The world is composed of objects (physical and non-physical).
Descriptors of those objects and the relationships between them are called facts.
Examples: That Greg is male and Katelyn is female are facts about objects. That Greg is the father of Katelyn is a fact about a relationship between objects.
In a nutshell, that is your world. It is a collection of objects and facts about 1) objects and 2) the relationships between objects.
Facts are neither true nor untrue. They just are. It is not correct to use the phrase “true fact.” That is redundant, or to put it more accurately, “true” is not an appropriate descriptor for a fact.
There are zero untrue facts and zero un-facts in the world. Only facts.
On the other hand, statements about facts can be either true or untrue. Perceptions of facts can be either true or untrue as well.
We are all purveyors of statements, in that we are both constantly giving and receiving them. However, we are not all purveyors of truth.
From both a moral and pragmatic standpoint, we are obligated to weigh the truth of the statements we dispense and absorb.
The same is true of perceptions of facts. As Descartes famously pointed out, our perceptions are not necessarily reliable.
How do we know if a statement or perception is true? The best way is simply to see if it corresponds to a fact. If it does, it is true.
That is what is meant by the oft-used phrase “factually correct.” A factually correct statement is true because it corresponds to one or more facts.
In this article, I am going to refer to this way of discerning truth as CTF (correspondence to fact).
For centuries, rigorous thinkers have adopted CTF as the best way to define truth.
There is, however, another way that is commonly used to examine the truthfulness of a statement/perception. It is called coherence.
When using coherence to examine the truthfulness of a statement, the statement is compared to the examiner’s body of knowledge and view of the world. If it is compatible without contradiction, it is accepted as truth.
Most people tend to judge truthfulness by coherence rather than CTF even though that method is often fatally flawed. We will go into why that happens in a second, but it is not a good thing.
Let me give you an example of coherence in action. Over the years, I have had a business that sold certain health products. And many times, I have heard conversations with customers that go sort of like this:
I love product X. I had pneumonia and was in the hospital last month. My doctor told me that I was lucky to survive. And I know that product X is why I got better. I would never have gotten out of that hospital without it.
Take a minute and evaluate these statements. Is the speaker using CTF or coherence to determine truth? (Whether the statements are actually true or not is irrelevant to this exercise.)
You should come to the conclusion that the first three sentences represent CTF while the last two represent coherence. Not coincidentally, those last two sentences are where things go off the rails. This is clearly a situation where worldview (rather than facts) is heavily influencing how the speaker determines truth.
As an aside, one wonders how the person might respond if you asked them why they ended up with pneumonia in the first place if product X is so good. I have often wanted to ask that kind of question but always resisted.
I think you get the point. The use of coherence in this example actually attempts to bend truth to fit a viewpoint. The corresponding facts are non-existent and have been neatly replaced by a viewpoint (the superiority of alternative medicine).
While an extreme example, this kind of thinking is prevalent. It is sloppy and erratic and often makes smart people sound stupid, but you see it everywhere.
Before I get more into the coherence trap, it is important to mention that coherence is useful and has its place. While not ideal, but it is often perfectly acceptable because CTF is not always viable. Here are three major reasons why:
- It is simply not practical or possible to examine the correlation between every single statement/perception and the associated facts.
- Some questions are unknowable from a CTF perspective.
- CTF by itself is inadequate for inductive reasoning (predicting the future).
As an example of the first reason, I believe that my employees are working as normal in my warehouse this morning even though I have not left the house to verify this belief. I am basing that belief on a set of assumptions that I trust because of how I view the world. To start, I assume I would have been notified if something was wrong at the warehouse this morning. Thus, my belief is not based on CTF but rather coherence.
My choice to choose to use coherence here is for practical reasons. (I have other things to do at home.)
As an example of the second reason, consider unknowable questions such as the nature of an afterlife. It is impossible to use CTF in such cases, which is where religions and similar structures come into play. Every religion is built on some form of special revelation about unknowable questions. Followers choose to adopt that worldview and then compare other statements against that worldview to determine their accuracy.
That every religious worldview is unverifiable at best and completely false at worst is not the point. People pragmatically choose to adopt such worldviews because they need to at least have a perception of an anchor to reality, and they need to know the unknowable. It turns out that people are not very happy with not knowing, even when knowledge is not possible. And once that foundation is in place, it gives them something to measure other statements against with coherence.
From purely an epistemological perspective, when considering that unknowable questions really are unknowable, adopting a worldview based on religion is probably no worse than a pragmatic choice, and using coherence based on a religious worldview is not necessarily a bad thing. (Many would disagree with me on that point, and for sure, a lot of harm has been done because of religious-based coherence.).
For the time being, I am going to skip an example of the third reason (inductive reasoning) because it is technical and will make this article too long. We will get back to inductive reasoning at some point down the road. For the moment, I will just say that our world would look drastically different if we did not use coherence to predict the future (even the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow).
Now, I want to talk about the dangers of coherence. I just gave three reasons why coherence is acceptable, though let me throw in the caveat that those three reasons can be (and often are) abused. I am not going to complain about those applications of coherence if used legitimately though.
However, where coherence gets dangerous and people start sounding stupid is when they allow a worldview to strengthen to the point where it overwhelms and replaces CTF. In other words, their worldview becomes more important to them than facts.
Rather than facts themselves being the yardstick against which to measure statements for truthfulness, one’s worldview becomes the yardstick.
As a rather obvious example, we are seeing this play out today with conspiracy theories. Because they flagrantly disregard facts, conspiracy theories can only survive when worldviews become more important than facts.
If you are like me, you are somewhat alarmed these days by people that you know to be smart but yet suddenly sound like idiots, spouting false statements and conspiracy theories with conviction. It is important to realize that those people are not idiots; they just have a gigantic flaw in their epistemology. They are in the coherence trap. Recognizing that does not make me feel enormously better, but maybe a bit better.
Here are three big risk factors for the coherence trap:
Getting old
Growing up, I was taught that older people are wise. As it turns out, the percentage of the elderly that are really wise is rather low. Because older people have had more time to develop a worldview, they are more susceptible to letting coherence to that worldview override CTF. The more developed the worldview, the greater the danger.
As you grow older, you will find that this fatal attraction with worldview will get stronger. We all eventually have to face a decision as we become mature adults: are we going to know everything or are we going to be able to identify what we don’t know and hold our theories loosely?
You cannot control your age, but you can do everything possible to avoid the coherence trap as you age.
A too-small world
Growing a dominant worldview is easy when your world is small and you do not know what you do not know. It is easy to know everything when there is not much to know.
If you enlarge your world, you will find it much harder to rely on coherence. In short, travel as widely as you can, read as widely as you can, experience as much as you can, and have a diverse set of friends.
The siloed echo chamber
Since I started this blog, I have been meandering toward a discussion of how social media and other internet forces have created a very dangerous situation where one can find friends, “facts,” and evidence to support any worldview. (I am using the word “facts” here even though those facts are often not facts at all. They are simply false statements about facts.)
Especially in a digital world, it is easy to enter a silo where one believes that their worldview is the only legitimate one and an acceptable replacement yardstick for facts.
It is very obvious that the longer you exist in such an echo chamber, the harder it is to differentiate between worldview and facts. Views get more and more and extreme, and dogmatism increases exponentially. If you look around, you see this phenomenon claiming people around you. It is not pretty and is not easy to escape.
Many people should reevaluate their social media, the sources they read, the entertainment they consume (such as cable news entertainment), and the friends they talk to. In a lot of cases, these things should just be pruned out of our lives. I will talk later on about how people are manipulated online toward silo thinking.
The first two dangers are common enough, but the third has become more prevalent in the last decade. We all have to be careful. If you think I am writing this warning about coherence to someone besides you, you are wrong. You already fall into the trap; I do too.
So how do you deal with those people who suddenly sound like idiots? Frankly, you probably cannot do much. I personally disengage as soon as possible to protect myself. The surest way to become that way yourself is getting in the mud and arguing with them. Only in my weakest moments do I react to untrue statements from people blinded by coherence. And every time I do, I regret it.
Arguing really is a waste of time. Let them be, keep things peaceful, and focus on fixing/protecting yourself from the same problem.
This post was a bit of a detour from my epistemology series but is sort of related. I will get back to normal in the next post.