Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero [11]
For a long time surgeons used talc on the rubber gloves they wear while performing surgery. Then they discovered it could be poisonous. So they switched starch only to find that it too can have a toxic effect on surgical patients.1
Film authorities were certain they were familiar with all the films the late Charlie Chaplin ever made. Then in 1982 a previously unknown film was discovered in a British screen archive vault.2
For hundreds of years historians believed that, though the people of Pompeii were trapped by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the people of neighboring Herculaneum escaped. Then the discovery of eighty bodies (and the hint of hundreds more) under the volcanic ash revealed that many from Herculaneum were also trapped.3
Your grandparents probably learned that there are eight planets in our solar system. Since Pluto was discovered in 1930, your parents and you learned there are nine. But if the observations of Joseph L. Brady of the University of California prove correct, your children will learn there are ten.4
After morphine was used by doctors for some years as a painkiller, it was found to be addictive. The search began for a nonaddictive substitute. What was found to take its place? Heroin.5
TRUTH: A DEFINITION
Where does all this leave us? If an individual can be wrong and even the most widely endorsed conviction of an age is not necessarily correct, what can truth be?
The truth about something is what is so about it, the facts about it in their exact arrangement and proportions. Did time run out before the field goal was kicked? How does gravity work? Who stole your hubcaps? Are there time/space limits to the universe? Who started the argument between you and your mother last weekend? Have you been working up to your potential in this course? To look for the truth in any of these matters is to look for the correct answer, the answer that completely expresses reality in the matter. What ever difficulty we may find in discerning or stating the truth is beside the point.
That last sentence deserves emphasizing. Much of the confusion about truth arises from complex situations in which the truth is difficult to ascertain or express. Consider a question like "Are there really UFOs that are piloted by extraterrestrial beings? Although the question is often hotly debated, and people make assertions that purport to express the truth, there is not yet sufficient evidence to say we know the truth about UFOs. That, however, doesn't mean that there is no truth about them or that people who affirm their existence and people who deny it are equally correct. It means that whatever the truth is, we do not yet possess it.
Similar difficulty arises from many psychological and philosophical questions like "Why are some people heterosexual and other homosexual?" "Is the cause of criminality genetic or environmental or a combination of the two?" Are human beings inherently violent?" "Is there an afterlife?" "What constitutes success?" The answers to these questions, and to many of the issues you will encounter in the applications in this book, will often be incomplete or tentative. Yet that fact should not shake your conviction that there are truths to be discovered.
Having the right frame of mind can make your pursuit of the truth less burdensome and give it some of the adventure the greatest thinkers of history experienced. A good way to begin is to keep the following thought in mind: "I know I've got limitations and can easily be mistaken. And surely I'll never find all the answers I'd like to. But I can observe a little more accurately, weigh things a little more thoroughly, and make up my mind a little more carefully. If I do so, I'll be a little closer to the truth."