Post-truth (part 13) - lead up the garden path by a metaphor

I've now been exploring the house construction metaphor for truth for a year. It's a long time since I declared the journey metaphor for truth was false and misleading.

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My interest in the truth was piqued by the word post-truth. Post means 'after' - which seems odd. Because the journey metaphor tells us we're on a torturous journey, heading toward truth (eventually), what does it mean to be in a time or place after truth? Are we lost; did we miss our truth destination somehow?

As I wrote in part 8, post-truth is a dangerous cover word for propaganda. But how does propaganda fit in the journey metaphor? What about lies, illusions, gaslighting, beliefs and wrong beliefs, delusions, mistaken memory, how do they all fit in the journey metaphor?

Our sense of truth is fundamentally important to us as individuals and as a society. Despite turning away from religion and toward science as our key source of truth, humanity's desire for truth remains tied to our needs for belonging, agency, safety, meaning and certainty.

So, how we think about truth is extremely important.

A critical question remains: is our metaphor for truth really that important? How does the journey metaphor influence how we think about truth, the varieties of 'non'-truth, and post-truth? 

Metaphors help us think about the world

Metaphors represent ideas and things. A metaphor is a word or phrase for one thing that is used to refer to another thing in order to show or suggest that they are similar.

We use metaphors because they help us think about the world. According to Steven Pinker¹ we use metaphors all the time in our thinking. We represent complex or poorly understood things with an object or simple idea that helps us understand it.

For example, we have long used metaphors to explain how our brain works - something so complex we still don't fully understand it. Computer scientist John Daugman explains that humans have pictured our brains as functioning like the technology of the time. We've thought about the brain using metaphors of steam engines, clocks, electrical circuits, computers, and most recently, online networks. Each metaphor offered some insights, and contributed to new thinking, but each also limited what we imagined as possible. And each metaphor, it later turned out, is inaccurate. (Our brains are not like steam engines and not like computers either.) 

What is interesting is that we don't seem to be able to think about the brain without a metaphor. Daugman asserts that thinking through metaphors is pervasive and inescapable for most topics. We need metaphors to think. 

So metaphors are important because they are ubiquitous and powerful tools for thinking about the world. But if they are not good, they might mislead us.

 

How do you tell if a metaphor is good?

So, it follows that a metaphor is 'good' if it helps us to think and understand the world and 'flawed' if it leads to faulty thinking. But how do you tell? 

A metaphor for thinking about thinking about metaphors

Luckily, Stephen Kellert² (someone who must love metaphors as much as me) came up with four aspects of metaphors to distinguish the good from the flawed: fit, utility, awareness and need.

♦️ Fit: whether the similar characteristics implied by the metaphor exist in reality, which can be determined by observing the real world. Lack of fit leads to wrong conclusions or illogical ideas and outcomes.

♦️ Utility (Usefulness): how well the metaphor guides and extends thinking and new ideas about what it represents. Lack of usefulness means it doesn't add to ideas or understanding.

♦️ Awareness: whether we remember we are using a metaphor so we can remain alert to both utility and fit when reaching conclusions. Lack of awareness means we forget that metaphors are tools for thinking, and if there are problematic ideas and conclusions, instead of discarding the metaphor, we limit our thinking to make it fit the metaphor.

♦️ Need: whether the metaphor is necessary to think about the world, and whether we could do better without it. Lack of need means that a flawed metaphor creates additional problems through thinking biases and assumptions, poorly identified concepts, blind spots, etc.

Metaphors help us think, integrate new ideas and understand the world. When we realise a metaphor is misleading, we need to stop using it. We no longer think of the brain as a steam engine, and we are starting to discard the metaphor of the brain as a computer. Those metaphors don't explain what new research has found and have led to some misleading conclusions. 

Or more realistically, when we realise a metaphor is misleading, we need to find a better one, because we don't seem to be able to think about the world without metaphors.

Reaching for facts when the metaphor is the problem

I agree, but many do not

We inherited the journey metaphor for truth from the religious pilgrimage. Did we ever consider whether it was a good metaphor? 

I content that the journey metaphor does not fit what we know about truth, does not usefully guide thinking, and critically, we seem unaware of the power of the metaphor on our thinking. (Need will be covered later.)

With this metaphor, when we run into problems with truth, we can only talk about the content of disputed propositions. We can't use the metaphor to think about these problems or how people can hold different versions of truth. We see truth as alignment with reality, and we see misguided or lying people as a 'technical problem' to be solved. The metaphor doesn't help us understand how propagandists and others gain power by manipulating truth. 

We reach for 'facts' to solve dilemmas with truth.

We continue along the journey, confused and often fearful, regularly tripping over our own shoelaces.

What is truth according to the journey metaphor?

In part 1, I started with the dictionary definition of truth: 'the condition of a belief or idea being in accord with fact or reality'. The journey metaphor leads to the following ideas about truth.

Truth is an aspect of an objective reality: If truth means alignment with reality, this sets up truth as an attribute of an objective reality that we assume exists.

Truth is a thing: As explored in part 11, we have the word truth, so we assume 'truth' must exist; it must be a thing. The journey metaphor tells us truth will be at the end of the path, and we will know it when we find ‘it’.

Truth is independent of humanity: As truth is an attribute of reality, and we just have to find it, this sets up truth as outside of humanity, ‘out there’, independent of human perspective, interpretation and meaning making.

Truth is objective and absolute: As truth is an attribute of reality, independent of humanity, then it is objective and absolute. Truth is a matter of determining the objective facts about an objective reality.

Truth is singular: If truth is a matter of facts about reality, then there can only be one truth, because (we assume) there is only one reality. This means everyone must agree to the same truth.

Truth is a matter of reason: If truth is about facts, then finding truth is a matter of evidence and reasoning. This means we think that each person considers the facts to arrive at truth. We set up truth as distinct from belief, which does not require evidence or a factual basis.

Truth is verifiable: Because truth is alignment with reality, 'non-truth'³ is lack of alignment, therefore truth is testable and fact checkable. We just check the facts, and then we are forced to agree with the one right truth.

Truth is right; 'non-truth' is wrong: If there is only one truth which we can verify, then a person's sense of truth can be either right or wrong. The only way to understand that someone has a different sense of truth is that they have taken the wrong path. If there are different ideas, someone must be wrong. There is no room for different perspectives on the world.

'Non-truth' is due to being uninformed, stupid or malicious: If there is only one verifiable objective truth reached by reasoning, anyone who professes ‘non-truths’ is uninformed, misguided, stupid, cowardly or malicious. We explain historical ‘different truths' as ‘primitive’ and contemporary ‘different truths' as ‘ideological’ (while our truth is rational and objective).

Social media snips from just one day: a very common assertion in disputes about truth

The journey metaphor is not a good fit

Fit refers to whether the nature of the metaphor matches reality.

This whole series has explored my starting premise that the journey metaphor was not a good fit for truth. Below is a very brief recap.

Humans cannot access an objective ‘reality’ independent of their organs of perception and their interpretation of what is perceived. As well, what we perceive and interpret depends on what we are primed to expect and the words available to represent our experience of reality.

While I’m happy to call what can determine about reality ‘facts’, humans don’t use facts to reason to a sense of truth; we use explanatory stories that provide meaning that are given to us by our community and culture. If we try to reason about ‘facts’ from reality, we do it extremely poorly and our sense of truth is influenced (even constrained) by our fundamental needs for belonging and safety.

 
Humans are demonstrably easy to manipulate through our emotions and our need for a sense of agency and safety. And we are frequently drawn to people who promise the ‘right’ truth - the objective and absolute truth that will meet all our needs.

A single and correct truth for humanity is only possible by excluding (and discounting) anyone who doesn’t agree. The idea there is or ever was a consensus on truth is simply those in power declaring it so.

This series contends that truth is constructed by humans to meet our own fundamental needs. We think of truth as objective, absolute and external because that is what would meet our needs for belonging, agency (certainty) and safety, and our need for a sense of meaning and coherence.

But the journey metaphor obscures all this, and cannot help us think about our relationship with truth. Determining truth is nothing like going on a journey.

The journey metaphor is not useful

Utility refers to how useful a metaphor is to guide thinking about the world.

Our assumptions about truth based on the journey metaphor infiltrate our thinking and create many unresolvable dilemmas. (The use of 'we' below is a generalisation; of course there are exceptions.)

Resistance to change: Changing one's sense of truth is a devastating process of admitting that we were wrong, possibly foolish and deluded. We don’t know how we know truth, and we can't just 'learn something new’ and change our sense of truth. There's right or wrong, and we sure don't want to be wrong! So we resist potential challenges to our sense of truth with everything we've got in our arsenal.

We fear discussion of subjectivity as an abandonment of truth: If we were to concede that human perception, language, perspective, context, status, and power all influence truth, we would have to give up our very idea of what truth is. We consider the suggestion that we don’t know objective reality distressing. We consider the post-modernist idea of relativism as undermining truth; we cannot even begin to glimpse its aim to analyse power structures in society.

The idea of 'provisional' truth is de-stabilising: We don't know how to reconcile the idea of the provisional nature of truth ('good enough for now for me') with our psychological need for a stable view of reality. We’ve overlaid our sense of truth with ‘absoluteness’ because of our need for certainty, and we do anything to avoid uncertainty.

The opposite of one objective truth is 'non-truth': We have no way to distinguish different perspectives on reality (different truths) from deliberate 'non-truths' peddled to manipulate people (lies, advertising, propaganda). We can’t talk about the deliberate manipulation of truth. They are all in the same mushy space that we can't think clearly about.

The only answer to 'non-truth' is more facts, better reasoning: As truth is about facts, then the answer to political lying, propaganda, and other 'non-truths' is better information and critical thinking skills. We assume if you give people the facts, they will reason their way to the right truth soon enough. This is the basis of calls for education, and for fact-checking in the face of attempts by some to take control of truth.

We lament the lost golden age of truth: The word post-truth literally means 'a time or place after truth'. Inherent in this word is the assumption that we used to have truth, or at least we were heading ever closer to it, and now we've lost it, or we've gone off the path. We pine for the golden era of truth before it was destroyed by all those liars. The answer must be getting back to the facts (while blaming the post-modernists), so, out come the fact-checkers. 

Social construction is interpreted as random and individual choice making: We can't entertain the idea that truth is socially constructed, again because we would have to abandon everything we think about truth. But also, we think social construction means that an individual consciously chooses whatever they want to think is truth and ignores whatever they don't like. (The metaphor for social construction is a flat pack bookshelf!). We don’t understand how constrained and fortified the process of social construction is. We mock it as a stupid idea because it is truly threatening to our sense of a stable reality.

Therefore, we can’t distinguish between the expected process of the social construction of truth and various forms of arbitrary fact-free 'non-truths' or deliberate destruction of that process. 

Mixing our concepts

The lack of fit and utility means we mix up lots of other concepts with truth.

We conflate 'true' with 'truth': As we consider truth as an inherent attribute of 'real things' in the world to be discovered or determined, we just need to accumulate facts and eventually we’ll get to truth. What we are doing is mixing up the concept of true – aligns with what is observed or reasoned – with the complex human relationship with truth – meaningful beliefs about the world.

We conflate facts with truth: Our contemporary understanding of truth entails getting the right facts. We assume ‘facts' are statements we make based on reasoning about observation of the world. In practice, we constantly make abstractions (using words) and judgements of values and important about facts, and we call that truth.

We confuse certainty and truth: We need a sense of certainty; humans can’t plan and take actions without it. So we create such a sense by making judgements about reality and how the world is, we get very attached to them, and we call that truth. We cannot abide the idea of provisional truth because that would mean abandoning certainty.

We confuse meaning and truth – the search for a 'higher truth': We define truth as alignment with reality, but then we find that very unsatisfying in meeting our need for a meaningful coherent picture of the world and our place in it. Instead of looking at our definition of truth, we look for something more meaningful, and we often search for a ‘higher truth’.

We confuse simplicity and coherence with truth: The human need to form a coherent picture of the world leads us to adopt simple (often simplistic) ideas about reality. This picture reduces the sense of chaos and being overwhelmed by complexity, so we feel good. And whatever makes us feel good and that we understand the world is what was call truth.

We confuse awareness of social construction with finding a 'deeper truth': Because we do not consider that truth is socially constructed, we have to create a new word for the process of identifying and slowly reassessing the various 'explanatory stories' from our community that we have integrated into our sense of truth as we grew up. We call this finding a personal or ‘deeper truth’. There’s a massive industry dedicated to helping people extract themselves from what are considered the 'lies and illusions' of their upbringing.

Our lack of awareness is disastrous

Awareness is whether we remember we are using a metaphor so can check both our conclusions and the metaphor.

Despite the numerous people constantly revealing the nature of truth, I contend that most people are entirely unaware of their reliance on the journey metaphor. Instead, we set our ‘criteria’ for truth based on the metaphor, and then we get upset and confused when truth doesn’t work that way.

Given the poor utility and fit, our lack of awareness is disastrous. We can’t discuss what kind of thing truth is, and why we have so many problems with truth, at all. We are restricted to disputing which specific propositions are, or are not, truth.

We overlook the emotional aspect of truth: Truth feels right. And we feel good about being right because that means our psychological needs. We equate the intensity of our feelings of being right for the strength of our truth. Steven Colbert’s great word truthiness touches on this, although he derides people who rely on emotion while ignoring facts. I think truthiness highlights that we all have a strong emotional attachment to our sense of truth.

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We overlook the role and value of social ‘illusions’: We think of illusions as being not aligned with reality, so simply wrong. This makes it impossible to discuss the usefulness and ubiquity of social illusions to enable a society to function. In this meaning, an illusion is an idea that humans treat as if it were a concrete thing. If we can't talk about them, we can’t draw a distinction between useful⁴ shared social illusions (e.g. money, nationhood, rights, truth) and dangerous illusions (status, nationalism, white supremacy).

We can't distinguish natural human bias and purposeful warping: We mix up concepts of subjectivity. Firstly, we can't distinguish the unavoidable subjectivity of perception, interpretation and use of words from the subjectivity resulting from power structures allowing only selected people the opportunity to contribute to the social construction of truth. We forget that any understanding of the world necessarily belongs to a person, and every person holds a specific perspective on the world.

Secondly, because we assume truth is objective, we equate subjectivity with ‘non-truth’. Thus we can’t distinguish between normal human biases in interpreting reality (perspective, context, experience) and purposeful bias and warping of information to manipulate other people (advertising and propaganda).

We neglect our own skills and capacities to engage with the social construction of truth: Because we don't understand how we know truth, we don’t necessarily see the value of developing skills to participate in the social construction of truth. We also don't develop skills to defend ourselves against deliberate 'non-truths'.

We can't explain how easily truth can be manipulated – people must be stupid: The many ways to manipulate truth revealed by advertising and lobbying have failed to impact our attachment to the journey metaphor. We can read articles about how repetition allows a lie to seem like truth, how social media profits from people’s cognitive biases, etc. But when we think someone (else) has been tricked by the professional or ideological truth manipulators, we conclude people are just stupid.

We can’t consider the idea of different truths: We can't even talk about the idea of different truths to explore how that can happen. There is right (ME), wrong (YOU) and changing your wrong view to my right view. The journey metaphor only allows us to say those who disagree with us are wrong (and probably stupid) because they are on the wrong path.

We can't distinguish between various types of 'non-truths', and the motivations behind them: We can only talk about the content of a disputed truth. We can't talk about problems in the process of constructing truth, pinpoint the sources of difference – the ‘other truth’ is just wrong. So we can’t productively explain variations of 'non-truth' – lies, gaslighting, fiction, ideology, grand narratives, historical rewriting, alternative facts, Santa Claus, Fox News, propaganda, etc., etc., We can only think of people who adopt them as misguided, stupid, or malicious.

We distinguish between truth and belief – misleadingly: Because we think of truth as an objective thing (supported by evidence) and belief as a subjective idea (without evidence), we draw a distinction between them that excludes any exploration of the process of developing a sense of truth as meaningful beliefs about the world. However, they are both abstract constructs, not things. I think this unhelpful and unclear distinction between the terms truth and belief may be an artefact of adopting the journey metaphor from religion, when these words had a different relationship.

We don’t see propaganda till it traps us: We can't put our finger on what is wrong with propaganda (as explored in part 9). We focus on it being flawed in 'alignment with reality', so we think fact-checking is the answer, while the propagandists set about destroying the social construction process itself. We fail to question the motivations of those who propose they are the single source of truth. And we’re often not too worried about a single source of truth anyway; that’s what the journey metaphor suggests we need to find.

We forgive too much for our higher truth: Because the concept of truth as about facts does not meet our needs for belonging, agency and safety, we find the idea of a 'higher truth' appealing. We are drawn to people who say they have the ‘simple absolute truth’ that they intuit about the world and can give to the people. We forgive lies and distortions of fact in the service of this higher truth. We accept ideological lies and give power to proto-fascists, cult leaders and ideological extremists in exchange for their 'higher truth'.

Leading us up the garden path

Because we inherited the journey metaphor from religion without considering if it even fits what we now say that truth is – alignment with reality - we continue to have a quasi-religious relationship with truth.

Based on the journey metaphor, we think of truth as objective, absolute, external to humans, and we say that if something does not achieve those criteria, then it is not truth.

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Faced with the copious evidence that humans are incapable of finding such a truth due to our neurology, biology, psychology, language skills, social groupings and behaviours, etc. we get distressed. If truth is not objective, absolute and external, then we fear that nothing is certain, nothing is stable, nothing means anything.

We want our experience of reality to match the metaphor. 

When we can't achieve these criteria, we conclude there must be no truth. Nothing is real. 

But truth is real and it's very important. It's just not objective, absolute and 'out there'.

We are drawn to those criteria because they reflect what will meet our human needs for belonging, agency, safety, meaning, certainty. We create an abstract idea called truth as an expression of deep human needs. Then we confuse and confound ourselves because of the metaphor we use to think about it.

The journey metaphor leads us right up the garden path. (Just in case you haven’t had enough metaphors yet!)

Replacing the flawed metaphor

The journey metaphor does not help us think about what kind of thing truth is, how the concept of truth relates to reality, how humans really determine truth, how to reconcile that people can hold different versions of truth, and how to identify and deal with the many variations of non-truth. Or what the hell post truth is!

Kellert's final aspect to consider if a metaphor is good is need. Need is whether we could do better without the metaphor. Lack of need exists when a metaphor creates new problems through thinking biases and assumptions, poorly identified concepts, blind spots, etc. I think we can safely say the journey metaphor creates numerous problems and gives us no options to develop new thinking. We don't need it. 

In sum, the journey metaphor does not fit and is not useful for thinking about truth, we’re not aware of that, and we don't need the additional problems it creates. The journey metaphor for truth fails all the aspects of a good metaphor.

We try to get around these metaphoric problems by talking about the real truth (facts), a deeper truth, a higher truth, an answer for post-truth. But they don’t help us understand truth either.

We sure have a lot to sort out, and we need a better metaphor to help us think. We should replace the flawed journey metaphor with something that fits, has utility and about which we can remain aware.

I think the house construction metaphor meets that need.

Footnotes

1. For a fantastic exploration of metaphors in thinking, read The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature, a book by psychologist Steven Pinker from 2007.
2. Kellert, S. H. (2008). Borrowed knowledge: chaos theory and the challenge of learning across disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
3. 'Non-truth' is my catch-all term for all those words we use to label what we consider not to be truth; includes fiction, lies, illusions, propaganda etc. 
4. Useful but not without problems.

Images, used under Creative Commons Licences where provided

• Garden path: Tony Hammond (imaged cropped to fit blog style)
• https://www.flickr.com/photos/8525214@N06/4219442138/in/photostream/ [CC BY-SA-NC]
• John Daugman quote created by the author with text from Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory, Neurophilosophical Foundations in Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A reader (2001) W. Bechtel, P. Mandik, J. Mundale, and R. S. Stufflebeam, Editors Basil Blackwell, 2001
• Thinking inside the box  https://insidethearts.com/sticksanddrones/context-versus-urtext-part-3-thinking-inside-the-box/ [CC BY-NC-ND]
• What refutes science snipped from social media [No source]
• Gandhi quote: Truth is one snipped from social media [No source]
• Why people ignore facts various comments snipped from social media [No sources provided]
• Perception of the world via our sensory organs https://www.philosophicalanthropology.net/2015/12/life-ultimate-deception.html?spref=pi [CC BY]
• Karl Popper quote created by the author with text from The Marginalian book review in 2017 of In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/01/26/karl-popper-in-search-of-a-better-world-truth-certainty/  
• Hannah Arendth quote created by the author with text from The Marginalian 
• https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/16/hannah-arendt-the-life-of-the-mind/  1981
• Freud quote from HDQuote https://www.quotemaster.org/Illusion#&gid=1&pid=1 [Used under terms] 
• Alternative facts library sign Snipped from social [No source]
• Garden path 2: Wildroof https://www.flickr.com/photos/wildroof/8266500499 [CC BY]
• The house is waiting for us (image cropped to fit blog style) https://lehighvalleyramblings.blogspot.com/2011/08/want-10000-home.html [CC BY-ND]