{"id":351,"date":"2022-11-19T15:41:59","date_gmt":"2022-11-19T15:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/?p=351"},"modified":"2022-11-19T15:42:01","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T15:42:01","slug":"objective-truth-and-being-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/objective-truth-and-being-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Objective Truth and Being Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A woman reluctantly tells her family at dinner that her feelings have changed when it comes to (insert controversial political opinion here)<\/strong><\/em><\/strong>. It comes as a shock to everyone in the family, and soon becomes the stuff of gossip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers, start asking themselves to varying degrees, \u201cWhat drives this person? What worldview, or disposition, or preference, or fear, has grasped her mental faculties just so?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a kind of life project, I try to stay away from this kind of analysis. Not because I don\u2019t find it invigorating, but because, if I\u2019m honest, it rarely gives me the catharsis I\u2019m looking for. Because I believe that so rarely does this kind of analysis actually take stock of what\u2019s being said. Instead it sounds to me like a nasty word-association game. You say \u201cPatriotism\u201d, and I say \u201cHitler.\u201d I say \u201cWomen\u2019s Rights\u201d and you say \u201cBaby Killer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We spend a lot of time in classrooms, in conversations, online, and in the news, talking about each other in this way. And I think that when we spend so much time talking about each other in this way, we start treating our experiences in a very un-serious way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If all of us, through our experience, are basically subjects of Progressivism, Neo-Conservatism, Post-modernism, Cubism\u2026 then there\u2019s no real need or incentive to talk about truth – we\u2019ve already setup the parameters. It\u2019s self-evident from the ropes around the ring, that what we are talking about is fundamentally Subjective<\/em> – a fight of semantics, ideas, social movements and constructs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So for me the question isn\u2019t: What are we subjects of<\/em> – what do our actions, our treatment of each other, say about our Subjective world? – as if we need to incessantly dig to uncover an underlying idea, lest we discover we\u2019ve been co-habitating with an unidentified “-ism.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more important question I think is: do I believe in truth? At least some of the time, is truth what we are aiming at when we talk about our likes and dislikes, our predispositions, our ethics, our opinions of our family. Are we concerned with saying something true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because if I do believe in truth in this way, then I also implicitly accept that I can be wrong. The things that give my life meaning might actually need to be changed. I can\u2019t accept their validity just on the basis of how strong I feel their conviction, or on the basis of how much I kicked ass in that verbal dispute inside that Subjective ring. I must look to sources outside myself, because I am a subjective creature, and I am almost certainly wrong about a great many things, the majority of which will likely be unclear to me for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A woman reluctantly tells her family at dinner that her feelings have changed when it comes to (insert controversial political opinion here). It comes as a shock to everyone in the family, and soon becomes the stuff of gossip. Her friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers, start asking themselves to varying degrees, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":352,"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions\/352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantswift.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}