Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Objective Truth

 Professor Tyson is very fond of the phrase "objective truth." He's a crusader for objective truth. And I applaud him for it. He understands the standards by which it is assessed, how it is known and confirmed, what it means to know it.

And yet I wonder what the word "truth" gains from the qualifier "objective"? What is lacking in the notion of truth that is completed by the notion of objectivity. I would have thought that truth was truth and needs no qualifier to make it, I suppose, truer. Because if truth needs something more than itself to rise to the level of an object, if it weren't already an object, it must be lacking something. It must be somewhat less than true.

But maybe I'm overthinking Maybe it's useful to add this qualifier, merely useful, not essential. I suspect it is deployed to distinguish objective truth--true truth--from subjective truth. But subjective truth isn't truth at all, but merely opinion. Well, it may be true. That that has to be established. Right now it's opinion. It could be structured as hypothesis and then tested, then established, as true.

I see. "Objective truth" is established fact. It is the object after it has gone through the process and been established by the rigors of the scientific method. Method truth known, raises it to the status of an object. Objective truth is truth confirmed sententiously. Of all that is true in the universe, or in being, or in reality, only what has been confirmed as such reaches the status of objective truth. 

Objective truth is truth expressed in language. Without words, there is certainly truth, but it's unknown, not objectified, not known and only in principle knowable. 

But there is a problem. This is not how the phrase is used by Dr. Tyson. For Dr. Tyson language is only deictic, only that which points to the objective truth. What it should point to is the truth. But we can't get the (merely redundant) object out of the thing itself. It's always added to the truth. And as he uses the phrase, there is not just a truth about, say, black holes or dark matter or the big bang, but an objective truth, not yet perfectly revealed. This objective truth is more than the truth itself. The objective truth is the actual reality and words have no effect on the objectivity of truth; they are just the ancillary way of knowing or expressing that the truth is true, itself, objective. (The "objective" as it "in itself.) 

So we come back to the fact that for something to be true is insufficiently; it needs to be "really" true, "simply" true, "objectively" true. There is therefore always something missing in truth. It be true, merely true, is to lack something--reality, simplicity, objectivity.

This points to the fundamental fact that science is a discourse as well as a method. It chooses to count as true what it can see through its limited and limiting point of view. And that's wonderful as far as it goes. But it also, too often, declares what cannot be seen via that p.o.v. not only as not "objectively true" but as not true at all, in anyway, by any standard, since all other standards lack objectivity. What is objectively true is what has been established by science. What has not been established by science is not true, or is waiting for approval. And what cannot be established by science is not part of the discourse of truth at all.