In search of Petersons truth

In search of Peterson’s truth
Introducing the Gronk reality
Figure 1 is a sketch that tries to reconcile the views of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson when referring
to truth. Physical realty here contains the real, fundamental but unknowable truth. Think of this truth
as the population mean, with the population being all time and space. We only ever sample this
truth through our existence, and even though we can improve our samples with tools like science,
we can never step outside our conceptual bubble to rub noses with this truth. We are only ever
acquainted with it through models. This is the opposite to Plato’s conception of reality and truth,
which he saw lying in the world of forms. Plato’s cave proffers it is this conceptual world that is the
place of real truth, and our experience in the material world is a poor grasp of the ideal, reflected
through the material and interpreted in the psychological. With ideal or imposed truth there is no
necessary reference to science or physical reality and instead truth is socially constructed, it is
personal and subjective. Religious truth and revelation might occupy this space, and I think an
element of Peterson’s truth resides here. But Peterson shifts from this space with his rejection of
social constructivism, gender studies and intersectionality.
One could hold that real truth resides in physical reality but this is unknowable as it is only sampled
with finite and imperfect observations. It can thus only ever be approximated through models –
conceptual models, strengthened and verified by, for example, the tools of science, into scientific
theoretical models. This I believe is the truth Sam Harris was arguing for – a scientific truth, an
approximation of the real truth (the best approximation we have). Jordan Peterson’s truth seems to
be a more pragmatic truth. While he openly scorns the idea of truth being subjective and residing
conceptually in the ideal, he does argue that something is true based on its usefulness, based on its

contribution to meaning and purpose. The negotiated realty (named here as the Gronk reality after
Aronson’s exercise in collaborative learning) is where both truths reside and collide. The negotiated
reality exists through collective attempts to approximate reality, and verify these models against data
but also their usefulness to us. But what is useful?
Scientific explanations as a map of reality and a guide to continued existence
While undoubtedly our best approximation of reality, scientific truth is still an approximation of truth
and differs from pragmatic truth which also exists in the Gronk reality. Imagine our scientific
endeavours structured into a map that allows us to negotiate reality – after all the aims of science to
describe, predict, explain, and control all point towards making sense of the physical world – but this
sense must be conceptual in nature, because it is not reality itself but a model, or a map. Now, this
map has areas of ignorance and there may be dragons. Until scientific inquiry illuminates those parts
of our reality, we can only speculate through reason as to what lies out there. But imagine this map
suggested a trajectory for humankind and we used it to pilot humanity, progressively forward. And
we sailed, all of us, as a species into some iceberg, some missed thing, an existential threat that was
unforeseen, or not mapped correctly. Could we say the map was wrong? If the map was wrong, it
cannot be true? Or what if by some fluke, some misunderstanding or false theory we accidentally
avoided total annihilation. That mistake had utility, it had a truth about it according to Peterson.

In the Gronk reality something is true if it provides us with sufficient correspondence to reality that it
enables our survival to approximate reality (seek truth) again. As ultimately an infinity of seeking
truth will perfectly approximate that truth (based on the law of large numbers – Fig 3). Important to
note is that each approximation doesn’t progressively and iteratively get closer to the truth, but
averaging out these approximations over an infinite time scale is how you get to real truth. And we
can only get there, if we survive as a species – which I think is at the core of Peterson’s Darwinian
conceptualisation of truth. Each one of those squiggles, at any time could be science massively
misjudging some element of reality. That is not intended to undermine science as our best way of
knowing.
So the Gronk reality is the stage where pragmatic truth and scientific truth compete to map out a
trajectory for us to allow us simply seek truth for another day, make better approximations with
more data, more time, more living and being. This aligns very well with Peterson’s idea of truth being
assessed by its consequences.