3. How Americans Define Truth

How Americans Define Truth

I was afraid this was going to be about MAGA Truth. Thank Goodness it isn't.

"The taste of wine. Now take away from this idea every possible property it has. Take away its redness or whiteness, its intoxicating effect, its taste, the slosh it makes, and so on. What are you left with? Nothing. An empty phoneme of the mind. An invisible color. A silent noise. Do this with any concept, and the result is the same."

This short article praises American thinkers, specifically Pierce, as sticking with reality and keeping our feet on firm ground. So check it out.

My take on all this: The mind is real and how it experiences is also real. To me, there are two aspects of modern philosophy, analytic and continental. There's a lot of bilge water sloshing in the world today that there is no objective truth. Of course there is objective truth, we just can't objectively experience it. Touch your sick child's forehead and you can "feel" a high temperature. But experts make digital doodads, designed in diagrams with electrical and chemical knowledge, that do, in fact, confirm your feel. Is that pure coincidence? No, it's not. It's reality.

Analytic philosophy seems to live mainly in English-speaking countries, but people include Kant and Wittgenstein in that category too. I'm no philosopher, but as I understand it, continental philosophy takes brave leaps that the analytic folks don't want to. Inevitably, a lot of it is brilliant, a lot of it is quite the opposite of brilliant. Postmodernist philosophy, for instance. We need both approaches and to connect them where possible, or to see things from two perspectives.

Humans live in a world of symbols. We have to understand those symbols, how they relate to each other, how they create our mental reality, and how we act on them. And it seems to me that Pierce's semiotic triangle started this whole movement. Symbols refer to things, but they ultimately refer only to other symbols, not to reality. Now we have symbolic oceans of bilge water sloshing around the planet destroying any concept of reality. MAGA truth is only one example. Their America is only a symbol. And so is their "again," a mystical vision of a past that lives only in the mind. We also have Putin truth, Xi truth, and Khomeini truth, and many more constructed truths. But they kill real people, not just symbols. And for what? For symbols. Nothing more.

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