Truth
We all need to pursue truth for truth's sake. Without this pursuit, every conclusion we reach and every decision we make will be the result of an entirely subjective process.
Before we continue, let's make something clear; I have no problems borrowing someone else's verbage if they've thought it out and articulated it well. I know for sure that I''ll be drawing on G.K. Chesterton. I'm pretty sure that I'll have borrowed various turns of phrase from others before I'm done.. But it starts with GKC's essay titled 'the maniac'. It's been suggested that insanity can be defined by doing the same thing(s) over and over and expecting a different result. GKC defines it from a reasoning viewpoint in a similar way: insanity/madness consists over drawing the same conclusion over and over as a result of processing a limited universe of facts. I'd expand on that and suggest that it's also the presence of 'factoids' that result in what we describe as insanity or madness. I define the term factoid to be something that in of itself is factually true but when used to draw a conclusion, actually prompts the reasoner to draw an inerrant conclusion.
The pursuit of Truth involves discovering all relevant facts as well as identifying and removing all factoids from an equation. In the case of factoids, their inclusion can be incidental or deliberate. An issue is that the pursuit of truth is not entirely an intellectual exercise. In many cases a conclusion has already been reached by emotional preference, so the goal becomes rationalizing the choice by seeking factoids to bolster the desired conclusion. One such example might be how anti-gun proponents will say that a specific number of children are killed by guns each year. What makes that a factoid is that the number includes people up to the age of 21; the vast percentage of that number are adults over the age of 18. Another significant percentage of that number is suicides. The actual number of children killed by someone else wielding a gun is actually relatively small compared to the number cited. But factoids also arise as a result of experience; that some event occurred is a fact, but the event itself could have been an anomaly or exception rather than an event that substantiates the truth. The bottom line is that it's not enough to remove a factoid; that factoid must be replaced by a fact that truly represents how things are.
So the pursuit of truth requires not just intellectual integrity, but emotional integrity as well. One cannot pursue truth and accommodate a need to be right.
Before we continue, let's make something clear; I have no problems borrowing someone else's verbage if they've thought it out and articulated it well. I know for sure that I''ll be drawing on G.K. Chesterton. I'm pretty sure that I'll have borrowed various turns of phrase from others before I'm done.. But it starts with GKC's essay titled 'the maniac'. It's been suggested that insanity can be defined by doing the same thing(s) over and over and expecting a different result. GKC defines it from a reasoning viewpoint in a similar way: insanity/madness consists over drawing the same conclusion over and over as a result of processing a limited universe of facts. I'd expand on that and suggest that it's also the presence of 'factoids' that result in what we describe as insanity or madness. I define the term factoid to be something that in of itself is factually true but when used to draw a conclusion, actually prompts the reasoner to draw an inerrant conclusion.
The pursuit of Truth involves discovering all relevant facts as well as identifying and removing all factoids from an equation. In the case of factoids, their inclusion can be incidental or deliberate. An issue is that the pursuit of truth is not entirely an intellectual exercise. In many cases a conclusion has already been reached by emotional preference, so the goal becomes rationalizing the choice by seeking factoids to bolster the desired conclusion. One such example might be how anti-gun proponents will say that a specific number of children are killed by guns each year. What makes that a factoid is that the number includes people up to the age of 21; the vast percentage of that number are adults over the age of 18. Another significant percentage of that number is suicides. The actual number of children killed by someone else wielding a gun is actually relatively small compared to the number cited. But factoids also arise as a result of experience; that some event occurred is a fact, but the event itself could have been an anomaly or exception rather than an event that substantiates the truth. The bottom line is that it's not enough to remove a factoid; that factoid must be replaced by a fact that truly represents how things are.
So the pursuit of truth requires not just intellectual integrity, but emotional integrity as well. One cannot pursue truth and accommodate a need to be right.
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