✿ How do we know we're telling the truth? ✿
Bel Chimes In on one of life's big, unanswerable questions 𓆩♡𓆪
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✿ How do we know we're telling the truth? ✿
Mōrena crushes! (still getting shit about calling you that, still gonna do it cos I love it, and it's true, and it's cute).
Ok firstly, INCREDIBLE to be the first person ever to write about this subject (joke), but this line of enquiry came out of my research on Yellowface for our Book Club last month and I can't stop thinking about it.
When I was trying to find a universal definition of truth (cue first year, philosophy 101 lecture), I was met with 7,000 academic articles that I found did not lead me down any definite path (herein lies the problem) and all of them made me feel not smart enough to fully understand what they meant.
It's relevant in Yellowface because the narrator is unreliable, in the sense that we're being told a fucked up story only through her perspective, so we're left as readers questioning - was that right? Did that really happen? What's the truth here?
So what is the truth of life then? Lol, just kidding - but in my travels, I did land on these two types of truths, which I found super useful. If there are any academics in the audience, I'm nervous to be proven wrong, but maybe it will open up a useful discussion!
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1) Empirical truth:
backed by science, undeniable facts and data, and is based on what happened factually in the past to make sense of the future. Like... it rained. The ground got wet. Someone slipped. Chaos ensued - that’s the truth.
2) Convenient truth:
based on need, desire and emotion. It's the truth we seek when we want to be right but suspect to be wrong. So, a bit more complicated, but this one's bound up in the signs we think we see, how we link those with how we feel and what we know to formulate the stories we tell ourselves. (Luce said on the podcast that this is like confirmation bias - seeking out things that are true in the context you want them to be.)
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Complicated old world out here, huh? Useful to think about these things working as a kaleidoscope. Obviously, some things are indisputable (it's literally raining, the climate is GETTING HOTTER) and others are less so. Also useful to think about, I think, in this hot rage of cancel culture we live in where it feels impossible to say the right thing. Eek.
Ok, enough philosophy chat for your Wednesday! See you this weekend in 💌No New Is Good News💌, where we're going to mainline some joy. Ily! x
I loooove this. When I was a teen I remember being taught about how the Bible contains different types of truths - it’s not all empirically true, it didn’t all literally happen. Some of it is moral truth instead. Or other types of truth. SO INTERESTING.