Part 1: What Is Truth?
Saying of What Is That It Is
This post is Part 1 of a four-part series exploring the nature of truth, the erosion of trust in public life, and how gaslighting fractures our shared reality. In this opening, we return to one of philosophy’s oldest questions: What does it mean to speak truthfully?
Aristotle gave this definition for truth: "To say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not."
The definition is precise, neat, and tidy.
The modern idea in philosophy is that all propositions, think of a statement, a claim, an assertion; all propositions have a truth value. You can really see the Aristotelian influence there. To say of what is that it is describes a true proposition.
The Aristotelian brand of empiricism gives us a straightforward notion of evaluating the truth of a claim: Truth is to match our speech to the world. If it corresponds, then it is true.
Truth: To say of what is that it is.
What matters for truth evaluation is speaking about what is. What is the case? What observations have we collected? What instruments did we use in the experiment? Have you looked at multiple news sources to scan for bias? Has this person developed a reputation for delivering trustworthy information?
Truth is not speaking so that it may be the case. As much as we may like, we cannot speak the world into existence. If what is the case happens to not be compatible with your worldview, it’s your worldview that has to change. I’ve not once heard of the world bending to anyone’s will. Instead, truth is responsive to the world.
One of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein goes something like, “Experience is the arbiter of truth.”
The trouble with experience is that no two people have the same. We must rely on a generally accepted “intersubjective reality” that grants we’re all getting the same general story from the world. Maybe more precisely, I should say that we all tacitly accept that our shared experiences in their base perceptions and conceptual understanding are compatible. We’re both seeing the same toaster on the counter.
The complication arises that our biases, worldviews, background beliefs, and our bodies that present the world to us through the senses lead to some nuanced disagreement involving what exactly we observe in a technical sense. Again, in philosophy, we say that all observation is theory-laden. Each of us lugs around the baggage of background beliefs, experiences, and biases everywhere we go. When we say that all observation is theory laden, we mean that we’ll never get a truly neutral objectivity. That sort of perceiving is plain beyond us.
Still, we all generally accept that we’re all looking at the toaster.
Truth is saying of what is that it is.
Experience is the arbiter of truth.
Truth is responsive to the world.
For cooperation, we each must tacitly extend trust that all of us are more or less seeing the same thing. There is a shared experience we all participate in, and to join in a cooperative society requires that we extend trust to each other that we all see the furniture of the world, even if we disagree on its meaning or causes, but we agree that it is. If we want to speak truthfully, we’ll describe what it is.
I hope to bundle these ideas together in an edifying way. The truth is more closely attainable when we’re describing the world as it is, presented to our senses. To speak truthfully is to match speech to the world. We grant each other trust that when two or more people perceive the world, they do so under an assumption of compatibility of experiences; intersubjective reality. If I say, “Look, a giraffe!” we both experience a broadly compatible image in the world or in our mind’s eye.
It seems to me that language has an important role to play here. Should we each be English speakers, we’ve learned the word ‘giraffe’ and can employ that term and its associated concept, and you and I will be on the same page. But if someone were not to understand the English word ‘giraffe’ and use another language, we may not understand each other’s reference, but those different words do not change the nature of our observation. Whatever word we may use, we are each referring to the same thing. Likewise, if a pre-linguistic child had not yet learned the term and concept ‘giraffe,’ I don’t think we’d want to say that the child does not see a spotted horse with a long neck. Surely they do! I may say, “Look, sweetie, that’s called a ‘giraffe.’”
While language suggests something of our values, for example, using gender-neutral pronouns when writing or speaking to exercise inclusivity and belonging, my choice of terms has no bearing on how the world is. If I choose not to be responsive to the world with my speech, I introduce several risks. Maybe I’ll become untrustworthy to others. Maybe I’ll be pegged a liar. I won’t be refining my ability to observe and describe the world. I may begin to distrust my own senses if I weaken my personal commitment to match my speech to the world.
The most pernicious result of decoupling our speech from correspondence with the world is when we seek to convince others that their experience of the world is incorrect. This is gaslighting. I want to pause us here for a breath. The term ‘gaslighting’ is buzzworthy in contemporary discourse. We all have a feel for its meaning. I want to slow us down a touch so that we really give the concept some thought. When we consider gaslighting, we’re considering much of what we’ve discussed in this article.
(Dis)trust is at the core of gaslighting.
Because we do not occupy others’ minds, we must trust our conversation partners that they share our general capacity for perception. We grant this trust all the time without really considering it. Because we are generally a pro-social species; a cooperative species, our cooperation is grounded both in shared aims and in a shared experience of the world.
Cooperation thrives on trust.
Gaslighting is an effort to undermine someone else’s experience. This is no mere lie. To undermine someone’s experience is to violate the tacit extension of trust we grant to others, and the target of the gaslighting distrusts their own experience. It’s a double betrayal. You’ve made yourself less trustworthy while also undermining a person’s trust in themselves. Gaslighting is manipulation, yes, but a deep and insidious manipulation.
There is no truth evaluation without reliable access to some standard by which truth-apt propositions may be measured. In simpler terms, truth is saying of what is, that it is, but what do you say if you no longer trust your access to what is the case? How can experience become the arbiter of truth if you have faulty reliability in your experience?
A liar may convince you to accept an untruth as true, but a gaslighter will have you doubting your access to the truth.
I think it’s intentional to tie gaslighting to censorship. If a gaslighter targets me, I may research my claim to seek a third-party view to arbitrate the disagreement. If people, ideas, movements, theories, programs, findings, histories, and whatever else have been scrubbed from the public record, my ability to evaluate the truth of my claim is greatly inhibited.
Recall our earlier discussion that truth evaluation has to do with what is and not what may be. Because we cannot speak the world into existence and because truth is responsive to the world, the reliability of our perception and experience is fundamentally important to our existential wellness. If you begin to doubt the reliability of your experience and face obstacles in accessing others’, orchestrated by bans on art and literature and divisions between each other, not only does our confidence about attaining the truth falter, the pursuit of truth itself as an aim feels foolish. We begin to feel shame because our experience is so wildly at odds with that claimed by the gaslighter. This cuts away at our sense of self as beings in this world. Jean-Paul Sartre said that existence precedes essence. We must be bodies in the world for there to be experience. This is how deeply experience is connected to our sense of self, identity, and many notions of free will.
Gaslighting, banning of art, culture, and literature, an erasure of the past, these actions block access to others’ experiences and our own histories of what has been the case and what is now the case.
This is why we each should keep a record. About what? Start by saying of what is that it is.
In Part 2, I’ll explore what happens when that shared trust in reality collapses, beginning with a personal encounter that shook my own confidence in what I saw and understood to be true.
Wow, I think I get it now. Thanks!