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Validity Claim - Upper Right Quadrant

Posted August 24th, 2010 by sdcaulley in Essential Integral

I just finished listening to a piece about validity claims.  The upper right quadrant's label of "truth" bothers me.  I know what they were getting at, but I feel "fact" would have been a much better label.  It is the truth versus fact struggle that I have been struggling with in Christian faith and in the world in general.  The two have been collapsed in the Western world for a very long time.  Something cannot be "true" unless it is factual.  I feel that the objective science deal in facts, not necessarily in truth.  And the religious world has felt a great pressure over the last five centuries to prove that their truth is also "fact". It has been in that quest to turn religious truth into factual truth that has given rise to the different fundamentalists around the world.  I believe that once we uncouple fact from truth, and give fact back to the realm of science and truth can stand in all four quadrants, we would be in a much better place.

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well expressed

Posted August 24th, 2010 by Ambo Suno

No solutions to the issue, but, yes, trying to characterize a quadrant with one word, or a few, is tricky, maybe dubious. Truth is one of the big words for me as well. Here, I think it is used heuristically, so helpful in a limited sense, yet maybe detrimental to such a fine expansive, good and beautiful word and possibility.

Factual, too, must have its problems as we tap down and expand out - "fact" becomes dubious. Finding words that match well in their complex connotative histories with ourselves, the multitudes, at various and varying kosmic addresses does seem challenging.

Personally, where "conveyor belt" is such a vivid modern signifier that so many of us know and can 'get on' visually-imaginatively, I find misdirecting and downgrading of what is possible. But seems to have utility for many people, and they say so.

Metaphoric representation. Good and big topic, this language. Even voicing oneself seems arduous sometimes. Thx.

ambo

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100% Right

Posted August 25th, 2010 by Jennifer Grove

When you view facts thru a larger lens (manifest reality as currently perceived, perhaps), you can see facts are on the other side of the coin from falsehoods. Fact/falsehood is one coin. This one coin belongs to the realm of sci inquiry. Its perfectly valid over the objects in it's domain. But it's domain has limits. Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar's. 

Truth. Reality. Fact. All these have accumulated multiple as well as conflicting meaning over the centuries. And their meanings differ from language to language. The languages exert their meanings and limitations into the very structures of cognition in those who are brought up using them. 

Before the age of reason, people would tell stories to reveal or expose or somehow describe a truth - like a parable. This truth may not be seeable any other way. Trying to shove those stories into either the "fact" or "falsehood" box does violence to the fabric of "reality" and our cognition structures are unable to even perceive this violent act because the language keeps us in line. It's a mess. 

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