Can Truth Come From Persuasion and Belief?

Pinocchio

Source: Public Domain (Credit: Enrico Mazzanti)

Let’s take a break from politics, along with all the discomforting news of the world that makes us feel helpless. I could suggest a Wordle competition. But no. Rather, for the sake of relaxation, consider the intellectual exercise of exploring the intimately entangled relationships of the words “truth,” “meaning,” and “communication” as one becomes mentally transported and influenced by a belief, a conviction, or evidence of something we might call truth.

I know, I know: Truth is a part of politics, and it has been in the news lately, or at least ever since Rudy Giuliani uttered that counter-tautological phrase: “Truth is not truth.” For now, however, let’s concentrate on the cerebral question: What is the perceptual trigger of truth when it comes to persuasion and belief?

Truth is a tricky word

One doesn’t have to believe in an assertion to make it true. We tend to use the word freely without much thought about what it means. It sits on a spectrum of accuracy. In mathematics, it is verifiable from almost ironclad logic; in law, where evidence is fiddly, it is elastic; in medicine, it depends on the care in finely tuning statistical research; and in political oratory, it is so flexibly distortable as to be duplicitous.

Psychologists have Belief Theory, which views persuasion as a cognitive reaction to opinions one hears from others to make sense of the world. In that sense, the brain expects confirmation that its past experiences, rising from vision, thoughts, and memories, come together like spokes on a wheel. But no wheel is perfect, so we wobble along on a wonky journey through trusts and doubts.

The meaning of truth escapes questioning in routine usage, yet it is critical to all human endeavors. In any discipline, truth—and hence, meaning—must communicate an emotional state, perhaps one that refers to an archetype packed in the history of one’s own experience. Our collective knowledge and experience shape our expectations, opinions, surprises, acceptance of facts—even doubts—and how we absorb and place our understandings into memory.

Truth and its meaning, through communication and the way it impacts our thoughts, do not simply come from the semantics in the vocabulary of its narration; it is not strictly a question of definition. Instead, we are asking for the engagement of the collective confirmation of evidence; we are asking to be conceptually brought on a journey to someplace unreachable except by way of common notions and hard facts. Believing something to be true or false comes from conscious and subconscious references to memorable experiences of trust and its consequences. When it comes to mathematics, however, truth takes on the question of impact—the “if, then” piece of logic that mathematicians are locked into by professional instinct and training.

In most fields, truth is the reward of supple evidence

In mathematics, truth is more rigid than in other fields. Every mathematician remembers a first proof, and within it, a magical moment of a sense that some things are beyond doubt. As with a first car, a first rented apartment, or a first kiss, it never fades from memory. Someplace during the workout of that proof is a moment when one feels persuaded that the proposition is true. It comes from interchanging thoughts, an activity by which ideas become swapped between individuals through a common language.

In mathematics, imparting thoughts and ideas come to us through our common sense, logic, and intelligence built from culture, education, environmental experiences, and innate knowledge. Truth in mathematics differs in many ways from meaning in music and poetry. And yet, there are some connections between questioning it in mathematics and questioning it in other fields.

Science has always been intimately connected to mathematics, even more so in this century with strongly supported interdisciplinary research. However, there is a difference between the evaluation of truth in mathematics and science. In science, imparted thoughts leading to truth come via real-world experimentation and a sense of mathematical connection to a theoretical world in which logic does not always fit with experience.

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Truth in the 19th century

Causality is the Western way of interpreting meaning in science. Nineteenth-century Western causality had a strict classical physics view that the laws of nature govern the movement and interaction of all observable objects. If the variables of the present state are precisely known, then the future is predictable. In other words, all predictions couple with what we can know of the past and present. However, by the early twentieth century, with the invention of quantum mechanics, Western philosophy took a radical shift of viewpoint: Observable objects arise from the non-observable events of the quantum world, governed by simple, wondrous laws. One such law claims there are no roads not taken. Every particle must follow not just one path but also every possible route with a probability that depends on that route. Truth, from that quantum mechanics point of view, is limited to the likelihood of an object being somewhere on each path and in a particular state. In other words, careful observation of precisely what happened in the past only gives us uncertain probabilities of what might happen in the future, a very different sort of truth than what we had in classical physics.

In this new world

We are overwhelmed with information that purports to be factual. Now, we tend to trust sources that accumulate facts from the collective intelligence of veiled experts behind fact-checking sites, including Wikipedia. Our knowledge base no longer comes directly from an authenticated expert, a textbook, or a peer-reviewed journal but rather from a collection of unverifiable sources. What happens if linked chains of evidence become broken by an unchecked fact? Even trusted sources can be wrong. They are often just partially correct when taken out of context.

Without attention to context, truth—whatever it is—becomes pointless.