Thank you very much for your comment and questions. Before publishing on Medium, I shared my work with only one friend, who would respond “sounds great” or “I don’t get it” without providing much more detail. So I’m very grateful for any questions and comments—they help me achieve my goal of complete clarity.
Your questions made me face the fact that truth units has a significant normative component—an ethics about the way one should look at truth in oneself and others, and how at times one should inject truth units into debates or arguments with others. I’ve tried to tone down the normative part, but it looks like truth units as a whole doesn’t come across clearly without the normative third leg of the tripod.
All beliefs, “true” or not, can be represented in truth units—“represented” in the sense of “mapped” or “diagrammed.” Reading a map shows how you can get from one place to another. Reading a circuit diagram shows how everything is connected. Neither is a complete representation of the physical object it portrays, but enough to fulfill its purpose.
Truth units represent mental constructions (beliefs) of ours that say this world is this way or that way. Epistemology is about validating beliefs based on evidence such as sensory perceptions, consensus, or logic, with the result that some beliefs emerge more valid than others.
Truth units says that all our beliefs are based on other beliefs. To say this is to take an epistemological position, throwing out any “validators” such as sensory perceptions or logic. Instead, truth units validates beliefs (mental constructions) based on their “structural integrity.”
The normative part is to say “your beliefs have to stand on their own”—that it’s “cheating” to appeal to traditional “validators.” The way you show that your beliefs stand on their own is to do a truth unit analysis (map, diagram) of them. Your belief is the top brick in the pyramid. It’s not floating in air, it’s sitting on top of other bricks (other beliefs that constitute an assembly—a mental construction—of beliefs).
When people say something is true, they are attaching a label that says “true” to a belief. A grocer sticks the label “ripe” on avocados or “fresh” on fish. It would be irresponsible of the grocer to claim absolutely every avocado is ripe. All the grocer can ultimately do is say “here are the steps I took in order to claim these avocados are ripe—I asked the farmer when they were harvested, I squeezed a bunch of them, etc.” Those steps (those experiences) can be represented by truth units. That would probably be certainty enough (a truth unit) for me personally to buy them. If the grocer told me “God told me they were ripe” (another truth unit) I’d see a brick floating in the sky.
But bricks have to rest on something (the sand), right? Truth units says the bricks rest on experience, which includes everything in your consciousness (sensory impressions, logic, thoughts, memories, etc). How the contents of your consciousness reflect reality is unknown to you, in the same sense you are reading this and you don’t consciously know how your mind is interpreting these squiggles as words—it’s an “automatic” process hidden from your “sight” because it became unconscious after you learned it. An infant learns object permanence the way we learned to read—having a set of experiences that led to structures of belief.
The idea that reality is a mental representation has been floating around in philosophy since Plato. It got articulated by the empiricists George Berkeley and David Hume in the 1700’s and by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century. After a decade of studying the supposed relationship between sensory perception and truth, it was crystallized by the empiricist Willard V.O. Quine in the mid 20th century and expanded upon by the philosophers Saul Kripke and Michael Dummett. Since then philosophers have only quibbled about the details. The idea is also fully consistent with contemporary neuroscience.
So: (1) there is an outside reality, but what we call reality, fact, truth, knowledge, etc, are mental structures in human consciousness; (2) these mental structures are rich and complex, but (3) they can be analyzed (represented, mapped) with truth units; (4) when people can’t settle their disagreements through conventional means (critical thinking skills, deductions from evidence, etc) then truth units analysis is an efficient path forward; because (5) truth units analysis can reveal the “pyramid” from top (alleged truth) to foundation (lived experience); and (6) we humans have nowhere else to turn after that.
I think the utility of truth units is we can sometimes get to understanding and agreement without getting sidetracked trying to settle various definitions of what is fact, reality, objective vs subjective, because all those things are mental constructions that can be expressed in simple truth units assembled, one belief on top of another, into complicated structures.
I doubt a complete manual of truth units analysis could be written for every situation. Trying to map beliefs is like Lewis and Clark trying to map the western U.S. All they could do was apply the principles of cartography, which is probably all truth units could ever be—tools for understanding.
Most of the above ideas are addressed from different angles and/or in more detail in other truth unit articles. I figure all that still leaves questions, and I’d love to hear them and try to address them. Thank you very much for spurring me forward.
