More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

by Bernardo Kastrup

The second culturally sanctioned concept of truth has to do with the validity of explanations, whose essential elements are inferred past causes. For instance, suppose that a person visits her doctor presenting a skin rash. Based on the rash’s appearance and the patient’s memory of a recent walk in the woods, the doctor infers that a now-invisible insect bite was the cause. After a few days, the rash clears by itself. Since this is the outcome expected in cases of mild insect bites, can we then say that the diagnosis was true? Not really: it is conceivable that the rash was caused by exposure to a chemical, cold weather, or even by clothes rubbing on the skin. In all these cases, rashes also tend to clear on their own. We can only assert that the doctor’s explanation was true if it corresponded to past causes that existed independently of the doctor’s conjectures: in this specific case, an actual insect piercing the patient’s skin just prior to the onset of the rash. In other words, a true explanation is supposed to be more than just a story that happens to be fully consistent with the present; it must also correspond to a past state of affairs independent of subjective, internal conjectures. Notice that what we call episodic memories are, in essence, elements of our explanations for the present moment: they, too, are only considered true if corresponding to past states of affairs outside mind. Let us call this second concept of truth ‘explanatory truth.’