How something appears is always a matter of perspective…
But how something really is, is always a matter of truth.
How can you tell if someone is lying?
I spend most of my social media time on Twitter and I see a lot of people say all sorts of ridiculous, false, and inaccurate things. Sometimes it’s immediately obvious but how can you tell when someone holds an opinion or shares a perspective that Is blatantly false and untrue?
Perspective is defined as a particular way of considering something. It is a way of viewing something, an angle from which something can be seen. The unique thing about perspective lies in its definition, it is only a view of something from a specific angle, which means that you can see different views of one thing when you change your angle (and the mental fluidity to do this is an important skill). It is also such that what you see from one angle will be different from what someone else would see from a different angle. Perspective has much to do with where you are standing and what angle your view is from. Truth on the other hand is distinctive from perspective such that where you stand, your view or angle does not change the true/overall state of a thing.
Perspective is like a 2D drawing, which shows height and length information from a specific direction of view on a flat surface but without depth.
A significant motivation for this post came from the frequent instances where people equate their experiences or perspectives to truth, mistaking part of a story to mean the whole story.
Nothing is as persuasive as what you’ve experienced firsthand.
Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced firsthand, but persuasion is not a validation for truth. So, caution should be taken not to make personal experiences the base for truth. For example, Someone could go on to say; for the past 20 years they’ve gotten out of bed at 5 am to have a productive life, so the best time for everyone to get out of bed is 5 am. I hope you can see the point in here, extrapolating personal experiences into standard laws, rules and facts seem prevalent these days with social media.
If the person looking through the cylinder in the image above assumes the object is a circle, that would not be true since there’s more to it than just one view. But when the person looks at it from the side, he would see a square shape which is also just the projection of the cylinder from a particular perspective. Therefore, for a complete view, multiple perspectives must be employed to properly understand that, what is in front of you is a cylinder. Saying it’s a circle or a square will not make it true nor change the shape and true state of the object in view, even though it can be true that a circle or square is what you see from a specific angle, this is merely a projection, it does not change the real state and shape of the object (cylinder)
How something appears is always a matter of perspective…
But how something really is, is always a matter of truth.
You can see perspective as a 2D drawing while truth would be more of a 3D picture which shows a more complete and multi-dimensional view and representation of an object.
A significant number of people now equate feelings, and personal experiences to truth, with most going on to preach those experiences as truth, shoving it down other people’s throats to be accepted or followed universally. They do this breaking every law of logic to make little sense.
How you see a thing or how you feel about a thing is not what makes the thing. For example, if I’m typing this on a Monday night, feeling like it’s a Saturday evening will not change the fact or reality of when I typed it. Feelings are great and important but it’s necessary to understand that they don’t dictate or always imply what is true. You can have feelings about something that turns out to be true (exactly how you felt it), but that thing is not true because of your feelings. Say you see the cloud gathering and you then feel that it’s going to rain tomorrow and it does rain the next day, you’d be correct about your feelings. But the point to note is that it did not rain the next day because you felt it. You didn’t ‘feel’ it into reality. You might think this is obvious and everybody should get it but plug in a few examples from the hot topics in society today and you’ll see how not-so-obvious it is to many people.
There is:
i) Mere emotional expression of what we feel is true or hope and convince ourselves to be true.
and
ii) there is what we’ve experienced, and seen to be true. That is; we see it from a certain point of view and conclude that’s all there is to it.
Finally:
iii) There is the truth. Objective truth.
This further begs the question of objective truth, how can you evaluate it, what is real, who defines it and how can you know it?
What is truth?
To be frank the definition of truth can be very simple. At least before you get too philosophical about it.
Simply put, Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality (merriam-webster Dictionary)
Two key elements of truth are; Truth must correspond to reality and it must also be coherent i.e logical, and consistent with reality. For example, If I say “The Zuma Rock is located in Nigeria” this will be true if the Zuma Rock is actually located in Nigeria. My claim would have to match the reality of Zuma Rock’s location in Nigeria. If I say: “A ball thrown up from my hand will fall to the ground” this claim will be true if the thrown ball falls to the ground. The claim and belief here do not only correspond to reality but also cohere with it and fit into a whole system of beliefs such as gravity, and our visual perception amongst others.
So, things that do not correspond to reality or are logically inconsistent would be considered, doubtful, far from the truth, or false. For example; if I say “My kitten is also my dog” you might think either something is wrong with me or I’m making a joke since the different animals can’t be the same. If I came to you and said “Europe is a country in Africa” you might think I’m ill-informed, joking, or crazy. But say we are both ill-informed or uninformed when I make some of these false statements, how can you tell if my claim is true or false?
The Three Tests of Truth
1. Logical consistency: is what is being said consistently logical? Do they fit together in a way that makes sense without contradiction?
2. Empirical adequacy: is there any evidence to support what is being said or claimed?
3. Experiential relevance: does the claim apply in real life?
What you say to be true can not just be true in theory it must also be relevant to what is actually experienced, It has to be coherent with what we experience in life.
Classical Theories of Truth and Postmodernism
It is worth mentioning three classical theories of truth. But perhaps the most important to discuss in this article is postmodernism.
The three classical theories of truth are:
The correspondence theory of truth — Correspondence theory of truth, roughly, is the idea that truth is a matter of a proposition (that is, a belief, thought, statement, representation) corresponding to reality; such that truth is obtained when reality is the way a proposition represents it to be. For example, if I say I was born in Nigeria and that corresponds to the fact and reality (not feelings) that my birthplace is Nigeria. Or say I am a man and that corresponds to the reality (not feelings) of my gender. But If I say I am an elephant, (because I feel like it) that would not correspond to the reality that I was born of a human being and would not match the reality that I have two hands and two legs, that I can speak and write the English language… not corresponding to the reality of what an elephant is.
The coherence theory of truth — According to the coherence theory, a belief (statement, proposition, representation) is true if and only if it coheres well with our other justified beliefs.
So, the truth of something according to this theory is not a matter of whether a belief matches reality in the external world, but it is rather the function of the belief’s relationship with other beliefs within one’s web of beliefs. “I was born in Nigeria” would be true if my mother delivered me as a baby in Nigeria.
If this is 2024, and Sam is 24 years old then it would cohere with the belief that Sam was born before 2010.
The pragmatic theory of truth — This theory holds that true statements are those that work for us and meet our needs better than their alternatives. According to this theory, a belief is true if it is useful to have it and if it gives desirable results for the maximization of happiness or pleasure. So, If I say I am an elephant (because I feel like it) and it makes me feel good about myself then according to this theory, It would be true that I am an elephant.
Before moving on to Postmodernism, it is important to mention that the topic of truth and these theories have been around for thousands of years, and as you read them it’s easy to see which ones are illogical and which holds more water, or passes the test for truth. These theories have also all had their criticism, but Postmodernism which is an expanded form of the pragmatic theory of truth has become popular in recent years, having significant impact shaping the society we live in and it’s worth talking about.
Postmodernism (Why exactly is that?)
[Given the current social time we are in, a discussion of truth would be incomplete without any analysis of postmodernism, but doing so in a brief way is a challenge. It’s a challenge for two major reasons, the concept of postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from several academic backgrounds, and it is difficult to characterize postmodernism in a way that seems fair to this diversity.
Additionally, part of the nature of postmodernism is a rejection of certain things—for example, Postmodernism rejects the Idea of truth, objective rationality, and authorial meaning in texts along with the existence of stable verbal meanings and universally valid linguistic definitions—that make accurate definitions possible. But since its friends and foes understand it well enough to discuss the view it is still possible to provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general.
From a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about things such as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self, and other notions.
So, a core belief of postmodernism is that; “there is no objective truth.” But this itself is self-contradictory as the statement would be false for it to be correct. The statement “there is no objective truth” is a truth statement that is trying to disprove the existence of truth.
Postmodernism views “reality” as a social construction. It states that Language creates reality, and what is real for one linguistic group may be unreal for another. Therefore, God exists relative to Christians but does not exist relative to atheists. Additionally, it states that the basic laws of logic are Western constructs, and in no way are they to be taken as universally valid laws of reality itself.
According to postmodernism, this would also mean that “The earth is flat” is true to flat earthers but not true to scientists who claim the earth is not flat.
Postmodernism claims that we have no way to get to reality and, since we know nothing about it, reality itself is a useless notion and, for all practical purposes, it can simply be ignored.
There is no objective truth, no God’s eye view of things. Rather, all thought is historically and socially conditioned.
It also rejects dichotomous thinking. Dichotomous thinking occurs when someone thinks in polar opposites or divides a range of phenomena into two groups and goes on to claim that one is better than the other.
Here are some dichotomies:
real/unreal,
true/false,
rational/irrational,
right/wrong,
virtue/vice,
good/bad,
beautiful/ugly.
Each pair represents a dichotomy in which the first member is to be preferred to the second. By contrast, postmodernists claim that assertions that employ these terms are relative to a widely diverse range of groups constituted by a shared language, narrative, and culture. Thus, there are as many ways of dividing these pairs, as there are groups that divide them because all such divisions are social constructions.
According to postmodernism, an item of language, such as a literary text, does not have an authorial meaning, at least one that is accessible to interpreters. Meaning, the author is in no privileged position to interpret his own work. In fact, the meaning of a text is created by and resides in the community of readers who share an interpretation of the text.
Postmodernism claims that there is no neutral standpoint from which to approach the world, and so observations, beliefs, and so forth are nothing objective but perspectival constructions that reflect the viewpoint implicit in one’s web of beliefs.] [1]
Postmodernism as explained above captures very well the ideas that motivated this article and a lot of what is wrong with our society these days.
It also makes you wonder how they manage to explain their point of view or beliefs.
If you check through many of the claims, postmodernism is incredibly self-refuting.
That is, if postmodernism is true, then by that same definition the idea of postmodernism itself is false. But somehow these illogical, self-conflicting, and self-defeating arguments are what you hear out there these days. That is, that there is no such thing as truth, there are no dichotomies, no beautiful, no ugly, no good and no bad, no true and no false…maybe the idea of postmodernism now sounds stupid as you’ve read to this point. Still, many people have these beliefs and I hope that you are more reasonable enough to not be as delusional.
Wrapping up
The next time someone tells you “This is my truth” or the next time you read someone making a big claim that seems far from the truth, put such claims through the test of truth or check what theory of truth the person is speaking from and evaluate with the three tests of truth.
Understanding different perspectives while pursuing the truth has its benefits but the truth will always stand tall.
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. – Winston Churchill
Sources:
[1] Paraphrashed excerpt from Chapter 6.3 of Philosophical Foundations for a Christian worldview by by J. P. Moreland, & William Lane Craig.