Aristotle famously said that a meaningful statement is either true or false; there is no in-between. This is called the Law of Excluded Middle. However, a great many people say there can be in-betweens, and even try to axiomatize the idea. Sometimes this is called “fuzzy logic.” I think it’s fuzzy thinking.
Superficially, the idea is plausible. After all, don’t we say that there are half-truths? We do say that, but only figuratively. The expression “half true” never means literally that a meaningful proposition can be something other than true or false, or that a state of affairs can be intermediate between reality and unreality. It may mean quite a number of other things, for example:
1. Someone might call the statement “Shale is a sedimentary rock” half true because he has only 50% confidence that it is true. Yet irrespective of how sure he is, the statement that shale is sedimentary is either true or false -- and irrespective of what kind of rock shale is, the statement that he has only 50% confidence about it being sedimentary is also either true or false.
2. Someone might call the statement “The cloth is white” half true because its actual shade is halfway between white and black. Yet what he means is that the cloth is gray, and the statement “The cloth is gray” is 100% true.
3. Someone might call the statement “Calico cats are even tempered” half true because the description applies to only half of all calico cats. Yet the more precise statement “Half of all calico cats are even tempered” would in this case be simply true.
4. Someone might call the statement “We have here a heap of sand” half true because the term “heap” is vague; there is no fixed number of grains above which an accumulation becomes unambiguously a heap. But by choosing to call a certain accumulation of sand a heap, he is using a noun as an oblique way to express a matter of degree – he is choosing to emphasize how much sand there is rather than how little. So saying “We have here a heap of sand” is like saying “Gee, what a lot,” or “There sure seems a lot of it to me.” And either there does seem a lot of it to me -- or there doesn’t.
5. Someone might claim that the statement "The unborn child is a person" is half true on grounds that the unborn child is only a potential person (in fact, this claim is rather common!). But although the unborn child has some unrealized potentialities – as a toddler does, or as the reader of this paragraph does – still, if the child weren’t already wholly a person, the child wouldn’t have these potentialities. A bone cell doesn't have such potentialities; a gamete doesn’t have them either. But from the moment the zygote comes into being, the zygote does.
6. Someone might claim that the statement “This theory is true” is half true because the theory consists of a number of different propositions, and not all of them are accurate. But taken one at a time, each of these propositions is either true or not. Rather than saying that the theory is half true, we should say something like “Half of its claims are true.”
7. Or take Objector 1’s statement, “Every intellect is false which understands a thing otherwise than as it is.” Someone might call it half true because it is true in one sense but false in another. But to say so is to admit that in each sense it is either true or false – not something in between.
None of these possibilities shows that there are values of being between true and false. Moreover, each of these possibilities needs to be handled in its own way. Unfortunately, a system of inference which calls them all “half truths” treats them all the same. For as we see,
● Possibility (1) doesn’t show that there are degrees of truth, but only that I may be more of less sure about what really is true. Instead of speaking of degrees of truth, we should speak of degrees of confidence.
● Possibility (2) doesn’t show that there are degrees of truth, but only that some things are more or less. Instead of speaking of degrees of truth, we should speak of degrees of qualities.
● Possibility (3) doesn’t show that there are degrees of truth, but only that some facts concern fractions or proportions. Instead of speaking of degrees of truth, we should make use of our arithmetic.
● Possibility (4) doesn’t show that there are degrees of truth, but only that some ways of describing how much of something there is are indirect. Instead of speaking of degrees of truth, we should pay closer attention to oblique modes of description.
● Possibility (5) doesn’t show that there are degrees of truth, but that our grasp of personhood is defective. Instead of speaking of degrees of truth, we should clean up our careless metaphysics.
● Possibility (6) is something like possibility (3). It doesn’t show that there are degrees of truth, but only that there are fractions. Instead of speaking of degrees of truth, we should distinguish among the propositions in the theory.
● Possibility (7) doesn’t show that there are degrees of truth, but only that some statements are ambiguous. Instead of speaking of degrees of truth, we should say what we really mean.
Other examples besides these seven can be suggested. For example, someone might call a proposition half true because it resembles the truth, because it figuratively expresses the truth, or because it could have been true, but isn’t. Someone might call a classification half true because an object is difficult to classify, because fits into more than one classification, or because no suitable classification for it has been devised. Someone might call the statement that Pegasus is a winged horse half true because Pegasus exists only in the story and not in reality. Someone might call the statement that a child is an adult half true because the child has traversed half of the distance toward being an adult. Someone might call the description of a patient as “still alive” half true because the patient is dying. And, of course, someone may call affirmations about God half true for all sorts of fuddled reasons. But in no cases whatsoever do we actually encounter states of being which are neither true nor false but something in between.
So the figure of speech “half true” is merely an amusing, ambiguous shorthand for things that more clearly be said differently, and does not describe what is actually the case. The fact that we can devise formal systems of inference for so called half truths does not show that there are, in fact, states of affairs that are half so -- any more than the fact that we can formulate syllogisms about things that taste like the number seven shows there are, in fact, things that taste like the number seven.
Copyright © 2023 J. Budziszewski