Truth v fact

[Stipagigantica]

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.

[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?

@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!

But that is the point of the thread. My son is younger than Euan Blair but trying to be sensitive to the “truth that people feel”. That is emotive _ so doesn’t bringing it back to data and fact always help? Appreciating that others are more “battle scarred” than me ?

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?

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

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.

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

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.''

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 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.

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.

@Linguini

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

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...

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.

@FemaleAndLearning

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.

I think you articulated it very well, and am not surprised that the debate hasn't rumbled on.

Truth is what a person believes to be true.

Do you really believe that? I don't. A person can believe something to be true which is objectively falsifiable. A person can believe something one day, but later change their mind. Where's the truth in that case?

...'is what a person believes to be true' is perhaps more accurately described by the word 'opinion' than 'truth'.

I think facts and truth sometimes belong in different parts of a discussion but that they both have value.

On the subjective truth side, in an argument you can have quite a lot of facts:

• A said something to B
• B is upset by what A said (therefore what A said is upsetting to B)
• A did not mean to upset B

Those things can all be true and it can be more helpful in resolving the argument / compromising to understand that, rather than going on a big 'fact finding' mission to determine whether what A said to B is 'objectively' upsetting (to the man on the Clapham Omnibus or otherwise). It can be - for example if A is on trial for harassment. But in daily life, it's not usually particularly constructive.

truth that people feel

I disagree that you can have your own truth in material matters. That's a belief, not an objective truth. The truth exists regardless of what humans think about it, humans can only perceive it, and one of the better ways we have of doing this is via the scientific method.

If I believe Paris is in Spain, is that simply "my truth"?

Feelings matter right up to the point they get overtaken by facts. You might "feel" you're a man trapped in a woman's body, and that's great until the point when you get accidentally pregnant, or you're sexually assaulted by a man who sees you as female.

@AlecTrevelyan006

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.

This makes no sense! Things don't become true or false according to whether people believe them. The statement "the earth FEELS flat" can be true, but that doesn't mean that the statement "the earth IS flat" also has to be true.

Truth is fixed and absolute, but sometimes unprovable. Facts are provable things which point us to truth.
There are also two different things: opinion and belief.
Opinions are subjective and not related to absolute truth, e.g swimming is fun, chocolate tastes good. People can hold opposite opinions and both are "true for them"

But beliefs hinge around truth which may or may not be provable by fact, e.g red meats cause cancer, the earth is flat, God is real. Beliefs are necessarilly either true or false, even if it's impossible to prove one way or another.

So humderds of years ago, everyone believed the world was flat, but now the evidence indicates that the world is round.
The world did not suddenly cease to be flat and start being round at the point that the scientific evidence emerged, nor does it become flat for those people today who reject evidence of its roundness.

And religious beliefs centre around truth/falsehoods that are unprovable at this point in time. Either God exists or he doesnt; either I have a soul or I don't. There may be no way to prove either way, but that doesn't mean that God can simultaneously exist and not exist. One day maybe there will be sufficient facts and evidence to prove categorically one way or the other, but until then people have to look at the evidence that is available and make their decision, knowing that they might have chosen wrong.

That is not the same thing as ignoring factual evidence. If there is an overwhelming body of evidence FOR something, and no evidence AGAINST it, then it makes no sense to believd it to be true

And religious beliefs centre around truth/falsehoods that are unprovable at this point in time. Either God exists or he doesnt; either I have a soul or I don't. There may be no way to prove either way, but that doesn't mean that God can simultaneously exist and not exist. One day maybe there will be sufficient facts and evidence to prove categorically one way or the other, but until then people have to look at the evidence that is available and make their decision, knowing that they might have chosen wrong.

Yes, exactly.

[quote owlinnahat]**@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.[/quote]

I am just catching up with the thread and was a bit at @namitynamechange's response to your post. This though? This made me smile.