Faces of Truth: How Words Trap Us
My previous piece focused on solid tools for making solid decisions. That is important, but I don’t want to get stuck there. We’re going to talk about beliefs. I’m going to challenge some of your beliefs. And then we’re going to talk about why almost everything we believe might be wrong. What you’re about to read is necessary prelude and background to that discussion. It’s detailed, risks going maybe a bit too far in the weeds for some readers, and it asks for careful reading. But this is, indeed, only prelude.
What I’m really interested in, the whole reason I’m writing here, is because of the edge of the map. As we move closer and closer to that edge, we find it moves. What was once exotic and untouchable becomes a little more known, and new mysteries are revealed. As our experience grows, so does our grasp. I want to move the horizon, but we have some work to do first.
What is Truth?
There are many dangers. One of the biggest is that we can end up just believing anything at all, any silly thing. This has happened to many people in the past and their experience should be a warning for us—without clear standards and attention to truth it’s easy to get into a deathspin of delusion from which we might never recover. How do we anchor the intangible? How do we write about the ineffable?
Not easily, but first we need to answer the question, “how do we know that’s true?” There’s a very big word in that small sentence. Nothing is simple. The word “truth” is an overloaded operator.
This concept comes from computer programming, and means that the same symbol can do different things, depending on context. Consider the *, which can be used as a wildcard (“cat*” returns all words beginning with “cat”) or the multiplication sign (2*2=4). While we’re at it, that equals sign can be used to express a formula or to assign a value to a variable (x=4). These same symbols have wildly different meanings and jobs. For computer programmers, overloaded operators often obfuscate code and cause confusion—many errors center here and good programming languages reduce or eliminate overloaded operators.
But they still crop up in our everyday experience. Ambiguity is perhaps the essence of poetry, but it can be an insidious poison in logical thought. Consider that overloaded word “truth”, which can have (at least) six slightly different meanings. If you say something is true, you might mean:
That it matches something you can point to in reality, or it might explain or depend on something in reality. This is correspondence truth and what you’re saying is, “This is true because I can see it.”
That it holds up and makes sense internally. This is coherence; you might say something is true in the plot of a fictional novel if it makes sense in context of that plot (even though you don’t believe Harry Potter actually did the thing “in reality.”) Mathematical proofs are coherent, as are most of the methods and thinking of science.
That it’s useful or maybe even critically important for society or individuals. This is pragmatic truth. An example might be believing that other people deserve to be treated like you want to be treated. True? Yes, but maybe not quite in the same way as a bag of flour weighs five pounds.
That it points to a profound truth. In mythic (also sometimes called narrative) truth, we might accept that a fictional tale encodes a truth that is real and important. In this case, one might say it’s a mistake to evaluate whether the actual story “happened” as presented—that’s very much not the point. As an example, a creation myth1 might tell us things about forces and principles, and about human nature, even though no one actually cut the head off a big cosmic snake.
That something should be true or that we hope they are true: “…that all men are created equal”, “justice matters more than power”, and “all people have dignity”. These moral truths are sometimes called aspirational truths; we often think of them as “ought” rather than “are”.
Or that it came through a process of contemplation or through some other non-ordinary channel. These are revelatory or revealed truths. The Christian mystic Meister Eckart (d. ca. 1328) said “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me… one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.” You might think that’s crazy talk. It might be, or it might be a spark from the burning bush.
Will the Real Truth Stand Up?
It should be immediately obvious that our basket of things I just labeled “truth” is a bit of a motley crew—some of these things are not quite like the others. And very bad things can happen when people use the word truth to point to these different categories. Let’s consider a famous example.
Is it true that the signers of the Declaration of Independence believed “all men are created equal”? As a great man said, “Very seldom if ever in the history of the world has a socio-political document expressed in such profound eloquent and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality.”
But, to express an obvious dissonance that was painfully vivid to that same great man (the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), the signers of that document were also comfortable with the idea that there was some wiggle room on “equal”. That founding generation settled, a few years later, on the idea that some men and women were “equal” to the tune of precisely 3/5 of what others were worth. Does that make the whole thing untrue? Does truth, in this case, depend on your perspective? Again, it’s certainly not absolute, not in the same way that bag of flour weighs five pounds.
Another famous, more recent example was the train wreck of a conversation between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson on Sam’s podcast in 2017—a slow motion train wreck that was reset and repeated over and over for the duration of the conversation. It’s hard to find a clearer example of two people talking past each other; they never got past the word “truth” in two hours.
This happened because Sam was simply asking if biblical stories happened in a way that could have been recorded on film (correspondence truth). Jordan didn’t care to address that question, and, in fact, rigorously ignored it, because he was interested in the principles illustrated in those stories. He believed the principles he was discussing were so foundational to the human experience that it did not matter whether a camcorder would have recorded the same events as they were written down or not.
Had the two of them been using better words, instead of volleying “truth” back and forth over the net, something productive might have come from that conversation.
Allow me one more example: much of culture and society has hinged on revelatory truth. Whether from that burning bush, or from sitting in silence facing the wall, or from the angel on the mountain, people have found truths that spawned entire nations, belief systems, and cultures.
But let me tell you another short story. Thirty nine people walked into a diner in Carlsbad, California in 1997 and all ordered the same meal of turkey pot pie and blueberry cheesecake. Later that night they, the Heaven’s Gate group, all died in a mass suicide. This happened because their leader had a revelation that a UFO, riding the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet, was coming to take their souls away to another planet.
If you’re offended, let me first apologize for the juxtaposition. I’m not equating the delusion of a fringe cult with the founding events of major religions, but I do want to provoke you to think about the nature of revelatory truth. It’s slippery. In fact, might it be valid only for the person who received the revelation?
Who’s to say that something one mystic discovers in contemplation applies to all people? Some communities have a phrase for this: “unverified personal gnosis”, which means “it’s true for you but maybe no one else.” I hope you can see how far we’ve stretched the word truth here—from an observable fact (the peak of Mt. Everest is 8,848.86 meters) to something that might be true for me but no one else? We’re asking a lot of that little word…
We Hold These Truths…
We are asking here questions about knowledge itself, such as: what do we really know? How do we know what we know? How do we get new knowledge? What are the limitations of our knowledge, and what makes us justified in believing something? We could spend a lifetime on any of these questions, but let’s try to drive toward some practical and useful tools.
To take another look at the map, I would argue that the first two kinds of “truth” (correspondence and coherence) belong to a special category. Actually, I can’t really claim that to be my argument because thinkers from Plato to Descartes to Spinoza and Bertrand Russell and Hume beat me to it, and modern writers such as Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker strongly agree.
Why is this such easy territory to defend? Because these kinds of truth are:
Objective. They don’t depend on our minds or interpretation.
Testable. In most cases, we can come up with experiments that could prove them wrong.
Universal. They work the same way for everyone. No matter how bad or good of a day you’re having, the same thing is going to happen if you drop that rock on your bare foot.
Precise. They allow for predictions and sometimes very precise predictions.
There’s not really much room for argument here. Even if we have fundamental questions about reality—maybe it’s a useful illusion (Donald Hoffman), maybe it’s a simulation, maybe the physical world is a shadow of something somehow more “real” behind it—reality still “works”. In short, these are the only forms of truth that allow us to build reliable, predictive, and widely shared models of reality.
“Consensus reality” is a useful phrase. For instance, every observer will find a cannonball follows the same ballistic trajectory no matter what our opinions on the matter might be. No matter our ontological framework, we’re still going to break our nose if we run into the door. (And, just reserving the right to come back to it later, I will indeed be raising some of those fundamental questions about the nature of reality later.)
These types of truth say something about what is. We might be tempted to stop there, but the other types of truth are critically important. In some contexts, one could argue that they are even more important. They speak to a different order of being, a different layer of experience. They may deal with a different layer of creation.
These other types of truth gather around meaning—which is essential to our human experience. The logical positivists made the bold claim that a statement like “what is the meaning of life?” was literally meaningless. They believed (ahem) that only statements that were tautologically verifiable had any meaning at all. Cool trick, but that claim, itself, cannot be empirically verified and so is, itself, meaningless. The sword of logic has two edges.
Other thinkers, including some famous scientists, chose a different path: declaring definitively that life and the universe have no meaning and it’s, frankly, infantile to assume they might. Asking such questions, they insist, is pretty stupid. According to them, whatever meaning we find is invented by humans and the universe doesn’t care.
That’s a bold stance, and I emphatically disagree. Perhaps this is part of what our society has gotten so tragically wrong and why we now require an entire industry to medicate despair.
The claim that conscious experience is incidental, that it doesn’t matter, that it’s just random molecules colliding, is not science. The claim that nothing exists outside of matter is not science. It’s a metaphysical belief system. While it’s presented as a great enlightenment, freeing us from the prison of belief, that’s not what it is at all.
All it does is to give us a new cell, and a new jailor, in the same dismal prison of Fundamental Beliefs That Must Not Be Examined. But what a convincing lie when told with utter conviction.
We Need a Map
So where does this leave us? First, a warning: words matter. We gain new insight when we think with precision. That’s hard work—as I discovered writing a few thousand words on the subject. But this is essential to our goal: being able to talk about and to evaluate beliefs.
Second, we really need a good map. We’re close to that, and I can make some promises about how I will use words. When I use the word “truth” as a stand-alone, I will mean only what I have defined as the “special category” above: truth that corresponds to consensus reality and that could be subjected to logical and (probably) scientific scrutiny.
Science has explained much and has given us much. As I’ve already said, this is clearly, in so many ways, the best time to be alive—the progress we’ve made in many domains in the last hundred years is incredible. But there was a terrible price to be paid. It was necessary to lock many skeletons in the closet. The cost was a forgetting of many things that are very important. It’s not exaggeration to say that the cost has been some precious part of ourselves, and maybe even part of our souls.
It's dangerous to think things like this, and even more dangerous to say them. Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living, and look what that cost him—not less than everything.
What if that examination is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing? What if, even with so much right, we have everything wrong? What if there is something very precious, very important, right in front of our faces and most of us die without ever seeing it?
Almost unbelievable, isn’t it? How do we know that to believe? How do we know what’s worth believing? That’s where we’re going next.
A note on usage: “myth” does not mean something is untrue. It’s an academic term meaning more or less “set of stories that motivate and support a belief system” without judging factual truth. To the casual reader, this word might seem dismissive, but it is not.