Trusting Truth: How Do We Sense What Is True and What Is Not?

Time Saving Truth From Falsehood, François Lemoyne, (1737)

Source: Wallace Collection, London; Public Domain

There is truth, and there is belief. Belief is a personal truth, not necessarily absolute truth.

Continuing with my ponderings on this matter, I have to say it is complicated because truth’s elasticity depends on context and field. Truth involves meaning and defining; that is, one gets to the validity by building a collection of possibilities and then categorically filtering those possibilities by some elimination process questioning how well the potentials fit in our world of experiences. For music and poetry, the truth comes from the spirit of our collective senses of our familiarities. For mathematics, it comes from our universal intuiting of logic.

In my previous post, “Can Truth Come From Persuasion and Belief?” I mentioned that our beliefs often come from trusting the opinions of others and from memorable experiences. This post pushes the theory of belief in a slight tangential direction. Consider the possibility that we come equipped with an intuition of logic.

An Example of Intuition of Logic

Many examples support this notion. Here is one, a Platonic dialogue, one among many routed in my mathematics teaching experience. Suppose you are not familiar with this mathematical truth: If a perfect square of a number is even, then the number itself must be even. If you are not a mathematician, how should I convince you that it is true? First, I might show that it works with a few examples. I give a self-evident list: 4 = 2 × 2; 16 = 4 × 4; 36 = 6 × 6, etc., and then, perhaps, one example of a large number, such as 695,556 = 834 × 834, to allay any suspicion that it works only for small squares. You know it does not prove that all perfect squares are the squares of even numbers, so you justifiably reserve a certain feeling of doubt. That’s good. So, to assuage your doubt, I propose a dialogue in which I would lead you through a few intuitive facts on course to the evidential truth that if a square is even, its square root must also be even.

Then, I would ask you this strangely existential question: Where are you? That is to say, where is your mind? You probably would not consciously be aware of your physical presence. It is in one of the corridors leading to thought processors somewhere in the hippocampus. In effect, you would be cerebrally transported or enraptured to a state that, at the very least, defocuses the physical room you are in. Of course, I’m assuming that you are still with me and not transported to lunch.

Beyond the Physical Presence

If you are a mathematician, you would know why the square root of an even perfect square is even, and you would also know that you are not you in the dialogue. Nevertheless, there is some intangible transporting happening in forming an opinion or in confirming a belief.

It’s the same with a poem. Read "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

That’s just one stanza of a villanelle. In the brief time of reading that short rhyming metered sentence, we are conceptually transported, enraptured in ponderings of mystifying metaphors— night, day, light—and emotions of power, anger, and frustration. As with the ponderings of proof-by-contradiction logic in the parity of square roots of perfect squares, we are not thinking about where we are or whether or not we forgot to buy milk on our way home from work. We are beyond the physical presence, someplace else in the universe of time, someplace that we tend to go to when we are in the spaces of multilayered thought.

“Hold on,” you say. “Of course, we are transported when thinking about mathematical proof. That happens with whatever we think about. Reading anything of interest transports us to places beyond the room we are sitting in. But it takes something of interest to make that transport.”

To that, I first say something to the effect that I am flattered that this is holding your attention, and then point out that for most tasks you could follow along, enjoying cappuccinos and blueberry muffins, multitasking an awareness of where you are, all the while holding random thoughts. You cannot do that so easily when absorbed in mathematical proof. The same can be said as we effectively awaken the spirit of our collective subconscious when we formulate an opinion or confirm a belief.

What Makes Persuasion Possible?

We often have intuitions for truth without direct evidence. Ironclad confirmation can either change an opinion of whether or not something is true or stiffen it into unyielding persuasion. Truth without persuasion is pointless because it sits in an abstraction. Psychologists view persuasion as a cognitive reaction to opinions one hears from others or the obsessive consumption of news to make sense of the world. Persuasion comes from a dialogue with one’s self. To that end, the brain expects confirmation that past experiences arising from vision, thoughts, and memories fit together like spokes on a wheel. But no wheel is perfect, so we wobble along in a wonky journey through trusts and doubts.

As with all self-persuasions, at some unnoticeable point in the persuasion process, we accumulate and evaluate evidence. The truth comes to the subconscious by links that slowly form between what is happening in the emerging sequential logic and an intricate, gigantic web of connections to old, established pieces of evidence.

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We don't talk in absolute logical structures; instead, we communicate with one another by what I would call a flexible logic, a plausible sense in a conversation between people having enough experience with the topic to listen with a generosity of comprehension.

Then, truth builds from experiencing evidence along with continued dialogues and generosities of comprehension. Unless, of course, one intentionally lies to profit one's self. Soon after, one believes those lies.