TELLING TRUTH FROM LIES

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D.  2-21

ABSTRACT:  Various ways of assessing the likelihood of truth and avoiding disinformation are presented.

KEY WORDS:  truth, lies, lying, disinformation

This essay will define and describe “truth” in its ideal form and its everyday form, will identify human difficulties in knowing the truth, and will provide guidelines for systematically determining the degree of truth in a claim or statement.  A final section will address the particular problems in determining the truth in internet and TV situations, both disinformation which does not intend to harm and disinformation that aims to deceive or harm.  We will deal here with written information and with video information when the presenter is trained to appear believable (cable news), since for these we do not have the many non-verbal “tells” that can indicate lying when you are able to observe the presenter and the presenter is not a professional presenter (tics, looking down, looking away, grimacing, crossing arms, stuttering, etc.).  You may wish to skip the first part on truth if you are only interested in dealing with disinformation

UNDERSTANDING AND SEEKING THE TRUTH

Knowledge involves understanding reality accurately.  “Truth” is our word for assertions about reality that can be relied on as accurate (to some degree) and dependable (to some degree).  Knowing the truth has always been of interest to human beings, because it can lead to more accurate predictions of the future and therefore to more effective decisions and goal-oriented behavior.  Seeking the truth is just as important for our emotional lives, where “knowing what is going on” (knowledge) is so important to us that when we don’t actually know something, we often make up something so that we can believe that we know (after dying, people go to heaven; the earth is flat).  If we think that we don’t know what is going on, then we are likely to fall into anxiety and eventually hopelessness.

Questioning what we believe is somewhat stressful, at least at first, so in order to figure out what is likely or unlikely to be true, you must exert some effort and tolerate some discomfort (from not being certain about things, and from being uncertain whether to trust yourself and your sources).  Many people believe only what everyone else believes, without trying to figure what is true, and while this strategy has some merit (strength in numbers), you will end up believing many things that are untrue.  Only you can determine whether you are willing to do the work and tolerate the uncertainties of questioning “facts,” beliefs, and opinions.

Historically, most people have depended mainly on the edicts of authority with regard to what to think and believe (parents, king, church), while now we formally subject many opinions to the proof method of science (careful observation and the confirmation of measureable observations by a number of different people in order to reach reliable consensus). 

Prior to the rise of science, philosophy was humankind’s most serious attempt to discern what is true and what can be considered to be reliable knowledge.  In modern times, people view science as the primary source of correct knowledge, but there are vast areas of human life about which science has nothing to say (love, freedom, purpose, meaning), and philosophy (most classically defined as the pursuit of knowledge or wisdom) has been unfortunately ignored.  The study of a part of philosophy called epistemology–whether and how we know what we think we know–is crucial for figuring out what is true and what is not.

The history of truth is a long story of corrections to inaccurate understandings (the earth is flat) and the creation of new and hopefully more accurate understandings (the earth is more-or-less round; the universe is expanding; the material brain is responsible for experience and the self; quantum mechanics is more true than classical mechanics).  We have a series of truth claims (claims about what is true), each followed eventually by some sort of dissent or new and contradictory data and knowledge, followed by revised truth claims, etc., etc.

Since we, too, are a part of history, this history of thinking we know something and then discarding “knowledge” for something we believe is more true shows us that many things that we now think are true are probably not true, since many of them will be changed in the future, and in order to be as aligned with reality as much as we can be, we should be careful to identify all “facts” or truth claims that are inferences from actually uncertain knowledge or that only seem true because of how we currently understand everything else (quantum mechanics?, string theory?, the multiverse?) and label them as “probably true” instead of “true.”  We know very few things absolutely.

To pursue this, we should remember for each thing that we think we “know” how likely that thing is to actually be true.  This could vary from very probably true to almost certainly false.  We could even assign a probability of being true to each of these facts or claims.  Thus, the claim “the sun will come up again tomorrow” might get a 0.9999 probability of being true, while “there are many parallel universes” might get a 0.2 probability, depending on your understanding of astrophysics.  In my opinion, the probability level of the assertion that you will complete your next drive in the car without an accident is something more like 0.995. 

To make things even more complicated, each person has his or her own view of reality, which is not exactly the same as that of any other person, because the life experience of each of us is different.  We also tend to believe that the information that we have about others and the world is correct, even if we have no confirmation of that information.  Gossip illustrates this, as people assert what they believe based on very little evidence. 

Since human beings have imperfect brains and always have imperfect understandings of reality (viz., classical mechanics vs. quantum mechanics), we must usually be satisfied with statements that are as close to true as humanly possible. 

Often, human statements are incomplete—i.e., they do not specify assumptions and conditions under which the statement will be true.  The statement “we can start a fire by putting a match to wood” is true in this sense of completeness and non-misleadingness only if the wood is dry and of a size and type of wood that can be ignited by the flame of one match. 

From among the various conceptualizations of truth (correspondence, coherence, constructivist, consensus, pragmatic, minimalist, pluralist, formal, etc.), the common sense view for almost everyone is a correspondence point of view—that useful truth lies in an accurate correspondence between statements or propositions and the reality that they attempt to represent. 

Given our cognitive limitations as humans and our penchant for distorting reality in order to make ourselves feel better or to get what we want, human truth is always less than pure or perfect.

If something is truly true, then it is true not just for those who think it or believe it but for everyone else as well.  (An individual or a group may have its own version of “truth,” but this should be understood as only its version of reality, which may be more true or less true when compared to careful observations or with other claims about reality.) 

Reality exists independent of human beings, and questions of truth still apply if no human beings are involved.  It is true that if a tree falls in the forest after human beings no longer live on the planet, pressure waves in the surrounding fluid (air) will be created, even if there is no human being present to hear them.  If there is no fluid atmosphere present, then no pressure waves will be created.

Given that truth claims that are not simply logic but always depend on a number of assumptions, and given the many sources of differences between one individual’s view of things and another’s, we can see that much of what most of us accept as true (or true enough to be useful) seems to us to be true simply because most of us agree on it (e.g., democracy is the best form of government; the sun will come up in the east tomorrow; masks will reduce the spread of COVID; masks won’t reduce the spread of COVID.

If we take a truly skeptical view of things, we can almost always cast unanswerable doubt on any claim that something is completely true (by questioning “how do you know that for sure?” to every step of evidence and agreement), since the assumptions we make and the things that we accept as indicating the truth of something almost always involve some degree of uncertainty.

The upshot of this is our search for truth is not really a search for pure or absolute truth but is really a search for trustable knowledge—i.e., conclusions that provide good guidance for decision-making in most situations for most people.  We could call these “almost truths” truths, but this would be a misnomer.

The greatest barrier to getting as close to the truth as humanly possible is our wish for the truth to be a certain way—a way that is comfortable for us, does not cause us pain, and does not threaten what we already believe.  When it was proposed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, many people were dismayed because this threatened their belief that humans were God’s primary concern, just as now a significant number of people are unhappy with the assertion that Blacks are equal to whites, because it attacks the previous assumption by whites that they were more valuable than Blacks and deserved some sort of priority in society.

We avoid knowing the truth and settle for lesser degrees of truth when we distort what we could readily know about reality.  We use various means of distorting, including denial, suppression, repression, sensory distortion, purposive logical errors, making up false explanations, obfuscating through language, and attacking those who voice views of reality that we don’t like (viz., social media).  Much of what we think and believe is affected by our distortions.  We distort reality when we believe or present to someone else a description of reality that we know or should know (could readily know) is not the description of reality that is most likely to be true.  We “tell the truth” (as far as we know it) when we present to someone else a description of reality that we believe to be the most accurate description of reality that has been achieved up to this time.  When we distort to others, it is lying.  When we distort to ourselves, it is lying to ourselves.

Many people claim to know the truth when in fact they have only their opinions and no evidence or arguments as to why their opinions are true.  Their measurement of truth is the agreement of others (so that they can get their own way or get what they want).

It is extremely important to put considerable focus on finding what is true regardless of what we wish to believe.  Sometimes we feel that we “know” things about ourselves or others with complete certainty, so that it seems like “truth,” but this knowing is not particularly trustworthy.  Ignorance is often preferred to truth out of fear of what might be learned.  This fear could concern a changed view of oneself, a changed view of another, or a changed worldview (as when people were first exposed to the idea that Earth was not the center of the solar system or the insistence by some that the U.S. is the best country in the world even though they know nothing about other countries, to make themselves feel more valued). 

Ignorance can be remedied by learning, through observation and investigation or through receiving true information from others, but of course people must want to know more of the truth if they are to do the work of observing and investigating or attend to the information that others have to offer.  Purposive ignorance and purposive avoidance of the truth can only be countered by a desire to know the truth that motivates individuals to put up with the unpleasant feelings that they may have in response to knowing the truth. 

There is a major divide between those who want to figure out what is true and those who wish to adhere to what others have told them is true (parents, society, religious figures, etc.). Revealed truth (what we get from others) has often been used effectively to regulate behavior in society and to organize people into societies that are productive, but its flaw is that revealers of that truth often allow their own personal wishes and goals to create, alter, or color that truth (Hitler; almost any politician; advocates of global warming theories; detractors of global warming theories; etc.).  

The postmodern criticism of truth-processes and beliefs points out correctly that we make up much of what we believe to be true (slavery is OK; the world is obviously flat; Blacks are clearly inferior; God hears my prayers), but it is incorrect in asserting that there is no such thing as truth. 

Also, some have argued that we can never know reality–that each person has only his or her own distorted view of things and that no one can know what is real or true.  Our common sense understanding of life disproves this argument.  We know that we will hit a large object in the road ahead of us if we keep driving toward it (regardless of any assertions of quantum mechanics), just as we know that if we don’t remove the object or warn others that others are likely to be harmed by running into it.  This “truth” is true for all drivers. 

The truth is often different from what any individual or group asserts about reality (Communists are evil; Aryans are genetically superior; being baptized is necessary in order to go to heaven; God is love; non-Catholics will not go to heaven; dogs will go to heaven; President Reagan was a great man), and often there is no evidence of the truth of these assertions or beliefs.  Many group beliefs (religious, moral, political) are not determined rationally or are relatively unsupported by evidence and could just as well have turned out differently in other times and other cultures.

In an effort to be egalitarian, many well-meaning people these days are fond of identifying “his truth” or “her truth” when referring to what a given person believes to be true, as if this grants it some special status in the truth rankings, but just because someone has done his or her best to discover the truth and now believes or even “knows” certain things, this does not at all indicate that those beliefs or that “knowledge” is true.  Others are fond of asserting their equality by claiming that everyone’s version of the truth should be considered to be equally likely to be true.  This is false as well, since the measure of truthfulness is the correspondence of a person’s beliefs with reality, as best we can understand it at that time. 

The recognition that beliefs and customs are not sacred and do not represent “truth” can be threatening to those who need such beliefs and customs in order to control their insecurity and bolster their self-esteem, but compassion and understanding make it possible to recognize these things about our culture and our fellow citizens without having to challenge them openly.

There are many circumstances in which we do not know “the facts” (what someone else was thinking or feeling, what actually happened in situations that we did not observe, what actually happened in situations that we did observe, etc.), and in these circumstances it is best for ourselves and for others to qualify what we assert with the degree of certainty that we have, instead of assuming what is true without reasonable certainty.  We can stay a little bit closer to the truth by qualifying what we say with “I think…” or “I believe…” rather than saying or implying that “I know…” or “It is a fact that…,” or “The fact is that….”  We are always tempted to make things certain or simple by assuming that we know when we don’t know, since it makes us feel insecure to not know, but it is better for our decision-making to know that we don’t know! 

We quite often have to act without knowing things for sure, and the best course of action then is to proceed using our full faculties aimed toward creating the outcomes that we want.  We can do our best even though we know in the back of our minds that we may be wrong about some basic assumptions about the situation, because we know that doing our best is the approach most likely to get us what we want.

For most of us, if we are to get as close to the truth as humanly possible, we must get used to reality that makes us uncomfortable and be willing to tolerate the negative feelings (dismay, disappointment, fear) that unwanted reality engenders in us.  We must not reject painful feelings that seeing reality arouses, but rather work gradually on tolerating and accepting them. 

Part of reality is that there is a great deal of suffering by human beings around the world, all the time—so much suffering that it can feel overwhelming when we try to understand others and have compassion for them, but after you get more used to that reality, you can learn to have empathy and sympathy for those who suffer and do what you can to help them while at the same time continuing to do what you must do every day for your own life. 

Avoidance of reality is a prime cause of the inhumanity of one person or group toward others, whether from avoiding facts or avoiding feelings, and it is the prime supporter of wars and other violence (from distorting the truth about others, as when we classify enemies as “subhuman” or attribute aggressive motives to them when this is actually untrue).  The only hope of being more humane to each other and of avoiding wars in the future is seeing more of the truth (e.g., others are pretty much like us in wanting what they want and feeling what they feel, regardless of their different customs; vying for superiority may lead to short-term advantages but it always harms others and leads long-term to some negative consequences for those who “win;” we have no more “right” to get what we want than anyone else on the planet; we are not morally “better than” anyone else on the planet; etc.).

For the thinker and the community of thinkers, the way to arrive at the closest that we can come to the truth or reality is to seek “tested reality” [my own term]—that version of reality that is produced by using intelligence, objectivity, careful observation, and consensus among people who are sincerely looking for the truth and who have removed their personal preferences for what reality is or will turn out to be from their considerations about truth.  When feasible, we can subject truth claims to the light of “scientific reality”–what is currently believed to be true after unbiased observations by multiple competent observers who apply mathematical and statistical tests to the data found and who compare a finding rigorously to the current understanding of reality by science.

COMMON ERRORS IN THINKING

Here are details of common errors in thinking, which we must guard against if we wish to get as close to the truth as we can.

(1) You believe uncritically what you have been taught, when the information is in fact not correct.  This is primarily information from your parents and your culture about how the world “is” (the world is flat; Communists are warmongers; Blacks are hypersexual; etc.).  The problem here is that you do not want to harm your relationships with others by critically examining what you have been taught. 

(2) You think in “black or white” terms, preferring to perceive things as being one of only two ways, with no other alternatives or shades of meaning being considered.  Making things either “good” or “bad,” either “all good” or “all bad,” and either “right” or “wrong” are examples.  The problem here is usually avoidance of the complications and uncertainties of allowing shades of gray to exist in your thinking about the world. 

(3) You overgeneralize, or generalize sloppily, so that incorrect implications are derived.  An example is “my father was a louse”–“my father was a man”–“therefore all men are lice.”  Another would be “some women are fickle”–“it is dangerous to trust someone who is fickle”–“therefore you should never trust a woman.”  The problem here is sloppy thinking, sometimes encouraged wanting to avoid harm (or enjoyment of the social drama that usually accompanies illogical assertions).  To identify overgeneralizations watch for extreme words–always, is, never, everybody, nobody, etc.

Don’t assume that thousands of people agree with information that you receive.  We have a tendency to overgeneralize and to think that many people beyond the actual presenters/senders also have the same opinion, and this is usually false.  Even if there are hundreds of internet followers who agree with something, that is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to the population in general.  Both individual and organizational presenters send you the most sensational things they can, to get and keep your interest, and these are usually the things that have the lowest support among the general population.  The bulk of the American electorate are skeptical and don’t agree with any of the more extreme positions.

(4) You select aspects of reality to emphasize, often to the exclusion of other, equally important aspects of reality, in order to make your view of reality consistent with how you feel or want to feel.

          (a) You select the negative details and downplay the positive details, thus arriving at or supporting a depressed or pessimistic view, or, you emphasize the positive details and downplay the negative details, thus arriving at or supporting an overly positive view.

          (b) You presume what others are thinking or feeling, to make it consistent with what you want to believe.

          (c) You consistently looks for impending disaster, presumably to protect yourself from being caught off guard, but with the added result of a life of fear and anxiety.  A variant of this is always predicting negative outcomes and finding reasons afterward to justify these predictions (so that you will never be surprised by disappointment).

          (d) You exaggerate the degree to which others’ behavior is a reaction to yourself, thus keeping yourself the focus of much attention.

          (e) You minimize the degree to which your behavior affects others, so this doesn’t complicate your decision-making.

          (f) You feel controlled by outside forces (fate, other people, etc.) and therefore believe that you are unable to significantly influence the quality of your life.  An example could be believing that everything that happens to you is God’s will.  A variant of this is believing that the quality of your life depends totally on the actions of others (and not taking responsibility yourself for any effort to change your life). 

          (g) You believe that you are in control of much more than is actually the case, thus allowing you to feel more powerful or less threatened than otherwise.  A variant of this is falsely feeling/believing that you are responsible for what happens to others (either because you should have prevented bad things from happening or because you wanted such things to happen to others).

          (h) You believe that others view and feel about things the same way you do.  This allows feeling closer to others and ignores the distance, differences, and trust issues in relationships.

          (i) You project upon others and posit life agreements that do not in fact exist, such as the “deal” many make with God that if you are a good person, then you will be rewarded and will encounter no bad outcomes in life.

          (j) You believe that how you feel reveals the cause–like if you feel hurt, then someone has hurt you, if you feel “bad,” then you are “bad,” or if you feel embarrassed, then someone has shamed you.

          (k) You distort reality (“My mother really loves me, even if she never shows it”) in order to feel better or in order to believe that you have not made a mistake or an error, thus avoiding the insecurity of not being in control of your fate.

Most of these errors in thinking can be identified by careful observation of a person’s incautious uses of the verb “to be.”  “Asians are clannish.”  “Women are fickle.”  “Intimacy is dangerous.”  “Blacks are brutish.”  “Politicians are crooks.”  “Men are pigs.”  “Policemen are pigs.”  “I am worthless.”  It makes one’s thinking more useful if it is more differentiated, such as “I have some traits and tendencies that end up causing me grief, but I also do many good things for myself, and overall I am OK.”

GUIDELINES FOR ASSESSING THE LIKELIHOOD OF TRUTH

If a person is willing to learn from new information and to learn from finding out about her avoidances of the truth, then she could follow the guidelines below regarding the process of figuring out what is most likely to be true.  Human beings rarely know the absolute truth, so we are always in the position of doing the best we can (getting as close to the truth as we humanly can). 

If these principles are applied honestly and sincerely, you will get as close to the truth as we human beings are likely to get.  Be patient and tolerant.  It takes time and effort to question what you have believed, what everyone else believes, and what your culture believes.  The bigger your base of reliable knowledge gets, though, the faster you can assess and establish what is likely to be the truth.

1. Learn more about how to think accurately and apply what you learn in all areas.  Always define your terms carefully.  Assess the accuracy of your information, and don’t make conclusions that aren’t supported by the best evidence available.  “Try out” all of the likely conclusions to see how they fit with what you already know relatively accurately and to see what emotions they engender in you.  Ensure that your conclusions about what is true are not being arrived at to make yourself feel better or to make it more likely that you can get something you want.  Take a course in logic or in philosophy, as these will show you more about accurate thinking.

2. Can you keep an independent mind about information to which you are exposed?  Are your loyalties (to family, political party, nation, profession) going to bias you about new information?  

Examine anew every sensory perception, thought, feeling, and memory that you have, questioning each one to see whether there are reasons not to believe it that you have been ignoring.  (Did my dad really beat me, or did he just terrify me?   Do I really simply hate my boss, or do I actually kind of respect him at the same time?  When I feel scared of my wife, is she really that dangerous, or am I perhaps reacting to memories of my mother?)   Ask yourself if you have any evidence to support each of your beliefs.  Evidence may be in the form of your own careful observations, observations by others whom you trust (either personally or in writing) and whose observations in the given instance are likely to be accurate, the findings of science, and the wisdom of institutions that are dedicated to knowing the truth.  Evidence for most things should be based on several (or even many) confirming repeated observations and observations by many observers, rather than on only one source.

If you face a situation similar to one you are already familiar with and need to evaluate it, identify the new elements in the situation and see how they may alter your understanding of the already familiar situation.

3. Be very careful about definitions when examining a proposition or assertion.  There are many, many definitions of “love,” “freedom,” “better,” “perfect,” “a good life,” etc., etc., and if you don’t ask or explore this, you and others will often be attempting to communicate with different underlying assumptions.

4. Don’t accept your own, your family’s, other peoples’, or your culture’s assumptions about reality, without examination.  (People from other cultures are dangerous.  Strangers are dangerous.  A free-market economy is always the best.  God actually guided the hand of every person who wrote every book of the Bible.  A foetus has a soul from the moment of conception.)  Assume that every perception and every interpretation of a perception may be distorted, and check every one of these as closely as you can.  Be skeptical but unbiased.

Before you make an important conclusion, review the assumptions on which it rests.  (If you concluded, based on your experience of being emotionally abused by your parents, that everyone else would emotionally abuse you in a close relationship, that conclusion would be in error.)

5. Identify all of your self-serving distortions–the ways in which you make reality into what you want to believe or what will justify your inappropriate behavior (e.g., I’m better than he is, so I should be the starting quarterback and not him; I like my white privilege, so I’ll continue to believe and claim that Blacks are inferior).

6. Accept that your emotions or emotional reactions to things do not necessarily guide you to the truth.  Sometimes our emotional reactions are simply telling us to avoid something (and therefore to avoid learning more) because the truth would be unpleasant (e.g., I feel scared around him, so he must be bad; I love her, so she must be “the one” for me; etc.).  Emotions do have information for us and do guide us, but it is best to examine them and compare their information to what we “know” otherwise before acting on them.

7. Notice any reactions that you have to a reality perception or description of reality that indicate aversion to that view of reality and a preference to avoid it or reject it.  These reactions will tempt you to distort.  (If you are angry at those who believe differently than you do, perhaps you’re actually unsure of your own beliefs.)

8. Identify the reasons for your aversion or avoidance of the facts or the issue.   You may find it to be threatening, unpleasant, hurtful, disappointing, confusing, calling your beliefs or adaptation into question, suggesting a change in your behavior that would lead to fewer gratifications, etc.

9. Notice and question the “holes” in your awareness–the things that you are not aware of or avoid.  (I wonder why I never think about my family.  I wonder why I just can’t see it when others accuse me of being self-centered.)

10. Gather accurate information about the issue, and be very careful about the reliability of your information. Just because your parents said it or it’s on the internet or in a book doesn’t mean that it is true or that it is the most accurate information currently available.  Much of what is taken to be information in the world is biased by the person’s emotions or by what he or she wants to believe in the first place, so it is important to be careful.

11. Figure out who or what is the source of the new information.  Evaluate the source of the information (author, organization, sponsor, publisher, etc.), and consider the influence of that source on the probable truthfulness of the information.  Does the source have any allegiance to the truth?  What is the trustworthiness of the source?  Does bias seem to be present?  What does the source want to achieve (for himself or itself) by presenting the information?  How is he or it trying to influence you?  How are you being affected by the information?  Product information usually wants you to buy something.  Political information usually wants you to change your mind about something.

12. Evaluate the method by which the information was obtained (author’s opinion, word of others, anecdotes, books, scientific research, real-life experiment, etc.).  If the source is research, do the methods seem appropriate?  Are the conclusions carefully stated, and do they follow from the data?  Information from formal research is usually more reliable than someone’s opinion or collected anecdotes.  Regardless of source and method, has the information been thought through thoroughly?  Are counterarguments addressed?  Are there “holes” in the presentation?  Are results of other research on the topic consistent with this information?

13. Use the consistency of your experiences and observations over time (after purging them of avoidances) to establish observations that are firm enough to use in constructing a fact or a description of reality.  (Young people are at a disadvantage with this, since they don’t have much life experience to consider.)  

14. If a question can be appropriately investigated using the experimental method of science, do so, or at least check on what results have already been gathered by this method on the question.  If it cannot be, then continue, using as much self-examination and self-reflection as you can as you think it through.

15. Check out whether a perception, thought, or feeling is consistent with your other senses and understanding at that time.  (When I think of getting closer to Joan I feel scared, but if I think about it further, she isn’t doing anything that would indicate danger.)

16. Check out whether the experience of others is consistent with your own.  Be especially careful in your use of language when you do this, because people often mean different things by the same words.

Regarding internet information, think carefully about who or whether anyone agrees with the information you see there.  We have a tendency to overgeneralize and to think that many people beyond the actual presenters/senders also have the same opinion, and this is usually false.  Similarly, since the TV news concentrates heavily on negative events (shootings, fires, storms, etc.), we get the impression that these things are much more prevalent than they actually are.  Even if there are hundreds of internet followers, that is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to the population in general.  Both individual and organizational presenters send you the most sensational things they can, to get and keep your interest, and these are usually the things that have the lowest support among the general population.  The bulk of the American electorate are skeptical and don’t agree with any of the more extreme positions.

17. Use cultural experience and concepts–the wisdom of the past–as a check on your observations.  People and their basic needs, emotions, and thought capabilities have not changed much in thousands of years.

18. Find out whether other cultures have come to the same conclusion about the claim in question.  If they have not, then you (and your culture) may be engaging in distortion (or perhaps what you are considering is a “custom,” on which cultures will naturally differ, rather than a question of “fact” or trustable knowledge).  Just because your culture believes something does not make it true.

19. Once you think you have a statement of reliable knowledge, try to think of any example (person or situation) in the world that does not fit your conclusion (a “counterexample”).  If you can find even one such example, then your conclusion is wrong and needs further refinement, by qualifying it or perhaps by stating the assumptions on which it is based.  It is especially useful in this regard to consider what other people are doing around the world, since if you confine your checking to your own culture, then you may conclude that the conclusion is correct simply because everyone around you already believes that conclusion.

20. Keep track of how you know each thing that you know.  Based on the history of how you “know” each of the things that you “know,” keep track of the degree of certainty with which you “know” each thing (and don’t assert more certainty than is justified).  (I think I see enough evidence in the world and in life that God exists to organize my life around that belief, but I still have no direct experience or evidence to “prove” it.)

21. Employ a healthy skepticism about how you interpret your own experience, as well as being skeptical about how others do this, too.

22. Pay attention to your inner voice or inner wisdom–that part of us that has some intuitive awareness of the truth and some awareness of when we are trying to fool ourselves.  Cultivate that part of yourself.

23. Ask others whose reality perceptions and honesty you trust to give you their opinion about the matter in question.

24. Strive to be honest with yourself, even when you are alone.  Most people find it easier to distort to themselves when no one else is involved (although the agreement of others helps greatly to establish and maintain group distortions).

25. Strive to know yourself well enough that you know your motives and what you hope to get out of each situation.  Using this knowledge will help you correct for self-serving distortions.  (I know that I tend to inflate my abilities, so I should re-examine whether I can actually do this new job before I accept it.)

26. Check out how accurately the understanding of reality in question predicts other realities.  Are its predictions consistent with what you know otherwise?  This is often done by looking at history and what has happened in the past when people have assumed this same thing to be true.  (Has having government and religion joined together for societies led to healthier and happier people than having them separated?)

27. Examine the impact that a given understanding of reality has had on the lives of everyone affected when people act on this understanding of reality (or predict as best you can what the impact on everyone would be if this understanding of reality were acted upon).  (Did heavier emphasis on conformity and on everyone in the society believing the same thing lead to people enjoying relationships more or did it lead to more distrust?)

28. Ask yourself if you would say or believe the same thing if you didn’t care about the outcome for yourself.  (Would I really claim that our team is better than theirs if I didn’t want to win so badly?)

29. Imagine yourself saying the same thing or expressing the same belief and then adding to it an explanation of your motives.  This also will help to identify your self-serving interests.  (I want the family to go to church today, but really I myself “need” to go because I’m feeling guilty about what I did this week.)

30. If you reach a tentative conclusion or theory, reflect on the assumptions that you made in the beginning about it, because your conclusion is only as good as your assumptions were accurate.  This gives you some suggestion about how certain your conclusion can be.

31. When you cannot determine whether something is true (or likely to be true), suspend judgment, if it is practical to do so, until you get more information one way or another.  Learn to tolerate currently unresolvable ambiguity.  Often we must act without knowing the full truth or facts, but you can act and still know that you are not certain of the truth or the facts (doing the best you can), and keeping this in mind will make it easier for you to adjust course as needed.  This necessary attitude requires us to know what we don’t know, and to monitor this at all times.  Human beings hate not knowing, so maintaining one’s sense of what is true, what is likely to be true, and what is unknown so far (and at the same time continuing to act in the real world on insufficient information) is a mountainous challenge!

DISINFORMATION

The guidelines above give good guidance about how to arrive at the best understanding of reality or truth possible at any given time with the information available.  Let us consider specifically how to deal with information on the internet and on TV, including information that is distorted unconsciously without intent to harm as well as information that is distorted on purpose to deceive or harm you!  It takes some effort to figure out what is true and what is not, and, as with the general issue of determining truth, if you are not willing to make the effort to determine whether what you see on the internet is likely or unlikely to be true, you will end up believing many things that are untrue!

ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THEY ARE TRYING TO INFLUENCE YOU

This is the first requirement—to acknowledge that a significant amount of the information in internet newsfeeds, blogs, podcasts, and websites is false and may be false on purpose, because the poster wants you to believe certain things or do certain things.  Their purpose in changing your mind is often political, but it can also be for religious reasons (to save your soul or to get money to build another church) or for economic reasons (to increase the income of the maker or provider).  We are familiar with the idea that advertising is trying to get us to buy things, including things that we don’t want, things that we don’t want in the quantity the maker would like, and things that we don’t even need.  Do you really need a better mousetrap, the latest vegetable peeler, HMO Medicare with its additional benefits, a better car, or a “better” flavored water drink?  Is the next i-phone better enough to justify an even higher price? 

We are all trying to influence each other every day, to get others to cooperate in our getting what we want.  This is done through words, through voting, through buying decisions, through protest marches, etc.  These efforts to influence are going to continue, so we have to decide what kinds of influencing we wish to allow in society.  I suggest that we allow most kinds but not allow influencing that aims to get a behavior from the recipient that is not necessarily in the recipient’s best interest.  All product advertising, as currently done, is not necessarily in your best interest, and the excuse that we give for allowing this “manipulation” is that people can and must make their own decisions about what to buy.  We ignore the fact that people buy primarily on emotion, not rational decision-making, so people buy things all the time that they don’t need, as well as buying things that will actually be harmful to them (alcohol, drugs, a mortgage they can’t pay).  Sellers are simply trying to get your money and as much of it as possible.  (Advertising that simply accurately informed you about a product available should be allowed, but it would be quite boring—just a huge list and a search function.)

In order to eliminate much of the communicating that is aimed at getting you to do or believe something that is not in your best interest, we would have to get the communicators to consider all of the possible effects on various people of what they are “pushing,” and to refrain from presenting things in a way that could encourage people to act against their own interest. (This would require a major change in our society’s view of who is responsible for what.)  In order to eliminate much of the self-harming actions that people do in response to the communications and to prevent recipients from coming to believe things that are untrue, we would have to train citizens (starting in grade school) to effectively evaluate the likely truth of the communications.

Advertisers have figured out that if they can seem to be our friends (by praising us, cozying up to us, entertaining us, or saving us from bad breath), we are more likely to buy.  These efforts are usually quite obvious, but it takes determination to avoid being affected, especially if we need friends or need to feel that the world is a safe and supportive place.  Since currently we in our society accord everyone the opportunity to change other people’s minds, even by lying, we let people say pretty much anything they want, even if they are doing it to get us to do things that are not good for us (fast food, the latest vitamin folk-cure for whatever).  So, the first requirement of not being scammed is to recognize and be aware, every time you watch or read an ad or any other statement, that they are trying to influence you.

Your job (Mission Impossible?) is to know that at the same time that you are enjoying the humor of the ad, you are being drawn unconsciously to agree with what you are being told because it feels good, by making you feel better, giving you hope, making you feel that you are better than others, making you feel that you have a friend, etc.  People who are trying to influence you are not your friend (even those who sincerely believe that their influence will be good for you).  (People who are providing basic information about an opportunity or a product may be doing you an objective service.) 

The same non-friendliness applies to all blogs, podcasts, Facebook pages, etc., that are pushing something.  (Even I am interested in changing your views with this essay.  The only justification for doing this is that I am doing my absolute best to be truthful, and after serious consideration I do not believe that it will be harmful to you to have your ideas changed in the direction that I am suggesting.  You, of course, not knowing me, have a hard time judging if what I claim in the preceding sentence is true, and for your own welfare, you must seriously question what I am presenting and decide for yourself whether you should reject it in your own interest.)

KNOW WHO IS TRYING TO INFLUENCE YOU

We must do our best to know who is attempting to influence us, since this is a major means of deciding how much credence to give the new information. Anyone who is anonymous on the internet (using a fake name, picture, or identity) must be suspected of being at least partially dishonest, since not taking full responsibility for what is presented is the whole point of using the fake name, picture, or identity.  If you are doing this on the internet, admit to yourself how you wish not to take full responsibility for what you present or show.  If you are doing it in order to pretend to yourself to be someone other than who you are (to have the fantasy of having a different life, to get someone to like you because you believe that if they knew the real you they wouldn’t, etc.), then consider figuring out how you can be yourself more happily and why being someone else is so attractive!

The ease of lying about oneself on the internet makes it hard to know who is who, but you can try searching the whole internet for the name given, and you can library search published literature (data compilations, registration of lobbying efforts, Debrets on peerage, the opinion of your presenter by authors discussing the same topic, etc.). You may learn about educational level or occupation of an individual by searching or from the nature of an organization, and these are relevant data.  Background identities may, of course, be faked, too, but we can only do what we can do.  In many cases, there will be a lingering, irresolvable uncertainty about exactly who originated what you are reading/watching.  This leaves you with some doubt about almost everything.  If you want the truth (as close as we can get), you must tolerate this doubt and put a tentative question mark after everything you read, rather than dismissing your doubt by deciding to simply “believe in” the presenter.

We must presume also that any presenter who wishes to profit from you may be giving false information or incomplete information (implying that if you use their deodorant, you will have more friends, or not mentioning in their ads that their car pollutes the air more than others).  This includes every company, corporation, association, and country.  Remember, most of the information presented by other countries seeking to change your mind is disguised as to origin and content.  Right now, we should be especially skeptical about information coming from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran (but we must allow also that they may have legitimate criticisms of our own country, and we should not dismiss those outright).

Even the information about covid19 and its treatment presented by our own government has been suspect, since the government has an interest in our believing information that will motivate us to adhere to the public health actions they are promoting (masks, social distancing, vaccination).  They may be reasonably sincere in doing this, but if you watch closely and pay attention to dissenting opinions, you can see how the “official” information is slanted to have maximum impact on you.  We must not reject all of the information but scope out how much we think is useful and true enough to use in our practical decisions. 

If the new information is part of a newsfeed on Facebook or other provider, then keep in mind that someone is selecting what you hear, or an algorithm is choosing what you get (perhaps influenced by what your own selecting processes on the internet have shown about what you like).  What are the motives of the newsfeed or the algorithm?  You should at least wonder about what you are not getting, because that is part of reality, too (as well as evaluating content, as discussed below).

Was the new information forwarded to you by another party?  Was it someone you know, so you can use your knowledge of that person to judge the probable worthwhileness of the content, or was it someone you don’t know?  What does the referring person know about the area of the content?  What level of judgment is the referring person capable of exercising about the content?  Remember, when you have become a player on the internet, there are lots of other players who spend all their time trying to figure out  how to involve you and get you to do what they want.

If the information comes from a source that will be held at least somewhat responsible for what it puts out (Fox News, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post), you can approach it knowing the slant of each of these providers, and in some instances the basic facts presented to you are reasonably correct (even if said in ways that are also designed to influence how you interpret the “facts”).  The rest is opinion, and even from reputable sources, it is just that—opinion, although these sources have some presenters who are better able to formulate those opinions than others.  For example, on CNN, Fareed Zakaria and on Fox, Chris Wallace both try seriously to get their facts right and to explore the attitudes that underlie what is said publically by various people, rather than simply sell you their opinions.  You must separate what is likely fact from what is opinion.

Bear in mind who is represented in the information you receive.  We have a tendency to overgeneralize and to think that many people beyond the actual presenters/senders also have the same opinion, and this is usually false.  Even if there are hundreds of followers, that is a infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to the population in general.  Both individual and organizational presenters send you the most sensational things they can (including your local news), to get and keep your interest, and these are usually about the things that have the lowest support among the general population.  (Most people are relatively tolerant of people of other cultural backgrounds, but the news would have you think that most are intolerant.)  The bulk of the American electorate are skeptical and don’t agree with any of the more extreme positions.

Question everything you see and are told!  If you cannot figure it out to your satisfaction, either suspend judgment about the information or deny the information.

RESOLVE TO SEPARATE WHAT YOU WANT TO BELIEVE FROM YOUR ASSESSMENT OF TRUTH

It is crucial (and difficult) to accept that we have a strong tendency to believe what we want to believe and reject what we don’t want to believe.  Clearly this will distort our view of the truth.  This tendency has been demonstrated over and over in research.  We tend to pick what will support the views we already have of reality and reject what challenges them.  If you are of a conservative bent, you will be more ready to believe Fox News and more ready to reject what you hear on CNN, and vice versa. 

If you are to perceive the truth or reality behind what you are being told (by everyone, not just on the internet), you must stop this practice of believing only what you agree with.  Check every opinion you have about what you are hearing/watching to see if you are simply supporting what you want to believe.  This means also that you must be open to reality that is uncomfortable (your spouse is having an affair, your child is using drugs, your priest has molested children, the president you voted for is a jerk, the president you didn’t like when you voted turned out to be a decent president).

The most important impact of this tendency for us to listen only to news outlets that agree with us is to widen the current political divide in this country and cause us to associate only with people who agree with us.  If you only get one side of a story, you will be making incorrect assumptions about the other side, which will not be good either for your decisions or for the country as a whole.

As noted above, much of what we think we know is really just what lots of other people have chosen to believe together, and the bulk of the populace believes what those around them believe, just to be safe.  You must have an independent mind if you are to get closest to the truth.

An important reason that we have for believing what we want to believe is that it allows us to remain unaware of painful emotions (you vote Democratic because of the Democrat’s emphasis on fairness for minorities, because then you won’t have to feel guilty for your preference to keep them out of your neighborhood; or, you vote Republican because of their stronger stand on immigration, because you are afraid of people who are different, and this keeps you from feeling that fear). 

Emotions do play a key role in our motivations, infusing cognitive planning with awareness of the emotional states that different courses of action are likely to produce.  Emotions, though, are more primitive in evolution than cognition, and they are more global and less differentiated than thoughts.  Hence, they do not give us the whole story about things outside or inside of us.  Our resistance to the truth is often because it shows us things we do not want to see, and seeing (knowing) these things arouses painful feelings in us.  In reaction, we avoid knowing the truth by refusing to see (know) these things (through processes like denial and repression), and we fall back to the beliefs about reality that most people hold, which are designed so that we don’t not have to see these painful things, or we deal with this problem by creating false beliefs that we prefer to the truth (such as, “I’m young, so I won’t get COVID19”; “masks don’t help anyway, so I won’t wear one”; everything that happens is God’s will).

Some people value or cling to their emotions so strongly that they insist that their feelings are telling them the truth (“even though I know nothing about the case, I know he is guilty—I just feel it”).  You can’t get closest to the truth without questioning the basis for your emotions about whatever the issue is.  Often your emotions arise from past negative experiences which you would handle differently if they occurred now, so this gives you an opportunity to re-condition yourself—to change your mind about how to view what happened.

As an example, consider how children in many families perceive their parents.  Regardless of the father’s drinking and the mother’s failing to carry out her responsibilities to the children, the children continue to maintain a positive, even idealized picture of their parents in their minds and emotions, and they will readily fight any other kids who cast aspersions on their parents.  To see the truth about their parents would be painful, so they do not see it.  People may justify this aspect of “positive thinking” as being charitable or loving, but the real reason is not wanting to see the reality (which would arouse sadness, disappointment, and/or anger in the child and suggest to the child that she should not trust her parents very far and should seek to model herself after other role models).  This same avoidance of reality can be employed with respect to other authority figures as well—priests, bosses, and presidents. 

Seeing the truth shows us our flaws and frailties clearly, as well as those of others (including our spouses and our families of origin), and this can hurt at first.  We see the falseness of some of our beliefs (if you just try hard enough, you can achieve anything; you are either for us or against us; etc.) and the relativity of some of our society’s cherished assumptions (e.g., people who are rich or famous are better than the rest of us).  We see how our behavior affects everything around us.  We see how all existing social structures necessarily involve disadvantage and harm to some members of society while giving advantage to others.  Seeing these truths is often painful, but you can come to accept them and accept yourself as you are if you work at it.

Separating what you want to believe from reality involves noticing everything about yourself (each of your feelings, reactions to things, actions you take) and examining your motives and what you hope to accomplish by your actions.  The explanations that most people give themselves regarding reasons for their behaviors are false and are intended to justify themselves rather than to really understand (“I’m punishing you solely for your benefit”; “I did what I did because you….”), so question your initial explanations and justifications.  Everything you do has to do with yourself, because we always do what we view as being in our best interest.  No one forces us to do certain things or feel certain things, if we are willing to be independent.

It is important to identify your own particular tendencies to avoid and to protect your feelings.  Perhaps your father is a person whom you both fear and need, and in reaction you pretend that he means well (instead of seeing clearly his disregard for others’ feelings).  Perhaps your desire for a better father leads you to want a strong political leader who is also concerned about people.  You bristle at any criticism of this leader.  Perhaps you become angry at every discussion of placing limits on gun ownership, because you are reacting to your feelings of distrust of others by having your guns.  Perhaps you are angry at gun owners, not because they resist limits on guns but because you don’t want to really feel your unavoidable vulnerability, in this world of both good and bad people and of forces that are affecting you but that you can’t control.   Take a look at your reactions to learn where your emotional vulnerabilities are, and adjust your rational view of things accordingly.

Every day, every time you feel emotion arising when you encounter a fact or claim, pause and think about why you are feeling that emotion, because it is very possible that you have a skewed way of looking at that fact or claim.  You will then have a chance to reconsider what you are thinking (and to find a different emotional response to it).

EVALUATE HOW INFORMATION IS PRESENTED

The more the new information is dolled up with fancy graphics and colors, you know that that much more money went into preparing this information for you, which suggests even more strongly that you should be skeptical about the content.  Similarly, the more strident, demanding, or seductive the presentation is, in words or in music, the more skeptical you should be.  (The music in the background of movies is not there because it artistically fits with what is happening, but it is designed to, without your awareness, exaggerate certain of your emotions at that point in the movie.)

A presentation that uses exaggeration in language or in claims loses some credibility just on that account.  Words such as “all,” “always,” “never,” and “completely” are clues, since very few things truthfully qualify for these words.  A claim that all Democrats are a certain way or think a certain way is untrue on its face, since the group of all Democrats contains quite a variety of opinions and attitudes among its members, just as a claim that all Republicans are heartless when it comes to the poor and disadvantaged is untrue for the same reason.  No one (even your spouse) “always” does a certain behavior in a certain circumstance.  He or she may do it a lot more than you like, but he or she does not “always” do it.  This kind of language is used for rhetorical purposes—to convince people of something or punish them, but it is not used in the search for truth.

Similarly, if a presentation is one-sided (only for something, or only against something), then it is at least lying to you by omission.  Every law that is passed or every decision by a group that does not identify its impact on citizens is secretly giving some members of the group an advantage while it gives some disadvantage to other members.  If investment income is taxed at a higher rate, that money is likely to benefit people who are not investors (like the poor), while it disadvantages those who are investors and who are rich.  If a zoning commission grants a variance for a builder (to build a building that doesn’t meet all the zoning requirements), it gives that builder an advantage, while it disadvantages other potential builders and possibly the owners of buildings that already exist around the new building.

A fair presentation would give reasons why the presenter favors a certain opinion or policy, but it would also identify the arguments used by others against that opinion or policy and point out why the presenter doesn’t think these counter-arguments are true.  A fair presentation would also tell you of other proposals regarding the same issue that aim to solve the problem in a different way, and would say why the presenter thinks his/her favored approach is better than these alternative approaches.

Another problem in our thinking to be aware of is that we tend to give more weight to information that we see over and over, even if is not true.  Lies that get a lot of repetition on the news will tend to be believed, even if the newscaster says that it is false!  So, make a special correction for simple repetition, by reviewing in your mind, every time you hear it, why you do or don’t believe it.

A special problem regarding truth arises when numbers, statistics, and graphs are used as part of the new information.  Most people seem unable to correctly interpret this numerical information, and this gives rise to much misinterpretation.  In no presentation have I observed any effort by presenters to explain how to interpret correctly the numerical information.

For example, when we are told that 350,000 U.S. citizens have died from covid-19, it sounds like a lot of people, and if you saw 350,000 people in one mob, it would look like and be a lot.  However, this does not translate directly into a statement about risk, because 350,000 divided by the U.S. population of 330,000,000 results in the fact that so far in the pandemic, 0.1 percent of the population has died from covid-19, which translates to 1 in 330,000 people.  So out of 330,000 people (many more than any medium sized city in the county), only one person has died, so far (on average).  Put that way, it doesn’t look so big.  Of course, as we go on, more people will die, but we appear to be near the end of the accumulation of large numbers of people dying every day. 

Of course, it’s a tragedy to lose 350,000 (or a future possible 450,000) to a new virus, but the risk of any one person dying is quite small so far.  Elderly people had a much higher vulnerability and therefore risk, and they should have been more scared and wary, but that means that the risk for younger workers and children was even less than one in 330,000.  (The risk of being ill from covid-19 was, of course, much greater than 1 in 330,000.) 

When you are given absolute numbers (the numbers alone), always ask for or think of what the risk is given that absolute number.  This same advice goes for the risks of any illness and for the risks of not making it through any surgery alive.  If you can’t do the math (or have someone capable do it for you), just disregard any implication of risk when you are given only the total number.

Similarly, if you don’t know what statistics mean (average, mean, median, probability of the truth of some research hypothesis), and you can’t obtain a reliable interpreter, just ignore statistical claims.  Sometimes numbers and statistics are cited (and slanted) to make you think a certain thing.  Even some research scientists, especially in the social sciences, don’t understand what their own statistics really mean.

Graphical presentations always break up the total into smaller parts, which should all be labeled clearly.  Be careful to see what that total is for any graph you see.  Some graphs that were used to show covid-19 statistics used the total of U.S. citizens, but some used the total of all U.S. citizens who had been diagnosed with covid-19.

USE YOUR CONFIRMED KNOWLEDGE TO JUDGE HOW MUCH CREDENCE TO GIVE TO THE INFORMATION

The more you know about the world, other people, and yourself, the better you will be able to judge the likely truth of what you are exposed to.  If you know, for instance, that many of our Founding Fathers owned slaves, you will be able to see the falsity of someone asserting the near-sacredness of them.  If you know that Russia holds elections, you will know that Vladimir Putin is not an absolute dictator (even if he and his apparatus can manipulate the elections and have firm control of the country).  If you know the limits of your insurance policies—i.e., what is covered and what is not, you will be able to protect yourself better.  If you don’t know that much, then you can be duped by things that sound good (because they feel good to you or they confirm what you want to believe). 

Americans’ general ignorance of history plays them false here, which points to the value of world history in high school and the value of a general liberal arts education in addition to learning employable skills in college.  It will pay off for you in the long run if you continue to learn throughout your lifetime.

Consider whether this new information is consistent with what you already know with a fair amount of certainty.  If it contradicts what you already know, consider whether you wish to reconsider what you thought you  knew, based on the reasonableness of the new information and the potential value that the new information could have for your future considerations of truth, if you were to change your current understandings. Any significant change in one’s fundamental understanding of the self or the world can change a lot of things in one’s life, and this change process can take some time to get to completion.

Bear in mind that human beings rarely know the truth, so absolute truth is rarely our goal in real life, but it benefits us to get as close to the truth as we can, by considering all the alternatives and questioning our prior beliefs.

COMPARE INFORMATION TO YOUR EXPERIENCE

Use the consistency of your experiences over time (after purging them of avoidances) to establish observations that are firm enough to use in constructing a fact or a description of reality.  (Young people are at a disadvantage with this, since they don’t have much life experience to consider.)

Check out whether a perception, thought, or feeling is consistent with your other senses and understanding at that time.  (When I think of getting closer to Joan I feel scared, but if I think about it further, she isn’t doing anything that would indicate danger.) 

COMPARE INFORMATION TO YOUR OTHER SOURCES AND EVALUATE THEIR RELIATILITY

Gather accurate information about the issue, and be very careful about the reliability of your information. Just because your parents said it or it’s on the internet or in a book doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true or that it is the most accurate information currently available.  Much of what is taken to be information in the world is biased by the person’s emotions or by what he or she wants to believe in the first place, so it is important to be careful.

Do your best to determine or guess at the honesty/reliability of the provider of the information.  Err on the side of caution rather than on the side of assuming the best.  If a provider is truly unknown to you, be very careful.  Books are in general more reliable than internet sources, but there are books written with the intent to deceive.  Large newspapers are as reliable as books, but they still have their bias (New York Times, Washington Post liberal; New York Post conservative).  Remember that internet news outlets (especially cable news) are all slanted (though PBS least of all).  If you watch only one (Fox, OAN, CNN, MSNBC), it will be very difficult to sort out the slant from the truth.

Utilize the library to find out what others who have seriously considered the issue have concluded.  You can usually tell the books that are written to inform (even though every author has blind spots and some biases) from the books that are written to persuade.  The percentage of books that are written to inform is much greater than the percentage of internet inserts, tweets, comments, newsfeeds, etc. that have the purpose of informing.

On-line resources that have a serious allegiance to the truth include The Internet Archive (archive.org.) and Wikipedia (though this varies with the curators of various pages), and a useful fact-checker is snopes.com.

Don’t accept your own, your family’s, other peoples’, or your culture’s assumptions about reality, without examination.  (People from other cultures are dangerous.  Strangers are dangerous.  A free-market economy is always the best.  God actually guided the hand of every person who wrote every book of the Bible.  A foetus has a soul from the moment of conception.)  Assume that every perception and every interpretation of a perception may be distorted, and check every one of these as closely as you can.  Be skeptical but unbiased.

Before you make an important conclusion, review the assumptions on which it rests.  (If you concluded, based on your experience of being emotionally abused by your parents, that everyone else would emotionally abuse you in a close relationship, that conclusion would be in error.) 

Ask others whose reality perceptions and honesty you trust to give you their opinion about the matter in question. 

Check out whether the experience of others is consistent with your own.  Be especially careful in your use of language when you do this, because people often mean different things by the same words (love, freedom, God).

Use cultural experience and concepts–the wisdom of the past–as a check on your observations.  People and their basic needs, emotions, and thought capabilities have not changed much in the last thousand years, and there is often some practical wisdom in how societies are organized and how people do things. 

Find out whether other cultures have come to the same conclusion about the claim in question.  If they have not, then you (and your culture) may be engaging in distortion (or perhaps what you are considering is a custom, on which cultures will naturally differ, rather than a question of “fact” or trustable knowledge).  Just because your culture believes something does not make it true, and just because your culture does something in a certain way doesn’t make it the best way possible.

Pay attention to your inner voice or inner wisdom–that part of us that has some intuitive awareness of the truth and some awareness of when we are trying to fool ourselves.  Cultivate that part of yourself. 

CONSTANTLY EVALUATE HOW YOU ARE THINKING

In order to get as close as possible to the truth, we need to both evaluate the new information and evaluate our own thinking about it and about the issue addressed by the new information.

Keep an independent mind regarding new information.  Set aside all of your assumptions and beliefs initially, and look at the new information on its own merits.

Learn more about how to think accurately and apply what you learn in all areas.  Always define your terms carefully.  Assess the accuracy of your information, and don’t make conclusions that aren’t supported by the best evidence available.  “Try out” all of the likely conclusions to see how they fit with what you already know relatively accurately and to see what emotions they engender in you.  Ensure that your conclusions about what is true are not being arrived at to make yourself feel better or to make it more likely that you can get something you want.  Take a course in logic or in philosophy, as these will show you more about accurate thinking.

Be very careful about definitions when examining a proposition or assertion.  There are many, many definitions of “love,” “freedom,” “better,” “perfect,” etc., etc., and if you don’t ask or explore this, you and others will often be attempting to communicate using different underlying assumptions.

Examine anew every sensory perception, thought, feeling, and memory that you have, questioning each one to see whether there are reasons not to believe it that you have been ignoring.  (Did my dad really beat me, or did he just terrify me?   Do I really simply hate my boss, or do I actually kind of respect him at the same time?  When I feel scared of my wife, is she really that dangerous, or am I perhaps reacting to memories of my mother?)   Ask yourself if you have any evidence to support each of your beliefs.  Evidence may be in the form of your own careful observations, observations of others whom you trust (either personally or in books) and whose observations in the given instance are likely to be accurate, the findings of science, or the wisdom of institutions that are dedicated to knowing the truth.  Evidence for most things should be based on several (or even many) confirming repeated observations, rather than on only one. 

If you face a situation similar to one you are already familiar with and need to evaluate it, identify the new elements in the situation and see how they may alter your understanding of the already familiar situation.

Identify all of your self-serving distortions–the ways in which you make reality into what you want to believe or what will justify your inappropriate behavior (e.g., I’m better than he is, so I should be the starting quarterback and not him; I like my white privilege, so I’ll continue to justify it by believing that Blacks are inferior). 

Accept that your emotions or emotional reactions to things do not necessarily guide you to the truth.  Sometimes our emotional reactions are simply telling us to avoid something (and therefore to avoid learning more) because the truth would be unpleasant (e.g., I feel scared around him, so he must be bad; I love her, so she must be “the one” for me; etc.).  Emotions do have information for us and do guide us, but it is best to examine them and compare their information to what we “know” otherwise   before acting on them.  

Notice any reactions that you have to a reality perception or description of reality that indicate aversion to that view of reality and a preference to avoid it or reject it.  These reactions will tempt you to distort.  (If you are angry at those who believe differently than you do, perhaps you’re actually unsure of your own beliefs.) 

Identify the reasons for your aversion or avoidance around the facts or the issue.   You may find it to be threatening, unpleasant, hurtful, disappointing, confusing, calling your beliefs or adaptation into question, suggesting a change in your behavior that would lead to fewer gratifications, etc. 

Once you think you have a statement of reliable knowledge, try to think of any example (person or situation) in the world that does not fit your conclusion (a “counterexample”).  If you can find even one such example, then your conclusion is wrong and needs further refinement, perhaps by examining the assumptions on which it is based or restricting the things to which it applies.  It is especially useful in this regard to consider what other people are doing around the world, since if you confine your checking to your own culture, then you may conclude that the conclusion is correct simply because everyone in the culture already believes that conclusion. 

If you reach a tentative conclusion or theory, reflect on the assumptions that you made in the beginning about it, because your conclusion is only as good as your assumptions were accurate.  This gives you some suggestion about how certain your conclusion can be. 

Keep track of how you know each thing that you know.  Based on the history of how you “know” each of the things that you “know,” keep track of the degree of certainty with which you “know” each thing (and don’t assert more certainty than is justified).  (I think I see enough evidence in the world and in life that God exists to organize my life around that belief, but I still have no direct experience or evidence to “prove” it.) 

Employ a healthy skepticism about how you interpret your own experience, as well as being skeptical about how others do this, too. 

Notice and question the “holes” in your awareness–the things that you are not aware of or avoid.  (I wonder why I never think about my family.  I wonder why I just can’t see it when others accuse me of being self-centered.) 

ASSESS THE CONSEQUENCES OF BELIEVING THE INFORMATION  

Check out how accurately the understanding of reality in question predicts or relates to other realities.  Are its predictions consistent with what you know otherwise?  This is often done by looking at history and what has happened in the past when people have assumed this same thing to be true.  (Has having government and religion joined together for societies led to healthier behavior and happier people than having them separated?) 

Examine the impact that a given understanding of reality has had on the lives of everyone affected when people act on this understanding of reality (or predict as best you can what the impact on everyone would be if this understanding of reality were acted upon).  (Did heavier emphasis on conformity and on everyone believing the same thing lead to people enjoying relationships more or did it lead to more distrust?) 

Ask yourself if you would say or believe the same thing if you didn’t care about the outcome for yourself.  (Would I really claim that our team is better than theirs if I didn’t want to win so badly?)  

Imagine yourself saying the same thing or expressing the same belief and then adding to it an explanation of your motives.  This also will help to identify your self-serving interests.  (I want the family to go to church today, but really I myself “need” to go because I’m feeling guilty about what I did this week.) 

SUSPEND JUDGMENT

The most difficult thing for us to do is not thinking through the steps above to evaluate the new information but suspending judgment when we have no basis for making a judgment.  We are so eager to “know” (for our daily decision-making) and to know things for sure (to quell our anxiety about not knowing) that we are quite willing to make a judgment about the new information and then to label it in our minds as a firm judgment, rather than label it as “maybe true” or as having a truth likelihood of 0.6 rather than 1.0.

When you cannot determine whether something is true (or likely to be true), suspend judgment, if it is practical to do so, until you get more information one way or the other.  When you suspend judgment, you put that claim on the shelf but watch for any new relevant information that may come along. Learn to tolerate currently unresolvable ambiguity.  Often we must act without knowing the full truth or facts, but you can act with hope and confidence and still know that you are not certain of the truth or the facts (do the best you can), and keeping this in mind will make it easier for you to adjust course as needed.  This necessary attitude requires us to be aware of what we don’t know, and to monitor this at all times.  Human beings hate not knowing, so maintaining your sense of what is true, what is likely to be true, and what is unknown so far (and at the same time continuing to act in the real world on insufficient information) is a mountainous challenge! 

To do this, we will need to tolerate knowing that we make many decisions that could be wrong.  We don’t like that, preferring to assume that everything will always work out, but the truth is that many of our decisions don’t work out but have to be amended or re-done in the future.  Accept this as our inevitable existential position, and you will be able to keep your head about what is true and what is not. 

WHAT COULD BE DONE TO CHANGE THINGS?

There are a number of things that could be done to make the internet more responsible.  (A number of these would, however, be quite difficult to implement!)

Eliminate anonymous use of the internet.

Eliminate pseudonyms on the internet.

Have registration for use of the internet (using biomarkers).

Start charging for internet posting (which would slow down the easy lying

that is now possible).

Prosecute those who knowingly lie on the internet.

Have every post (internet and hard-copy) labeled as opinion or as an effort

to report facts.

Become better ourselves at assessing likelihood of truth and at suspending

judgment when we don’t know enough to judge.

Help others with figuring out what is true, by applying the concepts herein.  An excellent presentation on methods of debunking is Lewandowsky et al—The Debunking Handbook 2020 (see below).

Encourage organizations such as Creative Commons, which provides “Creative Commons licenses that [1] [could] give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works” and [2] supports the “CC Global Network, a community initiative working to increase the volume, breadth, and quality of openly available knowledge worldwide.”  (Wikipedia, for example, operates as one of these licensed open sources.)

Give internet users choices of various newsfeeds on, for instance, Facebook, so that the user could choose news that is better curated or broader in coverage of points of view.  (Some would, of course, still choose biased news, to reinforce their already existing point of view.)

Inform users about the purpose of the algorithms employed in presenting your screens.

Establish more public sites such as Front Porch Forum, which seeks public participation on important issues but slows the conversation down by only showing your post 24 hours after you send it in.  This encourages more thought and less emotion.  (You must register with proof of who you are to participate.)

Use programs such as Polis, which accepts 140-character tweets on identified issues, which are then only “voted on” (no comments) by other participants (registered and identified as to their political or business associations).  There is no reply function, only these votes indicating preferences.

Experiment with the notion of a “self-sovereign identity,” where you build up a “trustworthiness” grade through proofs of your education, work, licenses, etc. (which would at least confirm that you are a person and not a bot).

Design algorithms to encourage trust, empathy, etc. (instead of profit and siloing) and use them on public sites with only users with proven identities (no bots).  (Information regarding the preceding six ideas were taken from “The Internet Doesn’t Have To Be Awful” in The Atlantic (April, 2021) by Anne Appelbaum and Peter Pomerantsev.)

As you see, many of these ideas require that we be registered users with known identities, so the idea of reducing anonymity on the internet is key, at least on these sites with clear purposes of gathering actual data from real people and encouraging responsibility by users.

REFERENCES

Adler, Mortimer. (1985). Ten Philosophical Mistakes. New York, NY: 

          Macmillan.

Audi, Robert (Ed.). (1999). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 

          Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Baldwin, James Mark (Ed.).  (1901-1905). Dictionary of Philosophy and

          Psychology, New York, NY:  Macmillan.

Baumann, Michael.  “Elements of Truth” in Philosophy Now (Feb./March

          2021).

Blackburn, Simon, & and Simmons, Keith (Eds.). (1999). Truth.  Oxford UK:

          Oxford Univ. Press.

Ebbe, Christopher.  Living Wisely, Deeply, and Compassionately.  pub.

          Christopher Ebbe/Lightning Source, 2021 (in press) .

Garfield, Jay L., & Kiteley, Murray. (1991).  Meaning and Truth:  The

          Essential Readings in Modern Semantics, New York NY:  Paragon

          House.

Grant, Adam.  Think Again:  The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. 

          2021.

Horwich, Paul. (1988).  Truth (2^nd edition).  Oxford UK:  Oxford Univ. Press.

          Kirkham, Richard L.  (1992).  Theories of Truth. Cambridge MA:  MIT

          Press.

Lewanowsky, Stephan et al.  The Debunking Handbook 2020

          available at https://sks.to/db2020

Russell, Bertrand.  (1912). The Problems of Philosophy. 1^st published 1912. 

          Reprinted, (1959) New York NY:  Oxford Univ. Press, Galaxy Books. 

          Reprinted, (1988)  Buffalo NY:  Prometheus Books.

ONLINE RESOURCES

An Introduction to Truth (http://www.galilean-library.org/manuscript.php?postid=43788) by Paul Newall.

Ebbe, Christopher.  www.livewiselydeeply.com

          Gaining Wisdom

          Gaining Maturity

          Definition of Truth

snopes.com (fact-checker

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http;//plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth)

The Internet Archive (archive.org)

Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia

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