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. 

How is truth constructed? 

Click for a larger image

In part 2, I outlined each of the components of the metaphoric house: the ground (objective reality), the footings and foundations (our methods to probe and understand reality), the floor (facts about reality as determined by humans), the walls (social consensus on truth) and the roof (security and confidence in truth). The house in its entirety is a metaphor for humanity's relationship with reality and truth. 

I introduced the components from the ground up. I focused particularly on distinguishing the ground (reality) and the floor (what humans can know about reality - which we call 'facts'), as this will be important when we get to contests of truth. 

However, the process of each person developing a sense of truth does not start from the ground up. 

As one reader commented after part 2, the most common way we determine truth is through what others tell us. And they don't tell us a bunch of cold hard facts. They tell us stories - a specific type of story I'm going to call 'explanatory stories'. 

For each person, our sense of truth is constructed as we are included and enclosed within walls of explanatory stories about the world in our family and community. 

What is an 'explanatory story'?  

From early childhood, we hear stories about the world from our families and others. 

I'm not referring to the familiar narrative stories of childhood like 'The three little pigs' with their covert moral messages.

In contrast, explanatory stories make sense of our experience of the world. 

Our childhood explanatory stories include: the sun comes up every day to give us light and that makes the plants grow; adults go to work to make money to buy food and good stuff; mummies and daddies have babies and look after them because they love them; some people are nasty, and they will hurt you, so you must stay in safe places; kids go to school to learn to read so they can grow up smart; being mean with words hurts just like hitting someone does, and people won't like you if you do that; the doctor/pastor/police officer knows a lot about how things work, so we can ask for their help; leave a glass bottle in the freezer too long and it will explode because the liquid gets bigger when it freezes; farmers grow the food which we eat so we can grow big and strong. 

Sure, these are trite (and Western) examples of early explanatory stories. 

But we hear thousands of these 'stories'; in fact, we seek them out. They answer our questions 'why?' and 'how?'

Think of the archetypal four-year-old: 'But why?' Explain it to me: what makes that happen? 

Explanatory stories may or may not be fact-based. They are the story-teller's interpretation of the 'facts' they consider relevant as well as what they think the child needs to know at that time. Many explanatory stories are fact-free: tales of tooth fairies and Santa Claus come to mind. As children, we rarely question the explanations.

In fact, the objectiveness and accuracy of the explanations about the world are less important than providing a wall of enclosing and including stories around the child. 

Together, the stories provide a coherent picture of how the world works, why things are the way they are, and our place, as a child, within it. 

Explanatory stories that others tell us are the 'prefabricated building materials' (different in each culture) used to construct a wall of stories that make sense of reality that form our sense of truth.  

We never stop seeking explanatory stories 

We continue to seek and also share these explanatory stories as we grow. Humans have a drive to find explanations. Why is the world the way it is? What causes things to be the way I experience them?  Something or someone must have caused this to happen... what was it? Why is it so? 

Explanatory stories are also woven into the more familiar types of stories: family anecdotes, fairy tales, novels, movies, parables, biographies, etc. 'The Three Little Pigs' graduates into the 'Hunger Games', 'that time when dad caught the eel', the Bible and the Qur'an, and the biography of Mark Twain, for example. These narratives reinforce our cultural 'explanatory stories' of why things happen, particularly what causes good things or bad things to happen to people.

Without being aware of it, we absorb and construct personal versions of these explanatory stories. We reinforce and share them with others, then with our children in turn. 

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Through them, we construct for ourselves a coherent picture of the world - how things are and why things happen. 

Some (Western) examples of 'grown up' explanatory stories are: good things come to good people (the 'just world' story); only insane people murder other people (the 'people's behaviour is predictable' story); wealth comes to those who deserve it and poor people just don't try hard enough (the 'merit leads to success' story); some people are inherently better than others (the 'natural hierarchy of society' story); even if humans don't understand something, god knows (the 'god has a plan' story); science will solve any issues for humanity (the 'science can solve everything' story). And many hundreds more. 

For the majority of them, we usually have no clear recollection of hearing or agreeing to them. Or ever questioning them. 

In combination, they explain why the world is the way it is, and how we fit into the world. They make the world comprehensible. Meaningful. Predictable. They explain our life circumstances and who is to credit or blame for those circumstances. 

Explanatory stories provide the core of what we consider truth. 

The human relationship to truth - it's not about facts

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Contemporary western society likes to boast that it values facts. Disputes about truth are often characterised as disputes about the facts. 

However, for humans, truth is not ever just a collection of facts. We don't determine truth by clinically considering all the facts and reasoning to a logical and 'correct' conclusion. That is not how we make sense of the world. 

Facts about reality are always wrapped into an explanation story that adds personal relevance and meaning. 

Truth is a collection of explanatory stories, which may or may not be related to facts about reality. It is a tightly interwoven bundle of stories, from which is it hard to pull any single story.

Our shared explanatory stories meet fundamental human needs in a way that facts cannot - our need to belong and share a sense of reality, our need to understand cause and effect so we can do things (have personal agency²), and our need to feel safe. 

They are so important to meeting these needs, that humans are well known to ignore, discard or refuse to accept 'facts' that contradict their preferred explanatory story. Despite compelling and widely accepted 'facts', some people are able to hold fast to what others think are ludicrous ways to explain the world, i.e. conspiracy theories.³

When someone else questions what we consider truth, we often have an emotional and defensive reaction. They are not questioning the 'facts', they are threatening our sense of belonging, agency (through understanding cause and effect) and safety. 

Pre-primed to interpret reality in ways that fit our stories

Of course, we each also personally experience reality too. 

Sometimes, we do question what we have been told is truth when it doesn't align with our direct and personal experience of reality. Sometimes, we realise that an explanatory story just doesn't hold up in the face of our own experience - such as when we first question the existence of Santa Claus, or when we meet people (say, with different skin colour from us) who don't fit an explanatory story that we've grown up with.  

However, the numerous interwoven explanatory stories make it hard to try to see and interpret the world in another way. It can be challenging to even isolate 'facts' outside of our explanatory stories.

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By the time we become critical about what we have been told is truth, we have already been 'pre-primed' to interpret reality a certain way. By 'pre-primed', I mean that our enormous library of cross-referenced explanatory stories also works to restrict what we notice and pay attention to, how we name and categorise things in the world, and how we make sense of our experiences.

This makes it challenging to be critical of our own sense of truth. It's also very uncomfortable to do so: we resist pulling out individual explanatory stories for testing, we don't like to examine our truth, we certainly don't want to entertain being wrong about how the world is. 

When people do change their understanding of the world and their sense of truth, they don't do it by reasoning about 'facts', they do so with a new explanatory story. 

They exchange one story (or set of stories) for another that is robust enough to also meet their psychological needs for belonging, agency and safety. 

Our sense of truth is vital to live, to take actions, to be mentally well. We work to defend our truth as we work to protect our physical safety. Even if it means ignoring some facts. 

In Part 6, I explain that. while many explanatory stories have only tenuous links to facts about reality, facts still matter. Our culture's explanatory stories are not at all arbitrary or random; it all comes down to who gets to decide how we know about reality.  

The walls as metaphor, ignoring the floor

So, in the house metaphor, the socially constructed and shared explanatory stories are represented by the walls.  

The walls are the most apparent component of the house to us; we forget about the ground, and we walk all over the floor without regard, but we are conscious of the walls as surrounding and enclosing us. We often participate in maintaining them. 

Physically, walls can be simple or complicated, made of local or imported materials, involve the contributions of multiple tradespeople with different skills and perspectives, sit upon a floor of some type (or on the ground), and have to be robust enough to hold the roof up to provide shelter and safety.

Metaphorically, our walls of explanatory stories can be simple or complicated, made of local or imported ideas and words, involve contributions of multiple people in our personal experience and culture, sit upon a floor of 'facts' that our culture has determined about reality (the ground), and are robust enough to hold up a coherent and meaningful understanding of the world that provides a sense of physical and psychological safety. 

In their relationship to truth, humans have a much greater investment in the metaphoric walls (explanatory stories) that hold up the roof than they have in the metaphoric floor ('facts') upon which they walk every day. The floor is just there. We keep getting told by smarty-pants scientists that what we think we know about reality is not right anyway⁴, so no point in caring too much about it. 

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Even if we don't know much about the building process, we know that serious damage to the walls might cause problems for keeping the roof above us. Metaphorically, we don't like anyone knocking holes in the wall of explanatory stories that hold up our understanding of the world, and meet deep psychological needs of belonging, agency and safety. 

The house construction metaphor highlights that 'facts' about reality (the floor beneath our feet), outside of any explanatory story, rarely change people's sense of truth. 

It also explains the appeal of fake news and post-truth to some - they represent explanatory stories that meet important human needs - particularly soothing if we feel things are out of our control - so it doesn't matter if they conflict with a stray 'fact' or two.

Finally, the walls also work as a metaphor for our relationship to truth due to the strength that comes from the interwoven, braced and carefully constructed material of explanatory stories.

Social construction makes truth strong, but also fragile 

Who has the truth?

Our sense of truth might be strong because of how it is constructed, but it is fragile for the same reason. 

As a social process, constructing truth involves people with different perspectives and motives. Contests of truth are inevitable. 

If we fail to acknowledge the social construction of truth, we fail to see that truth is under constant attack by those using lies and distortions to influence the building process. We fail to see that some people deliberately use warped explanatory stories with which they try to shape the social agreement on truth for personal gain, status, profit or power. 

If we see truth as a simple contest of right versus wrong facts, we fail to pay attention to the contests about what sorts of explanatory stories are permissible, who gets to decide the methods to investigate reality, whose stories are dominant and whose are missing, and what we do with 'facts' that don't fit with our truth. (This is explored in Part 6 on the metaphoric building code, our social agreement about how to construct truth.)

The world is full of those who seek to influence or control the construction of truth, those who would convince you to accept their explanatory stories, who would deny facts inconvenient to their personal quest for power.

Source: AZ Quotes 

They are enabled by our simplistic ideas about truth, particularly the journey metaphor and its idea of finding truth 'out there', and its concept of objective truth and untruth. They are enabled when we forget or ignore the social construction of truth.  

Most importantly, they are enabled when we fail to equip ourselves for the contests of truth. Such preparation requires a more realistic understanding about the nature of truth itself.

Conclusion 

The house construction metaphor represents the shared human activity of constructing truth as an ongoing social process. 

I just really wanted to use this image!

The human relationship to truth is not to a collection of 'facts', represented by the floor in the metaphoric house. Our sense of truth is based on the numerous explanatory stories that our culture uses to make sense of the world, stories that also provide a sense of belonging, explain cause and effect, and allow us to feel safe. 

Our walls of explanatory stories hold the roof up; that function is more important than any 'facts' in the floor or gaps in the walls.

Purely fact-based explanations might be most effective to help us harness reality (vaccines, flying machines, etc.) but they are not essential to an individual's sense of truth. Facts alone don't meet our human needs, and they don't necessarily make us feel that good!

The journey metaphor says that truth is objective facts to be found 'out there'; it says that being right or wrong are the only options. If you get lost, you must try to find the 'right' facts to get you back on the 'right' path. 

The house metaphor says that humans determine 'facts' about reality which they find useful, but a floor of 'facts' alone does not provide a sense of truth. Our walls of explanatory stories of the world are the basis for what we consider truth, and these shared stories also meet a range of fundamental human needs. In the Part 5, I explore those needs. 

If you get lost, you will tend to look for another explanatory story that meets these needs.  

Footnotes

1. It became evident pretty early on that this topic might be better as a book. I promise myself and my reader I will not take on such a massive topic on this blog ever again!
2. Definition of agency: the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power 
3. Here is a great article on our shared human needs and cognitive tendencies that lead some to believe what others consider conspiracy theories. I like this appeal to universality; we are all deeply attached to stories that explain the world, as conspiracy stories do.
4. In part 3, I gave this example of how we science tells us we are wrong about reality. '... modern science tells us that the chairs we sit on are not solid; they are mostly made up of space. Science tells us that our experiential level ‘facts’ about the world do not reflect objective reality at all. Do we sit down differently because of that? No. At most, we say, ‘Weird, hey?’ and shift slightly in what appears to be a not-at-all-un-solid chair. It doesn't really matter to our lives. It doesn't matter to truth.'

Images, used under creative commons licences where provided

• Soooo tired, must sleep: Tord Remme https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sooooo_tired,_Must_sleeeeep._Budapest,_Hungary_(23375543131).jpg [CC BY-SA]
• House metaphor image: the author
• Why? Why? Why? Sowmya http://clamorworld.com/how-to-boost-your-childs-memory/ [CC-BY]
• Here's a story for you: Family Perspectives http://www.familyperspective.org/dat/dat-1252-en.php [CC BY-NC-ND]
• Quotes 1, 2 and 3: by the author based on extracts from Anat Shenker-Osorio interview, The Slate, Feb 16, 2021 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/impeachment-republicans-just-world-theory.html
• I think anything is possible: snipped from social media from The Daily Show
• Walls: Katie Hargrave, Somerville https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2008_BeaconHill_Boston_2302897829.jpg [CC BY-SA]
• Quote 4: by the author based on an extract from article by John Ehrenreich. Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories, The Slate Jan 11, 2021 https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/conspiracy-theories-coronavirus-fake-psychology.html 
• True story of The Three Little Pigs: Research parent https://researchparent.com/the-true-story-of-the-three-little-pigs/ [CC BY-SA]
• Edward Abbey quote: AZ Quotes https://www.azquotes.com/quote/650244  [used within terms]
• Holding the roof up: snipped from social media, no source provided.