Finding Truth

I thought I would bring this essay back up to the top here again because I believe it has relevance relative to the AIG saga, and/or whatever else you might want to use it for....dgb, Mar. 21st, 2009.

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Finding Truth


We will take Nietzsche as our starting point, and then see where we can evolve to from there -- in our goal of finding truth.

'All facts are interpretations.' -- Nietzsche

We have a world both outside of us and inside of us that is impossible to know fully and completely because our senses are imperfect, our logical faculties are imperfect -- and our 'will to truth' is imperfect. In fact, our will to truth is often the biggest problem of all. We simply don't want to know the truth. As Jack Nicholson said in his famous speech (forgive me but I have forgotten the name of the movie with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Jack Nicholson in it, just looked it up -- 'A Few Good Men') -- 'You can't handle the truth!'

When it comes to truth, personal and/or collective narcissism (greed, selfishness, egotism, ambition, anxiety, fear...) often rears its ugly head to hide, suppress, distort, embellish, and/or push people away from the truth.

So the first thing that is absolutely necessary in finding the truth -- is a 'will to truth'. I do not say this lightly. The truth is not always attractive to the squeemish or the faint-harded...indeed, the truth often requires courage and bravery to seriously look for it in the first place.

My definition of truth: 'A strong structural similarity between things and processes as we believe them to be, and things and processes as they really are -- or were.

Unfortunately, that raises the huge Kantian problem -- the 'subject-object split' and the fact that we can't step outside of our own skin, our own senses, our own logical faculties, and our own narcissistic biases -- to 'know for sure how things and processes really are'.

Thus, we are, and man is, stuck in a paradoxical, epistemological 'Catch 22' -- one that man has been 'epistemologically cursed' with since the beginning of man's existence -- and probably to the end.

There is no such thing as 'perfect truth' unless we are talking about 2 plus 2 equals 4, and/or maybe 'The sun rose up this morning' although that for me is an assumption because I never saw it rise this morning. And of course, the sun didn't really 'rise' -- that is all human relativity at work and play.

So we just have to keep pursuing the 'best approximations of truth' that we can possibly get to, on our own, and/or with the help of our fellow human beings who are similarly interested in 'pursuing truth'.

And of course, truth means nothing without 'context'. If we want to talk about truth -- at least in any practical, pragmatic, functional sense -- we have to talk about something happening in some place and time. And then describing the way it happened. How it happened. Why it happened becomes even more interpretive, more problematic, more complicated, and more controversial. What caused her death? What caused the accident? Who was responsible? Who was to blame? What was to blame?

The danger is -- or at least one of the main dangers -- is that we 'box the truth', call it 'the truth' and forget that we are only giving a 'theory of the truth' that may be right, may be wrong, may be partly right and partly wrong, or it may be the 'truth at first' but then 'life changes' and our 'box of truth' does not change with the evolution of a changing life process.

Five 'Truth Dangers' I call respectively:

1. Idols of Theoretical Boxes and Labels (that don't fit the real world and how it works);

2. Idols of Reification (hanging on to an idea or theory that becomes 'dead' as life changes);

3. Idols of Reductionism (Dividing life into 5, 10, or a hundred pieces -- and not putting it back together again);

4. Idols of Abstraction, Association, and Generalization (One or two instances of a life process do not necessarily imply an 'iron clad rule of nature that will never change'; likewise, just because something looks like a duck and swims like a duck does not necessarily mean that it is a duck -- it could be a swan.)

5. Idols of Narcissistic Bias (Too much unethical, narcissistic bias at work and play -- selfishness, jealousy, envy, greed, anxiety, egotism, pride, money... -- to truly want to know the truth, and/or want it to be known.

Four Rules of Thumb For Pursuing The Truth...

1. Observations first, inferences/interpretations second, value judgments third...Don't jump to premature and/or unwarrented conclusions because then the value judgments -- even before any discussion or debate of 'values and ethics' -- are going to be wrong.

2. Skepticism is a good thing -- people are often jumping to fast and wrong interpretations, assumptions, conclusions...Check you assumptions, check society's assumptions, observe, observe, observe, check different sources, check different biases, check, check, check...

3. Life changes -- make sure your 'conceptual representations of life' change too in order to keep up with all of life's changing processes...evolution, mutation, compensation, etc...

4. Make sure your information comes from credible, reliable sources, and know what their line of bias and potential 'conflict of interest' might be relative to 'steering you away from the truth'.

Avoid these epistemological traps and follow these epistemological rules and you will be putting yourself in a good position towards steering yourself towards the epistemological truth.

A strong 'will to truth' -- and the strength, courage, and perseverence to chase it down like a bull terrier, even a pit-bull -- remains your greatest asset.

-- dgbn, Jan. 21st, 2009.

-- David Gordon Bain

-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...are still in process...