Lecture #2

Truth and Objectivity

Truth involves trust -- the person receiving the information must have confidence that the person who's giving doesn't have any ulterior motives.

Often that trust may be undermined when the giver and the receiver are from different worlds.

In Greek society, truth -- aletheia -- was the sum total of everything that people could remember, singled out through memory from everything that is destined for Lethe (LEE-THEE), the mythical river of forgetfulness that ran through Hades.

The definition of truth became more sophisticated when Plato suggested that truth was determined by the human intellect -- our power to reason -- rather than mere memory.

17th-century writer and philosopher John Milton suggested that competing notions of the truth should be allowed to co-exist, with the ultimate truth emerging from debate and comparison. the correspondence theory: all truth should correspond to some external set of facts and observations. It was an empirical approach to the truth based on personal experience: I must see it in order to believe it.

Modern philosophers have questioned the enlightenment definition of truth.

Pragmatists held that psychological, social, historical and cultural contexts all affected our perception of the truth.

The need to package a story and to find a "hook" for it can often lead to near-sightedness when an important story can't be sold in that fashion.

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