral visions that apply to specific behavioral domains.
• all of us participate in many behavioral domains, so all of us participate in many cultures.
• because cultures direct the course of human affairs, your cultures will take you to their destinations whether you like it or not.
• if you want to reach a specific destination, you must pick the right culture; if you follow the dictates of another culture, you must change cultures or you'll end up at a destination you may not like.
• all conflicts originate in conflicting cultural assumptions.

In short, cultures consist of a series of things that exist only by assumption and the moral vision implicit in those assumptions, which via evolved cognitive biases our minds tell us to do what we should and not what we shouldn't.  Nothing happens unless there's a culture to do it.  If you want to understand the origins of morality, how and under which conditions we treat each other well or exploit or kill our neighbor or family member, resolve conflict, heal from the traumatic stress that will otherwise kill us -- or merely puzzle out some of the confusions that permeate our world -- you must start with a critical analysis of the cultures that bear on specific concerns.   

This blog focuses on two practical issues.  

First, because human minds evolved to speculate about material experience, all human knowledge rests on assumptions.  Because assumptions, by definition, can't be proved, all human knowledge contains flaws.  The search for flaws created what we now call "science."
We will introduce and illustrate methods that allow us to effectively identify these flaws.

Second, because all conflicts and controversies rest on different assumptions, we will introduce and illustrate methods that allow you to identify cultural assumption differences and analyze their implications.