Epistemology: Why is the truth so hard to swallow?

Jacob Weaver
November 17, 2021
Philosophy vector illustration. Flat tiny sociology study persons concept. Ancient and symbolic culture elements. Sculpture with wise Greek, book and feather. Knowledge science and existence question.
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Imagine you are living in 16th century Rome, and you have just concluded from your experiments that (against current paradigms) the earth is NOT the center of the universe. You find yourself struggling over whether the truth needs to be told and what would happen to you once you told others. You reassess your data and your equations, check to make sure your diagrams are error-free, and ponder the philosophical and legal backlash that this finding could bring to you.

After inspection, you decide to go with your moral compass which tells you that it is your duty as a scientist to tell the world this truth. Luckily, you are not the only person who believes this, and you have the books another scientist wrote to help you argue for the truth. He even included diagrams, and to your astonishment, they match up with your findings!

Drawings from De Revolutionibus by Nicolas Copernicus showing the planets revolving around the sun and the different motions of the earth. 
Diagrams from Copernicus’ De Revoluntionibus1 depicting Earth's rotation and the planets revolving around the sun.

Alright. You have the truth. You have diagrams, charts and equations – proof of the truth. You even have the works of someone else who has shown the same proof that you have.

So, everyone must believe you, right?

Wrong. This isn’t a theoretical thought exercise – this is the true story of Giordano Bruno, a Renaissance astronomer, mathematician, poet, and philosopher who brought physics, metaphysics, ethics and psychology together to mold his philosophical beliefs. In 1584, after years of work, Bruno published Dell Infinito, Universo e Mondi, or “Of Infinity, the Universe, and the World”. Unlike Copernicus, who was hesitant to publish his findings and only did so once he was near death, Bruno did not wait. He knew his ideas were controversial, having already been booed out of Oxford for lecturing on his beliefs and from his travels across Europe telling everyone of what he had found.

People demanded Bruno be silenced for his apocryphal descriptions of the nature of the universe. Bruno went on to be tried and convicted of heresy and was silenced by the Catholic Church – literally silenced, having his mouth and jaw ironed shut with an iron spike driven through his tongue (I am sorry for the graphic detail, but it is important and will be talked about later) – and was then burned at the stake on February 19, 16002.

Why is this important? Well, Bruno is one of “us”: a truth seeker. Scientists, at their very core, want to understand why things are the way that they are. Why do cancer cells act the way they do? Why do we age – or phrased more philosophically, why do we die? What is truth? To search for what is objectively true can be understood as acting out the philosophy of epistemology.

The term epistemology stems from the Greek words epistēmē, which translates to “knowledge”, “understanding”, or “acquaintance”, and logos, meaning “account”, “argument”, or “reason”. But what does it mean for something to be objectively true? Is there anything that can be true completely? To go even further, how can you know that anything is true?

Descartes, the great 17th century philosopher (and my personal hero) tried to determine an objective truth by throwing away every preconceived notion he thought to be true. He tried to build up a new belief system entirely3. While that is a lifelong journey that not many will embark on, that is exactly what scientists do when they start an experiment that peers into the unknown. While taking other ideas and findings into account, a scientist is tasked with removing any biases that would hinder their search for the truth. This is absolutely the most important part of research because it can have detrimental consequences if done incorrectly.

"Scientists, at their very core, want to understand why things are the way that they are. Why do cancer cells act the way they do? Why do we age – or phrased more philosophically, why do we die? What is truth?"

-- Jacob Weaver

Back to Bruno and why I included the gruesome details. Although scientists today are not going to be treated like Bruno was for speaking what they believe to be true (at least in America), they are still politically and socially criticized if they do not know how to portray their findings correctly, if their finds are controversial, or if they do so with ill-intent. This can be seen in recent years with the “Climategate scandal”, where leaked emails were used by media outlets and bloggers to “falsely argue that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy and that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics”. After years of debate and inquiry into the scientists and the University of East Anglia, the school where the emails were taken from, it was established that the scientists had done nothing wrong. Those who initially received the leaked emails misinterpreted the content of those emails and shared their interpretation with their readers and viewers, telling what they thought to be the truth. These scientists were politically dragged through the proverbial mud because of misinterpretations, not because of their own wrongdoing.

Scientists today have it much easier than ever before because they can reach the masses with a simple publication online. The ease of telling a large body of people what you believe to be true can have positive and/or negative side effects, though. Therefore, throughout one’s life, there should be an emphasis placed on understanding the struggles of arriving at the truth. That is what the next series of posts will be about. I will take you through the many different paradoxes and philosophical ponderings that have occurred throughout history to show you how hard it is to find and tell the truth, and how philosophers and notable thinkers in the past have tried to find a way around the issues that arise.

To leave you with an idea of how important it is to take the truth more seriously, here is a quote from the great Albert Einstein in a letter to Robert Thornton, a philosopher of science, in 1944:

I fully agree with you about the significance and education value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today – and even professional scientists – seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.… The independence created by philosophical insight is – in my opinion – the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.

1. https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-copernicus-ide-revolutionibusi
2. Singer, Dorothea Waley (1950), Giordano Bruno, his Life and Thought. (New York: Schuman) [contains an annotated translation of On the Infinite Universe and Worlds].
3. Descartes, R. (2008). Meditations on first philosophy (M. Moriarty, Trans.). Oxford University Press.