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.
A prelude to post-truth
Perhaps I should have realised post-truth was no ordinary Wordly Explorations topic when I couldn’t wrangle a post in the usual time.
To cover my struggle, I wrote a prelude to the series, with some of the questions I wanted to ponder about this difficult concept. What does the word truth mean? And how does the word post-truth relate to that meaning. Would exploring the pictures we have for humanity's relationship to truth – how we get to truth - help us see things more clearly?
Post-truth (part 1) - revealing a false metaphor for truth
Truth seems a simple word that is anything but. We are (usually) comfortable saying if we think something is the truth or not, but (almost always) flounder when asked to answer the question: what is truth itself?
So, if it’s been so hard to answer, perhaps the question is the wrong one. Instead of ‘what is truth?’ and ‘how do I know truth?’, I wanted to ask myself, ‘how do we picture humanity’s relationship with truth?’ and ‘what metaphor (or metaphors) do we use to represent truth?’
In this post, I described the dominant metaphor for truth – a perilous journey to find an absolute and objective truth. It’s an old religious or mythologised image we continue to use while considering ourselves scientific and enlightened.
The problem is that a 'journey' is not a very good metaphor for truth. I think it is misleading and it blinds humanity to the signs of emerging dictators and other power-mongers.
With the journey metaphor, we tend to laugh off the emergence of post-truth as a problem of misinformed or misguided individuals (lost) or decry it as the lies of narcissistic or sociopathic political figures (taking the wrong path). 'Objective truth still exists', we say to ourselves: ‘We will find it eventually, at the end of our journey’.
I think post-truth camouflages something extremely concerning. I speculated that post-truth is a misnomer for a propaganda campaign to control society by taking control of truth. But I didn't really understand how anyone could succeed in controlling truth.
The journey to an absolute truth has been the dominant metaphor for recorded history, but it’s time to change that metaphor.
I began to build a metaphor that could help answer all my questions.
Post-truth (part 2) - we need a metaphor for truth that fits
11 December 2020
A good metaphor helps us think about the world. A false metaphor leads to flawed thinking.
In this post, I briefly outlined each of the components of the house and what they represent: the ground (objective reality), the footings and foundations (human attempts to probe and understand reality), the floor (facts about reality as determined by humans), the walls (explanatory stories that make sense of the world) and the roof (psychological security of dwelling within truth).
The metaphor represents that truth is the status humans give our coherent and meaningful stories about the world and our place in it. Truth is something we construct with others, to reside within. It’s not objective and it’s not ‘out there’.
So, in the same way that a story is socially constructed, truth is socially constructed.
While our house of truth is distinct from the floor of facts and the ground of reality, truth is not sustainably disconnected entirely from facts and reality. Facts are indeed the preferable basis upon which to construct truth if you want it to last longer. The house as metaphor represents this: the floor is ideally built on solid foundations (our best attempt to know reality), the walls are ideally well attached and braced to the floors (the facts we can determine), and the roof is ideally tied down to the walls to ensure it is stable and safe.
The contention that truth is socially constructed does NOT mean that nothing is real; the physical earth exists and eventually hits back if we ignore it. It also does NOT mean we need to abandon our efforts to establish objective facts.
This post explained the many ways the house construction metaphor provides a much better fit for truth than the journey metaphor.
By introducing the components of the house construction metaphor in one post, I skimmed over lots of complex ideas which I hope to come back to one day.
But I had a new metaphor to work with. I was ready to talk shop.
Post-truth (part 3) - reviewing the project brief
19 February 2021
Skimming over so many complex ideas, unsurprisingly, raised lots of questions.
This post was a response to some of those 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.
I was able to clarify several points, particularly the importance of the distinction between the various components of the house, but many questions remained. I hope to explore these in future articles (and will add to this index), but I decide to
focus on getting to post-truth.
The many questions also confirmed that truth is not a suitable subject for a blog post. The Post-truth Series became a thing.
Post-truth (part 4) - tell me a story
19 March 2021
In part 2, I had introduced the components of the house metaphor from the ground up to describe what truth is. However, the process by which each person develops a sense of truth doesn't start from the ground up.
Explanatory stories are the metaphoric 'prefabricated building materials' – the tradition, established knowledge and received wisdom specific to each culture. Explanatory stories answer our endless ‘why is the world like this?’ questions.
In combination, the explanatory stories provide us with a coherent picture of how the world works, why things are the way they are, and our place within it. Through sharing such stories, we all participate in constructing a wall of stories to form our sense of truth.
So, our personal sense of truth is made up of a tightly interwoven mesh of stories, which may or may not be related to facts about reality.
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 constructed with the numerous explanatory stories that our culture uses to make sense of the world, stories that, critically, also provide a sense of belonging, explain cause and effect so we can do things (a concept called 'agency'), and allow us to feel safe.
When people do change their sense of truth, they don't tend to do it by reasoning about 'facts'. For example, in a ‘crisis of truth’, humans discard one set of explanatory stories and replace them with another that is robust enough to meet those psychological needs for belonging, agency and safety.
Our personal sense of truth is vital to live, to take actions, to be mentally well. We strive mentally to defend our truth in the same way we strive physically to protect our physical safety. Even if it means ignoring some facts.
The walls of explanatory stories hold the roof up so we can feel safe within the house – in our sense of truth. The roof provides the shelter we need. That is way more important than any holes in the floor or gaps in the walls, which we do our best to ignore.
Post-truth (part 5) - from hmmm? to ah-ha!
16 April 2021
In the previous post, I had explored the metaphoric walls of the house of truth: our explanatory stories that spell out 'if you do this, that will happen'; 'if this happens, then that will follow'; 'this happens because that makes it happen', etc. I arrived at the idea that truth is the status that humans give to the explanatory stories that meet our needs to makes sense of the world, to belong and to feel safe.
In this post I looked more at those needs.
We tend to think the world works according to certain 'laws' (physical or religious) and follows patterns that we can determine. We are unsettled when we can’t understand the world (Hmmm?) and we are relieved when we find an answer (Ah-ha!). Some developmental psychologists think that ‘determining causality’ is a human drive, like hunger and sex.
We might constantly search out 'causality', but we are really, really bad at it.
We are prone to errors in reasoning, we trust people when we shouldn’t, and we shun contradictions and complexity in thinking about a world that is unavoidably contradictory and complex. We can ignore the evidence of our own eyes and will discredit facts if they don’t fit our existing ideas about causality and the world.
And that's the core conundrum: even though we all have simplistic or inaccurate understandings of the world, we are deeply attached to the explanatory stories that make up our sense of truth. We will defend them with dodgy thinking – and sometimes with deadly weapons - against any perceived threat, even when they are demonstrably wrong. They provide a feeling of safety and being in control of our lives.
If being accurate about reality and truth was critical for survival, humans would no longer exist.
The house metaphor for truth reflects that the most important thing for human survival is belonging to a community: our human relationships and social connections.
For truth, it is the shared status of the explanatory stories in our family, society, local community, church, or cult, gang, political party that matters most. Much more than their accuracy.
What we each hold as truth is the understanding of reality constructed through our relationships with many people, that meets our deep human need to see the world as meaningful and coherent, and that which relieves our many 'Hmmm?' moments with satisfying 'Ah-ha!' moments.
Post-truth (part 6) - the building code for truth
21 May 2021
In part 5, I contended that accuracy is less important to truth than being shared. So, the obvious next question is, ‘don't facts count at all?’ Or perhaps, ‘are you suggesting we replace the metaphor of a journey to an objective, external truth with a metaphor of humanity living in a house constructed of arbitrary delusions?’
This post explained why truth is not arbitrary or based on the delusions of any one individual by introducing the idea of an additional social agreement on how we determine truth.
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.
In the same way that a building code is designed to prevent problems and ensure that a physical house is robust and safe, the metaphoric building code for constructing truth provides rules and restrictions to prevent problems and ensure it is robust and allows us to feel safe.
Each era and each culture (or subculture) must adopted an agreement on how the people know truth. It's necessary for a society to function, but every code will have its own shortcomings and weak points.
The metaphoric building code provides a useful perspective on truth throughout history. Instead of saying that people in the middle ages had 'wrong' ideas not supported by facts about the world, we can focus on the idea that in the middle ages, the church was the approved way to know truth, which it did by interpreting divine will. This was the social reality of the time, and we saw in Part 5 that belonging to a community with a shared sense of truth is more important than physical facts and accuracy.
The house metaphor reveals that truth lies not in facts per se or in the stories we tell ourselves about the world, but in our social agreement that 'facts' and explanatory stories (or something else) are the approved methods of finding out about reality and knowing truth.
Contests of truth rarely reside in the information at hand; disputes most often centre around the rules to determine the truth. The central contest lies in who decides how we know truth.
Post truth (part 7) - revealing our relationship to truth
18 June 2021
With the house metaphor fully constructed, I could begin to explore what the various contests of truth reveal. This post looked at the way various people influence the wall of shared explanatory stories.
Our family, educators and community are our first source of truth. They are not motivated by a passion for objectivity. They embrace children within a shared sense of reality, as part of their own need for belonging and a coherent understanding of the world.
Our explanatory stories are 'built' by everyone and continue to be maintained by everyone (although their construction slips from our awareness).
After early childhood, we don’t change our understanding of the world easily. Our sense of truth is robust, and we defend it against any direct threats.
The text books of the fields of marketing and lobbying highlight our reliance on a social agreement on how to construct truth. Manipulating how humans construct a sense of truth is the standard method by which they exploit people for personal or professional gain. Each advance in knowledge about human biases, vulnerability and weakness over the last century has opened another avenue for these professions.
Yet, we seem indifferent to their variety of indirect threats to our sense of truth. We seem completely inured to the deceits inherent in advertising. We seem hamstrung when deliberate political lying is openly used as part of a political campaign.
It puzzles me that we aren't more outraged, not because of the content or aims of marketing and lobbying, but for their deliberate violation of human agency, trust and respect.
While we might otherwise defend ourselves against direct threats to our sense of truth, we don’t see the subtle, manipulative and self-serving actions of marketing and lobbying as they are - threats to truth itself.
Unbelievably, when the nature and vulnerability of the social agreement for truth is thrown in our faces and used against us, too many of us continue to think objective truth exists - out there, somewhere.
Post truth (8) - persuasion or propaganda
16 July 2021
In this post, I used the house metaphor to represent propaganda, the final word to explore before I can return to wondering what we mean by the word post-truth.
I explored definitions from dictionaries to propaganda experts which imply that any efforts at persuasion could be called propaganda. Overall, definitions of propaganda don't provide a distinction between an anti-slavery speech, a public health campaign, a persuasive article, a state of the nation address, an appeal to donate to a charity, this blog, the spin of advertising, climate denialists' distortion of climate science, and a fascist rally with weapons.
We remain captive to the image of travelling on a perilous journey to an objective truth. We are dissatisfied or terrified by suggestions there is no absolute truth. Because we need to have it; it is only within truth that we can feel safe.
So, when someone instigates a campaign to unsettle our sense of reality and our sense of truth, we don't see it for what it is. We don't really know how we know truth, so we're not good at withstanding the techniques of propaganda, the same techniques as marketing and lobbying. When our ideas about reality are blurry, when the methods by which we determine truth are undermined, we are ripe for the messages of the propagandist.
Because, when we are unsettled that we might not understand the world, the most common human response is to seek someone else who might just have the REAL objective truth we are so desperately seeking. Having created (or taken advantage of) a broad sense of social dislocation, the propagandist will step up to calm the people by claiming to have truth.
Metaphorically, we seek shelter under a roof held up only by Acrow props.
So, to my own definition: Propaganda is a campaign to establish one person (or small group) as the only one who can determine how we know truth - as the source of truth. My definition of propaganda distinguishes it from other types of persuasion.
The propagandist knows that meeting humans' deep need to have the 'absolute' truth will grant them power. Propaganda is a campaign to control truth to achieve power over a group or population.
Post-truth (9) - camouflage for an old adversary
20 August 2021
The word post-truth sparked a very old philosophical question for me: what is truth?
We define truth as alignment with an objective reality, but that's not how we use it in practice. This series has explored a more useful metaphor for truth – the social construction of a house – to represent that truth is socially constructed and deeply personal.
The metaphor reveals that we don't really know what we mean by the word truth. So how could we possible discuss what we mean by post-truth?
I think that, because we don't understand our relationship with truth, we fail to identify post-truth as propaganda.
Instead, we tend to think of propaganda as the lies, censorship and violence of the Nazis to gain power over the German people in the lead up to WWII. As a result, there seems to be a tendency to assume the goal of any propagandists must be authoritarianism.
Initially, the word post-truth emerged to describe the willingness of enough people to accept the lies, distortions and general antics of people like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump (and those pulling their strings). However, the house metaphor reveals post-truth to be purely camouflage for propaganda - an effort to control truth - perhaps as part of the UK’s and USA's long-standing preferences for heroic and fantasy stories about themselves. Yes, it's anti-democratic, but whether it's intentionally proto-fascist, I'm not so sure.
Post-truth propaganda is a campaign to screw up people's sense of how they know truth. A tried and true strategy.
As I said in part 8, propaganda works to first destroy and denigrate the processes and relationships that are inherent in the social construction of truth, then provide a ‘new’ version of truth manifest by one person. This version of truth is appealing because it meets fundamental human needs for belonging, agency, and feeling safe.
The word post-truth describes non-violent and insidious propaganda aimed at destroying our social agreement for truth and supplanting it with the truth of the propagandist. It benefits from a century of research into how to manipulate humans’ sense of truth - as refined by marketing and lobbying.
The emergence of the word post-truth provides even more evidence that truth is personal, provisional, and socially constructed by humans, and that is not only okay, it is inevitable.
Yet to come (Covid-willing)
The next planned post will explore the role of words, language and metaphor - the metaphoric building materials and tools - in the construction of truth. This will reveal why truth and post-truth are logically Wordly Explorations topics. So many words might be explored, including the question whether the distinction we make between the terms truth and belief is simply a relic of the flawed journey metaphor.
The final planned post will discuss what we can do now with this brand-new metaphor. We won’t be changing human beings any time soon, so what can we change?
I'm anticipating that Gran will say, 'that's nice darling, but what can you do with it?'
Topics I have skimmed over, but would like to revisit
- Why the barrier to our knowledge of objective physical reality does not lead to the conclusion there is no way to know anything; and equally, the value of the house metaphor to make the critical distinction between the ground (physical reality), the footings and foundations for the house (the ways we probe reality), and the floor (facts humans have determined about reality) when we discuss truth.
- Whether an objective non-physical reality exists, which will require an exploration of the concepts of objectivity, two different meanings of subjectivity, and the existence of physical correlates for subjective values.
- Why I think partial and relative are unfortunate words to describe the social construction of truth, as they continue to imply the idea of a full, absolute and objective truth, just poorly accessed, and why I prefer the word provisional to describe the nature of truth: the best available that serves well for the time being (until it doesn't).
- How the concept of a ‘higher truth’ is used to justify and excuse lies and distortions of fact, while being code for ideology, disconnection from a shared physical reality, and a version of truth that works not to achieve social cohesion, but social fracturing.
Images, used under Creative Commons licences
- Not really my gran, more a metaphor: https://get.pxhere.com/photo/woman-old-portrait-color-hat-lady-facial-expression-grandma-grandmother-close-up-elder-face-nose-art-eye-glasses-head-skin-organ-elderly-emotion-grandparent-wrinkles-992185.jpg [public domain
- Socrates quote: snipped from social media, no source
- Thinking inside the box by Matthew https://www.flickr.com/photos/purplemattfish/3854134991/in/pool-702859@N20 [CC BY-NC-ND]
- The house construction metaphor: created by the author
- Soooo tired, must sleep: Tord Remme https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sooooo_tired,_Must_sleeeeep._Budapest,_Hungary_(23375543131).jpg [CC BY-SA]
- Wrecking ball: Rhys Asplundh https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhysasplundh/5202454842/ [CC BY]
- Rules: Nick Youngson https://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/tablet-dictionary/r/rules.html [CC BY-SA]
- Upside down house by Axel Hindemith https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21530202 [CC BY]
- Acrow props by Keith Williamson https://www.flickr.com/photos/34673186@N03/32774892926 [CC BY-NC-ND]
- Painting of House Under Construction [Stroyuschiysya dom] by Kazimir Malevich 1915-16 from Arts and Culture
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