Friday, August 3, 2018

What Is Truth?


President Spanky is despised for his cruelty, racism, misogyny, etc., but a major reason is that he isn’t truthful. He’s a liar, unlike any liar ever seen before on our national stage. He’s not Washington or Honest Abe. This begs a basic question: “What is truth?”

Some might believe that the truth is what a majority of people decide is the truth, but we don’t evaluate truthfulness by voting. That’s not how it works. 

Some think that the truth is an absolute that exists whether people recognize it or not, which is like believing in unicorns. 

“Truth“ is a word people made up. Trees and cats have no sense of truth. It’s a human word.

Like most words, “truth” has many different uses in English (a language people made up), and those uses are its different meanings.

Someone tells the truth, as far as we are concerned, when something she says meets certain common standards. If she says she saw a full moon in the night sky, we believe her if she has a photograph or credible witnesses or we can see it ourselves or if scientists present evidence or whatever. If she has witnesses and it turns out that they were on LSD, we may decide that the evidence is inadequate. She may be deluded or lying. But there is no mystery, and Trump is a liar.


What Trump is doing now is insisting that evidence of his lying, which we experience as reality, is fake. Reality is fake. See: Orwell. 

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