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By Root 646 0

’s heart for poor reasons. Imagine someone liking a candidate simply because he keeps self-identifying as a good Christian. Well, we’ve seen enough politicians play that game to know that it doesn’t mean very much. In the twenty-fourth installment of the 434-part series “Better Know a District,”85 Colbert exposed Georgia Congressman Westmoreland’s inability to cite the Ten Commandments that the congressman so ardently felt must be displayed in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Westmoreland may or may not be a good Christian, but certainly a person who assumed that he was a good Christian on the basis of his political posturing would be acting foolishly. But this doesn’t mean that we should avoid trying to get know someone’s heart altogether. We don’t normally trust strangers like we would an old friend because we haven’t built up enough experiences with them. Our trust grows as our experience builds our sense of their character. We can always trust them too soon or misread them, but the method of assessing character isn’t itself at fault.

So what does knowing someone’s heart really mean? A claim to know someone’s heart is a claim to know what they value and how they are disposed to act in certain situations. This is a factual claim (which can always be wrong and unsupported, of course, but need not be).

Similar reflections will lead us to the same conclusion about the gut. If Colbert means something like intuitions, that is, that something feels right, these too have an important role to play in decision making. Gut feelings may be the result of repeated experience with similar situations. Think about the last time you got a bad feeling about someone. Maybe you were picking up on body language and subtle signs that reminded you of other bad experiences. We pick up on and process lots of information that isn’t at the center of our attention. So gut feelings may be the result of lots of experience being unconsciously processed.

Intuitions may even indicate something like rational ‘instincts’. Often people have trouble articulating the line of thinking that leads them to a conclusion. This isn’t to say that the brain didn’t process information. It’s just that the process might not be available for easy recall. A common example is found in introductory philosophy classes: Maybe someone can’t “prove” why they think that the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful God eliminates the possibility of personal human freedom, but this isn’t to say that there isn’t an implicit logic to it that the person simply has difficulty making explicit.

So a gut feeling does in all likelihood lend itself to some assertion of fact and will be the result of some kind of evidence. We are in the same position again: it’s not that gut intuitions are bad in themselves, but that they may be misused. Gut feelings aren’t infallible (sorry, Stephen, but the gut is not like the Pope of the Torso), but they are worthy components of any deliberation. Truthiness, if understood as the preferring of personal intuitions and experiences over claims to fact coming from others, may not always be bad. Authorities can indeed be wrong (experts often disagree, after all, so some of them must be wrong), and personal convictions need not be baseless. It depends on the situation whether this preference is justified.

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Surely we now see why the out-of-character Colbert understands truthiness in terms of someone abandoning “facts” to privilege her own “selfish” perspective. This is backed up by the examples of the in-character Stephen. While Stephen only defines truthiness in terms of heart and gut, with skepticism of authority, his examples are always of individuals who seem to doubt only the authorities that inconvenience the view they already hold. The character of Stephen is himself one who goes with his gut when the rest of us know that he shouldn’t. (I mean, come on, bears aren’t really that evil!) So Colbert complains that public discourse is all just perspective now, without any responsibility to objective facts.