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. 

Source

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?