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The truth grounds us, our institutions, and our place in society (Bliss and Trogdon, 2021). It is central to how we understand the world around. The truth matters; truthfulness is central to a virtuous life. Yet, truth in this so-called ‘post-truth’ age is becoming more elusive. Today, the truth appears open to interpretation, and something has gone wrong. Something is broken when institutional leaders claim absolute certainty beyond scientific facts, where alternative versions of truth have a basis in personal belief and opinion, and where, from opinion, anyone can offer expertise. This is not the way things should be. And while this problem seems immediately clear, it remains difficult to reduce. The discipline it takes to discern facts, and from this the truth, has somehow lost its way. However, I hold that education offers a pathway back. Education and ethics are grounded in truth; indeed, truth matters because it serves as the foundation for trust. Truth matters because to meaningfully engage, humans must do so with principle. This essay will argue that truth is not arbitrary. The truth is earned. But more on this directly. This essay will discuss perceptions of what ‘post truth’ means and how it has proliferated in the modern world. It will provide an overview of the theories of truth. The essay will offer a pathway to understanding the importance of earned truth through education. And from this, it will offer an appreciation of the role of ethics in seeking truth.

I hold that the modern world has a complicated relationship with the truth. I do not view the issue as complicated, though I acknowledge that such concepts exist in order to refute them. Still, they are troubling. Some philosophers teach that truth is relative to context or circumstance (see Westacott, 2024, or Baghramian & Carter, 2022). They claim that what is held as true for one individual, or one group, may not be true for another. The concept even has a name: post-truth. In this post-truth world, where institutional allegiance, loyalty and fidelity are waning, the media often twists the concept further. Notions of universality, a shared grounded consensus, simply have no currency in modern debate (Malcolm, 2021, p 1064).

As proponents of post-truth hold, facts are matters of perspective. The concept is not so much used to suggest that truth does not exist, but rather that the truth is open to interpretation. They consider it futile to adjudicate among context-dependent circumstances in a world of relative viewpoints (Baghramian, 2001, p 1). This relativism would have us understand that any beliefs, ideas, and claims can never be true or false, good or bad, right or wrong: they can never be absolute (Mosteller, 2014, pp 52-3). The relativist holds that there is no one truth; the truth is always subjective. This is a theory with some provenance and at least as old as the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, who said that ‘man is the measure of all things’ (see: Bonazzi, 2023). His interpretation seems clear. Although objective reality may exist, it will be interpreted and understood differently by each person experiencing it. From this, truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment. I see why relativism is so powerful. It offers one validation.

Relativism and the notion of post-truth would have us understand that factual judgments are confined to the circumstance that gives rise to them (Baghramian & Carter, 2022). One frequently hears the words ‘that’s just your truth’ in conversation or debate—as if to indicate that truth or fact is a matter of personal preference. This is simply incorrect, yet the phenomena are gaining impetus in the media and among Western political institutions. Both are underwritten with the ‘absolute certainty’ of opinion. To understand this, one might immediately consider the media campaign supporting the 2016 US Presidential election, widely covered online, where political positions and value judgments were posited as incontrovertible truths (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018, pp 44-5). The concept gained so much traction that the Oxford Dictionary named post-truth the 2016 ‘word of the year’ (OUP, 2016). In less than a decade this has resulted in a world movement that is more interested in self-empowerment and being right than in measurements of reality and competence. We should scrutinise this closely so that we do not confuse the blur of post-truth, and where it comes from, with the realm of established facts.

The post-truth phenomenon is driven by social media (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018, pp 29-33, pp 113 & 116). I am not a proponent, because social media often reduces civilised dialogue to an exchange of shrill invective. This has little to do with truth but much to with being ‘right’, whatever that means. I see this for exactly what it is: coupling post-truth with the internet is intellectually lazy. It is a mode that offers bite-sized pieces of knowledge as certainty, without precision, which arbitrarily selects facts—to be ignored if inconvenient (Malcolm, 2021, pp 1071-3). Post-truth does not even attempt to define what the truth is.

Dictionaries characterise the properties of truth in several ways, including: a conformity to objective facts or reality; conformity to rules, which are man-made; fidelity or constancy, which are human value-judgments; or the actualities of binding legal contracts, which are agreed upon (see, for example: Hawker, 2006, p 754). Such definitions conform to classical theories of truth: correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic, and which independently exist according to facts, shared beliefs and practical application (Glanzberg, 2023).

The correspondence theory equates the truth as corresponding to the measured reality of the world around (Mosteller, 2014, pp 110-11 & David, 2022). True propositions are objectively real. The coherence theory postulates that the truth of a proposition aligns with its coherent relationship with other propositions (Young, 2024). One sees in this a grouping of beliefs that ‘hang together in a coherent sort of way’ (Mosteller, 2014, p 40). The truth is shared through convention. The pragmatic theory of truth looks to how truth is used in epistemic contexts where people make assertions, conduct inquiries, and solve problems (Capps, 2023). The pragmatic theory claims that true propositions are those which are pragmatically useful. Mosteller (2014, p 67) points out that pragmatism bears some relationship to the correspondence theory, but extends this practice across domains to include scientific, ethical, legal, and political discourses, too (see also Capps, 2023). For what it’s worth, this is where my faith in the truth lies.

The classical theories have a grounding in intellectual rigour. I am an educator in the humanities and an aircrew officer in the Royal Australian Air Force—and I am certain of the pragmatic, correspondent and coherent truths associated with aviation. My claim is simple: the physical world simply cannot proceed without the idea of the truth. I am also certain that my institution and wider society cannot really function properly without it either. Here is an example of why. Aircraft wings are designed to create lift according to a scientific formula. The lift coefficient is defined as: CL = L/Sq, where L is the lift force, S the area of the wing and q = (rU2/2) is the dynamic pressure with r the air density and U the airspeed. These are true facts.1 They are only relative because to alter one of them will render a wing less capable of lift.

Post-truth proponents would have it that such examples are banal. They advance that the post-truth world does not apply to science and engineering, but rather to political discourse. This is a human dimension in which there are not only different—relative—truths, but different accounts of what can be verified as truth. The differences are of interpretation; ergo, there can be no absolute distinction among what comprises truth, meaning, and verifiable fact (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018, pp 124-7). Such is the social nature of human engagement: we access facts through statements, these are acts of communication, and therefore factual truths are effectively social in nature (Enfield, 2017 & Nelson, 1996, pp 636-7). Indeed, statements delivering facts are not necessarily indicative of the facts themselves (Enfield, 2017). The premise is bounded in post-modernism, and particularly the deflationary and semantic theories of truth which (in extremis) hold that facts do not exist, and from which a lie can be turned to represent the truth (see Gratton on Lyotard, 2018 or Cassam, 2018, pp 3-4).

The deflationary theory seeks to offer a simplified alternative to the classical theories of truth (Mosteller, 2014, p 92). The deflationist asserts that a statement is true according to the logic of the statement as it stands in context (Armour-Garb et al, 2023). There is a neat symmetry to this argument, but it is generalist. In attempting to dismiss classical theories, deflationists do not address the properties of truth; and equally, they do not account for the urge to align truth with opinion. The semantic theory holds that the truth deals with relations between expressions of a language and the objects or circumstances referred to by those semantic expressions (Tarsky, 1944, p 345). As this goes, truth is a property of language and the construction of sentences, ie. sentences are truth-bearers (Wolenski, 2024). Therefore, a linguistic statement proffers the truth. Yet, this is a very narrow frame of endorsement for objective facts. One should always question poorly constructed or ambiguous sentences that contain sensitive or contentious propositions.

Notwithstanding these limitations, post-truthers hold that truth remains diverse across a range of topics. These include the discourses of international engagement, morality, the law, art, and politics (Brahms, 2019). The theory offers to bridge the gaps among established facts, serve the objectives that those in power want to achieve, and influence what is held to be true. These matters are central to the alternatives offered by post-modernism, so proponents would have it that post-truth is also a philosophical concept, which finds legitimacy (even paradoxically) in the philosophical idea of consensus (coherence) it shares with the classical theories of truth (Bufacchi, 2021).

Very well, proponents of post-truth acknowledge that the laws of physics and engineering are intrinsic truths. Their mantra concerns the relative human condition. Let us address this. I hold that the crisis of truth in the modern world is manifested in cherry-picked tweets, speeches and the profligate claims of political commentators (see Brahms on the ‘Pluralistic approach to the truth’, 2019). The frenzy of the 24-hour news cycle and information flow is greater now than ever before, and the result is a media-fed mistrust of even our oldest institutions (Aguilera, 2018 & Kavanagh and Rich, 2018, pp 207-8). There is a growing acceptance of misinformation and disinformation in which opinion is posited as fact; and from this, an increasing rejection of social conventions and scientific reasoning (Kavanagh and Rich, 2018, p 174 & Sullins, 2023). The post-truth proponent might question the relevance of conventions, but I immediately dismiss such shibboleth with the proposition that the truth helps us to make sense of our world—and our earned knowledge is the foundation of truth.

The best knowledge is universal, and this is the universal question: “What if everyone arbitrarily dismissed the laws, mores, scientific facts and truths as established?” The answer is simple. There would be chaos. Reality is not relative. Convention underwrites the correspondent and coherent properties of truth. Indeed, since at least the Enlightenment, the West has evolved to where one should ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’ (Kant, 2012, §2 4:421, p 34). This categorical imperative, a duty as Kant held it, is the basis on which we establish morality and human truth based in universal behaviours and verifiable facts. These are distinct from conjecture or opinion (Johnson and Cureton, 2022). Convention matters! The concept is central to the field of normative ethics (Siegel et al, 2018, sect 3.3). Equally, the Aristotelian pursuit of truthfulness is an ethical process in pursuit of universality that is a virtuous act in and of itself. It follows that through virtuous practise one establishes a correspondent relationship between thoughts and statements, and real objects and outcomes (Kraut, 2022, sect 5.2).

Education is the key. It establishes the correspondent truth through the precise use of words or symbols (this differs from the semantic theory). A good education offers three things. It offers knowledge based in universally tested facts. It imparts useful skills, not just in the subject matter at hand, but also on demonstrated potential for future development. Finally, it necessitates convention and standards; this is not to say a dogmatic approach to gaining knowledge, but rather to reinforce a pathway tried, tested and true (Siegel et al, 2018, sect 2). There are no shortcuts in attaining a good education. For that matter, there are no shortcuts in attaining the truth. The world’s Christians would recall that Christ stated: ‘The truth will set you free’ (John: 8). I hold (for Christians and non-Christians alike) that the sentiment infers that it is the nature of the commitment to seeking the truth that is important. Seeking the truth through education requires dedication. A dedication to good education instils social standards and positive conventions. By this, it educates people not only on how to behave (Siegel, 2009, p 14), but also on how to engage with and analyse information rather than just accept it (Kavanagh & Rich, 2016, p 244). A good education engenders truthfulness and this is as important to anything else that it offers.

Let us reiterate. Virtuous practice does not give up, it pushes on, and it is the pushing on past what is difficult that defines the truth. I offer this to post-truth proponents: misinformation misinforms; worse, it potentially causes people to stop believing in verifiable facts altogether. The world is full of people who possess an absolute certainty in their own opinions. The pressure to think the same way as everyone else is intense and amplified by the constant stream of social media. Today, political positions and value judgments are laid down as incontrovertible truths across such platforms. I disagree, and in reply I do not simply state, ‘But that’s just your version of the truth’. I stress that facts are central to the truth, and that the truth and our humanity are one. It is ethical to seek the truth. There is an expectation that we express the truth in all professional and personal engagements. It’s not easy. The paradox of our age is that the world is more connected than ever before; yet it is the very connectivity that unleashes a deluge of information so large that it overwhelms our sensory capacity. We can overcome this. Knowledge, skills and conventions are based on the wisdom of our collective culture. The correspondent truth associated with wisdom stems from the facts and knowledge bequeathed to us, from the wisdom of those who have come before. For as it remains, this truth matters. It is important.

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Footnotes

1 This scientific fact sits in perfect accord with the sentiments expressed in the autobiography of the founding father of the RAAF, Sir Richard Williams (1977). These are Facts. Australian War Memorial and Australian Government Publishing Service: Canberra. Williams was an officer with precise political acumen. He understood the value of objective truth. More so, he was a proponent of the technical skills underwriting aviation.

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Frederickson, L. 2024. 'The Importance of Truth in our Institutional Service'. Available at: https://theforge.defence.gov.au/article/importance-truth-our-institutional-service (Accessed: 15 November 2024).
(Frederickson, 2024)
Frederickson, L. 2024. 'The Importance of Truth in our Institutional Service'. Available at: https://theforge.defence.gov.au/article/importance-truth-our-institutional-service (Accessed: 15 November 2024).
Lewis Frederickson, "The Importance of Truth in our Institutional Service", The Forge, Published: October 14, 2024, https://theforge.defence.gov.au/article/importance-truth-our-institutional-service. (accessed November 15, 2024).
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