As well, although Pierce’s remark clearly relates truth to community, the remark is ambiguous about the nature of this relationship; it can be read “Whatever the community settles down to constitutes truth” or “The community can be trusted to settle down, ultimately, to the single objective ‘real’ truth.”
“Whatever the community settles down to constitutes truth” is a subjectivist’s perspective on truth. Central to its validity is the absence of any one objective truth. Instead, truth must be mutable, changed according to any consensus achieved in the community. Certainly this is the truth we handle daily in nearly all aspects of life. The scientist, for example, uses as truth a body of knowledge on which the scientific community has settled in the centuries before he began his work. A mathematician may use as her truth laws and postulates set down by mathematicians millenniums ago. Average North Americans treat as truth the cultural assumption that all people are equal although they may not themselves have questioned its validity. None of these knowers have thoroughly tested the truths they use, but rely on the community of a particular time or place to define truths. Relying on these subjective truths is beneficial in these circumstances. We could not operate without entrusting some of our beliefs to the leading of such knowledge communities.
Even when we work with a subjective truth, however, we usually do so with the assumption that objective truth exists. The scientist who relies on a subjective truth for his work does so because he seeks an objective truth. He may make hypotheses based on atomic theory, for example, but he works to find out what an atom is “really” made of. If truth is not objective, there is no search; truth may be whatever we think it is. We must search because we expect truth to conform to certain standards before we accept it; some things are untrue regardless of the community’s beliefs. The wording of the title shows that it is concerned with a single objective truth. The title’s suggestion that the community must settle implies some objectivity. If truth were subjective, the title would not read “ultimately settles” or “truth” (singular), but “A truth, at a given time, is what the community agrees on at that time.”
An objectivist interpretation of the title might read: “The community can be trusted to settle down, ultimately, to the single ‘real’ truth,” meaning that although the community might be unable to define truth, the community’s conclusions could be used as a reliable indicator of truth. The implications of this statement, if it were true, would be enormous. Truth could be found simply by following the community. Anything that the community agreed upon must be true. Certainly, this is a common subconscious belief. In every culture or era, there is a reluctance to question certain core beliefs or knowledge common to all community members. We feel that this knowledge is the truth that the human race has settled on after many years of mistaken ideas. The Western belief in human equality is one such idea. Because it is widely accepted among those we see every day, we assume human equality is true and that any other belief about human rights that has been held in another culture or at a different time was simply a step on the road to our complete understanding. Obviously, this way of thinking has its advantages, both in allowing us to suspend doubts long enough to be able to act on a belief and also in reinforcing some truth. Doubtless there is validity to the idea that some contemporary truths are better than those that have gone before simply because they are the sum of many generations of learning.
Unfortunately, there is a downside to the belief that the conclusions of the community are truth. The idea of settling on truth is itself problematic because the term ‘settles’ is ambiguous. How do we know when a community has finished settling? A resting place along the road to truth need not be the destination. The community may be at a lull in its growth. Aristotle’s ideas, for example, were accepted without question for centuries. Can one conclude that the community had settled on his ideas as truth? Absolutely not; further changes have been made. Perhaps one hundred or one thousand years from now, human culture will look back on our ideas as primitive, as steps along the road to the truth that future cultures believe they have settled on. We must qualify our title, then, with this reminder: Because we can never be sure that a community has finished its settling, the notion that whatever the community settles on is true cannot be useful, at a fixed moment in time, as an absolute indicator of objective truth.
Even this reading requires further qualification. Although a community may agree on some truths, it may also agree on some untruths. We cannot know that the beliefs of the community are approaching truth over time; they may actually be moving away from truth. The community, made up of human members, may be deceived by false evidence. Moreover, the conclusions of the community must be driven by the conclusions of its members. If these members define truth as “whatever the community settles on,” an endless feedback loop will be created. Each person, looking to the community for truth, will see only a group of people looking to the community for truth. Some outside evidence or evaluation must help direct the search for truth. Finally, since communities are often defined as people who share certain beliefs, some communities are inherently biased. It may be beneficial to limit the scientific community to exclude those who lack the knowledge and training to generate valid scientific knowledge, but we risk excluding knowers who have valid knowledge obtained by different means. Thus, when the Catholic defines his or her faith community as “all Catholics,” he essentially says, “I will follow the beliefs of those who believe as I do,” which may operate as an excuse never to question his beliefs by investigating the reasons for the beliefs of other faith communities.
Pierce makes an important point in connecting truth to the consensuses that we, as a community of knowers, reach. His assertion, however, is too broad and too absolute. We do need to rely on knowledge communities to help us define truth and decide what we will and what we will not believe. We cannot, however rely exclusively on the leadings of a community to define our own beliefs, as the title implies. Instead, we must independently evaluate a given community before following its leads and we must consider the beliefs of other knowledge communities to keep from becoming too narrow in our understanding. We must also use our own reason and perception to evaluate individual truths that the community appears to have settled on as part of our own responsibility as members of the knowledge community. If knowers never question their community’s beliefs, these beliefs will never change and there will be no ultimate settlement. If we carefully avoid the dangers of trusting a community to point us to the truth, however, the leadings of the community can be a useful tool in our quest for truth.
