Three Kinds of Truth and the Scientific Method

A short talk given while an employee at Jama Software, a partial response to a talk from the CEO about Jama’s “habits”

When we talk about the truth we are really referring to a few different things. We are talking about the Truth, with a capital T, and truths, with a lowercase t. One is referring to what we can think of as the set of all statements that correspond to reality, an overarching collection of what is true, and the second as individual statements within this set. Let’s set aside the former for a minute and talk about the latter.

There are actually three kinds of truth that are commonly described:

The first kind of truth is a logical truth. This is the type of truth that can be found in the statements Either A or not A, or It is not the case that both A and not A. It is either precipitating or not precipitating is a good example, but I am sure you can think of other contradictions or tautologies.

The second kind of truth is an analytical truth. This type of truth arrives from the meaning or properties of things themselves. Things like All bachelors are unmarried men or All software engineers have no social skills. Well, maybe not the last one.

The third kind of truth is an empirical truth. This type of truth is one about reality itself. This type of truth is found in things like It is (not) raining in my neighborhood or Marc lives in Boston or Rust is superior to all programming languages and forever will be. Well, again, maybe not the last one.

Now we need to ask questions about the Truth with a capital t, these properties of properties of things. How many truths are there? Are truths consistent across the human experience? Across the universe? Are they all knowable? What is truthhood, anyway?

I have some tentative answers to these but they should not be taken as gospel: there are probably infinite truths, they are most likely universal, may or may not be all-knowable, and truthhood is correspondence to reality. Ask another philosopher, or me tomorrow, and you’d get a different answer.

But with that all said, it’s clear that the truth is complicated. We haven’t even gotten into what knowledge is and it’s already clear we don’t know a lot about truth; trust me when I say knowledge is even tricker, you should read about the Gettier Problem after this if you want your day ruined further.

But we at least have some way of finding these truths, right? We can use the scientific method to at least determine what the truth is. Sure, it might take a while, but… it’s there.

Well, actually, we might not, and for two reasons.

The first reason is that the scientific method doesn’t actually tell us what is true; it tells us what is not true. Science works on falsifiability to test for valid theories.

As philosopher of science Karl Popper—who also wrote about the paradox of tolerance, which I highly recommend reading about—as Karl Popper proposed, verification is in reality impossible. For example, to verify the statement “All swans are white” as either true or false, we would have to observe all swans everywhere that ever existed. But to falsify the statement “All swans are white”, we just need to observe a single black swan. As an aside, there’s discussion around whether or not our scientific practices actually follow falsifiability and the problem of induction which Popper aimed to solve but that’s a bit much.

The second reason is that simply, science has its limits. There seem to be truths out there that are not defined by observation; we haven’t even talked about moral or mathematical truths. But to touch on the former real quick, we cannot replicate the very math that underpins our scientific findings in any logical system. Per the incompleteness theorem, no formal logical system that can represent arithmetic will be either consistent or complete,

With all that thrown in the air, I want to wrap up on a slightly more relevant note. Marc [the CEO of Jama at the time] challenged us to follow the scientific method as one of our habits. But, I think it’s evident that reality is slightly messier then that; there is more to the truth than science, and to what we can know and how we know it.

So instead, I propose a different habit: Follow the truth. Logical, analytic, scientific, moral, mathematical, all truths. We shouldn’t assume we have all the answers, that everything is solved and we have a model to follow. We should be bold, be creative, and think deeply, and try to maybe untangle the messiness of reality. After all, our software helped build Curiosity and Perseverance; we should be curious and persevere.