Pet Peeve: Capital-T Truth

Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine: people who say we can discover the truth about the world but not "Capital-T Truth." I usually hear YouTube skeptical theists (from whom I of course distinguish logical atheists) say things like this all the time. So what's wrong with it?

I think I know what they mean. They want to say that we human beings can't be omniscient or infallible, which is of course true. If we were either of these things we would have no use of reason or logic--which precisely are methods that fallible beings need to if they are to reliably acquire knowledge. To the classical God, reason and logic would be superfluous. It would already and automatically have all the knowledge that could be had. So it's ridiculous to fault reason for not guaranteeing perfect knowledge. That misses the whole point.

We cannot deny that new evidence could come to our attention tomorrow that would require us to modify or even jettison an empirical belief. (This principle does not apply to axiomatic concepts--existence, identity, and consciousness--or to logic; no discovery could overthrow them because the concept discovery presupposes them.)   

What I dislike about the idea Capital-T Truth is that it suggests that something stands between us and reality, a position that just cannot be maintained. Incomplete knowledge--sure. But that is different from thinking that we're groping largely blind through a thick fog separating us from objective reality--a redundancy if ever one was. For one thing, we act in the world, and that means we act on our beliefs. Further, we can believe only what we take to be true (with greater or lesser confidence). We just cannot believe what we think is false. So by acting we test many of our beliefs every day. Through action we get feedback and opportunities to revise our beliefs. Action supplies evidence. We just need to be open to it. That--not skepticism--is the key to learning the truth, which is all there is to be learned.

Moreover, with the passage of time, during which any idea is open to challenge from anyone, we have increasing reason for confidence in a given proposition merely because it has survived scrutiny. (The test isn't how many people believe it.) This is one reason the free and competitive marketplace is so important. John Stuart Mill wrote the last word on that matter in On Liberty. We should want to see even those ideas we feel maximally confident in open to challenge if we are to learn the full truth sooner rather than later.

And that's the point: the truth is there to be learned.  The world is intelligible, open to our reason, beginning with the evidence of the senses and the application of reason and logic to that evidence. Any argument against that proposition would be contradictory: "I know that the world is unintelligible." As I've pointed out before, it is perfectly legitimate to accept, although always as defeasible, what reputable others have perceived and reasoned about. I am willing to take the word of trustworthy scientists about things I have no possible way to personally confirm, which, let's face it, is a lot of things. Let's call this vicarious confirmation. (Matters get tougher when reputable experts are found on both sides, as in the cases regarding allegations about catastrophic climate change and the best policy response to COVID-19.) I can take the word of specialists while also remaining open to creditable rebuttals.  Such things as these we can reasonably be said to know if not fully to understand. (This is a good Aristotelian distinction.)