"natural theology > III development > 1 Epistemology

vol III Development:

Chapter 1: Epistemology

page 4: Truth and communication

Science seeks the truth. To know truth is to know that a thing and a mind are in some way equivalent to one another. Aquinas asks 'Is God truth?' and replies

As said above, truth is found in the intellect according as it apprehends a thing as it is; and in things according as they have being conformable to an intellect. This is to the greatest degree found in God. For His being is not only conformed to His intellect, but it is the very act of His intellect; and His act of understanding is the measure and cause of every other being and of every other intellect, and He Himself is His own existence and act of understanding. Whence it follows not only that truth is in Him, but that He is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth. Aquinas 103, Original text

If truth is to have a non-trivial meaning, it must apply to more than strict identity, since to know the truth of an identity is simply to know that I, for instance, am identical to myself. This tells us very little. The simplicity of God, as conceived by Aquinas and many before and after him, makes God impregnable to us.

Truth exists when two distinct parts of the Universe are correlated with one another, like the kitchen in front of me and the image on my retina. The lens of my eye may be said to perform a truth preserving transformation of the scene in front of me. This is an act of communication, since the effect of communication is to correlate a receiver of information with a transmitter of that information. Eye - Wikipedia

Abstraction

In the classical model of God, idea and thing are effectively identical. This is not so in human knowledge. The image on my retina, although it is a faithful representation of my kitchen, it is nowhere near as complex as the original. It is abstract, ignoring for instance atomic detail and elements of the scene that are obscured by objects in my foreground.

When we seek truth, we usually seek true abstract representations of real things. So when I say that nn is an honest person, I am compressing a lifetime of experience of a complex real world person into a few words.

The contents of high level communications are also abstract. It is true that I am hungry, but the sentence 'I am hungry' contains only a minuscule fraction of the complex states within my body that correspond to the feeling of hunger. Communication is concrete only at the lowest physical layer where we imagine that meaning is absent.

We can see two aspects in the truth of any message. The first is that the message is transmitted letter perfect. This question is taken up by the mathematical theory of communication. Then there is the question of meaning. Does the receiver really understand what the transmitter was trying to tell it? This is a semantic question. Semantics - Wikipedia

The mathematical theory of communication

Since truth is intimately related to communication, the mathematical theory of communication helps us to understand and acquire truth. This theory deals with the problem of transmitting a message, encoded in symbols, from one point to another. It tells us the conditions necessary to achieve this transmission without error, that is without the receiver receiving a string of symbols different from that transmitted. Khinchin

Transmitter and receiver form a relationship created and tested by communication. Messages can be tested by the receiver transmitting the received message back to the original transmitter which can then compare the transmitted and returned messages. Medieval scholastic definitions of truth appear to have concentrated on the literal identity of transmitted and received messages.

Meaning

The question of semantic truth is rather more difficult because every string of symbols can support a large number of different interpretations depending on the meaning intended by the sender and the meaning understood by the receiver. Alfred Tarski

The mathematical theory of communication is an abstract 'local' theory. Like special relativity, it applies to every communication at every point in the Universe. We move from the local to more general communication through meaning. The hardware of the internet moves physical symbols around the world without error, but it does not know what they mean. Only the users know that.

Meaning comes from relationships, and relationships are non-local - they cover a distance, from me to you, for instance, or from point a to point b.

This relativity means that any particular set of transmitted symbols is only meaningful to the particular users of the network who share a language and a culture. In the case of this text, for instance, the meaning is only available to we who know the English language, and are interested in and familiar with the history of these ideas.

The mathematical theory of communication shows us that truth in transmission revolves around coding and decoding. Meaning is also a matter of coding and decoding. Meaning and coding are central issues for this whole project, and we will return to them frequently. Coding theory - Wikipedia

The evolution of meaning

We may gain some insight into this issue by watching how our children acquire language. When they are very small, all their communications are encoded in looks, inarticulate sounds and body language. Later they begin to acquire words, then phrases and sentences. de Boysson-Bardies

We are aware that an enormous amount of unconscious learning is required before one becomes an articulate speaker of any language. All this learning enables us to encode our thoughts and feelings into various languages and to understand the thoughts and feelings of others from the messages they send to us. Hofstadter

Many further years of education are required before we become skilled at reading, writing and arithmetic, which are themselves encoding and decoding operations, moving back and forth between more or less abstract representations of the world. In other words, because meanings are non-local, spread over space and time, they take time to assimilate. The more complex the meaning, the bigger it is, and we tend to come to it later in life. Education - Wikipedia

As with the development of an individual mind, the evolution of the Universe may also be seen as the evolution of an ability to encode and decode endlessly complex meaning.

The fluidity of meaning makes often makes truth very difficult to discern. The answer lies in dialogue. We can prove that the symbols in a message have been transmitted faithfully by repeating them back to the sender. The same strategy applies when we are dealing with meaning rather than just the literal text. The listener tells the speaker what she thought she heard. The speaker replies with corrections. The listener responds to these corrections, and, in the ideal situation, they go on until complete consensus is reached. La Trobe University Centre for Dialogue, Buber: I and Thou

This site is the first round of such a dialogue. In time, I hope, other people will take an interest and reply with their various interpretations of these words. The I will be able to clarify my meaning, for them and for myself, and so on. Like the overall process of science, this may go on forever, although eventually I will have to pull out of the discussion due to old age.

Latin text of quotation from Aquinas:

Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut dictum est, veritas invenitur in intellectu secundum quod apprehendit rem ut est, et in re secundum quod habet esse conformabile intellectui. Hoc autem maxime invenitur in Deo. Nam esse suum non solum est conforme suo intellectui, sed etiam est ipsum suum intelligere; et suum intelligere est mensura et causa omnis alterius esse, et omnis alterius intellectus; et ipse est suum esse et intelligere. Unde sequitur quod non solum in ipso sit veritas, sed quod ipse sit ipsa summa et prima veritas. Thomas Aquinas: Summa I:16:5, Back

(revised 7 August 2014)

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Buber, Martin, I and Thou, Martino Fine Books 2010 Review: 'I and Thou, Martin Buber's classic philosophical work, is among the 20th century's foundational documents of religious ethics. "The close association of the relation to God with the relation to one's fellow-men ... is my most essential concern," Buber explains in the Afterword. Before discussing that relationship, in the book's final chapter, Buber explains at length the range and ramifications of the ways people treat one another, and the ways they bear themselves in the natural world. "One should beware altogether of understanding the conversation with God ... as something that occurs merely apart from or above the everyday," Buber explains. "God's address to man penetrates the events in all our lives and all the events in the world around us, everything biographical and everything historical, and turns it into instruction, into demands for you and me." Throughout I and Thou, Buber argues for an ethic that does not use other people (or books, or trees, or God), and does not consider them objects of one's own personal experience. Instead, Buber writes, we must learn to consider everything around us as "You" speaking to "me," and requiring a response. Buber's dense arguments can be rough going at times, but Walter Kaufmann's definitive 1970 translation contains hundreds of helpful footnotes providing Buber's own explanations of the book's most difficult passages.' --Michael Joseph Gross
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de Boysson-Bardies, Benedicte, How Language comes to Children, MIT Press 1999 'Inside the genetically determjned envelope of what is linguistically possible, the child has leeway to choose his or her personal avenue to the mother tongue. In the author's own words: "Children's styles or modes of accessing language show themselves to be incredibly different. How can this be explained on the basis of common mechanisms?" Two-hundred-odd pages of clear prose built on an enviable expertise make it very clear that this is not a rhetorical question' [From a review by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, Nature, 400:829-30, 26 August 1999]
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Hofstadter, Douglas R, Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic/Harvester 1979 An illustrated essay on the philosophy of mathematics. Formal systems, recursion, self reference and meaning explored with a dazzling array of examples in music, dialogue, text and graphics.
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Hofstadter, Douglas R, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, Basic Books, HarperCollins Publishers Inc 1997 Amazon: 'In the fall of 1537, a child was confined to bed for some time. The French poet Clément Marot wrote her a get-well poem, 28 lines long, each line a scant three syllables. In the mid-1980s, the outrageously gifted Douglas R. Hofstadter- il miglior fabbro of Godel, Escher, Bach - first attempted to translate this "sweet, old, small elegant French poem into English." He was later to challenge friends, relations, and colleagues to do the same. The results were exceptional, and are now contained in Le Ton Beau De Marot, a sunny exploration of scholarly and linguistic play and love's infinity. Less sunny, however, is the tragedy that hangs over Hofstadter's book, the sudden death of his wife, Carol, from a brain tumor. (Her translation is among the book's finest.)
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Khinchin, A I, Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory (translated by P A Silvermann and M D Friedman), Dover 1957 Jacket: 'The first comprehensive introduction to information theory, this book places the work begun by Shannon and continued by McMillan, Feinstein and Khinchin on a rigorous mathematical basis. For the first time, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, cyberneticists and communications engineers are offered a lucid, comprehensive introduction to this rapidly growing field.'
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O'Sullivan, Tim, and Danny Saunders, John Fiske (eds), Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, 1994 Jacket: '... a book to help you come to terms with the terms. It is a multi-disciplinary glossary of the concepts you are most likely to encounter throughout the study of communications and culture. ... Each entry consists of a brief introductory definition, followed by a more detailed discussion which covers origins, usage and controversies. All are cross referenced and supported by a full bibliography.'
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Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press 1949 'Before this there was no universal way of measuring the complexities of messages or the capabilities of circuits to transmit them. Shannon gave us a mathematical way . . . invaluable . . . to scientists and engineers the world over.' Scientific American
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Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press 1996 The classic founding text of cybernetics.
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Links

A Mathematical Theory of Communication - Wikipedia A Mathematical Theory of Communication - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The article entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", published in 1948 by mathematician Claude E. Shannon, was one of the founding works of the field of information theory. Shannon's paper laid out the basic elements of any digital communication: • An information source which produces a message • A transmitter which operates on the message to create a signal which can be sent through a channel • A channel, which is the medium over which the signal, carrying the information that composes the message, is sent • A receiver, which transforms the signal back into the message intended for delivery • A destination, which can be a person or a machine, for whom or which the message is intended It also developed the concepts of information entropy and redundancy.' back

Alfred Tarski The semantic concept of truth and the foundation of semantics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944). Originally published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4(1994). 'Our discussion will be centered around the notion of truth. The main problem is that of giving a satisfactory definition of this notion, i.e. a definition that is materially adequate and formally correct. . . . ' back

Aquinas 103 Whether god is truth 'I answer that, ... it follows not only that truth is in Him, but that He is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth.' back

Aquinas 99 Does truth reside in the thing or only in the intellect? 'I answer that, As the good denotes that towards which the appetite tends, so the true denotes that towards which the intellect tends. ... the term of the intellect, namely true, is in the intellect itself. . . . "Truth is the equation of thought and thing" . . . '' back

Coding theory - Wikipedia Coding theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Coding theory is the study of the properties of codes and their fitness for a specific application. Codes are used for data compression, cryptography, error-correction and more recently also for network coding. Codes are studied by various scientific disciplines—such as information theory, electrical engineering, mathematics, and computer science—for the purpose of designing efficient and reliable data transmission methods.' back

Education - Wikipedia Education - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Education in its general sense is a form of learning in which the knowledge, skills, and habits of a group of people are transferred from one generation to the next through teaching, training, or research. Education frequently takes place under the guidance of others, but may also be autodidactic. Any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational. back

Eye - Wikipedia Eye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Eyes are organs that detect light and convert it into electro-chemical impulses in neurons. The simplest photoreceptor cells in conscious vision connect light to movement. In higher organisms the eye is a complex optical system which collects light from the surrounding environment, regulates its intensity through a diaphragm, focuses it through an adjustable assembly of lenses to form an image, converts this image into a set of electrical signals, and transmits these signals to the brain through complex neural pathways that connect the eye via the optic nerve to the visual cortex and other areas of the brain.' back

La Trobe University Centre for Dialogue 'The Centre for Dialogue is primarily committed to research but also education and training, policy development and community engagement focusing on the philosophy, method and practice of dialogue. Formally established by Academic Board in 2005, the Centre’s research focuses primarily on: dialogue between cultures, religions and civilisations – relevant to many contemporary local, national and international conflicts; and dialogue between competing globalisation discourses and perspectives.' back

Psychology - Wikipedia Psychology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Psychology is the study of the mind, partly via the study of behavior, grounded in science.[1][2] Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases.[3][4] For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society.[5][6] In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist, and can be classified as a social scientist, behavioral scientist, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie certain functions and behaviors.' back

Religious education - Wikipedia Religious education - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In secular usage, religious education is the teaching of a particular religion . . . and its varied aspects —its beliefs, doctrines, rituals, customs, rites, and personal roles. . . . The secular concept is substantially different from societies that adhere to religious law, wherein "religious education" connotes the dominant academic study, and in typically religious terms, teaches doctrines which define social customs as "laws" and the violations thereof as "crimes", or else misdemeanors requiring punitive correction.' back

Semantics - Wikipedia Semantics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Semantics (from Greek sēmantiká, neuter plural of sēmantikós)is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata.
Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used by humans to express themselves through language. Other forms of semantics include the semantics of programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.' back

Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Quaestio XVI The Summa in Latin. back