His concept of truth seems to be the main beef rationalists have with Peterson, and something I’ve also struggled with for a while.
I think this is partly solved with a healthy application of Rationalist Taboo—Peterson is a pragmatist, and AFAICT the word truth de-references as “that which it is useful to believe” for him. In practice although he adds a bunch of “metaphorical truths” under this umbrella, I have not seen him espouse any literal falsehoods as “useful to believe,” so his definition is just a strict generalization of our usual notion of truth.
Of course I’m not entirely happy with his use of the word, but if you assume as I do “it is useful to believe what is literally true” (i.e. usefulness = accuracy for maps) then his definition agrees on the literal level with your usual notion of truth.
The question then is what he means by metaphorical truth, and in what sense this is (as he claims) a higher truth than literal truth. The answer is something like “metaphorical truth is extracted meta-stories from real human behavior that are more essential to the human experience than any given actual story they are extracted from.” E.g. the story of Cain and Abel is more true to the human experience than the story of how you woke up, brushed your teeth, and went to work this morning. This is where the taboo needs to come in: what he means by more true is “it is more useful learn from Cain and Abel as a story about the human experience than it is to learn from your morning routine.”
I claim that this is a useful way to think about truth. For any given mythological story, I know it didn’t actually happen, but I also know that whether or not it actually happened is irrelevant to my life. So the regular definition of truth “did it actually happen” is not the right generalization to this setting. Why should I believe useless things? What I really want to know is (a) what does this story imply about reality and how I should act in the world and (b) if I do act that way, does my life get better? The claim is that if believing a story predictably makes your life better, then you should overload your definition of truth and treat the story as “true,” and there is no better definition of the word.
Regarding the Christian stories, his lecture series is called “The Psychological Significance of the Bible” and I don’t think he endorses anything other than a metaphorical interpretation thereof. He has for example made the same type of claims about the truth of Christianity as about Daoism, old Mesopotamian myths, Rowling’s Harry Potter, and various Disney movies. People probably get confused when he says things like “Christianity is more true than literal truth” without realizing he says the same things about Pinocchio and The Little Mermaid.
I think it’s pretty risk to play Rationalist taboo with what other people are saying. It’s supposed to be a technique for clarifying an argument by removing a word from the discussion, preventing it from being solely an argument about definitions. I would like it if Peterson would taboo the word “truth”, yeah.
I also don’t think that dereferencing the pointer actually helps. I object to how he uses “truth”, and I also object to the idea that Harry Potter is (dereferenced pointer)->[more psychologically useful to believe and to use as a map than discoveries about reality arrived at via empiricism]. It’s uh … it’s just not. Very much not. Dangerous to believe that it is, even. Equally if not more dangerous to believe that Christianity is [more psychologically useful to believe and to use as a map than discoveries about reality arrived at via empiricism]. I might sign on to something like, certain stories from Christianity are [a productive narrative lens to try on in an effort to understand general principles of psychology, maybe, sometimes].
The claim is that if believing a story predictably makes your life better, then you should overload your definition of truth and treat the story as “true,” and there is no better definition of the word.
This is indeed a hazardous application of Dark Arts to be applied judiciously and hopefully very very rarely. As a rule of thumb, if you feel like calling Harry Potter “true”, you’ve probably gone too far, IMO.
I do wonder whether you would change your mind after checking the links by Gaius Leviathan IX in a comment below. A lot of those did strike me as “literal falsehoods”, and seem to go against the things you outlined here.
I have previously noticed (having watched a good hundred hours of Peterson’s lectures) all of these things and these seem to me to be either straight-up misinterpretation on the part of the listener (taboo your words!) or the tiny number of inevitable false positives that comes out of Peterson operating his own nonstandard cognitive strategy, which is basically UNSONG Kabbalah.
This overall argument reminds me of the kind of student who protests that “i isn’t actually a number” or “a step function doesn’t actually have a derivative.”
For any given mythological story, I know it didn’t actually happen, but I also know that whether or not it actually happened is irrelevant to my life. So the regular definition of truth “did it actually happen” is not the right generalization to this setting. Why should I believe useless things? What I really want to know is (a) what does this story imply about reality and how I should act in the world and (b) if I do act that way, does my life get better?
Yeah, the benefits of literal truth are more altruistic and long-term.
His concept of truth seems to be the main beef rationalists have with Peterson, and something I’ve also struggled with for a while.
I think this is partly solved with a healthy application of Rationalist Taboo—Peterson is a pragmatist, and AFAICT the word truth de-references as “that which it is useful to believe” for him. In practice although he adds a bunch of “metaphorical truths” under this umbrella, I have not seen him espouse any literal falsehoods as “useful to believe,” so his definition is just a strict generalization of our usual notion of truth.
Of course I’m not entirely happy with his use of the word, but if you assume as I do “it is useful to believe what is literally true” (i.e. usefulness = accuracy for maps) then his definition agrees on the literal level with your usual notion of truth.
The question then is what he means by metaphorical truth, and in what sense this is (as he claims) a higher truth than literal truth. The answer is something like “metaphorical truth is extracted meta-stories from real human behavior that are more essential to the human experience than any given actual story they are extracted from.” E.g. the story of Cain and Abel is more true to the human experience than the story of how you woke up, brushed your teeth, and went to work this morning. This is where the taboo needs to come in: what he means by more true is “it is more useful learn from Cain and Abel as a story about the human experience than it is to learn from your morning routine.”
I claim that this is a useful way to think about truth. For any given mythological story, I know it didn’t actually happen, but I also know that whether or not it actually happened is irrelevant to my life. So the regular definition of truth “did it actually happen” is not the right generalization to this setting. Why should I believe useless things? What I really want to know is (a) what does this story imply about reality and how I should act in the world and (b) if I do act that way, does my life get better? The claim is that if believing a story predictably makes your life better, then you should overload your definition of truth and treat the story as “true,” and there is no better definition of the word.
Regarding the Christian stories, his lecture series is called “The Psychological Significance of the Bible” and I don’t think he endorses anything other than a metaphorical interpretation thereof. He has for example made the same type of claims about the truth of Christianity as about Daoism, old Mesopotamian myths, Rowling’s Harry Potter, and various Disney movies. People probably get confused when he says things like “Christianity is more true than literal truth” without realizing he says the same things about Pinocchio and The Little Mermaid.
tl;dr: Taboo the word “truth”.
I think it’s pretty risk to play Rationalist taboo with what other people are saying. It’s supposed to be a technique for clarifying an argument by removing a word from the discussion, preventing it from being solely an argument about definitions. I would like it if Peterson would taboo the word “truth”, yeah.
I also don’t think that dereferencing the pointer actually helps. I object to how he uses “truth”, and I also object to the idea that Harry Potter is (dereferenced pointer)->[more psychologically useful to believe and to use as a map than discoveries about reality arrived at via empiricism]. It’s uh … it’s just not. Very much not. Dangerous to believe that it is, even. Equally if not more dangerous to believe that Christianity is [more psychologically useful to believe and to use as a map than discoveries about reality arrived at via empiricism]. I might sign on to something like, certain stories from Christianity are [a productive narrative lens to try on in an effort to understand general principles of psychology, maybe, sometimes].
This is indeed a hazardous application of Dark Arts to be applied judiciously and hopefully very very rarely. As a rule of thumb, if you feel like calling Harry Potter “true”, you’ve probably gone too far, IMO.
I do wonder whether you would change your mind after checking the links by Gaius Leviathan IX in a comment below. A lot of those did strike me as “literal falsehoods”, and seem to go against the things you outlined here.
I have previously noticed (having watched a good hundred hours of Peterson’s lectures) all of these things and these seem to me to be either straight-up misinterpretation on the part of the listener (taboo your words!) or the tiny number of inevitable false positives that comes out of Peterson operating his own nonstandard cognitive strategy, which is basically UNSONG Kabbalah.
This overall argument reminds me of the kind of student who protests that “i isn’t actually a number” or “a step function doesn’t actually have a derivative.”
Yeah, the benefits of literal truth are more altruistic and long-term.