How to Determine What’s Most Likely True
Deciding whom to continue falling in love with, whether or not to mask-up, whether to become more or less religious, to travel or not during the pandemic, or which politician to believe — we are confronted daily with myriad decisions which, at their heart, all have one thing in common: how to determine what’s true, or most likely true.
You may already be asking, “What do you mean by true?” This begs exactly the right question.
Perhaps the most confounding aspect of ascertaining truth hinges on a common thinking error we make from the get-go: all truths are equal and can be ascertained by the same methods. Thankfully, philosophers, scientists, and even everyday good thinkers and mystics have been studying truth for a long time and we have a lot of guidance for how to go about learning what’s most likely true.
The Art and Science of Epistemology
The pursuit of truth pertains to a field of philosophy called epistemology, which is the study of knowledge, or how we come to more reliably know what we know. Along with ethics, logic, and metaphysics, epistemology completes the four main branches of traditional philosophy.
Understanding epistemology helps us not only discover what is more likely true, but helps us not take the discovery of one kind of truth (objective truth) so personally when it flies in the face of our cherished beliefs. And if we do take it personally, we can enter into another kind of truth-discerning process — subjective self-reflection — to discover why we get so worked up over having our beliefs challenged about ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
Thriving, and even just surviving, hinges on discerning what’s true. Discerning truth from falsehood creates less suffering. For this, the devil is absolutely in the details. New Age beliefs (and their attendant spiritual bypassing), religious indoctrination, magical beliefs, as well as conspiracy theories have thrived and contributed to so much suffering because they all share something in common: they adhere to what is most likely untrue. They represent an impoverished, collective epistemology.
Lack of education and failing to practice good thinking, coupled with American junk culture, creates epistemological dead zones: individuals vulnerable to cognitive errors, manipulation, and conspiracy theories. Crucial critical thinking gaps and lack of emotional intelligence have propagated a pandemic of lies. These lies in turn have generated an out-of-control medical crisis. At their root is an epistemological crisis, which is why learning how to decipher what’s true, and to act in accord with it, is so important.
Categories Are Crucial: Subjective and Objective Truth
Truth exists on different levels and in different categories, which means everything when discerning what to believe. Looking into the nuances of truth is key and turns an otherwise banal word (‘truth”) into a fascinating exploration.
The two overarching categories of truth are subjective and objective truth. Differentiating between these two forms of knowing is crucial.
The expression “You are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts” highlights the difference between objective and subjective truths, between justified belief and mere conjecture or opinion. Opinions and personal preference are a form of subjective truth, while facts pertain to objective truth that is true for everyone. Objective truths are either self-evident (for example, you and I are alive; or rivers and trees exist) and/or require scientific evidence (for example: light travels faster than sound or climate change is man-made).
A common mistake, and by far the largest clusterfuck, is to use subjective knowledge (opinion) to make objective conclusions (statements of fact). Doing so fails to acknowledge the categories of epistemology. The result is to use feelings and intuition to come to factual conclusions about the world, which are more often than not incorrect. For example, one can declare, “I feel that the Earth is flat.” Presumably this means the person senses or intuits this to be true. But it’s a fallacy to conclude that the Earth is flat without scientifically verifying this assertion as an objective (not subjective) truth, because assertions about the natural world are the purview of science, which is the best tool we have (even with its imperfections) to determine what’s true about the natural world.
To assert a flat earth truth because of subjective experience (feeling or intuition) is to make to a logical conclusion based primarily on subjective instead of accurate thinking and evidence. Feelings are a primary means of evidence when discussing how we feel, not for what is objectively true. Using feelings to ascertain factual truth paves the way for emotional reasoning to rule the show.
Intuitions and feelings can lead us to discover objective truths. Many scientific discoveries and inventions began in the creative imagination, such as via dreams and epiphanic insight. Mendeleev dreamed the period table, Neils Bohr dreamed the structure of the atom, and the epiphany of the Ouroboros image inspired German chemist Kekule to discover the structure of the benzene molecule. Elias Howe dreamed up the invention of the sewing machine.
Sometimes an intuition turns out to be true, yet it’s true not because it was intuited but because it is eventually evidenced. Subjective experience is only the first step in ascertaining objective truth. The next step is to verify the subjective experience to see if it can be placed into factual existence. Or, by way of experimentation, to verify the conclusion the experience intimated, such as by employing the scientific method. Many dreams and visions, after all, have little to do with objective reality.
Devils in the Details
Let’s unpack an everyday example to reveal the distinctions between subjective and objective truth. Consider that you like apples. You don’t have to provide any more evidence for this assertion because it expresses your opinion, your fancy. You are expressing a personal truth which happens to be uniquely true for you (unless you are outright lying about a fancy for apples, which would be silly). You are not making a factual statement about anything but your own preference. Your liking of apples is therefore a subjective truth.
However, if you assert that just because you like apples this means that everyone likes apples, or should like apples, this is moving from a subjective assertion to an objective truth about others that, in this case, you don’t know to be true. Or consider a medicinal food example: You believe that just because you drank peppermint tea and it helped your indigestion, or so you believe, means it will work for everybody, or that it was actually the peppermint that helped. Your opinion is that the peppermint tea helped you. Whether it truly helped you, or whether it would help anyone else, is the purview of objective truth, which would need evidenced verification.
Let’s examine another subjective-objective example: you “see” (imagine, really) a great serpent that whispered to you the meaning of life while on an ayahuasca journey. If the imaginary serpent conveyed something subjectively meaningful to you — as dreams, coincidences, and symbols sometimes do — it’s epistemologically appropriate to take on this meaning for your own life (subjective opinion), as long as you don’t assert it to be universally true (an objective truth) simply because you experienced a talking snake in your mind’s eye.
To believe that talking serpents exist in real life is to falsely transpose a subjective, personal experience (opinion) onto objective reality (fact). So is believing that the personal message you received from the serpent is true for everyone and everything. This is a violation religion has made — imposing personal, unevidenced truth onto others as gospel (alleged fact) — which has resulted in widespread abuse and genocide.
When I scroll my Facebook feed, I’m regularly amazed to see how many go gaga over an account of friend’s prophetic dream, versus, say, reading about the results of a major scientific study. Such is our infatuation with the imagination over reality. Just because someone dreams or envisions a world full of evolved humans, sci-fi futuristic animals, and life-saving technology — or that they will fall in love with their dream partner — does not in the slightest mean that it will come to pass. But it can inspire us to build a better future and to ready and make ourselves available for a true love.
Speaking of love, intimate relationship is another fertile terrain for which discerning subjective-objective truth can be helpful. Say you’re falling in lust with a fine guy (or gal). But then you discover, after solid vetting, that he has a history of being abusive and lying. Subjectively, you’re in love and your feelings propel you to be with him. But objectively, his destructive tendencies are red flags. A tug of war familiar to most of us ensues: do you follow your heart (subjective) or follow your head (objective), or some of both? Both are true, but occupy different categories of truth. Whatever you decide is a subjective decision. But what you base your actions on — feelings of attraction and knowledge of his character — are both subjective and objective truths, respectively. Distinguishing subjective feelings from objective verities can help you understand your inner conflict and desires. They may not give you an objectively “right” decision but they can help guide you in the conundrums of love by helping you make better subjective decisions.
Some other everyday examples: I may intuit that a bear is around the corner (subjective truth), but I won’t know for sure until I and/or others look to accurately discover it’s so (objective truth). Similarly, I may suspect my girlfriend is cheating on me but I won’t know until I find out if she indeed is.
I hope these examples illustrate the difference between subject and objective truths, when and how they can overlap, and why it’s crucial to ascertain categorical truths to develop a sound epistemology. We’ll get into more examples later. When we engage rigorous skepticism so as not to conflate subjective and objective truths, we can truly begin to “wake up.”
This essay is continued here.
