The Blind Truth-Seeker

Searching for truth is like throwing darts as a blind man.

We aim for the bullseye on the dartboard. Hitting it is hard and unlikely. Since we’re blind, we can’t know we’ve hit it even when we have. But we can hit it.

In this metaphor, the dartboard represents a problem. Throwing a dart means guessing a theory: a solution to the problem. Hitting the board means the theory contains knowledge. Hitting the bullseye means the theory is true.

A true theory entails only true sentences. A sentence is true if and only if it corresponds to the facts. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.)

Hitting the dartboard outside the bullseye means guessing a theory that entails both true and false sentences.

That we’re blind doesn’t mean we refuse to see the truth. It means, with Alfred Tarski, that there’s no general criterion of truth; no method to distinguish with certainty between true and false sentences.

Missing the bullseye means we’ve made a mistake. We’re fallible. But we can learn from our mistakes, adjust our aim, and hit the bullseye next time. Through practice, we can get better at hitting it. We can make better darts – faster, lighter darts with just the right weight distribution. We can get better at aiming and throwing. We can make the tips sharper so the darts don’t fall off the board.

Although we can’t know we’ve hit the bullseye, we can guess we have. And we can know we’ve hit the board somewhere, because the dart hitting the board sounds different from it hitting the wall.

Once we’ve gotten pretty good at hitting the bullseye for one dartboard, we may decide to move on to another, more challenging dartboard. Maybe it has a smaller bullseye, or maybe it moves, say.

This is a rough description of Karl Popper’s theory of knowledge in my own words. It’s not meant as an exact description of how we create knowledge, but as a purely metaphorical approximation. (The metaphor starts to break down outside the dartboard: since no theory entails only false sentences, we’re strictly speaking guaranteed to always hit the board somewhere, and never the wall around it. In real life, hitting the wall would obviously be possible. Still, we may pretend it’s possible to hit the wall for illustrative purposes, to represent being way off the mark.)

Using this metaphor, it should be easier to understand various false epistemologies. (I’ll exaggerate some of them a bit for clarity.)

Cynics claim that to hit the bullseye, we’d have to guess a theory that entails all true sentences, which is impossible. To them, the bullseye does exist, but is infinitesimally small. We can never hit it.

Authoritarians claim we’ve only hit the board if some authority, a referee, tells us we have.

Skeptics claim no such authority exists, and so we might as well conclude we can never know we’ve hit the board.

Relativists either claim there are no objective standards we could use to distinguish between different areas on the board, and so hitting any point is just as good as hitting the bullseye. Or they claim the bullseye changes locations based on the framework we adopt.

Empiricists, at least the naive ones, ignore the fact that we’re blind and claim we hit the bullseye just by looking at it.

Rationalists claim we can know we’ve hit the bullseye just by thinking about it.

Inductivists claim we’re more likely to hit the bullseye today if we hit it yesterday.

Logical positivists say throwing darts is meaningless if we can’t verify that we’ve hit the bullseye.

Then there’s another strand of epistemological quackery. I don’t have a name for it, but I’ve seen it in discussions. Some people claim that, if we can’t see the bullseye, it might as well not exist. (This stance translates to: if there’s no criterion of truth, then truth may as well not exist.) Their epistemological maturity is that of a child who hasn’t learned object permanence yet.