What Is Truth According to TOKENISM?

Every question TOKENISM asks eventually comes back to one: how do we know what is true? This page sets out how the TOKENISM writings answer that, adds a supplementary way of putting the same idea, and explains the vocabulary used in the discussion.

TOKENISM's definition of truth

The author's own definition appears in the writing Truth & Science Explained. It is quoted here exactly as written.

Two further statements from the same writing are worth keeping beside it, because they set the limits of the definition:

In short, the original TOKENISM position is that truth is established by evidence, that testing and independent verification are what turn a claim into something we can call true, and that every conclusion stays open to revision.

A supplementary working definition

This wording is offered as a working philosophical interpretation of TOKENISM's position. It is not a replacement for the author's definition above. The two fit together, with a difference of emphasis:

• The original definition is operational. It says what has to happen before a claim is treated as true: testing, verification, replication and critical examination.
• The working definition is explanatory. It describes why that process is needed: our experiences and beliefs can be mistaken, and the aim is to bring them into line with how things actually are.
• Both agree that understanding is fallible and must change when the evidence changes.

It is also worth being clear about what this is. It is TOKENISM's working interpretation, not the only accepted philosophical theory of truth. Philosophers have proposed several. The correspondence theory says a claim is true when it matches how things are; the coherence theory says a claim is true when it fits consistently within a body of other accepted claims; pragmatic theories link truth to what works in practice ^[1]. The TOKENISM wording leans most on correspondence while borrowing a method (evidence and testing) that any of these views can use.

Key terms

Reality

Reality is whatever exists and is the case, independent of what anyone thinks or feels about it. A planet's mass does not depend on anyone's opinion of it. TOKENISM's phrase "objective reality" points at this idea.

Truth

A true claim is one that accurately describes reality. Truth belongs to claims; reality is what makes them true or false. The difficulty is never the idea of truth but our access to it, which is why method matters.

Belief

A belief is a claim a person accepts. Beliefs can be true or false, and the strength of a conviction says nothing about which. TOKENISM's pledge expresses this with "I will not blindly believe, but I will search for the truth."

Evidence

Evidence is information that makes a claim more or less likely to be true: measurements, observations, records and the reasoning that connects them. Evidence varies in quality. Independent, repeatable and publicly checkable evidence is stronger than a single, private or unrepeatable report.

Knowledge

Knowledge is usually described as a belief that is true and well justified, although philosophers have shown that even that definition has difficult edge cases ^[2]. The TOKENISM writings define it in their own terms:

Subjective experience

Subjective experience is how things seem from the inside: what you see, feel and remember. It is real as an experience, and it is the starting point of all knowledge, but it can mislead about the world. Memory is reconstructive, perception can be fooled, and strong feelings can feel like proof. Treating an experience as data to be examined, not as a verdict, is the first step toward objective investigation.

Objective investigation

Objective investigation is a set of methods designed to reduce the influence of any one person's bias: careful measurement, controls, peer review, independent replication and open criticism. Its goal is not that scientists are never wrong, but that errors can be found and corrected by others.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is the honest recognition that conclusions come in degrees of confidence. A claim can be very probably true, probably false, or unknown. TOKENISM treats "I don't know" as a respectable answer, and treats the willingness to revise a conclusion as a strength.

Falsifiability, briefly

A claim is falsifiable if there is some possible observation that would show it to be wrong. The philosopher Karl Popper argued that this is a mark of scientific claims: a statement that no possible evidence could ever contradict gives us no way to test it ^[3]. It is one useful test among several, not a complete account of science, but it is a practical question to ask of any claim: what would change my mind?

Truth, belief and imagination

TOKENISM keeps three ideas apart, and the distinction is central to its approach to truth. The writing Create Your Own God (CYOG) states it directly:

Imagination is valued as a source of questions. Verification is what turns a question into knowledge.

Questions to ask of any claim

• What exactly is being claimed?
• What would count as evidence for it, and what would count as evidence against it?
• Who has checked it, and were they independent of each other?
• How confident is it reasonable to be, and what would change that?
• What happens if I am wrong, and what happens if I wait for better evidence?

References

1. David, M. "The Correspondence Theory of Truth." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/
2. Gettier, E. L. (1963). Is justified true belief knowledge? Analysis, 23(6), 121–123.
3. Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson. (First published in German as Logik der Forschung, 1934.)