• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 649 0

worse! Since the information we rely on becomes overwhelming and our needs for information outpace our individual ability to process it, we often rely on others to provide it. That means we quite often turn to an authority to tell us what to believe even though we have no direct way of testing the ‘facts’ they provide. I believe in lots of stuff that scientists say even though my lab experience probably consists of just slightly more than turning a potato into a battery. We have to judge who the good mediators of information are, but we do this either by trusting the word of another authority we’ve already accepted or by going back to our own personal views and gut feelings. With a wide variety of perspectives then, we should also expect vast disagreement about which ‘facts’ are even ‘facts’ to begin with.

Since I share Colbert’s and Adams’ basic realist attitude, I don’t find this too troubling. I’m optimistic that the variety of opinion tends to congregate around approximate facts. But this view means that truthiness is not defined in opposition to the truth or facts, but that truthiness is one part of the orientation toward truth, as I will explain below. Indeed, this realist optimism may itself be an example of Colbert’s truthiness, of “something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist.” I want to believe that rationality and empirical evidence draw us as a community closer toward reliable objective perspectives, but I do so by explaining away the prevalence of young-earth Creationists as simply being those lagging behind the more progressive pack. “They’ll come around, or at least their kids will be a bit closer than they are.”

The Politics of Bullshit

So the distinction between what facts there are and what is left over as mere opinion is itself something that emerges from perspectives. One woman’s truth is another woman’s truthiness. This isn’t to say that there aren’t clear violations of being oriented toward the truth. Someone is oriented toward the truth if they genuinely want to know the way things are, not just bathe in the bliss of ignorance. And when we say things without any care to the truth of the matter, we are just spewing bullshit. Bullshit is far worse than the truthiness of the gut and the heart.

A truth-oriented person, while testing things out to find evidence for her beliefs, is trying to be aware of how she might fool herself. She is cautious about her beliefs, and so would be cautious about her gut feelings and character assessments. And because she’s cautious, she engages with others to find out the truth. If she disagrees with someone, she argues her point and listens to the other person’s argument. Why? If she’s wrong, she wants to know! If you’re actually interested in establishing the truth, you ought to take your own views seriously enough to defend them well on reasonable grounds, and take other’s views seriously enough to listen to them and test them by the same standards.

On the other side of things, someone who simply denies evidence without giving any explanation as to why has taken himself out of truth-oriented discourse. For example, if I show you a video of me and Stephen fighting with lightsabers, you can’t just deny that the video is genuine. You need to explain why. “You just used footage from his famous green screen challenge.” Your explanations move the examination from the ‘fact’ of the video to the evidence for your explanations. Now it’s my turn to defend my claim that I really did fight the Sith Lord Colbert. Maybe I compare the footage from the green screen to my video and show that his body movements are inconsistent with the alleged original. Nailed you, didn’t I? Well, that’s how truth-oriented discourse works.

For those engaged in truth-oriented discourse, some explanations are better than others. Sometimes people say stupid things in defense of their views. Consider Colbert’s May 5th, 2008, segment of the The WØRD, “Free Gas.” In it, Colbert’s satire suggests that both Senators Clinton and McCain were pandering to angry consumers by proposing