Would I lie?
Originally published in Ellemeno on Medium.com on December 30, 2023
What passes as truth is often thought to depend on perception after submitting one’s perceptions to some sort of logical filtering process for verification, say experimental or statistical analysis or, less reliably, group consensus. This kind of truth has some degree of objective reality.
You could argue that seeking objective truth is simultaneously a discovery process, one that has given us modern medicine and advanced technology. But the process does allow for dissent and so we have contrarians, those supposedly following the same objective principles, who come up with completely different truths pertaining to the same objective realities. Vaccination is good. Vaccination is bad. Climate change is human caused. Climate change is just earth being itself. God is alive. God is dead.
It’s something of an illusion, then, to assume that objectivity and truth are close synonyms of one another. It’s the discovery process itself that’s really at issue. It’s not whether the truth is what you end up finding out, but rather that your discovery methods give your findings some measure of credibility. This is why truths in science are established by replicating and tweaking the methods themselves. So the scientist may say: Here’s the step by step sequence of my perceiving and logically advancing from point A to point B, all of which supports my claim that Jesus loves me. An alternative might dismiss all the intermediate steps and simply conclude that Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so.
We’re as a species maybe more likely to believe truth is discovered by the shortest path, which might explain why so many millions of us are so susceptible to believe in conspiracy theories. I believe that JFK Jr. is still alive because I saw him at the mall or I read it on the Internet.
But to be fair, even scientists admit that truth is a slippery concept. New observations can make a hash of last century’s truths. It’s best to go no further than believing that truth is nothing but an as yet unproven theory. This is especially the case if direct perception through our human senses is absent. Which is why evolution, the Big Bang, and UFO’s are still regarded as theories, however much in everyday practice some of us regard them as established truths. But you’re free to reject these truths again, maybe, if the Bible tells you differently.
I don’t think this squishy border between theory and truth gives objectivity a bad rap, but I would expect that anyone putting claim to some so-called objective truth has to come clean about the premises on which their conclusion is based.
At the outset of wanting to investigate some claim to truth, it’s increasingly important to be clear about who’s making the claim. But anymore, it’s not just a question of who, but what is making the claim. Is it the pope or Siri? With the rise of AI it’s going to be a question truth seekers from the unlettered to the philosophers are going to be curious about. Was the claimant an empiricist or a fundamentalist. Were they a blue voter or a red voter. Were they a person or a machine.
These various actors are subjective constellations of many complex, intersecting variables. But once you know who or what is professing some truth, you may decide to follow them into their rabbit hole or walk away. This notion of objectivity is driven by an initial subjective assessment. I’m a Catholic, say, so I believe the pope is infallible, but not the imam. Just the opposite, of course, if I’m a Muslim.
As a personal example, I’ve taken to not going any further than the title of a piece if it mentions Trump. I know reading the entire piece will be a huge bummer. Trump’s meanderings and fumbling toward what he professes as truth are so transparent, so vacuous that I doubt he believes them himself. True truth is fake to him. Trump truth is based in manipulation and contortion, a means to get what he wants. And yet millions embrace Trump’s pronouncements as tightly as religious people do holy scripture. It’s probably no coincidence that it’s the same individuals who attend Trump rallies on Saturday who fill the church pews on Sunday.
Anything I say from this point on as to why people reject the tedious bottom up approach to finding truth would be conjectural. I admit it certainly has to do with me being reliant on empirical reality fed by rational argument to produce some conviction. It’s hard for me to warm to people who argue that we can bypass empirical evidence entirely, the election deniers, for instance.
I realize that there have been centuries of argument between empiricists and rationalists as to the foundations of knowledge, but c’mon, we have to have some way to recognize the con men from the good guys.
It’s stupid and even dangerous to think that fast talkers and scammers aren’t there among us. I think everybody believes this. It might be one of those universal truths nobody would disagree with. All stemming from Eve and the Serpent myth. But the folks like me who think Trump is one of history’s greatest con men are opposed by others who believe that Anthony Fauci has been the one selling us snake oil.
I don’t understand them and they don’t understand me. I would like to change their minds and they mine. But the way the world works now, it’s likely that nobody is going to change.