A paper for my students
Truth Beyond Science: Why Moral, Aesthetic, and Human Questions Are Still About Truth
For historical reasons too complex to go into now, many people today have grown up believing that if something can’t be measured, tested, or repeated in a lab, it isn’t really “true.” It’s just “subjective,” meaning a matter of personal taste or emotions; that it's just in our heads, that it says nothing about the world but only ourselves. So there is no point in trying to inquire about such matters (apart from doing a psychoanalysis of the person). According to this view, only mathematical, scientific, or empirical knowledge gives us access to truth. Everything else – the whole human realm of meaning, the entire inner, subjective life – is reduced to private feeling, cultural bias, or personal taste. If something cannot be tested in a lab, measured, or put in data form in a “study,” it seems to them like “just opinion.” This view has a name: logical positivism. And my claim is that it’s false, not just wrong, but deeply self-limiting; it cuts us off from understanding some of the most important human truths.
Some Truths Are Not Measurable, But Still Real
· You know that friendship is better than betrayal. You usually know when someone is a true friend.
· You may recognize that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony expresses something noble.
· You understand that children should be loved and protected, not manipulated or used.
· You feel that a good teacher awakens something in you, not just transfers information.
· Loyalty to friends or family is a virtue (all things being equal), betrayal a violation of an important relationship.
None of these truths can be weighed, timed, or photographed. But that doesn’t make them “just subjective” without a relation to the real world.
Category Mistakes
To deny the claim, for example, that in some circumstances music significantly contributes to a young person’s character and personality because it lacks empirical support is a category mistake: it is like criticizing a painting for not sounding right, or a song for not being logically valid. Science answers some kinds of questions very well. But not all kinds.
Science can tell you how the brain reacts to pornography. Science cannot tell you whether pornography reduces human beings to something utterly unlovable and degrades the joy and beauty of sex. That requires moral reasoning and insight, not brain scans.
Science can measure the frequencies of music, the activity in the brain when music plays. Science cannot explain why a piece of music moves you to tears, lifts your spirit, or shapes your view of the world. Physics can analyze the sound waves but is deaf to the music that emerges from them. That is the work of aesthetic judgment and our lives with music.
Science can study behavior in the workplace or analyze communication patterns. Science cannot tell you what it means to be called to a vocation, or what makes someone a true teacher or authority. Those are philosophical and spiritual questions, not biological ones.
Science can help analyze how children respond cognitively to stories. Science cannot evaluate whether a fairy tale teaches courage, hope, or moral clarity. That insight comes from literary understanding and moral imagination, not data analysis.
Science can give data about classroom performance. Science cannot answer what kind of education makes a human being good, just, or wise. That is the domain of ethics and philosophy, not psychology.
Science can study the effects of music on stress levels. Science cannot tell you how music helps form character, trains the emotions, or opens the heart to what is noble and loving. These are questions of human nature and virtue, not mechanics.
Treating all questions as either questions for science or sentimental mush doesn’t account for how we do thinking about non-scientific questions because it assumes only one kind of knowledge counts – the measurable or coldly observable kind. But we don’t live our lives that way. We fall in love, admire greatness, tell stories, sing songs, suffer loss, choose right over wrong, and not according to the data but by judgment, emotion, our communities (if any), and reflecting (sometimes critically) on our experience. If someone who is confronted with the claims in any of the articles of this course says, “But where is the scientific proof?” they’re asking the wrong kind of question. It's like looking for the meaning of a novel by measuring the ink on the page. You’ll miss everything that matters.
Studies
Many students feel compelled to cite allegedly empirical studies as evident for a non-empirical thesis, studies often wholly driven by narrow conceptualizations of the key term such that the 'empirical results' were predetermined by the stipulated, narrow definition of the term – analogous to defining swans as white birds, and then failing to count the black swans as swans because they don't fit the stipulated definition? This problem of empirical research being shaped and limited by a narrow, pre-set definition can be found in many studies of “effective teaching” or “student achievement” in modern education research. Here is a paradigm example (constructed to illustrate).
Measuring Teacher Effectiveness by Standardized Test Scores
An empirical study aims to identify “what makes a good teacher.” The researchers define a “good teacher” as one whose students show significant gains on standardized tests over the course of the year. They then collect data, track test score improvements, and conclude that teachers who use certain methods (e.g., more test-prep strategies, structured practice, time-on-task routines) are “more effective.”
This study seems scientific. It involves data, control groups, and measurable outcomes. But it’s conceptually circular. The researchers have already decided what counts as “good teaching”: raising test scores. So the only teachers who will be considered “good” are those who do the things that raise test scores. That’s like defining swans as “white birds,” and then reporting the discovery that all swans are white because your definition excluded black swans from the start.
The study fails to recognize other crucial aspects of good teaching that don’t show up on standardized tests, such as:
· Helping students grow in curiosity, moral courage, or love of learning
· Creating a classroom environment that fosters respect, dialogue, or self-discipline
· Encouraging long-term habits of thinking that won’t appear in short-term test gains
· Teaching subjects (like art, music, or ethics) that don’t have standardized tests
Truth in the Realm of Meaning and Value
In science, a statement is true if it matches the observable world: ‘E=MC²’ or ‘Water boils at 100ºC at sea level’ or ‘Your glucose level is 7.2 mmol/L.’ But in the moral, aesthetic, and human world – the realm of meaning – the meaning of truth shifts meaning without ceasing to be truth. While all truth is, as Aristotle said, ‘the saying of what is that it is,’ the kind of thing being judged shapes how truth appears to us. When an educator says certain stories form character and others distort it, they’re not expressing a mood they happen to have; they are rather making a judgment about human development. When we say a teacher is truly a good teacher or a paper is a good paper, we’re talking about real differences between them and not-so-good ones. These judgments are not just "my opinion." They are part of a tradition of shared human reasoning, of trial and error, of poetic and philosophical exploration that seeks the real just as science does, but by different methods.
There are applications of the concept of ‘truth’ other than empirical (observationally verifiable) or mathematical truth:
Unlike mathematical truths (which are fixed and closed), a great literary work like Hamlet is open, ambiguous, and layered. There can be more than one true interpretation, because the play itself presents human experience in tension, not formula. Thus truth here involves understanding and insight. Just like translations of the work, some readings are deeper or more faithful than others. But multiple true readings may coexist. Here true means: “that make good sense of the play”; “that show true insight into the play.”
As we know, human behavior has multiple causes: physical, emotional, relational, cultural, economic, etc. There may be several plausible and partially true explanations, unlike a single numerical result. Thus truth here is situational, practical, and often revealed through care and observation, not statistics alone. Intellectual caution (humility) is often called for given the enormous complexity of the reality involved.
Character is not a number. It is shown over time, in patterns of words and actions. Judgments about it are truth-claims, but they are evaluative, not measurable. Thus truth in this realm must be reasoned and supported by evidence, but it cannot be reduced to data. It requires practical wisdom, not just calculation or cold observation.
Beauty is a complex judgment. The judgment’s claim to truth lies in the fittingness of form and feeling, and in how a good listener responds to the music’s structure and spirit. (Some listeners are deaf to certain kinds of music. I suppose we are all deaf to one kind of music or another.) Thus beauty’s truth is perceived, recognized, and deepened by tradition, not measured, not an observable fact.
This is not a provable empirical fact but a moral truth grounded in the nature of persons and the reality of love. Hence, to affirm this is to speak a truth about being, about the worth of persons, and the demands of love. It is a truth known through relationship, conscience, and reason rather than coldly observable states of affairs or quantities. In all these cases and many more, truth is still the ‘saying of what is’ – the adequacy of the thought to the world. But there is not just one kind of reality in the world, namely, that kind that can be quantified or coldly observed. And about some kinds of reality, we can be more certain than others. These differences do not make moral or artistic truths vague or relative (in an absolute sense); they make them suited to the kind of reality they reveal.
What the Positivists Missed
The logical positivists said that moral and aesthetic claims are meaningless because they aren’t empirically verifiable. But this is like saying compassion is meaningless or unreal because you can’t put it under a microscope. The pathologist can’t help us think well about our mortality. The truth is: the most meaningful parts of life demand interpretation, judgment, reflection, etc., and not just measurement or neutral observation. Their truth isn’t mathematical or scientific. Such things are known through living, through practice, through art and story and conversation. Imagine we were incapable of really learning anything about parenting, education, ethics, a work of art, politics, history, religion except what was compatible with the science at any given moment. Everything that gives life meaning and depth would be just subjective mush in the end. That is a kind of thought-suicide.
To say that matters of justice, pedagogy, good ways to live, the understanding of great art (including what great art is) are about truth is not to say they are scientific. It is to say, with all due respect for science: that truth is bigger than science; reality is bigger than what discloses itself to science. In our experience of love or beauty, moral repulsion or compassion – the list could go on for some time – we transcend the picture of the universe according to science. We have two choices: 1) to concede that our experience of meaning is part of nature; is real; that, therefore, meaning is a part of reality, or 2) reduce our subjective lives to illusions, as though Nature were like AI from the movie The Matrix and has pulled down an illusory world over our eyes to promote its blind purposes (reproduction of the species or whatever). True, you can’t prove either one since we can’t leap out of our experience of the world to compare it to the world unexperienced. But option 2 seems a form of insanity.
The Fear of the Personal
It is a central challenge for thoughtful students today: to understand that truth in the realm of meaning cannot be known apart from the personal, and that this does not make it subjective in the sense of arbitrary or irrational. It means only that the subject – the person, you – is/are a part of the process of understanding, as the so-called hermeneutic circle makes clear.
The hermeneutic circle refers to the way we come to understand meaning: we interpret the parts in light of the whole, and the whole in light of the parts. In all meaningful human matters – texts, relationships, art, ethics, education, politics – we do not approach things as neutral observers but as engaged interpreters, already shaped by our biography, relationships, genes, language, history, social-and-economic structures, uses of technology, and much more. Just try to get out of yourself and read a poem or think about a problem of justice as though you were not the one reading or thinking! That doesn’t mean, however, we are imprisoned in our subjectivity – as though our minds were enclosed in a submarine with no window onto the sea but only instrument panels with no way to compare our readings with the reality of the sea itself. It does mean that truth in this realm discloses itself (never absolutely) through dialogue, through a back-and-forth movement between self and world, self and others, present and past, known and unknown, inner life and outer form. This, far from being a flaw that cuts us off reality ala certain political movements and cults, is the necessary structure of all understanding that involves understanding.
The kind of reality being disclosed is not brute fact but meaningful being: a poem, a gesture of love, a law, a musical phrase, a moral act, political justice or injustice. These realities do not show themselves automatically to everyone, like the weather; they must be received, interpreted, understood. And such understanding requires the active participation of each of us: our attention, thinking, honesty, memory, and sometimes suffering. It matters who we are, what character we have, what our educational and social-cultural background is, and what we care about. In this sense, a philosopher wrote: “Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht” (science does not think). Which is precisely why it is attractive to many: it seems to promise a path to knowledge that doesn’t ask anything of our inner lives, no risk, no transformation, no self-involvement. It also puts our “subjective” inner lives beyond thought and thus possible criticism. The appeal of applying science to the realm of meaning. But in matters of meaning – education, art, justice, love, vocation – that path is closed. You cannot outsource your thinking to a machine, a formula, or an algorithm.
Hermeneutic Reason vs. Positivism and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Hermeneutic reason, which is reason at it deepest, what we use when we think about metaphysics, religion, morals, and art, accepts that we are beings who come to relative truth through interpretation, and that our task is not to eliminate ourselves from the process, but to purify and discipline our involvement through dialogue, inquiry, study, and attention to the particular. This kind of reason listens, waits, and works to see more deeply. In stark contrast, positivist science seeks to eliminate interpretation, to reduce all knowledge to what can be measured or controlled. It does not ask what a thing means, only how it works or what it is composed of. When applied to the human world, this becomes reductive: it cannot grasp moral depth, beauty, or vocation because these are not causes, but meanings.
The hermeneutics of suspicion (found in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, etc.) begins by questioning appearances and asking what hidden interests or power structures lie behind them. This is often valuable. It can uncover forms of self-deception, manipulation, or hypocrisy. In my life I have recognized all these hidden interests in my thinking at one time or another, and no doubt I have not cut every puppet string. (That’s why we need others.) But when applied absolutely, it becomes another form of positivism: it denies that any expression of human meaning can be true on its face. Every claim is reduced to something behind it, whether economic motive, repression, or will-to-power. The result is a world like The Matrix, in which all experience is assumed to be a simulation or ideological trick, and the only true knowledge is unmasking the lie. But if everything is a lie, then nothing is true. And people are left alienated, cynical, and epistemologically paralyzed.
Any philosophical “theory” taken as absolute is self-refuting. Logical-positivism claimed all meaningful statements must be verifiable or true by definition (in many more complex variations) – a statement that is meaningless on its own criterion as it is neither empirically verifiable nor true by definition. A theory that claims all truth claims are masks for a will-to-power falsifies itself as it too must be an expression of the will-to-power of its author and thus is not binding on anyone. Any theory that imagines it can step outside the hermeneutic circle to judge all experience from outside it, judging the whole of our subjective inner lives to be illusory, to deny any access to the real world, refutes itself. It is like taking an approach that has validity in a limited area and making it absolute to apply to the whole of the life of the mind. And then making reality as it appears in that limited perspective, the absolute interpretation of reality. That’s a fallacy.
Conclusion
The hermeneutic circle, rightly understood, is not a trap but a path: it shows that we are not machines recording data, but persons called to understand and to be transformed by what we learn in the process. In the realm of meaning, truth is disclosed in and through personal and especially inter-personal engagement, and only those who dare to interpret honestly, patiently, and with reverence for the real can hope to see what we can see of what is.
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