What is Truth?

“Words have no inherent meaning, you know!” Every time I hear that, I have the strongest urge to continue talking to whoever uttered it in no language whatsoever. Objectively, that’s true: words are just sounds or symbols strung together. As long as you define it beforehand, any word can have any meaning you want. But subjectively, words are how we learn, communicate, and even think. Words, and their meanings, are inescapable. Without meaning, words are just sounds or symbols strung together, and accomplish no purpose.

“I didn’t mean it like that!” Whoever has said this had probably just received a sharp lesson on words and their meanings. We can do our best to encode our meaning (though often we don’t really try our best) but for the hearer who decodes them, that meaning can be lost. The problem is when we get lazy about encoding our meaning.

See, meanings of words are incredibly critical – far more critical than the glib utterance that opened this post indicates. Words are nuanced, often by context, to carry negative or positive connotations – only in scientific dissertations are there words that can be truly neutral, and subsequently usually very dry. But even when words are completely neutral and terribly dry, nuance is still conveyed: this is a highly rational, highly reasonable, highly objective series of facts, and is therefore highly trustworthy.

But I think science has it wrong. Because day-to-day people are not highly rational, highly reasonable, or highly objective. Usually we’re emotional, passionate, and mired in context. What this does not mean is that day-to-day people cannot grasp the truth. And this is where things go horribly wrong.

Because either we give off a sterile, highly rational, highly reasonable, highly objective, and totally unattainable legalism that no one is attracted to, and no one feels is particularly relevant to their life (and they’re probably right); or we get so mired in context that we lose sight of objective truth, and end up encouraging a post-modern, do-what-you-want-and-I-can’t-judge-you vibe that a lot of people like, and people who want to try to make the current world a little bit better can’t stand.

The point is this: you can speak as much of the pure truth as you want, but if the person walks away with a false view of reality because of what you’ve said, you have lied to them. Sure, some of the burden falls on their decoding of your words – but just as much depends on us being very careful about what we say, and being careful that those to whom we speak understand what we’re saying.

If we try to be radical, or poignant, or profound, or holy, we may miss being understood. And we desperately, desperately need to be understood.