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. 

The social agreement on truth is not arbitrary

Although it is a social process, the construction of truth is not arbitrary and it is not up to any one individual.

A useful analogy is sport. In order to play at all, teams and individuals must agree on some basic rules, standards and guidelines, like the dimensions of the playing field, how long teams play, rules of physical contact, the role of the official referee, etc.  

These rules or standards ensure the game is played as everyone expects; one individual cannot arbitrarily play their own rules, and the rules don't change mid-game. If there's a dispute, everyone can consult the rule book. Rules can change over time, but there will be debate about implications, and some resistance from those who don't like the suggested change. And a minority always try to bend or avoid the rules.   

Despite being 'made up' by people, both the game and its rules are very real to us. 

Our social agreement on the rules of sport allows us to run suburban fixtures and million-dollar sporting businesses.  

Competition in the game might be fierce, but rests on cooperation - an agreement about how to compete.  

So, we can think about 'the game', and separately consider 'the rules of the game'. 

Indeed, every shared activity either starts with rules or humans 'make them up'. Small children discuss and create rules for imaginary play, e.g. 'Let's say this is the safe place, and over there is the monster's house'. We have social rules for our play, our social situations, in our family, our religion, and generally for living in society. They allow cooperation and competition. 

This also holds for truth. We can think about truth, and separately consider the rules for constructing truth. 

To cooperate as a society, we have to start from an agreement on how to determine what is likely to be real, what we think reality is, which statements are legitimate, which information is 'factual', and what happened in the past. As well as these 'rules to construct truth' (explained below) we also agree that various institutions play a role: courts of law, journalism, science, historians, philosophers, religious leaders. It might not be perfect, but we need to at least agree on some basic rules about determining truth and interpreting reality in order to function as a society.  

In each era, every culture is based on a social agreement to certain rules, standards and guidelines for the social construction of truth. 

So, truth is not arbitrary, as it rests on a social agreement about how we determine truth.

Introducing the metaphoric building code for truth

In the house metaphor, a metaphoric building code represents the rules, standards and guidelines for how we agree on truth. Thus, the metaphor differentiates between the process of constructing truth, and the building code for that process.  

In the same way that a house constructed according to the building code should stay up and be safe, the metaphoric building code for constructing truth provides rules and restrictions to ensure it is robust and allows us to feel safe. 

Both the physical and metaphoric building codes are complex but usually undervalued, provide a shared reference point for disputes, and are violated by a minority.

The critical difference is that the building code for truth is not written down. It's not stored in any equivalent of a Building Code Authority. It is rarely even acknowledged. 

This means it is very challenging to discuss. 

It also means disagreement about the rules is usually very messy.

What’s in the metaphoric code

To overcome the challenge of exploring something we rarely acknowledge as existing through a metaphor, I've come up with a hypothetical contents page with the chapter headings. 

Rule number 1 (and 2) might look like a flippant reference to Fight Club, but just like fight club, it's deadly serious. We don't talk about how we agree about truth, and those who try to do so face major hurdles, as I will explore below.  

Source

Two people with a 'fight' about truth can only reach a resolution if they share the same rules about constructing truth, e.g. on how to know about physical reality and the necessary standards of logic, etc. 

Hypothetical metaphoric Rule 4

To explain a bit more, here is some hypothetical content for Rule 4. It isn't written anywhere, remember, but this gives an idea of the tacit agreement we share in the building code for truth.

Rule 4: Approved tools and guidelines for knowing about physical reality in Western societies¹. Updated 2010.

• Personal observation and perception, and what others tell us about this, is the primary source of information about physical reality. While it is recognised that personal observation is often misleading due to human thinking biases and distortions, it is sufficient for daily functioning.
• The approved standard tools for determining physical reality at the human scale and experience are the physical sciences and biology. These standard tools provide the basis of civil engineering, medicine, industry and manufacturing, etc.
• These sciences are the recognised authority for dispute resolution about personal observation and perception. While science is also based on observation and perception, it uses various strategies to minimise the known human thinking biases and distortions. It is somewhat concerning that this rule is inconsistently applied. (See Rule 6: Standards of thinking, and Rule 7: Guidelines for dealing with cognitive bias.)  
• Explanatory stories that integrate and simplify scientific 'facts' are permitted as truth to ensure the human need to understand the world is achieved without requiring understanding complexity.  
• The approved standard tool for knowing about physical reality at sub-atomic level is quantum science, and at the super-human (cosmos) scale is relativity. This standard is currently applied only in technical applications and can be ignored by most. Ridicule of its findings are acceptable. The human need to avoid contradiction and complexity overrides integrating the findings of quantum science into truth. 
• Change since last edition: In the past, religion and divine edict was the only approved tool. Observation, testing the physical world and questions were forbidden as tools to know physical reality. 
• This rule is currently being challenged by populism, so anticipate updates. The tools of science (as above) have generated conflict for many of those in power. (See Rule 8 'Guidelines for the role of feelings and need for certainty' and Rule 12 'Regarding exemption from the code for those in power'.) The emergence of 'truthiness' as a potential new authority for knowing about physical reality has been noted. Counterclaims have been lodged. 

Source: Doc and the Deathbot

It's my idea of satire, but you can see it can be deadly serious.

If we don't agree as a society on how to know truth, on a shared sense of the reality that truth references, then we don't have the basis for any communication or any agreement. 

If one person thinks observation is the only appropriate tool to know about physical reality, while another thinks how they feel negates other information, then that's the end of debate about truth. 

Without shared rules about how we agree on truth, a society is at risk of collapse. 

It's so important, that if someone wants to destroy a society, the place to start is attacking the shared agreement on how we know truth.

So, the building code ensures that while the construction of truth is a social process, it's never arbitrary, it's not up to one individual; truth cannot be boundless or random. 

While we can't just make up our own version, we can challenge how truth is constructed.

Challenging the building code: changing how we know the truth

You might have noticed the subheading 'Change since last edition'. Yes, people do change their thinking on how to agree about truth. It's not easy, it takes years, sometimes centuries, but it can happen.

It is illuminating to look at historical changes in the metaphoric building code on the rules for knowing about physical reality. 

In the middle ages, god was considered the source of truth and the creator (explanatory story) for the world. It was not considered appropriate for humans to seek to understand how the world worked as this amounted to questioning god's wisdom. In terms of the building code, observing the world was not an approved tool by which to know truth. If there seemed to be a contradiction between what god said and what an individual observed in the world, then it was resolved in favour of god's word. The saying 'god works in mysterious ways' gave the faithful a way to reconcile the cognitive dissonance. 

Source: Existential Comics

This changed in the 1600s with the increasing use of empiricism as a tool for knowing the physical world. Empiricism describes knowing the physical world by carefully observing what happens.²

We think of Galileo and other empiricists as changing our understanding of the physical world, i.e. asserting as truth the idea that the earth travels around the sun. But more importantly, they challenged the social agreement on how we can know about the physical world - the 'approved tool' changed from god's word to human observation and measurement. The change required a critical mass of humans to agree to use empiricism and science to determine truth; it took over two hundred years to fully shift.  

It's important to note is that nothing actually changed in terms of physical reality, just how humans think about it.  

We now take observation as a way to know truth for granted (and don't realise it's one of a few agreed ways to do so), but it was a major shakeup in the social agreement on how to know truth at that time. 

The real shake up was to the church's power as the source of truth, which had a much broader social impact. A sizable minority continues to assert that humanity can only really know the world through (their particular brand of) religion, but the majority agrees to science as truth regarding physical reality where conflicts with religion arise.

The metaphoric building code provides a useful perspective on truth: we should focus less on the idea that people in the middle ages had 'wrong' ideas, and focus more on the idea that the extant agreement that the church was the approved way to know truth is being different from ours. (And science as our current source of truth raises its own issues, to be explored in the future.)

A more recent example of a challenge to many aspects of the building code for truth is second wave feminism in the 1960-70s. Women challenged men's status as the only authoritative source of truth, which shut them out of conversations about the world. Among many things, feminism asserted that women's personal experience and observations of things that directly affected them was an appropriate tool to know truth, and challenged the (ludicrous) patriarchal claim to be scientific and 'objective'. 

So, it is possible to challenge truth by challenging society's agreement on how to construct it. At various stages in history, society has been convulsed by contests about the rules for constructing truth. 

And this is unavoidable, because in every version of the metaphoric building code for truth, various people have been left out or ignored.

Who gets to write the building code for truth?

The most interesting question by far about the metaphoric building code is who gets to 'write' it (or control it, anyway.)

The two major influences on the building code for truth are tradition (what's happened in the past, what we already know) and power maintenance. The details of our building code are very much influenced by who has the power to make the rules in society. Those in power strongly influence the social agreement for truth - creating Foucault's 'regime' of truth.

Historically, those without social power have not been allowed to contribute to the building code for the construction of truth.

Every culture has any number of people who are not happy about the rules and guidelines for truth. Those people can see the biases or power abuse in what they consider questionable standards, the restrictive guidelines, to the power-serving nature of who gets to determine truth. 

Source: A-Z Quotes

But, it's not as though society could simply discard the existing agreement on truth and how we know truth. We have to agree to some code for constructing truth, and we have to (largely) agree on what is truth in order to function as a society. Any code will necessarily reflect the social structures and relationships of the culture.

However, what we could do is change rule number 1 (and 2); we need to start talking about how we agree on truth.

Challenging the building code and how we know truth is always challenging those in power, those who benefit most from how our society understands the world. And those in power do not sit back and agree that things could be different; they fight back.

In the past, when religion was the approved source of truth, people who questioned or rejected truth were called heretics. These days, when science and evidence are (still, mostly) an agreed tool to determine truth, those who reject this as truth might be called post-modernists, or they might be called propagandists (or their victims).

Post-modernism and truth

In the 1960s, post-modernism took on the entire building code for truth and those who 'wrote' it. This was tricky, since there is always that problematic Rule 1. 

Post-modernism argued there are no universal truths, only personal truths shaped by cultural and social forces of one's day. (This is similar to my argument there is no objective and absolute truth, but there are some critical differences.)

Post-modernism challenged society to recognise that truth involves a social agreement (or two). The collaboration of people in the social construction of truth underpins the post-modernist argument that all truth is partial or relative.³ 

Source: Facts sometimes are contentious?
Politicians covering someone's lies?

It is often mis-interpreted (by proponents⁴ and opponents alike) as meaning that nothing is real or there is no truth. This is so far from its message.

Some hijack and distort the post-modernist claim that truth is partial and relative to mean that facts are arbitrary and therefore contentious. This (deliberate?) distortion hides self-serving lying and manipulation. 

Partial or relative do not mean arbitrary or contentious.³ 

Partial and relative relate to questions about how we know truth. Who is involved in constructing your truth? Who provides your 'explanatory stories'? Did you hear explanatory stories only from the dominant and powerful? Whose contribution is missing? What is your reference point or authority for truth? Would changing any of this improve your life and our society? 

Of course, the backlash to such questioning was fast and furious. Those in power stood to lose a lot. The camouflage of power in the construction of truth was too incendiary to be revealed. Post-modernism is now often commonly ridiculed as a blip in humanity's progress.

The main message from post-modernism is that we should not accept that any one person or any one group of people has a monopoly on truth. 

Propaganda and truth

Propagandists, on the other hand, have the opposite message: 'Trust me, I am the only person who knows truth'. (And we know from recent history where that takes us). 

Propagandists like Bernays, Goebbels and the 'puppet-masters' behind people like Trump, first deliberately undermine our agreement on the authorities and approved tools for knowing truth, like science or journalism. Then they make up their own truth.   

It might seem they create an arbitrary truth, but a close look reveals this is not so. 

Propagandists exploit our human needs in relation to truth: they know we need certainty and a sense that we have the right truth - so they provide one that meets this need. They know we don't like complexity - so they fabricate simplistic explanations for confusion or suffering. They intuit how the social construction of truth works and they use this knowledge for their own ends. 

The success of propagandists makes sense when you understand the social construction of truth. Propagandists hold up emotion and 'truthiness'⁵ as approved tools for how we know truth, much more important than facts, and then manipulate people's emotions. They provide believers, not with a partial or relative perspective of a shared reality (as the post-modernists might have said), but a denial of it, an alternative reality.

When propaganda spreads, the fact checkers get very shouty about needing to use our approved ways to know about reality, such as facts and evidence. But facts alone don't impact the deep attachment we have to our coherent world view, our need for simple explanatory stories, the sense of reality shared with our community. 

Facts alone don't work effectively to counter propaganda because they don't provide an alternative shared truth. And most importantly, they only work for those who already agree that facts and evidence are how we know truth. 

The power of propaganda results from our failure to see truth for what it is. I delve into this in the next two posts.

Giving our power away for truth

So, truth is not arbitrary or up to any one individual, as it rests on a social agreement about how we determine truth.

Each culture (or subculture) has a shared building code - an agreement - on how we can know truth. We have to agree to a shared code for constructing truth, it's foundational to a society, but every code will have its own vulnerability and weak points.

The metaphoric building code - the rules and guidelines for constructing truth - includes socially approved ways of knowing about reality, suitable sources of information, standards of thought and logic, the role of evidence and proof, the role of emotion, and more. Just like a house and its building code, truth and its building code are 'real', socially constructed, tightly controlled, and designed to meet human needs. 

The house metaphor reveals that truth depends not on facts or in the stories we tell ourselves about the world, but in our social agreement that facts and explanatory stories are approved methods of finding out about reality and knowing truth. 

Contests of truth rarely reside in the ideas at hand; disputes most often centre around the rules to determine the truth. The central contest lies in who decides how we know truth.  

Our failure to recognise that truth is socially constructed and the rules for determining truth are also socially constructed means that those individuals who work this out have a lot of power over everyone else.  

Enter the advertiser, the propagandist and the dictator: people who know a lot more about truth than the rest of us. They just don't care about it. 

Footnotes

1. It’s not necessarily stated each time, but I can only comment on the types of rules used in my own culture – so all assertions are limited to western culture.
2. Empiricism is the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience. It emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, and argues that the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori (i.e. based on experience). The term "empirical" (rather than "empiricism") also refers to the method of observation and experiment used in the natural and social sciences. It is a fundamental requirement of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition or revelation. Hence, science is considered to be methodologically empirical in nature. 
3. I think partial and relative are unfortunate words as they exist only in reference to some implied concept of full, definitive, objective, and they also seem to imply their proposed idea of truth was defective and wrong. I prefer the concept of 'provisional' as proposed by Joan Didion: serving for the time being. 
4. Their case was not helped by ludicrous statements by some of post-modernism's proponents who failed to distinguish between the subjective nature of perception, i.e. what we call 'facts' (subjective meaning by a human subject, but broadly shared) and the subjective nature of explanatory stories (subjective meaning culturally dependent, partial, relative). This I will write about one day!
5. Truthiness is a word coined by Stephen Colbert for the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.

Images, used under Creative Commons Licences where provided

• Kahneman quote: made by the author from an interview in The Guardian 16 May 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/16/daniel-kahneman-clearly-ai-is-going-to-win-how-people-are-going-to-adjust-is-a-fascinating-problem-thinking-fast-and-slow
• Sheffield foot-ball rules, regulations and laws: https://artefootball.com/football-the-corner-kick-hemy/ [CC BY-SA-NC]
• Coach’s field equipment rule 1-6: http://brophyfootball.blogspot.com/2015/07/sideline-technology-leg-up-analytics.html [CC BY-SA]
• Rules: Nick Youngson https://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/tablet-dictionary/r/rules.html [CC BY-SA]
• Building code sample: by the author
• Fight club meme, do not talk about truth: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/fight-club [Used under terms of use]
• Opposing, Doc and the Deathbot by Steve Ogden Art https://tapas.io/episode/2003629 [Steve Ogden owns this toon, but it was so pertinent, I hope it will be allowed] Do chase his work up https://tapas.io/series/Doc-and-the-Deathbot/info it’s very on point.
• Galileo and the Empirical Technique, snip from full cartoon from Existential Comics  http://existentialcomics.com/comic/384
• Patriarchy Ahead: Hugh illustration https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patriarchy_Ahead.svg [CC BY-SA]
• Foucault quote about power: A-Z quotes https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1015068 [Used within terms of use]
• Facts sometimes are contentious: snipped from social media [no source]
• Stephen Colbert’s first episode in 2005 introduced the word ‘truthiness’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
• Terry Pratchett quote: snipped from social media [no source]