Truth v fact

Truth is what a person believes to be true.

A fact exists and remains a fact whether or not the person believes it to be true.

And they will find some bullshit way to justify it. And if the bullshit way doesn’t already exist, they will invent it.
Postmodernism, queer theory...

My son is younger than Euan Blair er but if you go back and read my last post, you will see that I said his youngest son Leo, not his oldest son Euan. Now that’s a fact backed up by evidence

Leo was the surprise baby born in 2000 while Blair was in office and he’s only 21, so roughly of an age with your son or maybe younger?

And I think “battle scarred” is pretty spot on. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read some excellently argued piece, full of inarguable facts and lucid reasoning, and thought to myself, how can anyone not get this? Only to realise that when people have enough of an emotional need to cling to a lie, they will do so. And they will find some bullshit way to justify it. And if the bullshit way doesn’t already exist, they will invent it.

Of course the excellently argued, reasonable, lucid pieces do convince some. Many of the posters on this board, in fact, came here to chide the dreadful women here for our evil transphobic ways, and gradually realised they’d got it all wrong. So facts do work for some people (and of course it’s important for our own integrity to stick to them).

But sadly nothing works on someone who isn’t interested in a balancing of rights, in recognising the needs of others, in a truly equitable outcome. The only thing that will work against those people is sheer force of numbers; us reaching a critical mass of such proportions that the tide well and truly turns.

That’s where we all play our part. But I think it’s going to be a while yet.

I think that the issue is that people tell "the truth" as they see it - its why in a court case you can have a number of witnesses all genuinely telling "the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth" but all saying something slightly different. So in a rioting crowd person A will see something different to Person B who is somewhere else in the crowd and very different to Person C who is watching them from above, out of a window.

SO person A thought that person B pushed a policeman whereas Person C could see that person B was shoved from behind by someone else.

Truth is linked to belief, whereas facts are Linked to evidence

Well here's the problem - people seem to be working with different definitions of what the word 'truth' actually means. As far as I can see, the primary definitions are about facts, actuality, reality. Not belief.

I'm a scientist, and moreover one who writes software. 'True' is not an abstract, subjective concept. Scientists try to deal in objective truths - and that's why we tend to talk about probabilities - an acceptance of our incomplete knowledge and inaccuracies in data yet.
Likewise, historians don't have different 'truths' - they just have different interpretations based on partial data, some now irretrievably lost, especially around peoples motivations. Using the word 'truth' to represent different theories based on partial data is a travesty of the word.

notions such as 'fairness' or 'justice' or 'mercy' are hugely important

Yes, they are. But they're not 'truth' in and of themselves. To work, for sure they generally need to be built on a foundation of truth.

I think I'd approach this from a completely different angle;

''If a man shouts 'help, I'm drowning', do you help him or give him a lecture?
Women are drowning. Lectures and luxury beliefs are not helpful to our situation. There's a time and a place for philosophy, and this isnt it.''

Perception is a real phenomenon, but it is not reality itself.

I e never really thought about truth and facts. But it sounds like they are not synonymous.
I'm a scientist and understand facts to be a hypothesis supported by evidence. So we don't know the Earth is a sphere but we have huge amounts of evidence that supports it is a sphere. We see this as fact.
We have loads of evidence to support the hypothesis that sex is binary. We see this as fact.
But no fact is ever 💯 supported there will always be something to refute the hypothesis. It is this small percentage of doubt that people use to support their hypothesis that sex is not binary. Science works on consensus.

I'm not sure I have articulated it very well and I've not talked anything about truth or feelings.

Some people believed the earth revolved around the sun before we had all the evidence it does not.
Hahaha oh dear sorry about that

He know I am GC but and broadly agrees but very strongly felt truth had a subjective element vs facts that are incontrovertible.

Yeah he's right that there's a difference between truths and facts and some good examples have been given above.

Truth is linked to belief, whereas facts are Linked to evidence

Some people believe God exists and is real. That's true.
Some people believed the earth revolved around the sun before we had all the evidence it does not.

Some people believe the word woman is meaningless and can include people with a penis. That's true. Everyone else knows the status of womanhood is biological because that's where the facts point.

What's your son actually arguing though? That some beliefs can override facts or what?

@owlinnahat Fair enough, apologies! I studied some of that stuff too (a looong time ago though). I think I was "triggered" by the no-one knows how and why thing because I've seen that used in bad faith. I still think that those discussions around functionalism V intentialism only really work if they are done in good faith that there is some truth people are groping towards (by interpreting facts) even if they will never know it fully/fully agree on it. Otherwise it turns into an "all truths are equal" and gets a bit weird. But I think I know what you mean!

[quote Stipagigantica]@RoaringtoLangClegintheDark. I don’t think I cited any example of things he was a questioning as fact. And as I said he is broadly understanding of gc views. It was more a disucussion that he felt “truth” was subjective to people that got me thinking. The Discussion was more around a certain person who talked long and hard about “speaking their truth”. I said truth was absolute and he disagreed saying facts were. So how do we use this?[/quote]
Like I said, I’m confused - I’m finding it a little hard to grasp the point of the thread, tbh!

I’m also not sure that even objectively verifiable facts are much use in the current culture wars. There was a quote in that Tony Blair interview the other day where he said his youngest son Leo said to him that what he needs to understand is that it’s not facts that matter, it’s feelings.

And that’s the problem. We have a great many people, a large number of them in positions of influence or authority, who don’t care about the facts no matter how true, or factual, they are. If they clash with some people’s feelings (the feelings of the people who matter, that is; women’s feelings don’t count for much in this worldview unless of course they’re women who are cheerleading the Important People) then they must be denied, minimised, decried as “transphobic”, and consigned to the dustbin of the Wrong Side of History.

We have always had the facts on our side. It doesn’t matter. Some people just make facts up (“sex is a spectrum!”) and they’re so good at propaganda/indoctrination, and they have so much support from the Establishment, that god knows how many people now really believe that sex is a spectrum.

What do we do about that?

@namitynamechange - www.holocaustcentre.org.nz/uploads/1/1/5/2/115245341/interpretations-of-the-holocaust.pdf is a good place to start with different schools of history.

And I'm not a Holocaust denier. I'm a Jewish historian with a Master's degree in the historiography of the Holocaust.

Dr. Henry Jones: Archaeology is the search for fact... not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.

Except no, because for the holocaust there is an overwhelming amount of evidence - Nazi texts written before the war that described Jewish people as a threat that needed to be dealt with; Hitler's own words; mountains of paperwork; signed documents; eyewitness testimonies; physical evidence; the uncomfortable fact that deliberately killing people in labour camps is less efficient in war. Mountains of evidence were examined as part of war-crimes trials. Of course there is always some things that remain unknown. But it has been proven, and there are piles of proper evidence people can look at. Any "school of historical thought believes that the Holocaust happened a result of a terrible cascade of improvised choices made in the chaos of war" is dodgy as hell quite frankly. You can't just say "6 million dead, no-one can really knows why".
That's why this shit is so dangerous. Its really really dangerous.

But that's not really different truths, is it? It's different theories, or different perceptions of the truth... But surely something that's not true cannot be the (or even a) truth*

*Paging Dr Jane Claire Jones, I'm out of my depth here!

Evidence is indeed key and there is plenty of evidence to support everything you said.

All the examples you’ve cited certainly seem to qualify as facts rather than “truths” that may contain an element of subjectivity to me, OP.

Just as it’s a fact for example that sexual reproduction requires the union of the two sexes. Always two. Never more, never less.

And that it’s only one sex that actually performs the reproductive labour.

Is your son having a problem accepting any of them as facts? What does he think is subjective there? And what point is he making? I’m a bit confused…