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.