musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Is Truth really Truth to the end of reckoning?


Sometimes it’s just too exhausting to argue, too difficult to attempt to convince; sometimes what seems obvious to me, is counterintuitive to someone else; sometimes I am a Sisyphus assigned the heaviest rock to roll uphill. Why is that? Are we not who we are because of our opinions and hence our relationships? Our friends? Our society? Or is it, rather, that only by exchanging ideas we assume our personhood? I am who I am because I’ve tried to validate my views by comparing their worth against the ideas of someone else? Am I, then, the results of the debate, and not whether I represent the Affirmative, or the Negative position? Or, is the very fact of being a learning moment?

The problem with an argument is that unless it is examined in a debate format with reasoned arguments clearly stated and clarified and responses addressing the argument equally received and refuted, both sides risk entering it with entrenched positions that do not often allow for compromise.

Sometimes what is being thrashed out are competing Truths; but how can two competing and differing statements both be true at the same time? Are we merely jousting with opinions in an argument?

I found an interesting essay that, I think, might help to resolve the conundrum.[i] One idea, the correspondence theory, links truth to facts and reality:  ‘a statement is true if it matches (or corresponds to) how things actually are.’

But, of course, there are other ways to look at Truth: the coherence theory, holds that ‘a claim is true when it fits within (or coheres with) a larger web of beliefs.’  The mores of a culture; current scientific beliefs…

Another widely held view about truth is that it is tied to authenticity: ‘calling someone’s statement ‘true’ means they were honest and transparent…  truth is about speaking openly and without deception.’ That they truly believed what they were saying.

So, in an argument, which is more important: Fact, or Honesty? If the person really believes what they are saying, does that not count for something? Do they get some credit because people do not all mean the same thing when they talk about Truth: for them, it’s what they believe to be true; they are, after all, being honest about it; they are not trying to deceive… It’s actually a difference in intent: misinformation (false information spread unintentionally) and disinformation (created and shared deliberately to mislead or manipulate).

Perhaps this is why ‘many personal and political arguments feel strangely unresolvable. People often argue from within their own sense of what truth requires, and each side seeks to offer a particular type of evidence… if two people or groups do not share a common notion of truth, their attempts to persuade each other are unlikely to be fruitful and may even spiral into conflict and frustration, with each side feeling that the other simply ‘doesn’t get it’.’

One person’s view of Truth may require correspondence with reality; another’s may feel that if it agrees with how they, and many others, see the world, then it is True. The worst result, of course, would be if the person issuing what they declare is the Truth, is actually lying.

The author of the essay suggests taking a step back before trying to out-argue the other person: it could help to pause and listen for what kind of answer the other person is actually waiting to hear. Are they asking you to provide facts, to demonstrate good faith, or to explain how your view makes sense within a broader picture? In other words, when disagreements seem stuck, it can help to consider not only what we believe to be true, but what we mean by Truth.

“Do you remember those days in our Philosophy classes, G?”

I’m not sure why she asked; Janet and I went to the same university and took some of the same courses; we have been friends for years. She enjoyed the Philosophy classes, I remember -it gave her the permission to argue about abstruse points in the various seminars. But this time, so many years away from university, I just shot her one of my eye-rolls: like, not again, eh?

“Don’t look at me like that, G,” she said, stamping her foot and frowning. “You were the one who disrupted the seminars, remember?”

I smiled at that. “Enlivened, you mean? Some of them were pretty heavy…”

She shook her head. “I simply couldn’t abide arguments that didn’t correspond to reality.”

I returned her shake. “And it was me who maintained that we shouldn’t stray too far from what Society is willing to tolerate. Compromise, and willingness to consider other perspectives, wins more arguments than defiance.” Her brow was beginning to furrow like I remembered from the old days. “What was once an accepted fact in Science, is allowed to change as new evidence arises.”

“Aren’t you taking that a little too far, G? Truth cannot be manipulated on a whim simply because it is no longer fashionable. What’s true is, well, True when it’s True!” She thought about her reasoning for a moment and then pointed at the bench in the little park where we were sitting. “This,” she said with an impish grin, “is a bench; whether or not you choose to call it by another name, it has a ‘benchness’ for us…”

I smiled and pointed to an old fallen log at the edge of the grassy field. “And so would that be a bench if we’d chosen to sit there…”

“A rose is a rose, you mean…?”

I shrugged. “Since you are thinking about those Philosophy courses we took when we were young, do you remember Plato’s Forms? That worldly things are only imperfect representatives of the Forms? A chair, or a bench are only such when they are used as such. If I sit on that log, it then becomes a bench for me… it is only one example of ‘benchyness’: for a child playing beside it, the log can become, oh, a platform to balance on; a wall to hide behind; or a source of bark to throw for their dog to fetch…” I looked at Janet’s puzzled expression for a moment. “Things transmute into other things, Jan. We have to be open to that.”

 Janet loved this kind of an argument; I could tell because her eyes always began to twinkle when she had a choice to make. “Are you trying to convince me of the coherence theory we used to argue about in the seminars?”

I shrugged as if I wasn’t sure what it had been called.

A smile began to grow on her face like a child’s drawing. “Tell you what. I’ll consider agreeing with you if you buy me a coffee and a couple of doughnuts.”

I chuckled. “A paradigm shift?”

She shook her head and chuckled. “No, a tummy-rumble…”

I’m not so sure the two of us are as different as we like to pretend…

[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/why-its-so-hard-to-agree-on-what-counts-as-true

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