Mark Lewis

My next book is called Truth. Here is @RichardDawkins from Unweaving the Rainbow on truth. If ever a scientist were to win a Nobel Prize for literature it should be Richard. "Purveyors of cultural relativism and the ‘higher superstition’ are apt to pour scorn on the search for truth. This partly stems from the conviction that truths are different in different cultures and partly from the inability of philosophers of science to agree about truth anyway. There are, of course, genuine philosophical difficulties. Is a truth just a so-far-unfalsified hypothesis? What status does truth have in the strange, uncertain world of quantum theory? Is anything ultimately true? On the other hand, no philosopher has any trouble using the language of truth when falsely accused of a crime, or when suspecting his wife of adultery. ‘Is it true?’ feels like a fair question, and few who ask it in their private lives would be satisfied with logic-chopping sophistry in response. Quantum thought experimenters may not know in what sense it is ‘true’ that Schrodinger’s cat is dead. But everybody knows what is true about the statement that my childhood cat Jane is dead. And there are lots of scientific truths where what we claim is only that they are true in the same everyday sense. If I tell you that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, you may doubt the truth of my statement and search (in vain) for evidence that it is false. But we both know what it would mean for it to be true, and what it would mean for it to be false. It is in the same category as ‘Is it true that you were in Oxford on the night of the crime?’, not in the same difficult category as ‘Is it true that a quantum has position?’ Yes, there are philosophical difficulties about truth, but we can get a long way before we have to worry about them. Premature erection of alleged philosophical problems is sometimes a smokescreen for mischief."