Language, Truth, Perspective, Paradigm...

This post is a prequel to another post (or three) I have rattling around in my brain. Before I can get to that, It is necessary to precisely (as possible) define a few words. Level-set, if you will.

Language really is an amazing thing, is it not? We humans emit a wide range of sounds. We arrange, combine and modulate all those hums, whistles, clicks, hisses, 'oooh's, 'aaah's, etc... And we assign meaning to them.

It isn't natural or  inherent, if you will. Babies don't come into the world able to speak. They have to learn to make the various sounds sound by imitation, trial and error. They have to learn from others the meaning of each particular set of sounds. And it is entirely arbitrary. A "Dog" is a Dog, only because somewhere in the past a group of people agreed to it, and we continue to accept and use that convention. But only certain of us do.

Somewhere in the distant past of the people we designate as "Germans", they agreed on "Hund". For the Croatians it was "Pas".

Oh, and yeah, not only did we agree on combinations of sounds and assign them meaning, we also agreed on combinations of drawings - lines and curves, and assigned them meaning as well. "狗" for instance is Chinese for Dog. Some people say entire words with a single symbol. Others, assign sounds to the symbols so we can combine them to make the words.

But there are two glaring problems:

1. We sometime re-use symbols - entire symbol sets and sound arrangement.

"Done.", "Dun."

Clearly different when written, not so when spoken.

"Wind."

Did I just wind a clock, or is the wind blowing?

2.  We can arbitrarily reassign meaning. At any time.

"You sly dog!"

Clearly I'm not a "Dog". When and how did this alternate meaning come to be?

And that is a word which is assigned to a physical, tangible object. Imagine the difficulty in assigning and retaining precise meaning for words which describe intangibles, such as emotions, feelings, ideas...

It thus becomes necessary to use more words in an attempt to clarify the meaning of the words we just said.

Words are hard!

 That being said, I now intend to attempt to define a few words (using words- it all seems somewhat futile when you think about it...).


Truth - I need this word to have a very precise meaning for my future post(/s). Rather humorously, most dictionary definitions of truth say something to the effect of "that which is true". And then one definition of True is "Truth".

For my purposes I will start my definition with the phrase "Things as they really are."

Now a few thoughts to try and visually add some tangible boundaries to that.

First, imagine you can only see two dimensions.

What would you say this object is?




A circle?

But this is just a two-dimensional projection of a three dimensional object.
It could in fact be a sphere

or a Cone

a cylinder



Or perhaps something even more complex.

But if you only experienced the world in two dimensions, you likely wouldn't even be able to comprehend those shapes, it would likely be utterly beyond your grasp. 

A few more observations to help flesh this out:

--

Imagine for a moment the shape in question was a cylinder, and a friend of yours saw it from one of the sides. He would be completely confused as to why you were calling it a circle when it was obviously a rectangle! You would be equally alarmed by your friends seeming blindness to the obvious.

--
Science does not discover truth. Science creates models, which attempt to approximate truth, based on our observations from within the system.

--
A person can speak truthfully, and yet not speak truth. (In the above example, you called the cylinder a circle. while your friend called it a rectangle. You and your friend both spoke truthfully. You did not intend, nor wish to be dishonest. And yet, what you said was untrue.

--
There is no "My truth" and "Your truth". There is only "The truth." Which due to our limited vision, our limited perspective, may be beyond our ability to grasp.


And that is the second word...

Perspective - Perspective is the position from which you look at something. This is why you saw a circle, while your friend saw a rectangle in the example above. Each of you saw the object from a different perspective. Perspectives are not fixed. They can be changed by our current mood,

Tying that back to truth, let's add a contextual definition to the word...

Observation - This is the fragment of The truth which we see from our particular perspective. We habitually think of this as The truth, it isn't.

Finally, one more word..

Paradigm - Paradigm is a particular world-view. A system of beliefs, ideas, and experiences which define our perspective. If perspective determines what you saw, paradigm determines why.

Our paradigm is created by our genes, by our environment, by the people we interact with, and the things we do. They can change over time, as we expand our knowledge, or increase our experience. They can even change as our friendships change. As an example, I have had friends who were very liberal in their political views, who moved to areas which were predominately conservative. As time passed and they integrated into their new environment, making new friends, I observed their views shift quite dramatically from liberal to conservative. Similarly, I have had friends who were very conservative, who shifted to liberal upon moving to a predominately liberal city. "You are the sum of your five closest friends," as the saying goes.

People can have different paradigms. They can have different perspectives. They can't have different truths.





-- Claim:

For a given system, truth can only be observed from outside of the system. In other words, we can't observe truth.  We can make educated guesses about what is true. But they are only guesses.


-- Religious Corollary I:

Assuming the existence of a Deity, and assuming the above claim is valid. If said deity is omniscient - the source of all truth, then it holds that said deity must exist outside of the system, thus sees the system in its entirety, as it really is.

-- Religious Corollary II:

Communication with Deity does not bestow upon the communicating individual, any claim to truth. Said individual remains within the system, is still bounded by the constraints of their (albeit expanded) paradigm and thus said individual must still interpret the communicated truth via their limited perspective. Furthermore, their attempts to communicate said truth to another individual incur the added difficulty of being filtered through the other individuals paradigm.