A prelude to post-truth

Well, this post has been harder than usual to wrangle into shape.

The word I am currently exploring is post-truth and what it tells us about how we think about the word and concept truth. 

By 'we' I mean you and I (not so much philosophers or religious writers or scientists who write a lot about it!) So, I'm making some assumptions about how you think about truth. It may be wrong, but I have to.

As a prelude to the series, perhaps you could ponder how you think about this difficult concept. Then you will be ready to check and challenge my assumptions. 

Do you think of truth as a set of objective facts, a principle, a collection of slippery contestable ideas, one interpretation among many? Who decides what the truth is? Why do you think humanity needs to know the truth? How have you felt when what you had believed to be true is shown to actually be false? How do you think about some of the strange and discredited ideas that people believed to be true in the past?  Despite the recent flurry around relativism and the current palaver about post-truth, do you nevertheless continue to think - or feel - that truth exists? 

What does the word truth mean to you? And given that, how does the word post-truth relate to that idea. If you had to think of an image or picture for humanity's relationship to truth, what might that image be? 

So many questions.

That's what I've been exploring and drawing, among too many other things to get this finished. I've changed direction several times, as the concept of truth seems to resist close scrutiny.  

Essentially, I have no answers to the many questions, but I have got a nice picture. And a new, improved, and more useful metaphor for truth.

Hopefully I can share it soon, if the world will permit.

TATKOP 128

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who see the world as 'us and them' and those with their eyes open.

  

See more in the TATKOP series.

Enough - when it means anything but

In part 1, I explored the reasons the word enough is spelled so weirdly, and traced over 1000 years of the history of the English language to do so. 

Source

In recent times, numerous attempts have been made to make English spelling more regular, less chaotic, but all have failed. Yes, there really was a group called the Speling Reform Asoshiasun. 

So enough continues to be spelled as enough. 

Spelling is one of the areas of language; it changes over time through popular use, but history shows it rarely does so through dictate and rule making. 

However, it's in popular use that the word enough gets totally weird. Enough might occasionally be spelled enuf, and we get it; but sometimes its meaning changes within a single sentence. And we get that too. That's why 'Enuf is enuf' makes sense.

The way we use words beyond their literal meaning can tell us so much about ourselves. 

What can we learn by exploring the word enough? 

From Nandini Pandey

Wordly Inspiration from Nandini Pandey, pondering the value, quandary and therapeutic benefit of writing during a pandemic. 

Nandini writes about the classics and this is a reflection on Ovid's poems Tristia (sad poems) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea):

"But when the universe is collapsing in flames, there is a certain solace in building new little worlds on the page. In ordering words, wrestling thoughts into sense, giving fixable form to chaos when we can put right so little else. In reaching out from our own isolation to fellow humans in theirs, by a means that’s no substitute for human contact, but that’s managed on occasion to survive “Jupiter’s anger, fire and sword, the gnawing tooth of time.”

That’s what Ovid’s exile poems teach us: the consolation not of philosophy, but of poetry, in its original, almost magical sense of making."

See more Wordly Inspiration.

Enough - when enuf is not enauph

A group of protestors paced outside the annual local spelling bee. 

Ruly protestors Source

But they weren't protesting about the spelling bee. Their protest was against spelling itself.

'Simplify English spelling!', they demanded. Their posters read, 'Spelling shuud bee lojical' and 'enuf is enuf!'.

The spelling bee continued unaffected inside, as young students spelled nemesis, apartheid and campanile. Enough wasn't on the list though! 

The protestors eventually went home, having pointed out what we all know: English spelling seems chaotic and inconsistent. 

Why can't it be simpler? Why isn't enough spelled as enuf? And even though it isn't, why does 'Enuf is enuf' make sense anyway? 

TATKOP 127

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who seek heros for inspiration and those who prefer villains. 

See more in the TATKOP series.

 

The market - a solution to what? Part 2

In part 1, I explored the nature of 'the market'. The word is ubiquitous but often quite vague.

So far, I have clarified 'the market' is a process for allocating resources for humans. The economy is very complex, so some simplifying ideas are essential: 'the market' simplifies ideas about the world into 'things', 'ownership' and 'utility (use value)'. 

When an old meme is perfect. Source

Knowing that, I want to explore the idea of a 'market-based solution'. To the problem of ensuring enough apples and turnips to meet the food needs of people, it seems reasonable. But for the problem of ensuring clean air for people to breathe, I can't see that as a matter of 'things', 'ownership' and 'utility'. 

So how does the market provide a solution? To answer this, I need to delve into how 'the market' process functions and how it measures success and failure.

Now, a warning: this exploration involves some nerdy, abstract, and perplexingly vague economic words. My focus, however, is not economics jargon, but the ideas about the world that economics relies on to explain the way 'the market' works. 

Economics¹ can make you feel confused and lost, but my suspicion has always been that it is deliberately opaque. So, stay with me!

In fact, as you're about to read, it is downright strange and scary.