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There has been much discussion since at least 2016 about the concept of “post-truth”...
Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
—Wikipedia
...but this notion presumes that we had an era of truth. What truth did we have? Let's review...
“A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality.”
—Thomas Aquinas
Cool, as long as you know what external reality is.
“A theory of knowledge which maintains that truth is a property primarily applicable to any extensive body of consistent propositions, and derivatively applicable to any one proposition in such a system by virtue of its part in the system.”
—Cornelius Benjamin
OK, but a given “system” is not necessarily tied to anything real or practical. I can create a coherent system in which all kuki are mumar, but this system may have no relevance to anything at all.
The truth can never be “your truth” because The Truth is Jesus.
—Christianity.com
Uh...right. You're not supposed to think about it. You're supposed to accept it. Jesus is The Truth, whatever that means.
Pragmatic truth refers to the idea that the truth of a statement is determined by its practical consequences and usefulness rather than correspondence with an objective reality. This concept, closely associated with the philosophy of Pragmatism pioneered by thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, suggests that beliefs are to be judged by their effects on behavior and actions.
In this view, a proposition is true if it works satisfactorily or if believing in its truth leads to successful outcomes. Pragmatic truth doesn't necessarily negate the possibility of an objective reality but emphasizes that understanding and evaluating truth can be highly dependent on context, human goals, and experiences.
That's what Phi-3 told me, anyway.
Of these notions of truth, Pragmatism seems the most relevant to our predicament. What if we're not simply suffering from liars, bullshitters, and lunatics, but rather suffering from many different people's different pragmatic truths? As the author of _On Bullshit_ himself wrote:
But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
—Harry Frankfurt, _On Bullshit_
It's not a far stretch to say that for many people, “truth” is whatever judgment makes them feel good. They're not trying to lie; they're not trying to bullshit; they're just trying to live with themselves and this world.
If you're looking for truth, go find it; just don't expect anyone else to recognize it as truth.