Know Your Culture

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 23:15 - 1 Comment

The Delusions, the Deluders and “the Truth”

Why We Believe What We Do and Why We Should Be Concerned

I venture to say that most of us take for granted the reasons for why we believe what we do and what we don’t.  After all it is a process we automatically and without forewarning enter into as soon as we became able to grasp our first concepts about the world.

To complicate matters our world is filled with biased learning sources and our own thinking is subject to certain subconscious tendencies predisposing us to believe in ideas having little or no validity outside of our heads and/or we are apt to confabulate spontaneously (make up on the fly).

“What is the Truth?”

Anthropologists, psychologists and other cognitive scientists use the term veridicality to refer to the degree of relationship between the ideas we have about how or why anything exists or functions and the actuality of it.

For example, it was once believed the universe revolved around the earth (geocentric view) when in actuality the earth revolves around the sun (heliocentric view).

The idea of a geocentric view would persist for over 2000 years until better tools (telescope) and methods (scientific process) were developed. Therefore the degree of veridicality between the idea of a geocentric universe (an erroneous understanding) versus a heliocentric universe (the actuality) was zero.

There was absolutely no correspondence between what was believed (geo-centrism) and the reality of helio-centrism.

The “truth” is then any idea, belief or concept that accords with independently verifiable evidence. Everything else is either a fabrication, a speculation yet to be proved or disproved or an idea already proved false. Continue…