I have just started reading The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent, described as "A cognitive history of man's search for meaning." – Right up my street!
Reading the opening chapters on how language developed, how communal thinking came to be a thing, and the anthropological approaches currently being combined with recent advances in neuroscience, made me realise yet again what a malleable thing the truth is.
Even in the scientific world the best any particular version of the truth can claim is that it is a currently working hypothesis. In fact one of the strengths of the scientific method is that it acknowledges this and is continually testing existing hypotheses and "improving" them.
But one of the points of the book is that what "improving" means changes over time. Our overarching narratives of what life means steer our day to day experiences and determine what sort of truths we seek proof for.
While I worry that we appear to have a generation of politicians in charge who have an even more loose than ever grasp of the truth, the fact that it is making apparent how consensual these truths are will, in the long run, prove to be a good thing.
So much of ‘Truth’ is based on our language and our ontology. Heidegger, Wittgenstein and even Descartes still offer a lot we can learn from.
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So true. Kids should be being taught philosophy at school not maths!
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