The Twofold Objectivity of Truth

There are three strands to our ordinary notion of an objective fact or objective truth. First, an objective fact is accessible from different angles. It can be repeated by the same sense (sight, touch, etc.) at different times, it can be repeated by different senses of one observer, and by different observers. Different laboratories can replicate the phenomenon. What can be experienced only at one instant by one sense modality of one observer is indistinguishable from random noise, and does not (securely) count as an objective fact. second mark of an objective truth, related to the first, is that there is or can be intersubjective agreement about it. And the third feature concerns independence. If p is an objective truth, then it holds independently of people's beliefs, desires, hopes, and observations or measurements that p. These three features of objective truths certainly are in need of elaboration and refinement, if only to meet the counterexamples to thinking of them as individually necessary and jointly sufficient. We also may wonder how the notion of independence fares in the light of quantum mechanics. However, it is a fourth and more fundamental characteristic of objective truth that I want to investigate here today. An objective fact is invariant under various transformations. It is this invariance that constitutes something as an objective truth and it underlies and explains the first three features (to the extent that they hold). That invariance is importantly connected to something's being an objective fact is suggested by the practice of physicists, who treat what is invariant under Lorentz transformations as more objective than what varies under these transformations. Dirac writes, The important things in the world appear as the invariants... of ... transformations.1 Einstein taught us that spatial distance and temporal distance are relative to an observer; their magnitudes will be measured differently by different inertial observers, and spatial and temporal intervals are not invariant under Lorentz transformations. However, inertial observers will agree about another more complicated interval between events, involving not just spatial separations alone or temporal separations alone but a particular mixture of the two, namely, the square root of the square of the time separation minus the square of the spatial separation. This more complicated interval is invariant under Lorentz transformations. principle of relativity of Einstein's Special Theory holds that all laws of physics are the same for all inertial observers; they are the same in every inertial reference frame, and so are invariant under Lorentz transformations. That an interval involving both temporal and spatial separation is invariant, while no simpler interval involving only temporal or only spatial separation is

Facts and truths are termed “objective,” and so are beliefs. There are three strands to our ordinary notion of an objective fact or truth. First, an objective fact is accessible from different angles. It can be repeated by the same sense (sight, touch, etc.) at different times, and it can be repeated by different senses of one observer, and by different observers. The second mark of an objective truth, related to the first, is that there is or can be intersubjective agreement about it. And the third feature concerns independence. If p is an objective truth, then it holds independently of people’s beliefs, desires, hopes, and observations or measurements that p. A fourth and more fundamental characteristic of objective truths underlies and explains the first three features (to the extent that they hold): an objective fact is invariant under all admissible transformations. Which transformations are the admissible ones, for instance, Lorentz transformations, is discovered in the course of the history of scientific investigation.1

The Netherlands are often considered an excellent example of ‘new public management’ reforms. Especially the ‘Tilburg model’ of management reform that took place in Dutch local government in the mid-1980s has become internationally renowned. In this review of public management reforms that took place in Dutch local and national government during the 1980s and 1990s we will show that managerial reforms were not the only dominant story in the The Netherlands. Dutch administration experienced a shift in frame of reference beyond public management. This review will not concentrate on ‘factual reforms’ but rather on reform ideas. This study departs from the empirical positivist approach where ‘objective facts’ play the central role. There is no one and single ‘objective truth’ about reforms. Managerial reform seemed the dominant story. In ‘reality’ there was a variety of reform ideas.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Toward an Archaeogenealogy of Post-truth

What if there were no objective facts, no objective truth, only our belief in them? What if our consciousness itself is an unconscious invention, constructed out of logic and language? In this thought-provoking volume, Lynn Segal describes how the ideas of Heinz von Foerster compel us to explore the question Do we discover the world or do we invent it?. He suggests that we must first know how we think before we can claim knowledge of the world. While Constructivism may seem relevant only to those in the cognitive sciences, it is, in fact, highly relevant to everyone. Paradoxically, grasping the limits of our own understanding can free us to live more creative and meaningful personal and professional lives.

The post-truth era has had a significant impact on the responses and behaviors of both individuals and groups. The characteristics of this era tend to blur objective facts and lead to relativism, where objective truth is no longer considered absolute. This situation triggers the spread of false news and the distortion of facts, causing individuals to become disseminators of lies or, at the very least, mislead others into logical fallacies far from objective truth. The purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of the post-truth era on individual behavior and thinking, as well as to uncover the factors contributing to the widespread dissemination of lies and manipulation of facts. This study also aims to understand the root causes of the chaos in the post-truth era from a theological perspective. This research employs a qualitative method with a library research approach. The researcher analyzes the variables used and presents them descriptively. The results of the study indicate that the chaos of the post-truth era stems from individuals being deceived, manipulated, and trapped in the allure of lies, diverting them from the objective truth that originates from God, and instead leading them towards subjective truth driven by personal desires and passions.

The post-truth era has had a significant impact on the responses and behaviors of both individuals and groups. The characteristics of this era tend to blur objective facts and lead to relativism, where objective truth is no longer considered absolute. This situation triggers the spread of false news and the distortion of facts, causing individuals to become disseminators of lies or, at the very least, mislead others into logical fallacies far from objective truth. The purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of the post-truth era on individual behavior and thinking, as well as to uncover the factors contributing to the widespread dissemination of lies and manipulation of facts. This study also aims to understand the root causes of the chaos in the post-truth era from a theological perspective. This research employs a qualitative method with a library research approach. The researcher analyzes the variables used and presents them descriptively. The results of the study indicate that the chaos of the post-truth era stems from individuals being deceived, manipulated, and trapped in the allure of lies, diverting them from the objective truth that originates from God, and instead leading them towards subjective truth driven by personal desires and passions.

When you make a moral judgment, say you judge that it is morally wrong to eat meat, do you afterwards ever wonder whether that judgment is objectively true? This question of whether there are objective moral facts lies at the heart of the debate between moral realists and moral anti-realists. Moral realists believe that there are objective moral facts, moral anti-realist do not. This thesis develops several novel problems for some of the most prominent anti-realist theories. The source of most of these problems is one particular way in which philosophers have defended moral realism: by arguing that there are conceptual moral truths. A moral realist of this persuasion, claims that the content of our moral concepts entail certain moral truths. Were these conceptual moral truths to indeed exist, they would be objective moral truth, which is a problem for moral anti-realist theories. This thesis argues that setting aside this matter of conceptual moral truth is more difficult for anti-realists than it might at first glance seem to be. This is a novel problem, because it cannot be resolves by calling upon the solutions that anti-realists have given for more well-established problems for their theory. This thesis therefore puts the onus on anti-realists to develop news solutions to the problems that it puts forward.

The communication of scientific knowledge is traditionally oriented towards objective truth and facts, and builds on the authority of science. This article argues that, besides or even opposite to these aims, creating authenticity has become a major factor of successful science communication. Conveying a “personal touch,” or giving the audience a feeling of “being real,” are crucial promoters of credibility. Significant methods of gaining trust and sympathy on the level of textual as well as visual presentation are disclosed by exploring a bestselling popular scientific book, and with references to ancient rhetorical texts.

In this paper we attempt to find an answer to the question – how can we revisit political theory? This question may seem apparently simple, but the moment one start exploring, the incongruities and complexities of politics make the undertaking question highly toilsome. It is impossible to completely reject the normative framework in political analyses as far as it deals with the human society. On the other side, the age of post-truth politics also creates a difficulty to find out the objective facts and truth. So rather than arguing which method of politics is more efficient to deal with the uncertainties of human political life today, we attempt to visualize politics from a new understanding i.e., politics as absence of general agreement beyond excessive empiricism and extreme normativism. It is the antagonistic nature of human beings what keep ‘the political’ alive, and constitute the factual practices known as ‘politics’.

The Truth dominates many public discussions today. Conventional truths from established epistemic authorities about all sorts of issues, from climate change to terrorist attacks, are increasingly challenged by ordinary citizens and presidents alike. Many have therefore proclaimed that we have entered a post-truth era: a world in which objective facts are no longer relevant. Media and politics speak in alarmist discourse about how fake news, conspiracy theories and alternative facts threaten democratic societies by destabilizing the Truth – a clear sign of a moral panic. In this essay, I firstly explore what sociological changes have led to (so much commotion about) the alleged demise of the Truth. In contrast to the idea that we have moved beyond it, I argue that we are amidst public battles about the Truth: at stake is who gets to decide over that and why. I then discuss and criticize the dominant counter reaction (re-establishing the idea of one objective and irrefutable truth), which I see as an unsuccessful de-politisation strategy. Basing myself on research and experiments with epistemic democracy in the field of science studies, I end with a more effective and democratic alternative of how to deal with knowledge in the complex information landscape of today.

In this chapter, Patrick Casement differentiates between provable objective fact and psychological truth, and between memory that has not been subjected to the processes of repression and memories that have. He focuses on these issues in connection with adult patients. Casement also deals with patients traumatized by complex family systems in which there is a sense of inappropriate sexuality and lack of containment but no clear evidence of actual concrete abuse.

The coincidence of the passing of the great European sociologist Zygmunt Bauman with the British decision on Brexit, the American election to president of Donald Trump, the rise of fake news, and the normalization of what would have previously been extremist political views raises profound ethical questions and political challenges for not only Bauman’s home discipline, sociology, but also the wider humanities and social sciences.Although Bauman was a sociologist, he was not a social scientist in the Durkheimian mold of those who want to prove causal relationships between variables in the name of establishing social facts. Against the antihumanism of so much contemporary sociology, which has been able to uncritically serve the interests of the state because it considers ethical norms distortions of its value-free methodological mission, Bauman wrote through what C. Wright Mills ([1959] 2000) called the sociological imagination. In Thinking Sociologically (Bauman and May 2001), what I consider his greatest book, simply because it seems to capture the essence of his sociological project, Bauman insists upon the primacy of the social relation in the name of the critique of the kind of brutal individualism that has taken over capitalist society, certainly since the 1970s when the postwar consensus between business and labor broke down. Reading Bauman’s work, one cannot escape the conclusion that his project is deeply political, profoundly human, and unashamedly critical of what he called the individualized society (2000) and the related apolitical turn in the social sciences where facts trump values and ethics every time. It is for this reason that Bauman was more than simply a sociologist and should be instead understood in the broader sense of European intellectual history, where the writer or thinker was never confined to a particular professional discipline that defined what could and could not be said. Against this limiting profane professionalism, the intellectual had a kind of ethical, political, and historical mission to teach, humanize, and critically engage in the world in the name of the good or the utopian possibility rooted in the human ability to make the world better. It is also for this reason that Bauman’s passing represents a serious ethical and political challenge to sociology, and to the wider humanities and social sciences, because he was one of the final representatives of this tradition steeped in European history and the horror of utopian projects gone awry. These projects based in naive idealism, the belief in objective truths, and the fantasy of the transparency and self-identity of facts that are somehow beyond critique are perversions of our capacity to make our world better brought about by a kind of antihumanist hubris and failure to understand history and the tradition of those who came before.Bauman’s very human opposition to this strain of brutal utopianism based in violent othering and the uncritical belief in objectivity and fact emerged from his experience of the Holocaust, which he later theorized in his book on the subject, where he drew upon the works of Max Weber and the Frankfurt School writers. But there was always more than history at stake in his work. In the current situation, the importance of Bauman’s history and place within a tradition of thought sensitive to the madness of inhuman utopia is founded upon the extremism of the present. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1991) Bauman outlines this madness, and it is possible to identify comparable tendencies in the populist politics of the Brexiteers, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and Trump, who have had enough of globalization and want to return to a fantastical version of the nation by violently attacking others who have somehow corrupted their perfect worlds. In this sense the profound irony of the current political situation, and the reason Bauman’s passing is so important, is that the violent extremism of the present is the result of the ending of his modern history and the rise of a posthistorical society that has come to regard ethics, values, and human politics as passé and unnecessary simply because these seem self-evident. This is precisely how the postideological, posthistorical society emerged from the period running from the 1970s onward. The story here was that there is no need for politics and endless debate about ethics and the good, because we have realized the good in a truly human, liberal society—there is nothing left now but the working out of technical detail. However, what Bauman understood because of his roots in European history is that the value of humanity is never self-evident and that we must take care of even the strangest other on the basis that neglect of the embodied truth of our shared humanity in a kind of profane objective culture will quickly strip us of our ability to think ethically, politically, and critically. When we lose sight of our shared humanity and no longer care for the weak, the miserable, and the homeless, because we have vanished into the kind of bureaucratic calculus Weber associated with instrumental rationality, our social, political, critical, and ethical intelligence is impoverished, diminished, and destroyed, and there are no limits to our potential inhumanity. The idiocy of facts, figures, and uncritical, unethical, objective truths, therefore, opens up a space for violent attacks on strange others who are so much waste, trash, and useless (post)human material to be processed away.If the normalization of violent extremism, which we struggle to name because we have neglected our social, political, critical, and ethical responsibility in the period since the rise of neoliberalism where numbers dominate, is the contemporary problem for those who believe in a shared human future, it is clear that Bauman saw this coming in the good times when violence was deferred by economic growth and the mirage of universal prosperity. Consider Bauman’s own working context. In the Britain of the late 1990s, Bauman remained skeptical of the Blairite advance on Thatcherism because he thought that the ideology of the Third Way was unsustainable. While the other great sociologist of the period, Anthony Giddens (1998), advanced the theory of Third Way politics and became a kind of spokesman for the Blairite project by arguing that his theory of structuration was realized in the policy idea of public-private partnership that meant it was possible to have both social protections and rampant individualism at the same time, Bauman recognized the problem of the violent disembedding of the social self produced by this move. Against Giddens (1993), who celebrated the transformation of intimacy and a situation where human relationships were provisional and rooted in the vicissitudes of fleeting desire, Bauman (2003) wrote of the horror of liquid love founded upon the empty objective form of asociality Georg Simmel criticized in the early twentieth century and the Frankfurt School would later associate with the consumer society. For Bauman, what was lost in the advance of Western capitalist freedom celebrated by Giddens was deep human connection, respect, and a determination to care for others when times are hard and it would be easier to walk away.This is, I think, how Bauman’s project focused on the transformation of solid into liquid modernity emerged from his earlier books, including Postmodern Ethics (1993). While these earlier books are often considered superior to Bauman’s later works, primarily because of their deep theoretical engagement with the destruction of social relations in postmodern society, it is possible to find the same ethical, humanist critique of the individualized society at the heart of this range of books exploring different aspects of the liquid society. Read from this perspective, the problem of the liquid society is not simply that it is fluid and difficult to understand but also that it is provisional, fleeting, lonely, loveless, stupid, uncritical, and unethical, simply because there are no durable social relations able to survive the good times or, more important, the bad times, when we need to support and care for one another. In the thoughtless, liquid society there are no long-term social relations founded upon understanding, intelligence, empathy, compassion, and trust because these take time to evolve; instead, there is a high-speed, short-termist, provisional, alienated mode of objective asociality that, on the one hand, seems to globalize freedom on the basis that it is easy to extend such thin interactions across all borders but, on the other hand, creates immense levels of anxiety, loneliness, fear, and mistrust and a desire for some kind of thick communal engagement. What Bauman understood most keenly, in my view, is what happens when this primal desire for thick engagement develops in the context of an anxious, disembedded asocial situation devoid of ethical, human intelligence long since sacrificed to the computational logic of market principles. The result is the kind of sadistic violent attacks against objective, dehumanized others carried out by the Nazis in the name of a utopian ideology organized around hygiene and a better, cleaner society. However, in much the same way that the Frankfurters moved from Nazism to the critique of the consumer society, Bauman extended his critique of the modernity of the Holocaust to the horror of the liquid society and its discontents in the present.In the 1990s the neoliberals sanctioned objective violence on the grounds of the truth of market principles, and today we see the same tendencies developing in the thinking of the most extreme of the Brexiteers, who want to abandon Bauman’s great humanitarian project Europe to the rubbish heap of history, and Trump, who wants to take America out of the world and into a utopia of isolationism. The problem in each case is the fate of the other who is dehumanized, objectified, cast out, and destroyed in the name of the emergence of the new that rises up on the far side of critical intelligence, any sense of ethics, or human understanding of our inherent fragility, weakness, or vulnerability. Although Bauman was never naive and understood the real violence of both the neoliberal European Union and processes of globalization, he also recognized the destructive power of cynicism, despair, and hopelessness. As a result, he held onto the utopian possibility of humanity, human sociability, human intelligence, and our capacity to behave ethically, because he knew what happens when we lose sight of our capacity to recognize the ultimate value of life. This is, I think, Bauman’s legacy to sociologists, those working within the humanities and social sciences, and the people he tried to reach through his books that were written to be read by everybody: we cannot abandon human value for objective facts and some transcendental vision of the truth because this opens up a posthuman abyss for colonization by violent, extremist politics that thrives upon the idiocy of the anxious and fearful who have forgotten how to think. After Bauman, we have to save and take care of our social, critical, ethical, and, most important, human intelligence in the name of opposition to the brutal materialism of facts; the need to critique the apolitical, antihumanist space that fact-based thinking opens up; and finally, the possibility of resistance to the violent extremism that knows no truth and that grows up through the cracks in this deserted landscape.

Burden of proof in tax proceedings from a constitutional perspective

Ordinary moral thought is committed to non-relative moral truth, moral facts, and objective first-order properties like rightness and wrongness—in short, is committed to moral realism. Many metaethical theories deny all or some of these commitments. Moral non-cognitivists deny that first-order moral discourse is either true or false. Moral nihilists hold that first-order moral discourse is false because there are no moral properties. Moral relativisms—sociocultural, radical subjectivist, pragmatist, et al.—deny that there are any transcendently objective moral truths or facts. All of these views deny that there is anything specifically “moral” to metaphysically ground. Evolutionary morality locates moral truth and facts in nature, not in the sui generis “moral,” contrary to the view I develop in later chapters.