Wayne, thank you very much for your connecting on our parallel missions! I’m glad to be talking with you about this. I’m definitely sensitive and motivated about how truth or lack of it is deeply disruptive among humanity. I definitely want to be an advocate for society taking practical steps. That said, I approach the problem from a fairly deep philosophical perspective, based on a lot of reading. Maybe the most central was The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, which gathers, organizes and introduces 1–2 dozen papers by noted philosophers each with their own perspectives.
To be candid, I think if any absolute truth exists, it is not cognitively accessible. In saying that, I’m not throwing in the towel on the need for truth in human affairs. Rather, I’m saying that pursuing absolute truth has proven fruitless. Not only that, but everything we do to label kinds of truth — fact and opinion, objective and subjective, etc — is also fruitless and just makes the problem worse.
To be more specific, sometimes people can be productive using labels like absolute, factual, etc, but when it isn’t productive, we have nowhere to turn. So the idea of truth units is not to amend our historical ideas of truth, but to rebuild our idea of truth.
What we consider to be truth are simply conclusions we draw based on our experiences, including our interactions with teachers, books, etc. This sounds like I’m saying we all have our own truth, that one opinion is as good as another, that anything goes, but I’m not. We have our different beliefs about what is true, and I call them truth units to emphasize that any of those beliefs, by themselves, are as close to truth as we can get.
However, all beliefs can be plotted as points on a line — at one end, seemingly indisputable truth, at the other end, fantasy and nonsense — with no belief actually sitting on either end-point.
People are then left to sort it out from there. The problem today is if people deeply disagree, you can’t resolve things by saying some beliefs are verifiable facts and some are baseless opinions. That gets you nowhere.
Instead, our beliefs are made of truth units, just as a pyramid is built out of bricks. To claim the top of one person’s pyramid is higher than another person’s pyramid can in the end only justified by showing all the bricks supporting the top brick in the pyramid. Relativism doesn’t accommodate this kind of constraint. There is no framework for evaluation. All labels like “verifiable facts” while useful among those who agree on the definition of “verifiable facts,” are not much use when people disagree about, e.g., what counts as verification.
Because truth units are based on experience — the contents of our consciousness over the course of life — that is all we have to fall back on in a pinch. Every truth unit is the result of a test that we pick and run. It works to call that testing process a verification. But it is only a verification of a tiny thing at a single point in time. Over time, truth units assemble into larger beliefs that generalize over many experiences.
I’m frustrated that my truth units articles don’t explain truth units well, and am struggling to articulate my ideas better, and will keep trying. In the articles, I try to offer examples in them. Please allow me to try an analogy now.
In a casual game of poker, players might say “I’ve got this won” and make a big bet. But unless everyone else folds, players can’t rake in the pot until they show their hands. It’s what seen by all the players that counts.
The closest thing we have in real life to showing your truth units or your poker hand is in court trial. Prosecution and defense each make their cases, and the jury or the judge decides. However, we know the verdict is not absolute truth — mistakes are made. But otherwise, a good case beats a bad case.
I had my house remodeled years back. Part way through, the contractor said “I think you owe me $1,000 more than you’ve paid so far.” I disagreed, showed him my accounting and said “Where is my mistake? Or show me your accounting!” All he had was gut feeling, no evidence. That was the end of the discussion for me. He didn’t have the bricks to build a higher pyramid. Sadly, my wife who was there said “Just pay him the $1,000 and let it go.” My test was careful accounting. What was his test? Wishful thinking? Which test do you think should have won?
