Logic and Truth are Discriminatory and Divisive

An article in the Guardian today discusses some comments made by Richard Dawkins in an on-line conversation somewhere. Dawkins discusses the merits of the idea of starting an Atheist school. Now since Dawkins has also decried the divisiveness of religious schooling, the idea of teaching Atheism in a segregated setting seems to be more of the same.

Now it was just a discussion, not a decision. There is no plan to actually open an Atheist school. But it does bring up an interesting issue, that of discrimination. Dawkins has previously called religious schools discriminatory and divisive (and a few other things). The term discrimination is now a pejorative in our post-Enlightenment society. It seems that few even consider the benefits of discriminatory thought in everyday life. The term discrimination has been co-opted, as have so many other previously decent words, to apply mainly to a cultural negative. But discrimination is an absolute essential.

We discriminate between good food and bad food; between safe and unsafe; between enjoyable movies and annoying movies; between driving in the right lane or the left. Every decision is a discrimination between choices, with one of the choices dominating and the remaining choices being discriminated against. Discrimination is part of the decision process. It used to be an admirable trait to have discriminating tastes. But then discrimination became confused with prejudice, which is actually its opposite. Prejudice makes decisions based not on rational evaluation, but on irrational axioms developed out of emotional responses. Discrimination makes decisions based on rational evaluation of the choices.

Discrimination still means to separate the more desirable choice from the lesser desirable choices. We do it all the time. And here is where truth comes into the picture. Because no matter if the culture claims that there is no truth, we still make truth claims all the time. When we encounter a truth claim we evaluate it for validity (if we don’t just ignore it). And we decide whether there is any real validity to the claim using a process of discrimination.

Truth itself is discriminatory in a similar sense. If a statement is true, then it contains no falseness whatsoever – it discriminates against fallacies of all types. There is only one way for a statement to be true; there are countless ways for a statement to be false.

The path to valid, true thoughts includes examination of all the premises, explicit or implied, that bear upon the subject and history of the thought. And before that can produce validity, all axioms that come to bear must also be examined to determine whether they are completely valid or really just unsubstantiated premises. And all axioms ultimately resolve to the First Principles. If this path is broken somehow, then the original thought cannot be known to be valid.

Truth is a feature of the universe in the following sense: Unless self-contradiction is a universal feature, then non-contradiction is a universal feature. In fact, non-contradiction is a First Principle for just that reason. This means that the statement, ”there is no truth” cannot be a true statement: it would be self-contradictory and self-refuting. The result is that truth can be seen to be a feature of the universe.

The second feature of truth is its discrimination. We can say that, ”if it is true, then it cannot be false”. This also derives from non-contradiction. And it is clear that truth does discriminate against falseness, categorically.

If truth exists and if it discriminates against falseness, then our chore is to examine the truth statements we encounter for falseness. As Friedrich Hayek says in paraphrasing Karl Popper, we cannot necessarily prove a truth, but we can prove a falseness. A statement that contains no falseness might be true, whether proven or not. This is not just a premise of logical thought, it is the basis for empirical science, which seeks to falsify its hypotheses.

Finally, this is where charges of divisiveness are encountered, because when sellers of “truth” statements find themselves split off into categories of “falseness” by the logical process above, they frequently label it “Divisiveness”, and the implication is that such a thing is evil. It is not evil. It is a direct product of the pursuit of truth. If there is truth, and there is, then it is divided from falseness. That’s how the universe is set up.