What is Truth?

Does it even exist?

Most people believe in things, whether derived from cultural or religious influences, or family dogma. Some beliefs emerge from truisms rarely ever questioned. Others arise from the political climate of the moment. The majority, perhaps, evolve from the collective thinking of chosen social circles. Conversely, some people possess an emotional inkling or unevolved penchant that leads them to seek those who hold ostensibly similar inclinations.

All of these manifest in specified categories like political beliefs—such as views on abortion; metaphysical ones—such as whether ghosts, god, or aliens exist; or social ones—such as preferred music or sports. Many belief systems proclaim knowledge of ‘the truth.’ Can that be possible?

Facts versus ‘Feels’

A fact is verifiable through some means that carries the hallmarks of credibility. In other words it is reproducible, logical, provable, or usually some combination thereof. Two different people can analyze a thing and unflinchingly agree on its qualities.

As an example, it is a fact that a building is a certain size. Any number of measurers can independently confirm each relevant dimension (height, length, square footage, etc.). Some facts are discovered through a logical examination of other information. To illustrate this, for a long stretch of human history, people attributed lightning to a supernatural phenomenon. Over time, however, scientists began to understand concepts like charge separation and field generation. Today, while it is not known precisely what generates a lightning strike, it is a fact that lightning constitutes an electric discharge created through necessary atmospheric conditions.

An opinion expresses a belief, not a verifiable fact. Typically, though not always, opinions represent interpretations of facts. To say that some brand of trucks are “terrible vehicles” is to proffer an interpretive opinion. Declaring something is bad, good, ugly, or nice (or whatever) at best represents a conclusion drawn from the metrics by which a thing is evaluated, and at worst articulates a mere ‘feeling’ about it.

Thus, from a factual standpoint, one could point out that those trucks fall below various agreed-upon minimum standards, such as fuel consumption, towing capacity, maintenance averages, etc. From this, “terrible” may comprise a reasonable inference, but that conclusion might nonetheless remain open to debate, whereas the gas mileage of a specific vehicle generally does not.

Another type of opinion, often less invasive, is the kind a person holds for no particular reason at all. One might articulate it as “pink is a pretty color” or “the sound of rainfall is soothing.”

Opinions affecting the trajectory of society tend to carry the most significance. Of these, an opinion reached on the weight of facts is more credible, but nonetheless does not create a fact. In politics, for example, many will say that this or that politician is “bad” without any further qualification. If, however, one were to say that politician A is bad because he voted against this policy or voted for that one, the argument is more compelling.

To use a current example, one can call former president Donald Trump a bad presidential candidate because he has been indicted on 91 criminal charges (fact), his administration rolled back dozens of climate protection measures (fact), and he owes around half a billion dollars in fines and penalties (fact). A compelling argument. But if those supporting facts do not matter or are unknown to another, that other person might instead believe Trump is good for various reasons, or for none at all. In either case, the value of the opinion rests on the supporting evidence behind it.

In certain decision-making, comprehending this disparity between fact and opinion is critically important. Recently, increasing numbers of people have opted themselves or their children out of taking vaccinations for certain maladies, lately measles. This decision has led to an outbreak affecting 16 US states, so far.

Measles is extraordinarily communicable; before the development of the vaccine against it in the 1960s, nearly 100% of the American population contracted it. It is also a deadly disease, especially so for low-income people or those living in areas lacking sufficient medical facilities. In a recent outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 6,000 people died from measles. The vaccine against measles is among the most effective of all vaccines. It prevents infection in 93% of cases, cutting annual incidents in the US from about 4 million per year to a few dozen since its introduction.

Since 2016, reported measles infections across the globe have risen by 30%. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) explains why:

The spike in cases comes amid growing movements in several regions against certain vaccinations, as some parents fear harmful side effects. However, there is no debate within the medical community over the safety of vaccinations, which are rigorously tested and continuously monitored for adverse effects.

Succinctly situated within that message is the bottom line—people are making life-affecting decisions, ones which also impact the larger community, based on belief. The length of time the measles vaccine has been around, has been widely used, the medical community’s testing, and the numerical trends of infections all provide facts supporting the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of and profiteering from spreading misinformation has contributed to a shift toward errant decision-making. Mary Holland, president of the organization Children’s Health Defense, and others like her, make a lot of money off of instilling confusion and obfuscating the long, beneficial record of the vaccine, saying things like “The truth is, measles is not a super severe serious illness when you’re a child.” Note the key elements of the sentence: ‘the truth’ — ‘super severe’ — ‘serious.’

What the truth is (or is not) is addressed further below. Super severe is an opinion. If one says the Barbie movie was “super good,” people can argue otherwise. Serious is an opinion as well. One might characterize the condition of the roads in his town as a serious problem because he drives a small car, while the owner of a truck might disagree. To declare a truth—the lack of severity and super seriousness of the disease—based on a subjective premise is an Argumentum ad Populum—a logical fallacy.

Choosing to forego taking a vaccine based upon statements like these illustrates a willingness to gamble on an outcome from belief alone. When put into a different context, one in which belief barely pervades at all, the notion seems foolhardy. Holding the belief that one is an excellent swimmer, for example, would probably not be sufficient to convince most people that they could leap over Niagara Falls and survive. Likewise, believing in guardian angels does not seem to stop people from wearing seatbelts. Thus, in these cases despite their beliefs people rely upon fact and logic to make decisions.

Emotion Complicates Matters

A person’s belief system is intrinsically tied to emotion. In many religions, for instance, emotion provides the essential predicate for subsequent directives. Among some, like Sigmund Freud, this emotionally-driven moral rule making keeps people from straying into their purported ‘natural tendencies’ of aggression and narcissism.

Others, such as sociologist Émile Durkheim, have argued that religion creates a collective “alignment of emotional states.” Stephen T. Asma, a professor of philosophy, claims that “emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion.” Eduardo Bericat notes that emotion goes far beyond religion to playing a fundamental role in “all social phenomena.” Moshe Ratson writes that emotions play a necessary part in decision-making, driven as they are by certain automatic survival instincts.

Circumstantial evidence shows how emotionally influenced decision-making can both benefit and harm. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, many lauded the idea that certain impositions—such as lockdowns or mandatory masking—should be ignored because only those with medical infirmities or the very old faced serious risk by the virus. Journalist Jeremy Warner starkly illustrated this view when he wrote, “Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”

If Warner’s proclamation had proved factually true (the ‘culling’ did not occur, so we do not know if his proposition would have been true), then one could argue that eliminating mandates would benefit the economy and thus had a rational basis. Normal people, however, who prioritize the welfare of people over the economy, ferociously criticized the idea. For at least some time then, most locales enforced various mandates. In this case, the decision to protect the vulnerable arose—at least partly—from an emotionally driven priority as much as from facts.

As it turns out, the elderly were not the only at-risk category: 1 in 3 adults who have contracted COVID-19 have suffered short- to long-term debilitating effects, irrespective of age group. This has led to around 23 million people being put out of work for some time, and at least 1 million for the long term or permanently.

People adopting views like Warner’s reached their position on incomplete facts along with their own emotionally driven prioritization—economy over people. Those advocating various impositions did so based on the belief that the economy took second place to protecting as many people as possible, regardless of the economic damage that might result. In both cases, emotion contributed to the conclusions reached, and also exhibited how emotions can either supplant facts or supplement decision-making in their absence. Moreover, the example shows how decisions driven by emotion may lead to bad or good outcomes.

The Road to Truth

In nearly all cases, facts, opinions, and decision-making processes seek to find truth. But what is truth itself? The question is more loaded than its length suggests. G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell articulated the correspondence theory that defines truth as:

what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are—to the facts

The logical opposite to this dictum is that a belief is false if no such corresponding fact exists. In this framework, it is hard to imagine something akin to a ‘universal’ or broader truth. Rather, it seems to target specific ‘truths’ that are eminently provable at a granular level. Russell’s conception of truth was not monolithic, suggesting there may not exist any single universal truth—a sensible rendering of an extremely complex world.

H.H. Joachim took the opposite approach. For him, individual judgments comprise only a part of a more wholistic truth, one that requires comprehension of “the whole system of knowledge.” This is another version of what very early philosophers argued, though they often referred to it as a division between conventional and ultimate truths.

Those thinkers found that “Ultimate truth is reality that transcends any mode of thinking and speech, one that only enlightened figures can properly apprehend.” Conventional truths, for them, were not necessarily true at all; rather they were the resulting human apprehension of ‘reality’ fueled by flawed cognitive processes.

Ultimate truth, or ‘the whole system of knowledge’, seems unexplainable to any but those who already comprehend it. In a previous piece, I described the paradox created within this line of thinking:

The logical fallacy, though, is that discerning a limit on the availability of knowledge to comprehend necessarily requires knowing at least something about that which exceeds that limit (the Archytas paradox). Even when it comes to the expansion of the universe, scientists have conceptualized what such expansion means (it is potentially incorrect to say “space” is expanding into “something else”). Therefore, to impose a limitation on knowledge—a knowledge constant—we would still need to propose something beyond it for it to make any sense. By doing so, it seemingly would incite “knowing” or becoming aware of something that exceeds the knowledge available to us. Thus, at a minimum knowing has no limit. As knowing inevitably leads to comprehension, or the pursuit thereof, the capability of knowing purportedly unobtainable knowledge also erodes any potential restraint on understanding, perhaps down to none. In sum, we can never know if humans can comprehend everything because the mere act of knowing that we cannot invites a paradox that requires us to know that which we cannot.

To know the ‘universal truth’ ostensibly requires recognizing a limit or end of that truth or it means understanding an infinite body of knowledge. In the former case, the mere conception of a ‘limit’ implies a border to the scope of cognizable knowledge. For there to exist a limit, there must also exist something on the other side of that limit—the Archytas paradox.

On the latter, if universal truth is infinite, it demands comprehending unquantifiable knowledge. Here, we are left with the Book of Sands problem. No matter how we determine the infinite, an infinity remains within. To illustrate, between 0 and 1 sits an unending slew of possibilities—an infinity of space within that range. Above 0 there is 0.1, 0.2, 0.3… but between that there is 0.01, 0.02, 0.03… and 0.101, 0.102, etc. Once could never obtain infinite knowledge because an infinity would always remain.

Another foundation for the existence of a universal truth situates itself within mathematics. Max Tegmark has proposed the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH), which asserts that “there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans,” and that external reality is essentially an abstract mathematical structure.

Tegmark ponders whether reality comprises “only computable and decidable… structures.” In this view, the unveiling of truth is limited only by human computational capability, but that truth is consistent irrespective of any belief imposed upon it or derived from it. Nonetheless, it seems Tegmark’s hypothesis suffers from the same infinity paradox as any other universal truth conception.

The comprehension of the meaning of truth itself may depend upon the context in which the word is invoked. In terms of describing reality, truth seems to mean understanding and explaining the underlying processes for how observable phenomenon either come into being or act once arrived.

For this version of truth, belief ostensibly carries little weight in ascertaining a thing’s reality, since the passage of time has continuously proven to displace explanations driven by belief with provable and reproducible facts and their associated inferences, theories (in the scientific definition), and laws. That which seemingly defies explanation, usually does so only ephemerally until such time as human ingenuity rises to the task of disentangling the underlying problem. Of course, the larger the question, the more complex the task of solving it (and, subsequently, the amount of time necessary to do so).

Truth at the more particulate level means describing things as they really are. Here, facts necessarily must coincide with and support the explanation. Logic directs the interpretation of facts, such that any explanation cannot simultaneously tolerate diametrically opposite narratives. Put simply, a person cannot be a murderer in one place while appearing in another at precisely the same time.

Ignoring this principle leads to cognitive dissonance, “the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.” Abandoning logical decision-making, including in the formulation of opinions, often emanates from wanting to believe something despite the torrent of evidence against the viewpoint. Politicians weaponize this phenomenon to win over voters by blatantly lying about issues they know conjure emotional responses. It is the basis for claims that sound objectively ridiculous to those with no emotional investment in the issue, but are eminently believable to those who do. America can solve gun violence by inserting more guns into society is just one example.

Manipulation

There is nothing inherently wrong with entertaining various beliefs. They bring people peace of mind, or stir mental curiosity. Indeed, many significant discoveries in history began when the discoverer’s beliefs triggered their exploration. Historians have shown how Isaac Newton often weaved together his research on science and mathematics with his expositions on religious philosophy. In some cases, this intertwining was motivated by criticism of any or all of them. Elsewhere, one influenced his approach to analyzing another. Belief that ignites inquisitiveness benefits society in virtually any capacity. When it shuts down curiosity, however, it creates substantial harm.

Authoritarian belief, that which suppresses the unhindered pursuit of knowledge, provides the foundation for manipulation. In days past, this sort of oppression resulted in the punishment of people seeking to uncover mysteries, such as when Inquisitionists imprisoned Galileo because his observations contradicted the autocratic doctrine of the day.

More recently, manipulation of people’s beliefs has led to many disregarding long-understood principles, even to the peril of their own health or wellness. Provocateurs craft their statements or arguments in such a way as to incite an emotional response that precedes or altogether obliterates an intellectual one. Vast conspiracy theories, ‘alternative facts,’ and cognitive dissonance have thus been allowed to reign supreme in some quarters. Stephan Kahn illustrates why:

The careful, strategic, and highly rational deployment of lies in the political context is so effective and damaging because politics has been pronounced as a discourse of truth; a lie is rendered a highly newsworthy event, one that allows voices that would otherwise be ignored to be broadcast nationally.

The saying goes ‘any publicity is good publicity’ and politicians, pundits, and others clearly know it. It is how people like Ben Shapiro or Tucker Carlson became vastly wealthy by broadcasting mostly disprovable discourse focused on stirring anger or fear. Exxon Mobile acquired trillions of dollars in profits over half a century by playing on the public’s emotions to downplay the conclusions drawn by its own researchers about its damage to the environment. The plastic industry has accomplished the same. And the list goes on.

Recognizing manipulation starts with paying careful attention to the words used by the potential manipulator. Examine this soliloquy by Matt Walsh:

Social Security is without a doubt, without a shadow of a doubt, an unsustainable, unfair, morally atrocious, and economically insane system that is only defended by both parties because it is politically unpopular to be honest about it. But I'm not a politician running for office, so I can be honest about it. The system is a farce, and it should be abolished, obviously. It doesn't mean we should abolish it overnight. It doesn't mean we should leave elderly people high and dry with no safety net. All it means is that the current system is a disaster on every level, and we should be looking for a way out. The conversation should be, how do we get out of this boondoggle without harming people? But we can't have that conversation because most politicians on both sides have declared that this awful, insane, unsustainable, self-destructing system must be kept entirely intact and untouched and allowed to continue exactly as it is until it all falls apart anyway. Again, that is not a position that anyone has taken because they think it's the right position. It's a position taken out of pure cowardice and cynicism.

Note the variety of terminology intended to conclusively paint social security as “economically insane,” among other things. Toward the end of establishing the truth of what Walsh asserts, he inserts a fact that he illogically extends as ‘proof’ that what he is saying is without a doubt: “I'm not a politician running for office, so I can be honest about it.” What he leaves out is that he is a commentator who earns his income by spinning these very types of narratives. His motives differ hardly at all from the subject to which he makes the comparison.

Aside from the abundance of adjectives proffered implicitly as facts (unsustainable, unfair, morally atrocious), he also blatantly lies:

…we can't have that conversation because most politicians on both sides have declared that this awful, insane, unsustainable, self-destructing system must be kept entirely intact and untouched and allowed to continue exactly as it is until it all falls apart anyway.

Numerous politicians have called for cuts or the wholesale abolition of social security or other benefits programs (otherwise known as ‘entitlements’). Mike Lee (at 7:50):

Donald Trump; Mike Johnson; Lindsey Graham, and many others:

By placing the lie late into the narrative, the emotional stirring caused by his adjectival orientation of what is ‘true’ essentially trumps the need for the listener to evaluate the veracity of any concrete statements, no matter how explicitly provable or falsifiable they may be.

Walsh does not even care if the listener chooses to fact-check this single statement, because he knows the listener will find any factual counterpoint to somehow still support his overall contention—that social security is unsustainable or unfair, or whatever. The feeling Walsh has embedded in the listener from the beginning will see to it. Now, should the listener discover that Walsh is simply wrong or lying about what position politicians are taking, he doubles down:

Again, that is not a position that anyone has taken because they think it's the right position. It's a position taken out of pure cowardice and cynicism.

Finding out that some politicians are calling to cut or eliminate social security altogether suddenly will make them seem like ‘brave outliers’ or whatever other cognitively dissonant description the committed listener chooses to apply. In other words, even establishing that Walsh is a liar will—to the emotionally committed—nonetheless prove his point about social security. And sadly, those who succumb to this kind of manipulation will agree with him even if they themselves rely on the very system for which Walsh is calling to destroy.

Dispelling Manipulation

Trying to decide whether a universal truth exists might be a futile endeavor. Determining if a specific thing is true, however, is a much more obtainable goal. One need not know every factual predicate of a pronouncement to detect whether an attempt at manipulation lingers beneath its surface.

Perhaps the prevailing red flag waves whenever the arguer proclaims to offer “the truth.” Closely following are the inclusion of superlatives or emotion-invoking adjectives—deadliest, most frightening, morally atrocious, despicable, etc. Provable statements also sometimes include these, but their presence should cause the listener to at least stop and think about what is being conveyed in any instance.

Finally, watch for clever nouns that situate an issue as an accepted premise. Calling immigration a ‘crisis,’ or fentanyl an ‘epidemic’ are two common examples. Whether one might reach the same conclusion or not, beginning the narrative with such words is intended to position the recipient to start from the same conclusion as the speaker and then shifts the burden upon the recipient alone to disprove the speaker’s characterization.

Mis- (or dis-) information can only succeed when employing these tactics works. Politicians thrive on such manipulation, particularly when their platforms actually hurt the very people upon whose vote they rely. Pundits, commentators, and media depend upon it because their income requires the clicks or views such emotion stirring provokes. Conspiracy theorists need it because the tales they weave are entirely unavailing without it. Scammers use it as a tool to trick their marks into parting with their hard-earned money. Recognizing the methodologies these hucksters use will enhance your personal protection and allow society to pursue solutions to the world’s abundant, real problems.

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I am a Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, Certified Crime Analyst, Certified Fraud Examiner, and Certified Financial Crimes Investigator with a Juris Doctor and a Master’s degree in history.

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