I, too, am curious. But, I read this part of a short story in The Things They Carried, many, many, years ago, and it stuck with me:
You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.
For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen - and maybe it did, anything’s possible even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.
That’s a true story that never happened.
I don’t know that this article was written by Luigi Mangione, or if Luigi Mangione killed the CEO. But, I do know that this story is true, even if it never happened.
i think there are two different meanings of truth here, and it sounds like one of them might be referring to aletheia. from the wikipedia page:
Heidegger gave an etymological analysis of aletheia and drew out an understanding of the term as “unconcealedness”.[6] Thus, aletheia is distinct from conceptions of truth understood as statements which accurately describe a state of affairs (correspondence), or statements which fit properly into a system taken as a whole (coherence). Instead, Heidegger focused on the elucidation of how an ontological “world” is disclosed, or opened up, in which things are made intelligible for human beings in the first place, as part of a holistically structured background of meaning.
edit: just want to say that i agree with the message, and i think it’s true that things don’t have to actually happened in order to be true in some sense. i think the term aletheia can be helpful for making the distinction and wanted to share it for that reason
The truth lies in the heart of the beholder. If the story speaks to you in some particular way, if it resonates deeply enough, then it’s speaking to something you know to be true about the world as you know it. Something which remains true regardless of whether the story is factual or not.
It speaks to something you believe to be true. There is a difference and it’s rather important.
Populist political campaigns speak to such “truths” all the time but the belief of a lot of people that [insert outgroup here] are responsible for all the bad things and that we can all live a great life if we just let [insert strongman here] have absolute power so he can punish them is still just a belief, not truth. Declaring it to be the truth just devalues the concept of truth.
We’re all biased. We should try not to confuse our biases with reality.
Not just populists: many groups have less concern for the truth across the whole political spectrum. Example: feminists and their claim that women make an ever decreasing amount of money relative to men. This claim is based on a single study that compared sweeping aggregate data, and then called the whole thing an actionable issue.
The problem is that when you get into the weeds of the claim, and you should always do so, you find that there are so many confounding variables that went unaccounted for that the study cannot reasonably conclude anything. Meanwhile women have been graduating at higher rates since the 90s, younger generations of women make more money on average than men, and women have more job security than men. Women also get substantial benefits throughout their education and are considered a minority class for the purposes of hiring in many jurisdictions.
Be wary of people driven by agendas, even (or perhaps especially) the agendas you think are good.
I, too, am curious. But, I read this part of a short story in The Things They Carried, many, many, years ago, and it stuck with me:
I don’t know that this article was written by Luigi Mangione, or if Luigi Mangione killed the CEO. But, I do know that this story is true, even if it never happened.
i think there are two different meanings of truth here, and it sounds like one of them might be referring to aletheia. from the wikipedia page:
edit: just want to say that i agree with the message, and i think it’s true that things don’t have to actually happened in order to be true in some sense. i think the term aletheia can be helpful for making the distinction and wanted to share it for that reason
New concept, still confused. Sounds like a combination of ‘what’ and ‘why’. The ‘why’ always matters but doesn’t precede the ‘what’.
Like a death by accident, doesn’t matter if someone was drunk or sober. Dead, is ultimately dead.
The truth lies in the heart of the beholder. If the story speaks to you in some particular way, if it resonates deeply enough, then it’s speaking to something you know to be true about the world as you know it. Something which remains true regardless of whether the story is factual or not.
It speaks to something you believe to be true. There is a difference and it’s rather important.
Populist political campaigns speak to such “truths” all the time but the belief of a lot of people that [insert outgroup here] are responsible for all the bad things and that we can all live a great life if we just let [insert strongman here] have absolute power so he can punish them is still just a belief, not truth. Declaring it to be the truth just devalues the concept of truth.
We’re all biased. We should try not to confuse our biases with reality.
Not just populists: many groups have less concern for the truth across the whole political spectrum. Example: feminists and their claim that women make an ever decreasing amount of money relative to men. This claim is based on a single study that compared sweeping aggregate data, and then called the whole thing an actionable issue.
The problem is that when you get into the weeds of the claim, and you should always do so, you find that there are so many confounding variables that went unaccounted for that the study cannot reasonably conclude anything. Meanwhile women have been graduating at higher rates since the 90s, younger generations of women make more money on average than men, and women have more job security than men. Women also get substantial benefits throughout their education and are considered a minority class for the purposes of hiring in many jurisdictions.
Be wary of people driven by agendas, even (or perhaps especially) the agendas you think are good.