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Original poster

Truth v fact

66 replies

Stipagigantica · 15/02/2022 20:32

Interesting discussion with early 20’s son.
He know I am GC but and broadly agrees but very strongly felt truth had a subjective element vs facts that are incontrovertible.

I was interested in thoughts and opinions about always reframing statements as fact and whether this would be helpful?

“ the facts are your dna does not change even if you affirm you are a different gender”
“The fact is puberty blockers may cause long term harm vs short term relief”
“The fact is women are harmed by violence from male bodied people”

Interested in thoughts. I am so wearied by what seems obvious truths but keen to move the discussion forward.

OP posts:
ErrolTheDragon · 15/02/2022 20:42

but very strongly felt truth had a subjective element

What does he mean by that - does he have examples? Does he think that something can be in any meaningful sense 'truthful' if it is at odds with incontrovertible facts?

But yes - stating incontrovertible facts seems like a good idea as the basis of shared understanding of any position.

Yarnivore · 15/02/2022 20:45

He's not wrong!

'God is real' is true for people who follow religions where god is considered real, yet it is not a fact as it is not evidenced.

TheMarzipanDildo · 15/02/2022 20:48

@Yarnivore

He's not wrong!

'God is real' is true for people who follow religions where god is considered real, yet it is not a fact as it is not evidenced.

That’s true, but there is an abundance of evidence for biological sex!
ErrolTheDragon · 15/02/2022 20:53

@Yarnivore

He's not wrong!

'God is real' is true for people who follow religions where god is considered real, yet it is not a fact as it is not evidenced.

I don't agree. 'God is real' is not a truth, it's a belief.
Tiltawhirl · 15/02/2022 20:57

How people feel is a truth. That is what is driving a lot of this.

Facts are arrived at by means of objective, measurable, repeatable science etc.

So people feel how they feel, that is ‘their truth’, it whether that is judged to be reasonable by objective standards is another thing altogether.

As women know, many abusive men feel they are the most victimy-victims ever, and that their own (illogically derived) feelings make that a fact, when by objective moral standards they are the ones being unreasonable (abusive).

Tiltawhirl · 15/02/2022 21:04

Similar to mental health delusions. A sincerely and deeply held belief that a person is made of glass, Elvis, Joan of Arc, the daughter of God, or when a dangerously malnourished girl thinks she is obese and so refuses food, or that the government has put trackers inside you, does not make it true no matter how much it is believed and how much distress it causes to hear otherwise.

The mental distress needs compassion as that is truthfully felt and deeply painful and confusing but responding the the distress with compassion does not mean you must affirm the delusional belief.

Tiltawhirl · 15/02/2022 21:05

What would he say regarding someone with paranoid schizophrenia or severe anorexia for example?

Barbarantia · 15/02/2022 21:06

Truth is the earth feels flat. It looks flat too. It also appears stationary.
Fact is none of the above is true.

Easy to get tangled in the web of mixing my truth with the truth. My truth is based on my anecdotal observations. For humanity to progress we need to be able to find the truth behind my observations.

Some are not tangled in the mix up. They just want to stop at observation level because it is convenient to them.

owlinnahat · 15/02/2022 21:08

I think truth is subjective. It's that Pratchett quote, isn't it?

"TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY."

But notions such as 'fairness' or 'justice' or 'mercy' are hugely important to many humans, and you could argue that it would be a fairly grim society to live in where none of that mattered.

teawamutu · 15/02/2022 21:12

How people feel may be a truth, but not the truth.

namitynamechange · 15/02/2022 21:20

I think that our perceptions of the truth are subjective, and probably no-one can never know the whole truth. That doesn't mean however that there is no such thing as objective truth.

e.g. if I am leaving the house with my partner and we get locked out. I remember that I asked him "did you put the keys in your pocket?" and him saying "yes". He is absolutely certain that I didn't ask him that at all. The point is that by the time we come home, tired 8 hours later neither of us can say for certain. But objectively something fixed happened - maybe I am right. maybe he is right, maybe I asked him and he didn't hear/reply. We might never know The Truth but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We both have our own versions of the truth which are true to us.

Obviously this assumes that no-one is being deliberately dishonest/gaslighting the other because in those situations it becomes impossible to even have a good faith discussion of the truth.
In the key situation all we can do is have a big argument agree to disagree, but in other situations it might be possible to arrive at a closer understanding of what happened by examining the evidence/facts/balance of probabilities etc.

We should all have the humility to understand we will never know the whole truth of anything - whether in terms of historical events, politics, other peoples relationships. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to find the truth/speak as truthfully as possible.

namitynamechange · 15/02/2022 21:25

I also think the idea that the truth is wholly subjective/based on strongly held feelings/beliefs is dangerous because it can easily tip into weird conspiracy theories/holocaust denial etc. There seems to be a trend to see such things as wrong just because they are "offensive". And while saying the holocaust didn't happen is deeply offensive (and dangerous) it is also untrue - and that is a key part of why it is wrong to say it.

Waitwhat23 · 15/02/2022 21:26

If we're doing Pratchett quotes....

'Haven’t you got any romance in your soul?’ said Magrat plaintively.
‘No,’ said Granny. 'I ain’t. And stars don’t care what you wish, and magic don’t make things better, and no one doesn’t get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference.'

Original poster
Stipagigantica · 15/02/2022 21:28

@namitynamechange. I agree. You would probably never know who was correct or who had remembered correctly however if you could examine the evidence, Say there was a film of you leaving the house and who did what, there would be evidence to support the facts.

Surely dna is this evidence of male dna vs female dna and that is an incontrovertible fact.

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Original poster
Stipagigantica · 15/02/2022 21:32

@Tiltawhirl. I hope to an anorexic a or person with schizophrenia he would say there is a clinical and evidenced based diagnosis which would be met with treatment and understanding to alleviate symptoms but he would not affirm an anorexic to be fat or a person with schizophrenia to be actually hearing voices. It feels real but it is not and the facts speak otherwise.

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owlinnahat · 15/02/2022 21:34

But from a historical point of view, there are multiple truths - different schools of history which construct different narratives, different uses of facts to construct varying 'historical facts', which are different, shifting understandings over time.

To use the Holocaust as an example - it is a fact that 6 million jews were killed. But there are different truths as to why and how that happened and what it means - one school of historical thought believes that there was always a plan, that Hitler took a leading rule, that it is a sign of how deliberately evil humans can be and that it was a manifestation of remarkable and inhuman malice. Another school of historical thought believes that the Holocaust happened a result of a terrible cascade of improvised choices made in the chaos of war, that the Nazis were not super organized monsters, but rather the Holocaust was a sign of just how almost anyone can end up complicit in terrible monstrous acts and what is awful about the Holocaust is that so many people - a huge percentage of the non Jewish population - were a part of the process.

Those are different truths. The fact is that 6 million dead. The truth is the subjective interpretations of how and why.

Original poster
Stipagigantica · 15/02/2022 21:38

But @owlinnahat isn’t that why we need to focus on fact as the facts are Fundamental and are we not on firmer ground mif we focus on that rather than try and interpret ?

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RoaringtoLangClegintheDark · 15/02/2022 21:39

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…

RoaringtoLangClegintheDark · 15/02/2022 21:40

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

ThatsWhenTheCannibalismStarted · 15/02/2022 21:42

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!

namitynamechange · 15/02/2022 21:44

@owlinnahat

But from a historical point of view, there are multiple truths - different schools of history which construct different narratives, different uses of facts to construct varying 'historical facts', which are different, shifting understandings over time.

To use the Holocaust as an example - it is a fact that 6 million jews were killed. But there are different truths as to why and how that happened and what it means - one school of historical thought believes that there was always a plan, that Hitler took a leading rule, that it is a sign of how deliberately evil humans can be and that it was a manifestation of remarkable and inhuman malice. Another school of historical thought believes that the Holocaust happened a result of a terrible cascade of improvised choices made in the chaos of war, that the Nazis were not super organized monsters, but rather the Holocaust was a sign of just how almost anyone can end up complicit in terrible monstrous acts and what is awful about the Holocaust is that so many people - a huge percentage of the non Jewish population - were a part of the process.

Those are different truths. The fact is that 6 million dead. The truth is the subjective interpretations of how and why.

Is that you Whoopi?

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.

AlecTrevelyan006 · 15/02/2022 21:46

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.

Original poster
Stipagigantica · 15/02/2022 21:47

@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?

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Original poster
Stipagigantica · 15/02/2022 21:52

I agree there could be different interpretations of the Holocaust but the fact that many millions died is incontrovertible and anyone who wants to lessen the impact is not deserving of respect. I have seen the horrors of both auschwitz and Belsen. The facts speak for themselves of the horrors.

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owlinnahat · 15/02/2022 21:55

@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.