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Truth, truthful, truthy
July 4, 2011 - 12:20am
How hard is it to "write the truth"?
In a novel i've been reading, the narrator says, near the beginning, that he can't write the truth, because it keeps changing; he doesn't trust his memory.
There may be many other reasons why telling the truth is difficult, and it may be more difficult about some subjects than others. Can we even know with any degree of certainty whether we're telling the truth?
Religion and similar forms of faith (chauvinism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, etc.) operate in reverse. The truth is established first, then reality is determined relative to "our truth". If we sincerely believe it, it becomes real.
If i sincerely believe that the earth is flat, it's true for me. It looks right, feels right; this is how i experience the earth. But then somebody convinces me that the evidence of my senses is incorrect, and that, from a greater perspective than my own, the earth can be proven to be round. Then, round earth becomes my intellectual truth, while flat earth is still my physical reality. I can sincerely believe both, but objective fact and subjective experience are now two different stories.
My academic background is in history. Part of an historian's job is to attempt to understand what happened and why. Even establishing that sort of "truth" is difficult.