What is Truth? Part 2

Here is a suggestion for a general framework for thinking about "truth".

I propose picturing three layers to truth.

Let's start with the middle one - the language of facts. 

Truth works as a language game, in which we learn the rules of creating true statements the way we learn the rules of any game. The "height" game has the rule of measuring how tall someone is, the "colour" game the rules of identifying the colour of something, the "mood" game has rules to report on how someone is feeling. Mathematics is another example of a language game with its own rules. 

Language allows us to communicate with each other and ourselves to perform useful functions and work together.

There are many games we learn to play to use the categories true and false. The nationality game - I am British, not German; the Gender game - I am male, non female or non-binary; the Capital City game - London is the capital of England, Oxford is not; the Continent game - England is in Europe, not Africa; this is how we integrate into society by learning the rules to communicate.

Of course at the social level of language games there are no doubt many languages and cultures that have no notion of nation, capital city, continent and maybe even gender - certainly not a simple binary gender model which has been dominant in the west.

Incidentally our language to describe our inner world may well be different between languages and cultures. I read the notion of romantic love was introduced to the east from the west (see the book  When True Love Came to China by Lynn Pan). So again different languages would have their own rules of how to play "fact" language games.

It is worth noting that metaphors can be true. Saying something like "Madonna set London on fire" would also need to be counted within the game of facts. Some argue (Julian Jaynes is one) that all language is metaphor, so we can't even begin to speak or name without metaphor.

But how does language relate to reality?

I'll call "reality" our non-linguistic world that we experience, both inner and outer worlds - this is my second layer of truth. I suppose I could go another layer behind that and question what exists outside of experience, but I will leave that for now.

The point about this layer is that by definition it lies outside of language, yet language can "shape" and "order" it. If our world is mostly snow we have lots of words for snow and perhaps none for sand or jungle. Our language (and vocabulary within a language) allows us to make all sorts of distinctions within our world of experience. Each language has its own truth games, because we all share the same physical world it may be there is a lot of overlap with languages with words for the external world, but different languages may still identify different colours, may number things differently, may identify different qualities, may even relate to time differently. 

My point is there isn't a single "true" language that describes objective ("non-linguistic") reality. There are many languages, each relating to the world in its own way. This layer gives us our experience which language uses to play truth games.

But there is also another layer of language - this is my third layer. This goes beyond the language of facts and describes processes - how do things work? How do things fit together?

Trying to describe a process means trying to link a lot of facts together to somehow "model" what is going on. We want our model to have as much explanatory power as possible, and so to "make sense" of our experience. This obviously is different to simply learning how to identify facts. To appreciate a model means to apply judgement and understanding.

To be able to hold a conceptual model in our minds is to think about change over time, how elements interact, to employ notions of cause and effect. To communicate about processes is a more complex language game with its own rules and behaviours. To say a process is true is different to saying a fact is true, often facts are generally agreed as they have their own quite simple rules, but a process usually requires judgement - and it would be more common to use terms such as "I believe this is a good account of what occurred", or "this makes sense to me as an explanation". A fact isn't (usually) an explanation.

I'll stop there but hopefully these are useful distinctions when thinking about what truth means.