Words - inexhaustible explorations

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I love these words from Albus Dumbledore (from Michael Gambon's Deathly Hallows: Part 2).

To me, words truly do seem an inexhaustible source of magic, wondering and exploration. 

In contrast, I am entirely exhaustible. My writing plans have been swamped with other things and my energy and time are finite. 

Post-truth and truth have been way bigger explorations that I anticipated (and will ever attempt again - please remind me!) The end of the year has arrived well before I have explored all I wanted to about these two words. Still to come are two posts on the fit, usefulness, awareness and need for the house construction metaphor for truth, which will explore what we might be able to do with a better metaphor.

But, next year, after some R&R. 

Wordly Explorations will pick up again in February 2022, covid-willing.

 

Post-truth (part 13) - lead up the garden path by a metaphor

I've now been exploring the house construction metaphor for truth for a year. It's a long time since I declared the journey metaphor for truth was false and misleading.

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My interest in the truth was piqued by the word post-truth. Post means 'after' - which seems odd. Because the journey metaphor tells us we're on a torturous journey, heading toward truth (eventually), what does it mean to be in a time or place after truth? Are we lost; did we miss our truth destination somehow?

As I wrote in part 8, post-truth is a dangerous cover word for propaganda. But how does propaganda fit in the journey metaphor? What about lies, illusions, gaslighting, beliefs and wrong beliefs, delusions, mistaken memory, how do they all fit in the journey metaphor?

Our sense of truth is fundamentally important to us as individuals and as a society. Despite turning away from religion and toward science as our key source of truth, humanity's desire for truth remains tied to our needs for belonging, agency, safety, meaning and certainty.

So, how we think about truth is extremely important.

A critical question remains: is our metaphor for truth really that important? How does the journey metaphor influence how we think about truth, the varieties of 'non'-truth, and post-truth? 

Post truth (part 12) - reminders about words and truth

It's not necessary to think about words all the time, but sometimes it is essential.  

Over the last two posts (parts 10 and 11), I explored how words are representations of our experience of reality, and yet we treat them as part of the things they represent. We also tend to assume that if a word exists, a 'thing' for that word must also exist, even if the word represents an idea (like freedom) rather than a thing. 

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Because we use words to make sense of the world, and because we need a stable sense of reality to function, we treat words as if they were objective, neutral and stable. We ignore that we use subjective, value-laden, abstract representations (words) to construct our sense of truth. We need both to be stable and solid - so we just assume they are. 

This false assumption is brilliant and productive. With it, we create and share amazing knowledge, technology, literature, and much more with words.

However, it is foolhardy to forget entirely that we make such an assumption. It dulls our awareness to the deliberate destruction of words as a way to supplant the social construction of truth.

Further developing the house construction metaphor for truth, in the previous post I added handmade unfired bricks to build with. They are a metaphor for our human tendency to treat words as objective and solid things, despite being subjective and abstract representations. With these solid - yet easily damaged and eroded - bricks we build our floor of facts and our walls of explanatory stories. The house feels snug and safe. 

We forget all about words and the social construction of truth. Luckily a whole pile of people is ready to remind us. 

Post truth (part 11) - making things with words

In the last post, I turned my focus to the role of words in the construction of truth. This is Wordly Explorations, after all. 

Words are what humanity uses to label, understand and share our experiences of the world, and to create explanatory stories that form our coherent view of the world. We use explanatory stories to make sense of the world (and one of those stories is that humans are progressing always toward truth).

I explored how words - spoken, written, signed, symbolled - are 'representations', abstract symbolic units that 'stand in for' our experience of reality. As representations, our words are thus laden with our values, beliefs and ideas (shortened to 'subjective' for this post). 

The conundrum is that, while we might agree in theory that they are subjective, in practice, we need to assume words are stable, neutral and objective in order to use them. 

The human need for a stable sense of reality, which we construct with words, means that we need words to also be stable 'things'. So we just assume they are. We treat words as solid things, despite being confronted with numerous times when they are not (misunderstandings, disputes over meaning, propaganda, etc.). 

To integrate this into the house construction metaphor for truth, I added handmade unfired clay bricks (solid but easily damaged) to represent the words with which we build our house. We use these handmade bricks to construct our floor of 'facts' and our walls of explanatory stories, and they hold up the roof and our sense of safety in truth. 

When we have words for things and concepts for our experience of reality, we feel we know reality.

What does this mean for our understanding of the world? What does it mean for our idea of truth? And does it say anything about the word post-truth? 

Post truth (part 10) - words are our building blocks

Many posts ago, I started my exploration of the word post-truth.

I've thought about the human experience of reality, the social process of constructing a shared truth, the psychological and social role of truth, the weaknesses in human reasoning about their experience of the world, how many people take advantage of the nature of truth, and ended with the contention that post-truth was a camouflage word for propaganda, which I defined as 'truth determined by one person alone'.

I represented those concepts through the metaphor of the construction of a house - the ground being the reality we assume exists, the foundations and floor being humanity's probing, perception and interpretation of reality, the walls being the explanatory stories about the world, and the roof being the sense of safety and stability we need as humans and as societies to function. Read a summary of the series so far. 

Through the series, I have interrogated many words as part of telling explanatory stories, expositing facts, declaring evidence, and sharing a sense of reality with our society. 

What I have not yet explored is how words work in the construction of truth and how they fit in the house construction metaphor. 

This post explores words as things that humans use, to set the scene for a future post relating this to the construction of truth.  

Simplistic thinking - 12 steps to beat your addiction

It's great you're here. The world needs more people willing to let go of simplistic thinking, ready to join the complexity revolution. 

Simplistic Anonymous (SimpAnon) is an international fellowship helping addicts resist the appeal and pervasiveness of simplistic thinking in our culture. It opens the door to living well with complexity.

If you are willing to let go of some simplistic illusions, experience the discomfort AND awe of complexity and contradiction, and embrace the rewards of living in an amazingly rich and incredible world - Simplistics Anonymous is for you. 

The Twelve Step program was created as Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. It has since been used for many types of addictions - gambling, shopping, prescription medication, etc. Although it has been adapted over time, the premise of each step remains the same for all recovery programs. The original program emphasised healing power of the Christian conception of God, but recent adaptations use the idea of 'a higher power' however the person conceives it. 

The Simplistics Anonymous twelve-step program provides a guide to a lifestyle that embraces the rich fullness of our amazing world and your place within it. 

This page outlines the 12-step program for recovery from addition to simplistic thinking. On this page, you can read a background to addiction and the appeal and many dangers of an addiction to simplistic thinking.

Post-truth (index) - grandma tours the house

This series began in November 2020 with my puzzlement about the word post-truth and what it reveals about the word truth. 

I had no idea then how hard it would be to explore these words. They are complex and difficult to write about. I am satisfied I've added some clarity to the thinking on this question.

However, I believe that if you can’t explain a complex idea to your grandmother, it could mean you may be hiding behind vagueness, abstract words and fuzzy concepts. 

So, this post takes my gran on a tour of the house construction metaphor for truth. 

It serves as a series index, lists what is planned, and acknowledges some areas that I really should go back to. 

That is, if gran doesn’t tell me that it’s all claptrap.

Simplistic thinking - are you an addict?

Welcome to Simplistics Anonymous, also known as SimpAnon.

You may have come to this page because a friend recommended us, or you may have been googling why you feel numb, bored or so disconnected from life. You may be wondering if there is an alternative to feeling that life is pretty flat. 

Well, it's possible you are addicted to simplistic thinking, without knowing it. This addiction is real, it's destructive, and it's disconnecting. 

Luckily, there is a solution. 

Part 1 on this page explains the appeal and dangers of simplistic thinking, and why people become addicted to it. Part 2 outlines the 12-step recovery program for people addicted to simplistic thinking. 

Post-truth (part 9) - camouflage for an old adversary

House Under Construction
Kazimir Malevich
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The emergence of the word post-truth sparks a very old philosophical question - what is truth? 

I've now written over 20,000 words in 8 posts to attempt to explain how I see truth. (A full recap and a contents page are coming.) 

My exploration has focused on how humanity pictures the concept of truth. I contend that our most common image - the metaphor of the tortuous journey to an absolute objective truth as a destination (out there) - is part of problem in thinking clearly about truth and post-truth. 

In this series, I have presented a new metaphor that is a better fit with humanity's relationship with truth - the house construction metaphor. The metaphor represents the shared process of constructing and maintaining the house - our sense of truth - and also the vulnerabilities inherent in any project that involves a lot of people. 

The house construction metaphor illustrates that truth is personal, provisional, and socially constructed by humans, and that is not only okay, it is inevitable. Our concept of truth, as I see it, is the outcome of our human needs. 

So, how does the new metaphor help in understanding post-truth? 

Counter-anti-dis - the prefix strategy in politics

When I was growing up, my family would compete to find the longest word. (There was no internet then, and no Wikipedia with a page entitled Longest word in English).

My brother trounced with floccinaucinihilipilification with 29 letters. We liked the meaning: a series of Latin words that each mean 'nothing' - floccus ('a wisp') +‎ naucum ('a trifle') +‎ nihilum ('nothing') +‎ pilus ('a hair') + -fication used together to mean "the act of estimating something as worthless" 

So, family members: admit defeat! You can buy
this shirt by GolemAura at Redbubble

My favourite word was antidisestablishmentarianism (at 28 letters) for its inherent ‘anti-anti-’ness. I loved how English allowed the construction of seemingly endless suffixes and prefixes: establish with -ment, then -arian, then -ism, then dis-, then anti-.

I didn't know then that antidisestablishmentarianism was an archaic word that meant a position that advocates that a state Church (the 'established church') should continue to receive government patronage, rather than be disestablished (or I would have liked it way less). I liked it because I could beat my brother by adding another prefix: counter- to make a word with 35 letters.¹

 
Counter-anti-dis-. Anti-anti-anti-. It was a good joke if you were into words.

It was difficult to fit on a t-shirt though.  

Lately, however, I’ve noticed what I am going to call a 'counter-anti-dis-establishmentarian strategy' in politics.

And it's no joke at all.

Email subscription ending

Hello Wordly Explorations email subscribers

In the near future, this blog platform is turning off the capacity to use your email address to automatically generate emails notifying you of each new post.

For now, I will manage emails for each post manually, while I think about the best option to replace this system without selling my soul or inflicting advertising on readers (because you already KNOW how much I loathe advertising!). I understand, for some, email is the best way to manage your reading, so I will keep it up as long as I can.

Another option for you to see the posts might be to follow Wordly Explorations on Facebook. 

Post truth (part 8) - persuasion or propaganda

In the last post, I explored the motivations of those involved in the social agreement for truth, with a focus on how marketing and lobbying work to influence that agreement for their own aims. 

While this influence can be sinister, my main point was that we are rather cavalier about overt manipulation of truth, even as it infiltrates our minds and shapes our actions. The strategies of marketing and lobbying reveal so much about the social construction of truth. 

And yet, still we prefer to think about truth as objective and absolute, and advertising as inconsequential or irrelevant to truth. Many disagree, including the insightful Daniel Boorstin. 

This series began in November 2020 with my puzzlement about the word post-truth and what it means about the word truth. I had no idea then how hard it would be to explore these concepts.

In parts 1 and 2, I pointed out that the false journey metaphor for truth has allowed the emergence of post-truth to be laughed off as a problem of some 'stupid', misinformed or misguided individuals, or decried as the lies of narcissistic or sociopathic political figures to stay in power. 'Objective truth still exists', we say to ourselves: 'They are just wrong'. 

I don't feel so disdainful. I speculated in that post that post-truth is a symptom of a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign to control truth. But I didn't really understand how anyone could succeed in controlling truth. 

To explore this idea, I created a new metaphor, the house construction metaphor for truth. 

In this post I use the house metaphor to think about propaganda, the final word to explore before I can come back to where I started and ponder what we mean by truth and post-truth.

Yantbom - claiming the right not to think

Last week, I was standing at the lights waiting for the Walk signal. A guy drove past, going way too fast for the built-up area. I could see the automatic 'SLOW DOWN' signal flash at him. He revved loudly and increased his speed.

I felt disconcerted by this reaction, one I notice more and more often. 

When I see people objecting to instructions to slow down, wear masks to combat Covid 19, use seatbelts or bike helmets, or ideas like restricting human access to some natural areas, changing the date of Australia day, allowing gay people to marry, ad infinitum, I am puzzled not so much by their opposition, but their intensity and anger. 

Rarely do they offer any specific reasoning for their objection.

Instead, resistance is often fiercely proclaimed as the vital defence of individual freedom. They might call themselves freedom fighters, freedom lovers, upholders of personal liberty, or sometimes libertarians.

But I don't think it's about freedom or liberty at all. 

I think what I'm seeing is just an adult tantrum in response to being asked to think and to self-reflect. And tantrums always look rather disconcerting in adults. 

This type of reaction needs a better name; a name that reflects what's really going on. 

Post truth (part 7) - revealing our relationship to truth

In the previous six posts in this series, I have described humanity's relationship to truth through the house construction metaphor. (The series starts here.)

Now, we can begin to explore the various contests of truth. These arise partly from our poor understanding of the human construction and relationship to truth, and our prevailing but misleading journey metaphor for truth.

In this post, I am exploring the motivations of those involved in the social agreement for truth, including those who would like to influence that agreement for their own benefit. 

Average - typical, conforming and invisible

It seems a lot of us suffer from FOBA: the fear of being average. This being Wordly Explorations, I wondered if the word average itself was part of the problem.

In part 1 of Average, I explored how people use and misuse the concept of average from statistics. I started with the statistics meanings of average - a single number (score) to represent a group, and normal - a particular pattern of the spread of different numbers/scores of a population. Two useful concepts for specific uses.

However, while the word average retains the 'authority of maths' in everyday use, it slides to mean normal (as in not abnormal), mediocre, and moral. It is mis-used to mean normal as in 'how we should all be'. This can cause considerable grief. 

That explains some of the sloppy word use that sits behind FOBA.  

In this post, I am exploring how the word average, used to mean normal, ends up meaning boring… and there's more grief as well.

Post-truth (part 6) - the building code for truth

Unlike the dictionary definition provided in part 1, this series has shown that the human relationship to truth involves much more than simply finding information that accords with fact or reality.  

Despite this, we are extremely reluctant to accept that truth is a social agreement using explanatory stories shaped by our cognitive biases and our deep need to believe that makes us feel safe. 

Everything in our being wishes that truth were absolute and objective. Otherwise, it raises a very uncomfortable question. 

If truth is not objective and absolute, is it completely arbitrary, disconnected from facts, even delusional?  

Does accepting that truth is socially constructed also mean accepting that 'facts' don't matter? How can we possibly agree that truth may not accurately reflect reality, when we have deep psychological needs for certainty and understanding how the world works? If we let go of our absolutes and our certainty, what will we hold onto for safety? 

Distress at the idea of truth as a social agreement is the result of a false dichotomy. We wrongly assume that the opposite of an absolute and objective 'real truth' is an arbitrary and delusional 'unreal truth'. But it's much more complicated than this misleading dichotomy. 

A more useful question to ask is what (usually) stops an individual from making up their own arbitrary explanatory story and calling that truth? 

The answer is that the social agreement on truth is tightly controlled and very real. 

Average - normal, mediocre and moral

Do you suffer from FOBA: a fear of being average?

FOBA, sometimes FOBO (fear of being ordinary), seems to be pretty common (here, here, here and here). If you suffer from a fear of being average at least some of the time, then you probably are … um… average.   

When I read the word average in articles about FOBA, I see several other meanings lurking behind it.

To me, fear of being average appears to be a modern condition caused not by illness or injustice, but by sloppy word use. Sloppy enough to cover a fear of something else entirely.

In this post, I focus on average when it is used and misused to mean normal, and in part 2 I'm going to explore average used to mean boring. 

Post-truth (part 5) - from hmmm? to ah-ha!

This post builds on the ideas explored in the previous Post truth posts: part 1 - a false metaphor, part 2 - a metaphor that fits, part 3 - reviewing the project brief and part 4 - tell me a story. 

In part 4, I described how the walls of the metaphoric house of truth are constructed. The metaphoric walls represent our interwoven explanatory stories, shared and reinforced by lots of people throughout life. Our explanatory stories run constantly under our thinking, most often without our awareness. It's hard for us to pull out any single 'story', think critically about our understanding of the world, or notice if some stories have only a tenuous link to 'facts' about reality (the metaphorical floor). 

But we don't really want to anyway; why take a wrecking ball to the walls of our own house? We like living there!

In the last post, I suggested that our shared explanatory stories meet fundamental human needs in a way that facts cannot. Those needs include our need to understand 'cause and effect' so we can do things, out need to belong and share a sense of reality with others, and our need to feel safe. 

Here's an idea: truth is the status that we give to the explanatory stories that meet these human needs. 

'Whoa!?!' you say. 'Don't facts count for anything? Doesn't being right or accurate matter? Can I just call any random idea truth if it 'feels' good then?'

Very important questions. To begin to answer them, in this post I'm looking into the nature of our relationship to truth, how truth meets fundamental human needs.

I want to explore how truth makes us feel.

Free - a prepositional problem

We love feeling free.

Western national anthems often proclaim their people’s status as free: the USA as the ‘land of the free’; in Australia, ‘we are one and free’; and the Brits see their isle as the ‘home of the brave and free’.¹  

Those anthems celebrate being a people and a society² free from domination, oppression and tyranny, thanks to historical fights against tyrants or governments.

But, what does the word free mean to us in a purportedly free society? 

When I think about how we use the word free these days, I see images like going on a long drive, ideally in a sports car, with the wind tousling your hair.

I wonder, what exactly do we celebrate being free from now?

And I wonder, what happened to the prepositions that should go with that word. Free from what? Free of what? Free to do³ what? And... free in order to achieve what? 

What can those strangely absent prepositions tell us about the contemporary meaning of free? 

Post-truth (part 4) - tell me a story

Welcome to part 4 of the Post-truth series. Well done for staying the course! 

The aim of this series is to explore humanity's relationship to truth from a new perspective. I want to explore what's behind the numerous contests of truth through concepts including objectivity, subjectivity, relativity, the boundaries to what we can know, the place of untruth in all its guises, and the concept of post-truth. 

No rest in the construction of truth!

"Part 4?!" you might be thinking. Is truth really such a massive topic? Is truth really that complicated to write about? These questions remind me of the deep appeal of the journey metaphor for truth. It suggests that when we find it, truth will be simple and pure and absolute. We will KNOW. Then we can rest. 

But that's one of the many problems with the journey metaphor: truth just isn't simple and pure and absolute. 

My new house metaphor symbolises that truth is a complex and ongoing social construction process. It's tiring; there is no rest. 

At first, this might seem a much less appealing metaphor for truth. 

It might also feel like the ideas behind the house construction metaphor are not hanging together yet. That could be because my exploration is only about one-quarter of the way through!¹ 

However, if I can nail it (bad metaphor-related pun intended), I will explain soon how the better fit of the house construction metaphor for truth provides some big payoffs…

This post builds on the content explored in the previous Post truth posts: part 1 - a false metaphor, part 2 - a metaphor that fits, and part 3 - reviewing the project brief. 

We turn now to the exciting process of constructing truth. 

Habits - freeing or limiting?

At the beginning of the year, the usual articles about New Year's resolutions rolled out in the media. Yawn.

These were followed by the usual blither on making your resolution into a habit. Same, same.

I didn't make any resolutions. But I did think about habits.

A quote from William James (Habit, 1887)¹ prompted this exploration (my emphasis added): 

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are the subjects of express volitional deliberations." 

Really?! Habits are freeing 'our higher powers of the mind'? Can habits also be limiting? And William, how do we distinguish the 'useful actions' from those 'likely to be disadvantageous'? And are 'express volitional deliberations' so bad?

Post-truth (part 3) - reviewing the project brief

Truth is a massive topic and, as I said in part 1 of this series on post-truth, my writing comes after thousands (if not millions) of articles, comments, philosophical schools, books, memes, scientific debates, epistemological feuds, personal disagreements, psychological studies, ideological assertions and legal contests about truth. 

Click to enlarge

In part 1, I described how the dominant metaphor for truth – a journey to find truth – is a poor fit. Not just that, it creates problems for humanity’s relationship with truth. It stops us understanding what is happening with post-truth.

In part 2, I introduced a new metaphor - the construction of a house. I briefly outlined each of the components of the house: the ground (objective reality), the footings and foundations (our attempts to probe and understand reality), the floor (facts about reality as perceived and determined by humans), the walls (social consensus on truth) and the roof (psychological security of confidence in truth). 

I intended to follow this with a post explaining the metaphoric building processes (social agreement on truth) and the building code (social influences on these components and processes). Finally, I planned to get to a discussion about post-truth. 

I was aware I was skating rapidly over the details in the new metaphor and how I have selected from the extensive previous writing on truth. So quickly, I left too much out. Not surprisingly, it raised a few questions for readers.

This third post in the Post-truth series is a response to some of the questions. It seemed like a good time to go back to the metaphoric drawing board to revisit the project brief for the construction of truth. 

Burdened - writing the load off

This month marks two years of Wordly Explorations. A time for review. 

Last year pushed many of us to consider what we were filling our lives with and why. What are we doing with our precious finite time on earth? Are we relishing and honoring all that life offers? Are we exploring the vast richness of our physical, emotional, aesthetic and intellectual experiences? Are we honestly facing our challenges, and supporting others through theirs? Are we doing anything meaningful?

And for me: is writing a blog the right thing to be doing at this time in history? In what way does the blog contribute to the world? 

It was a weighty question and played on my mind over many months. 

With this in the background, I read Susan Sontag's 1966 Against Interpretation and Other Essays. I was struck with new ideas from these 60-year-old essays. I sorted out a few puzzles, found a new perspective on topics I struggle with, and cheered her underlying argument: how we use words can either open or close our eyes to the wonderful complexity of the world. 

In short, I experienced what I hoped my exploration of words and the world might provide for readers: maybe a new perspective, perhaps a pause to reflect on how we use words, and even occasionally, some new ideas.