Beyond Feelings

CHAPTER 3 What Is Truth?
the discovery of eighty bodies (and the hint of hundreds more)
under the volcanic ash revealed that many from Herculaneum had
also been trapped. 7
• Your grandparents probably learned that there are eight planets
in our solar system. Since Pluto was discovered in 1930, your
parents and you learned there are nine. Then Joseph L. Brady of the
University of California suggested there might be ten. 8 But more
recently Pluto was removed from the list.
• After morphine was used by doctors for some years as a painkiller,
it was found to be addictive. The search began for a nonaddictive
substitute. What was found to take its place? Heroin! 9
Truth Is Discovered, Not Created
Let’s review what our evaluation has revealed. First, our ideas and beliefs
are unavoidably influenced by other people’s, particularly in childhood.
Second, perception and memory are imperfect. Third, our information
can be inaccurate or incomplete. Add to this the fact, noted in Chapter 2,
that some people’s thinking skills are woefully meager and/or ineffectively
used, and the idea that “everyone creates his or her own truth”
becomes laughable. We do create something, all right, but it is not truth. It
is beliefs, ideas that we accept as true but that could easily be false.
What, then, is the most reasonable view of truth? The truth about
something is what is so about it—the facts in their exact arrangement and
proportions. Our beliefs and assertions are true when they correspond to
that reality and false when they do not.
Did time run out before the basketball player got the shot off? How
does gravity work? Who stole your hubcaps? Are there time/space limits
to the universe? Who started the argument between you and your neighbor
last weekend? Have you been working up to your potential in this
course? To look for the truth in such matters is to look for the answer that
fits the facts, the correct answer.
Truth is apprehended by discovery, a process that favors the curious
and the diligent. Truth does not depend on our acknowledgment of it,
nor is it in any way altered by our ignorance or transformed by our wishful
thinking. King Tut’s tomb did not spring into existence when archaeologists
dug it up; it was there waiting to be discovered. Art forgeries are
not genuine when people are fooled and then fake when the deception
is revealed. Cigarette smoking is not rendered harmless to our health
because we would prefer it to be so.
Much of the confusion about truth arises from complex situations in
which the truth is difficult to ascertain or express. Consider a question like
Are there really UFOs that are piloted by extraterrestrial beings? Although
the question is often hotly debated and people make assertions that purport
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