Q&A: Values, Truth and Falsehood. Good and Evil.
Values, Truth and Falsehood. Good and Evil.
Question
Is the concept of truth determined by someone? Did the Creator determine what truth is? What is good? Or are these facts? Is there a certain reality that is true and could not be otherwise?
Murder is evil, and it could not be otherwise. (Good and evil.)
To do good is not to commit an act of falsehood.
In another context: the mathematics of 1+1=2 could not be otherwise in any human conceptual world. There could have been a different humanity with a different conceptual world, such that our mathematics and theirs were different, but not in an essential way, only in the example. For both of us, mathematical truth would have been unchangeable.
What I am trying to ask is whether truth is necessary by definition. It is carved out of and derived from reality. Nobody determined it. Because if someone determined it, then he could also determine something else. So in what sense is that truth? It is just an arbitrary decision about the definition of truth.
Could it be that the value of truth and falsehood was not determined by people or by the Creator? Could it also be that they are not part of our laws of logic, but rather are a reality in themselves, just as the sun is a reality in itself and is merely perceived by the senses—so too truth is truth, and it cannot be otherwise.
Is that correct? Or could truth have been otherwise, and still have been truth? That is, is truth a determination rather than a reality?
Answer
It depends on your definitions. Truth, as I understand it, is a property of propositions. A proposition is true if there is a correspondence between its content and the state of affairs in the world that it describes. So there is no room here for a discussion of whether this is a creation of the Holy One, blessed be He. Reality is a creation of the Holy One, blessed be He, and propositions are our formulation. If there is correspondence, then the proposition is true by definition, regardless of the Holy One, blessed be He. The same is true of mathematics. The Holy One, blessed be He, created the mathematical entities, if you are a Platonist (as I am). But the relations between them are properties that follow from their nature. One can create a world without triangles, but if there is a triangle (in straight Euclidean space), the sum of its angles is 180. You can look at my columns on Platonism, and search for “the laws of logic versus the laws of nature.”
Logic does not deal with concepts of truth (of propositions), but with concepts of validity and invalidity (of arguments). Science deals with truth indirectly. It discovers the facts, and thereby the truth of propositions about them becomes clarified.
As for morality, there the categories are forbidden and permitted, not truth or falsehood. However, I am a moral realist (see Column 456), and therefore there are moral facts, and theories about them can be true or false. In any case, regarding your question, I tend to think the picture is fairly similar. It is possible to create a different world, but given our world, the laws of morality are binding even on the Holy One, blessed be He. See Column 457.
Discussion on Answer
You didn’t read 457.
I saw Column 456 about the source of morality as deriving from God’s authority.
So basically you are saying that not murdering is not an evil act in and of itself, but rather it is God’s decision that it is an evil act?
If the definitions of what is good and what is evil are not facts but decisions of a transcendent agent, then He certainly could have made different decisions.
He did not merely reveal moral entities to us; He determined them. So they are frighteningly arbitrary. And by the same token, He could determine that what we call evil is good, and vice versa.
If so, then the same would apply to truth and falsehood.
The Torah is truth—a Torah of truth. In what sense is the Torah truth? After all, it does not necessarily make claims about reality; rather, it determines reality. For example, when the Torah says that murder is forbidden, is it saying something true, or is it teaching morality—what is good and what is evil?
If it is teaching what is good and what is evil, then it is “superfluous” as Torah, because ethics preceded it. And if it is saying what the truth is in the sense of how one ought to act, even if in principle refraining from murder is evil—then supposedly there is some kind of fit between the person and reality, what is right for him and what is true for him, regardless of the question of what is good for him. (Could it be that something is right for me and yet bad for me?)
In two words: does truth exist as part of reality itself, or is it a value judgment about reality, and therefore arbitrary?
And likewise regarding mathematics: could there have been a world in which 1+1 equaled 3? Or is that a way of phrasing a question that means nothing, because 1+1 is always 2?