TRUTH
I hear a lot these days about how “unfair” autocratic folks, foreign and domestic, feel they’re being treated these days. The popular saying, “truth hurts” as well as Khaled Hosseini’s famous quote: “better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie” say it all. In my opinion, the best defense against autocracy is truth, exactly what U. S. President Biden seems to be doing to defend against a Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
The problem, even in countries relatively intolerant of propaganda, is knowing what is the truth. The USA has its own challenges in this arena with advertising where sometimes, “the truth is what sells” and with social media where sometimes, “the truth is whatever’s popular.” The ancient Greeks recognized this problem with knowing the truth, eventually identifying the three great “appeals:” logos, pathos and ethos, to which I would add keiros and numos/nomos.
Logos (good reasoning and logic) is said to be the only appeal with “truth value.” Not truth per se, but at least truth value, meaning, if the evidence and arguments check out, the thesis can be assumed to be true. Not so with pathos (emotional), ethos (cultural/nationalistic moral imperative), keiros (leader inspired and laden) and numos (derived from law) appeals. These four non-logos appeals have instead, emotional, moral, popular and/or legal value. But not truth value. It’s more difficult when one or more of these “other” four appeals is mixed in with logos.
Yet, even knowing the truth isn’t sufficient to isolate it from “spin,” namely the author’s personal needs, wants and desires. To the best of my knowledge, over the millennia, humans have only come up with four “proofs,” each of which in some situations is flawed: authority, logos, science and statistics. And maybe, just maybe, as portrayed in my Sci-Fu (science-based futuring) novel, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor, a fifth proof derived from M-Superstring and Multiverse Theory. Something welling up from the quantum world through ours into the cosmic world, the illusory Unified Field Theory.
The Edge of Madness
The problem, even in countries relatively intolerant of propaganda, is knowing what is the truth. The USA has its own challenges in this arena with advertising where sometimes, “the truth is what sells” and with social media where sometimes, “the truth is whatever’s popular.” The ancient Greeks recognized this problem with knowing the truth, eventually identifying the three great “appeals:” logos, pathos and ethos, to which I would add keiros and numos/nomos.
Logos (good reasoning and logic) is said to be the only appeal with “truth value.” Not truth per se, but at least truth value, meaning, if the evidence and arguments check out, the thesis can be assumed to be true. Not so with pathos (emotional), ethos (cultural/nationalistic moral imperative), keiros (leader inspired and laden) and numos (derived from law) appeals. These four non-logos appeals have instead, emotional, moral, popular and/or legal value. But not truth value. It’s more difficult when one or more of these “other” four appeals is mixed in with logos.
Yet, even knowing the truth isn’t sufficient to isolate it from “spin,” namely the author’s personal needs, wants and desires. To the best of my knowledge, over the millennia, humans have only come up with four “proofs,” each of which in some situations is flawed: authority, logos, science and statistics. And maybe, just maybe, as portrayed in my Sci-Fu (science-based futuring) novel, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor, a fifth proof derived from M-Superstring and Multiverse Theory. Something welling up from the quantum world through ours into the cosmic world, the illusory Unified Field Theory.
The Edge of Madness
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