What Is Truth?

Good evening. Truth has been on a long journey from Aristotle to Donald Trump. The ancient philosopher thought it was simple, loosely paraphrased as telling it like it is. The president calls his media platform megaphone truth social, but tells it as he sees it, which his critics would say is not the same thing at all.

What is truth is perhaps the first and most important question in human thought, and never has it been more hotly contested. It conditions what sense we make of the world and how we relate to others. But does it even exist? There are empirical data, observable facts. We can often see what corresponds to objective reality. But journalists, historians, scientists even, inevitably see it from their own perspective.

There's always subjectivity in the issues they choose, the facts they present, in selection, order, emphasis. And beyond the merely factual, artists and theologians have their own truths they think fill in the gaps and extend horizons. Perhaps the postmodernists are right. Truth is an artificial construct, historically and culturally specific, a mirage to give our lives meaning, purpose, and certainty. But where does it leave us if that is well true?

Reality check. Our moral maze tonight, the panel Ash Saka from the Navara Media Group, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Religion and Society at King's College London. Anne McElvoy, executive editor of the news and commentary site Politico, and the priest and polemicist Giles Fraser. Anne, you're a journalist. What's been your relationship with the truth? Well I like to think it is a close relationship over many decades. But in my thank you. But in my ear I have the words of a wise old editor I had

early in my career when I would come in with some hot take, which I would insist was the only way of looking at something, and he'd say, It's plausible, Anne, but is it true? And it's that grey zone I think we're going to have an interesting time exploring with our witnesses tonight.

Um a non monogamous relationship with the truth? No. I I strive to be as honest and as accurate as I can be in my work. But when we're talking about the sort of philosophical basis of understanding what's true, I think it's possible to get a bit too clever clever. So if your mum asks you Have you defrosted the chicken? And you reply, Well, the chicken being in an unobservable state in the deep chest is both frozen and defrosted. Where do you think that's gonna get ya? Mona.

I don't like to use the word truth quite a lot actually, much to the alarm of my uh colleagues in the religion world. Because I think the basis for me when I think about truth is really in human relationships. that it's not about separating fact from fiction or truth and reality. It's about How do we have relationships? that are based on some s kind of acknowledgement and accountability. Yeah I want to defend some of our basic uh intuitive instincts about truth uh against the postmodernist.

That there is such a thing that it's important and without this sense of truth.

We're cast adrift in a world of power where might is right. Panel, thanks very much indeed. Our first witness is Professor Charlie Beckett, who's director of Polis, it's a think tank on international journalism and society of the London School of Economics. uh which a while back produced a report called Tackling the Information Crisis. Kind of truth emergency. Are are we losing touch with the truth?

Uh I think we're getting too much truth in a way. Um I think uh the fact are absolutely vital, certainly to journalism and in our everyday lives we absolutely need facts to function. But uh most of the facts are quite easy, they're quite simple. Uh what when it gets interesting for journalism and for everybody else is when they're contested.

And that's when you start getting into power, ideology and emotions. Mona. Professor Beckett, could you say briefly what you think is the difference between fact and truth? Um I think that facts are more tangible, they're data. They're if you like more scientific, they're you can count them, sometimes you can see them. Um but I think that the truth is in the uh the eyes of the uh beholder and uh certainly around uh journalism, it's about the journalists themselves of course.

you know, their agenda, how they frame things, the selection of uh facts and so on. But absolutely critical now I think is uh the reception that all journalism is networked so you cannot remove the way that people understand uh the journalism that you're giving them. So would you say that so what we call truth now in journalism

at least is inseparable from human perception, interpretation and context. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And I d I don't see any problem with that in the sense that it's always been the case. It's just we didn't know about it. So what distinguishes d journalistic truth and does it just jo does journalistic truth become secondary to narrative coherence? As long as they can tell you a good story, it doesn't really matter if all the facts are true.

No, it does matter if the facts are true or not, but where I resist the I don't I don't like the word truth, certainly not in the singular anyway. I I also I slightly l loathe to use w the word narrative, it's become somewhat uh diluted just to mean storytelling or aversion of events and so on. But absolutely, yes, how people uh understand uh events is absolutely to do with their values, it's to do with their life experience.

And sometimes it's to do with their idealism. Yeah, what they hope is true. I I understand that, but you're making true sound something that's very subjective. And if truth does become this even for journalists very subjective, then misinformation can be used as oh this is my perception. Leaders can come out with a alternative facts and say, Well, this is my truth or my perception.

So how do you create a healthy epistemology that says we need some standard, some criteria whereby we can distinguish truth from falsehood? I think there's a non sequitur in what you just said, which I don't think. that having a, you know, contestable relativist idea about, you know, competing ideas about interpreting the world, I don't think that necessarily leads to misinformation. Misinformation in the you know, the clearest sense

uh emerges because people want it to do too. You know, most misinformation uh a arises because there are people in power usually or people with certain motives who want to shape uh the discourse. They want to shape the narrative in a particular way which other people uh may disagree with and other people may come up with to coin the cliche their own set of facts. Whether you're a journalist or just a a citizen, there has to be

some way it's a moral position. We have to have certain facts that we can't contest. Otherwise how do you make well, are there empirical scientific facts that you would such as, well, the earth is round. Even if somebody keeps telling me no the earth is flat.

Um two and two don't make four. Are those incontestable truths or is that a matter of perception as well? I would argue what are you gonna do about that? I think that's we're already in the state that you've described. And I'm much more interested in what you can do about that. And I would argue that uh if you want to have, you know, a s a a sense of

commonly accepted facts that you can have a debate around, then it's up to you to uh display those, to to explain them in a better way, but also to recognise why other people uh disagree with you. And I think that has been the problem, I think that Uh if you tell people, even the so called flat earthers You know, we can show a whole raft of evidence to show the earth is not flat.

But if you want to actually engage and counter that narrative, the worst thing you can tell them is, Hello, I'm a scientist or I'm a journalist and you're wrong. No, I'm not saying that and then um and a lot of people argue in all kinds of ways to try and persuade But persuasion is one thing. We have to at least acknowledge. For example, if two people perceive the same event differently.

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Uh I think you can say that people are entitled to their own view of the world. I'd also question I'm speaking from a journalistic perspective, so in that sense I'm I would question whether it the news media's purpose to correct people. Uh I think in a way I have a more limited uh understanding of the value of journalism, which is to first of all tell you what's happening in the world and then try and reflect that plurism of perspectives that there are out there. I'm a cowboy.

Dar you seem to suggest that somewhere along the line uh the public a and a lot of the journalistic profession have kind of parted ways or don't have a a as close a relationship as many of us may like to think when we we started our careers. Is that because journalism, like a lot of institutions that are going through some so soul searching at the moment, it become a bit of a a clarity and maybe write and broadcast for each other rather than the public.

Well I think the latter is true. I think that uh certainly if we're talking about kind of liberal media institutions like the B B C then I think it's certainly true there's part of a kind of institutional crisis going on. But I would also question whether uh the media was as close

to the public in a if you like in a pre internet era. When when I worked as a journalist, uh I'm not sure I even knew what uh my audience thought or felt. You know, uh we we f we we were gatekeepers, we were in a sense uh a kind of priesthood, uh and we were, you know, uh invulnerable to that kind of um challenge. A modest but I think still ambitious saying that journalism should to tell people what it what had really happened. Yeah. It's like rancor's great.

uh description of what history was, what really happened. But then if you're in a world where there are so many my truths, and that could range from what Donald Trump uh puts on truth social to what people feel in a population which didn't suit uh a liberal uh elite in politics or whatever. Y should we perhaps indulge the my truth idea a bit more. I mean maybe there's more to it than we might like to think. Mm-hmm. You know, that um this is the uh the state of uh of information now.

uh in that. So all right, then in that case are you more forgiving with Donald Trump Yusof, the My Truth idea, if you're saying, well, it's already happened, we lost the plot a bit earlier, in terms of understanding that people did... see the world perhaps in as i as much in a harmonious or unitary way. So has that made you think more like actually Donald Trump's got a point.

No, I would never say Donald Trump's got a point. Uh I think in a sense Donald Trump is a bit of an outlier. In a sense he is quite old fashioned about the truth. He insists that he is speaking the truth. Uh and it's, you know, shockingly uh unfounded in data and contrary to um you know, the evidence other people see in front of them. But I think in a way he's he's quite old fashioned. He really does.

uh believe in the latest thing that he said. I'll just step a little bit back, which is, you know, I travel around the world a lot In the global south. And from the north uh uh north to the south, journalists are fighting every day just to get the basics out actually. The idea that it's a limited ideal just to report on the world. uh is underestimating the challenge that they face.

We'll talk I'm sure a bit more as we go uh through the programme about the differences between facts and truth. Wh where do you stand on the rise of a kind of fact checking industry within journalism, whether it's B B C Verify

or those fact checking websites to get in touch with you when I go on questions. I think you'll find that you made a mistake of two thousand pounds in the Treasury sta and I I I mean I I I have a slight irritation with it but I also wonder whether that might be you know I'm being a bit defensive. Just fact checking work. Uh the short answer is not no, it doesn't work very well. Uh I'm all in favour of verification, fact-checking. I love it when I'm edited.

when people point out my mistakes. I find it really uh helpful and and useful. So I would applaud anybody who's tried to do that work. However, all the evidence shows that if it is done in a discrete way, you know, separate, if it's not built into uh journalism processes, then uh it tends to often actually backfire. that if you p tell people that we fact chess this and your cherished belief is actually uh not grounded in truth, then people actually resist. So

It's a kind of uh conundrum. I think there has been a problem which is that If you see uh these, if you like, mistruths or distortions of the truth as fact checkable, then you ignore uh the emotional reality and the ideological reality uh of how they're created.

Professor Charlie Beckett, thank you thank you very much indeed. Uh next witness is Fay Bound Alberti, who's Professor of Modern History at uh King's College London. Um You describe yourself as um historian of emotions as much as events. Are they equally as valid as truth? Do you believe in such a thing as objective truth?

Do I believe in objective truth? I believe that emotions are a form of truth because so much about expressing truth is about performance. And that's one of the fascinating things about the nature of the so-called post-truth world. And the notion of what evidence is has changed over time, as has the the purpose of the truth that you find in it. Let's unpack that, Ash. Um you said something really interesting just then, which is that emotions are a form of truth.

And I wonder what you make of this, which is that we can know that thirty to fifty percent of babies died before their first birthday in medieval times. But is it possible for us to understand how it felt to be a parent then when our expectations of, you know, infant mortality, um, you know, w our expectations for our children are so radically different now?

I think that emotions are a form of truth in that the performance element is important in conveying truth and always has been. So I I'd like to separate that from the embodied experience of truth that you're describing. And as a historian of emotion, I do believe that the emotional experience has changed over time.

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you know, to measuring measuring the um uh blood in uh or doing a lie detector on somebody. I mean th there's always been an element of human interaction has always involved the physical, lived dimension. And that's one of the reasons I think why the post truth age is so problematic is that everything is sort of virtual and out there and we've lost that sort of sense of embodied connection.

I mean, when you're talking about the performance element, I I suppose are you talking about the ways in which we feel the need to prove that we're feeling something internally? Yes, because of the ways in which authenticity is so contested. If you think about um influencers who are too emotional for some people, then there's a sense of it feeling kind of fake. There's an exact point at which authenticity works. But of course, I think it's not a good thing

whose authenticity is incredibly important. We know that the emotional expressions of of black men, for instance, are interpreted through a racialized lens. We know that women are presumed to be more emotional because of the way they emote. So sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n But is there a little bit of an assumption that while we're all experiencing things?

um, in the same way. I might experience grief in the same way that my white partner does, but because we are racialized and gendered in different ways that people are Are reading it differently? Or is there a possibility that we are just experiencing fundamentally different things and the performance is trying to create a a myth? that we are sort of the same and we occupy a shared reality.

Well, there's the rub, isn't it? Because we actually never really know what a person experiences. So all we can do is assess and analyse based on our expertise, our analysis, studying the language, studying the bodies and performances. I'm often struck when you think about the notion of emotional expression itself. We presume, post Paul Ekman, that there are, you know, six, maybe seven, core emotions and they're all expressed in the same way. But is one of them peckishness? It ought to be. Um

But you know, I mean increasingly historians of emotion have been saying that for twenty years and now um neuroscientists are saying actually we think maybe there's variability. You know, we experience something and then we sort it out in our brain what is the nearest kind of category. I wanna ask you to bring it back to history. What's the value in us?

believing that we are the same as the people who lived in the past.'Cause when I was walking around Pompeii, I felt hugely moved by the idea that someone who was just like me did the same thing thousands of years ago. But of course they weren't just like me. I think the value is that we need stories. Humans are, you know, storytelling creatures. We need stories to survive. And when we have a family story about our origins or a national story.

Mae'n ymwneudol yn ymwneudol yn ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol fel ymwneudol fel ymwneudol yn ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol fel ymwneudol fel ymwneudol fel ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol fel ymwneudol fel ymwneudol fel ymwneudol. Of experience there. Does it matter if it's not true though? Not for the purposes of historical reconstruction if we want to get people to go to the Richard III Centre. It depends. It's all about what we want, isn't it? It's all about what is it for? Jaws.

Hi history's been on a bit of a journey, hasn't it? I mean uh you know when I went to my terribly old fashioned prep school it was what happened in the past and it was dates and it was kings and all that sort of thing. And people like you have been a part of this sort of idea that history is from different perspectives and so forth. You're responsible for this my truth nonsense.

So I'm I'm you know that truth is always coming from a particular perspective of now this This i the problem with this is it it divides us rather than United. But I think that's based I think that you're um I think that's based on a misapprehension of what we're doing. Um essentially.

History has never been a question of telling it what it is. What makes it into the archives is biased. What happens once things are in the archives is biased. It's never ever been that there are things out there, facts that we can collect and thread on a string, and there it is. It's always been biased.

Now, what historians like me do is we we are um We're careful about detail, we're rigorous, we're analytical, all of the things we have to be as historians, we are simply expanding the notion of what counts as evidence. What matters, who matters, how do we have the multiplicity of voices to accurately reflect?

The kind of people who deserve to have a history. And that's different from what MAGA do with the kind of fictionalization and cherry picking of truth. They are different things. But you think there is sort of black history there is uh the history of the poor, there is the history of from different perspectives and that these ways of seeing things are different. I'm asking you the question, I'm not um I think that

People deserve to be represented and they want their stories. I think that inevitably that means that people will focus on those elements, those versions of the truth that have resonance with them. That does not mean that I think there should be separate stories. That truth is something that I that that that is that is personal to me. And if if truth is personal to me and truth is personal to you, then truth is not what unites us, truth is what divides us.

We inevitably have our own troops. If you have a family sitting around a table at Christmas dinner, they're all gonna have a different version of an incident that happened two years ago when granny smashed the favourite glass or whatever it is, everybody's got their own perspective and their own truth.

Um we can't get away from that. Yeah. Um and then when you introduce into that sort of statement a big thing like Holocaust denial or something like that, you know, that seems what you've just said there seems to be weakening your capacity To resist the Meddling around with history.

But I think that it's lazy to call it meddling around with history if it's done according to historical rigour. What I think you're doing is blanketing any approach to the past which is not very sort of specific and traditional as as non history or non-valid. I'm saying there is as many different kinds of non truths as there are truths. And I think that the job is for us to show rigour about what feels a legitimate truth, what's it for, in what context.

That doesn't mean that all truths are the same. No. I just I just have this sort of like this idea that truth is Truth is maybe this is'cause I'm religious and there's a God type of connection with this. But the idea that that truth is something that actually binds us all together into something common. That's a very old fashioned view of truth. It's really interesting and it's and I think you might be right that it is because you are religious, but it also might be because you're a white man.

Yeah. And I think I wonder whether you'd feel that way if you were not. So it's a claim of so truth is a cla the use of the word truth is a is a claim of power for people like me. I think truth truth can be associated with power because the person who speaks the truth and who is listened to, of course there's power attacks.

Not everybody's truth is listened to. If you think about something like the bodies of slaved people, enslaved people, their truth, their pain, their suffering is not heard. So it's who who gets the mic. Well, you're just you're just losing it. Uh Professor Bandalberti, thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

Our next witness is Mark Vernon, who's a philosopher and a psychotherapist, interestingly enough, in this context. Um philosophically speaking, Mark, uh do you think it's possible to know the truth, to have a perfect understanding of the truth? Maybe not to know, but I think to love the truth.

Because I think I mean I'm with Jars on this. I um a believer in God and and then an infinite God, moreover. So in an infinite perspective there's gonna be many different kinds of truth, but there's a sort of sense in which the good, the beautiful and the true might bind things together, rather than arguing about particular facts.

The beautiful a and the the true. That association a lot of people will remember from Keats that is all we know uh uh on earth and all we need to know. But is it, so to speak. True. I was thinking at the year end I always listen to a German singer I've been listening to since I was in in my teens. I think he's one of the funniest, cleverest

And uh I've just discovered he's in a sort of terrible mess over an inappropriate relationship uh as an old man with a uh a a far too young woman. Now, in that sense the beauty and the truth seem to have go got a bit apart here, right? So the idea that the beauty of what he produces still stays there, but the truth underlying it, the emotional truth, now seems I think there's a couple of things. One is I think that the romantic turn d has led us to feel that

feeling i in itself can be a sort of proxy for truth. So this is part of the whole my truth thing, that the intensification of feeling somehow stands in for truth. And I think that leads us in religious fundamentalism, even in psychology, the idea that you have a sort of big plungy psychedelic experience, it's somehow gonna reveal the truth of things. But I'm suggesting that things can still be beautiful, but the that some of you know the

the the claims that this person made about their poetry, their art were were sort of they maybe they were my truth, but they certainly don't look like they they were the full truth and nothing but the truth. So uh do we kid ourselves that some of those things are beautiful and The the real disaster would be if we stopped arguing whether it's beautiful or not. Um we're we're inevitably going to disagree on what's beautiful. But that doesn't really matter. That's part of this expansiveness of

of beauty. Um but if we stopped even bot if you didn't say it was a bit shabby, that would be more concerning. Okay, I'm off the hook on that one. But uh let me come to your work as a a therapist. Do you aim to find truth or to help people that you work with Find the truth.

It's more... find something that keeps things moving, that opens things up, um, that prompts a different reflection and then I guess the implicit well I think psychology actually and psychotherapy is a bit um in a bit of trouble about this because on the one hand there is a sort of my truth. stress in psychotherapy. And but for myself it's more how can I become more open, judge what's going on in order to asymptopically reach something that could be called the truth actually i of my life.

And of course that's not just my personal life but how it resonates with others and so on. So in moment by moment you look to say something that produces a sort of shift, a different perspective, um helps people stop being stuck. Um but quite whether you feel that is gonna lead to the truth. um or not. That would be a more personal philosophical conviction I guess. But we just heard from a previous witness a strong defence from a historical perspective over the kind of my truth.

way of looking at things as opposed to the idea there is unitary truth and y you should just learn more about it and then th the facts will will fill that out and you put'em in the right order somehow and then that that's big truth. But I I mean I think you th you seem to have a slight scepticism about the idea of my truth being an absolute

Is there a danger then that you end up in more of a mess if you go down that route than if you just said, Look, there is a truth about of childhood that we're dealing with that th that you are uh feeling like this most likely because of some factor which we can we can put our finger on, we can say what it is. Or do we just let let people sort of interpret it in any way they like, which is more helpful? I think we need other j judgements about whether what we're saying

It's getting closer to the truth. I mean the famous one is By their fruits ye shall know them. And someone, for example, in psychotherapy who is able to tell a better story of themselves and feels freer as a result, that would be a case of by their fruits you'll know that something is becoming truer, whereas they felt traumatised and stuck before. Um so I think that we need to

do definitely have ways of judging and discerning and but they're not th this idea that there's somehow there's a bit of physics envy in the room, you might say. That this kind of absolute, pinned downable, expressed in the emotion uh in these equations rather than emotions.

And and I mean I did a physics study where it happens and the funny thing is that physicists deal with what they don't know, like dark matter and so on, all the time. And so we got the finally got ourselves in a bit of a bind about truth about with things that aren't really quite true. But other Truths that you think i it's better not to foreground. What about the the good old idea of yeah, it's true, but do we necessarily want to throw this on on the table?

I suppose the f the psychotherapist in me says there is a developmental element here and much as you won't say certain things to your very young child, you'll try and judge when they're able to process it. So similarly I guess with at a social level as well, when's the right moment to reveal certain truths? So white lies do exist. Um, we've been talking a lot about what's true, but I wanna get into what constitutes a lie.

So Plato had no time for poets because he was like, You man are liars and you can have this very literal fundamentalist idea which excludes the value of fiction, poetry, psychedelics, even the tooth fairy. I'm gonna leap in there and say there's a lie that does the rounds that Plato didn't like poet.

In the Republic he did it. In the Republic he did it. What he's what he's uh what he's doing there, he's he this is one of three different republics he proposes in the Republic and asks you to consider what would be the effect of, for example, banning poets.

And then Socrates himself says that wouldn't work. And of course, Plato is a great poet himself. So the irony is when you read it, it's wrapped up in great poetry. You did. But it's an education in order to help discern what's going on more. So when a poet speaks. and rhetoric of course has a great power, how can you live in a dynamic relationship to that power? That's much more what Plato's injury. Well let's say something like um taking L S D or ayahuasca, right? Some people think, well

Obviously it was a artificial experience. I added something to my brain chemistry, but I emerged with a sense of truth and authenticity and purpose. Well, the psychotherapist in me again, uh you know, s people often say it was left it was five years worth of therapy in like, you know, a week or something and I'm saying, Okay, well let's see you in five years time and let's see where you're at.

Th there's there's always a um an ongoing process around these kind of revelations and integration would be the word. You know, what's gonna happen next is much more interesting than what just happened now. Um where does being protected from a painful truth end and the corrosive impact of lying begin? Because let's say daddy dies in a horrible autoerotic asphyxiation accident. You probably wouldn't tell your five year old that.

But by the time they get to eighteen, they might actually feel very betrayed that that knowledge was kept from them. And what you need there is a more expansive sense of yourself. but not even of yourself to absorb difficult things, but your y your worldview I think really matters. You know, how can there be a certain relativization of the brute fact like that actually enables you to relate to it?

But not to be completely consumed by it and traumatised by it, which of course the younger person would be. I mean teenagers can be very black and white about this stuff. They'll say, Well, Mum, you lied to me And what they're saying is true. Mum did lie. And in the discussion I guess that the win ensue you'd hope that the parent and the child would both realise that they were trying to look out the best for each other, but together they need to work

Into a much wider sense of what what's useful and good. I mean shuffling on just a little bit, what about artistic truth? And I'm thinking particularly about the role of personas. Because I I love rap, I love hip hop. And something happens every couple of years that a rapper who's like, I went to prison and I was shot these many times turns out had a very comfortable life, parents didn't divorce, had a good education.

And their fan base feels very betrayed. So you could say that that persona serves the art better. Bob Dylan's persona served the art very, very well. You didn't really know who he really was. What do you think about that kind of situation? um your rapper will. But also that but then there is also another sense here. I mean Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own she writes about how

The person who can most speak the truth is the person who has sort of lost some sense of their selves, who they really are. She called it the androgynous mind. And then the whole of reality can sort of flow through them. And she used that to explain why when people ask the question, but what's the truth of Shakespeare's life? you never quite find it, because he's dissolved himself into a wider truth.

And so I guess Bob Dylan might be a bit like that as well. And what about William Blake who's seeing angels in trees and stuff like that? Well Blake of course realised that the imagination is not a private possession that you might have, I might have

you know, that can be my truth as it were. But the imagination has us, it's flowing through us all. And actually life becomes more expansive when you can step into the the ground that's been between us, you know, even now. We're trying to sort of meet in a conversation. And if we can actually meet then rather than me just defensively holding on to my position

the meeting will elicit a wider, more expansive sense of things and that that's the imaginative grounds that we might meet on. And I think Blake was very, very alert to that. I mean can I maybe put something back to you, which is that it sort of sounds to me that what

That's objectively true or objectively not true doesn't seem super important to you, but the extent to which it facilitates social connection does matter. And that's the moral value. But I think social connection needs not just a horizontal element, it does need a vertical element. And I think that we're suffering uh famously from what Nietzsche called the death of God here, that it's as if our relationships have become

uncoupled with no sense of a horizon, no sense of a north star, and and that that is a real problem which we face today when social relationships are seen to be a kind of flatland totality. Then we do float and drift. Time to resurrect God again. I think God never went anywhere. Mark Vernon, thanks thanks very much for joining us. Uh our last witness is Hilary Lawson, who's a philosopher founder of the Institute of Arts and Ideas and author of Closure, The Story of Everything.

Uh modest m modest title is on the line now. Uh uh Modest title, what does it mean? It is an attempt to try and come to terms with the problems that we've been discussing here that Throughout the twentieth century we became more and more aware of the importance of perspective, you know, that uh we have a historical perspective, a cultural perspective, a linguistic perspective. We have a perspective as a result of our physiology. And that's led us to a difficult situation in which

It looks as if we can't access objective truth. That it's so there's no way of reaching through. But in that case, how do we make sense of the world? And what I was trying to do with Clojure was to provide an alternative framework. Which enables us to exp uh account for how it is we have these radically different ways of holding them. and yet are unable to describe the world ultimately, but We can improve them and we can use them effectively.

Giles, Giles right here. So Henry you think the attack on objective truth that you've you've seen coming from um you know, many different quarters and the the the the the perspectival truth. You think that's been successful? You think objective truth is gone? I think objective truth is gone. Yeah. All of the evidence. So let me just so let me just let me just give you a scenario. Uh heaven for Fenn that you get arrested um next week and you go to court.

And uh you're you're up for a m you're up on a murder charge and uh they're bringing all the evidence and uh you know, you're about to go down, perhaps you did it, and you come on in with Uh your argument there's no such thing as objective truth. That this sort of objective truth that people are trying to find this is all hokum, there's just um perspectives and and how do you think that defence is gonna go down in the court of law?

uh the court is in a way deciding what we mean by those words. In fact, uh there are many people who find themselves uh in a court being charged with murder. And they say, no, no, no, I I didn't do it. And actually they are guilty of murder because the definition, the legal definition of murder includes if you go along to someone's house with other people and somebody else kills them, you are guilty of murder. But that's not the way it's usually understood by the average person in the street.

So they misunderstand the way that the term is defined. But you have a much stronger you have a much stronger critique of truth than than what you've just said. You actually think the whole idea of objective truth is a mistake. But isn't the whole idea of innocence and guilt in a courtroom based on something like that sort of truth? Well, the court is trying to produce outcomes which are effective for society and for the uh good running of the way that we operate with other people.

Um, you don't need to introduce objective truth. Now you're a great believer of uh uh Giles of objective truth. But you know, there is plenty of other people, plenty of other people who are also believers objective truth. Liz Truss, for example, I imagine you don't have that much in common with her political views. But she who is like to you is a great believer of an objective truth. So your notion that objective truth binds people together.

Is entirely misleading. Um I I actually don't believe in objective truth. I believe in something called truth, which I just don't like the distinction between objective and subjective, but that's a That's a different matter. But there is a there is a I think that uh that the idea That truth is just and

um something that that makes sense to me makes truth a claim of power and then it's just the war of all against all. And that's the problem with getting rid of truth. You get rid of truth is all you've got is my truth And you've got an assertion of who is the most persuasive, who is the most powerful, and they're the ones that win. Trump wins in the end. Well, what I was trying to do with closure was precisely to address the problem that you correctly identify.

yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw Because we live in a perspectival world, people have made the mistake sometimes of thinking, well, we can say whatever we want. We can all have our own truth. And what I try to do in closure is to show that that's not the case. That giving up on objective truth, giving up on the idea that reality comes sort of ready packaged, and all we are doing is just naming the things in reality and we get a sort of tip for a right answer, is not helpful.

Uh and that what we can do instead is we can abandon that while at the same time doubling down on the tools of the Enlightenment. Which were empiricism, looking at the world to see how our models or our closures, as I would put it And rationality, looking to see how they conflict or otherwise with others, and using those to refine our models without imagining. That we can reach through to an objective truth which enables us to say we're just right.

And everyone's and it's it's great, uh Giles, that you're sort of very keen to say, I'm right, I'm v I'm very comfortable with with that and everyone else is wrong. But it's not a very good strategy and it's not very believable in the light of the history of the Bona. So just to simplify for well myself and the audience, is your closure theory about the fact that we construct with our own narratives and stories, the world was as we see it.

Yes, it it it it is, but it provides an explanation of how we are able to do that. Without Uh getting into a circumstance that there's no way to choose between one thing and another. Sure. But I I just want to clarify. So The theory of closure is basically saying that it's a linguistically constructed story. You can't claim anything is more accurate than corresponding theories, or are you saying that the theory of closure is the best theory we have of trying to understand competing truths?

Yes, that's a good good uh good point. So of course I don't say that the theory of closure is true. But I do say if you hold the world like this, you will find that it has many advantages. And uh one of those advantages Is it means that you can you're not committed to there being a final answer and after all we've never found a final answer. Probably none of us here really think that anyone in our lifetime is gonna come up with a final answer. And yet

you have a way of navigating a world without objective. But but there are some moral hazards here, aren't there? I mean if the world can only be known through this closure theory or not only but from your perspective. then moral critique risks becoming ineffective because it all depends on truth that exists beyond perception. It's really about competing realities and you know, we wouldn't no closure is truer than any other. All are just different ways of organising reality.

Well they are different ways of organising reality, but some of them are more effective than others. And this applies this applies just as much in science. uh as it does in everyday conversation about politics. And the key scientists, people like Hawking, abandoned their belief in objective truth. You know, he he had the idea that we were on a verge of a theory of everything. He abandoned it. In his latest work in favour of global dependent realism, which is very close to closure.

So closure may explain w how we see, but it doesn't explain why some actions are wrong, independently of how someone else might frame them. And we need we need a reality where we can say some things are wrong. Well, we all want to be able to impose our views on other people. And when or at least many people wish to do that. And the framework of good and evil on morality is a way of trying to say, bring an end to the conversation, of saying I am right and you are wrong, and this is how it is.

But it doesn't work because if somebody disagrees with you, they are not impressed. With you saying you're wrong. It's not a useful strategy, it's not an effective one. What instead you have to do is make a case. for your way of holding the world. It sounds very notional. How can you ground it in something real? What do you say to a Holocaust denier, for instance?

Well indeed I've had this conversation with um in a seminar in Oxford with somebody who uh whose relatives were uh killed at the Holocaust. And of course you are going to say to a Holocaust now, well wait a minute, what about all of the evidence of the the people uh who were there? What about the remains of the uh of the death camps, et cetera?

They are going to have to respond to those and they will no doubt if they if they are uh serious about it as opposed to lying, which is a very different thing. Lying is just saying something that you know not to be how you hold the world to convince others. They will defend that by pointing to uh saying it's all a fabrication.

But you then say, Well, if it's all a fabrication, it involves an awful lot of people. It seems to involve most of the people uh in the world, many of whom you respect, how are you going to maintain that? Of course. You would like to move in and just say, Well, that's that's just nonsense. But that's not a healthful way of changing their way of holding the world.

What you have to do is uh make the case sufficiently strongly for whoever it is you are talking to to adopt your way of holding the world. I understand. Hillary Lawson, thanks very much indeed for joining us uh this evening.

Um so, uh, panel, how much closer have we got to the truth about the truth? It was a long journey, wasn't it, one way or another? Charlie Beckett, uh the the um um academic journalist, I suppose you call him at the beginning. Uh he sounded rather nostalgic, didn't he, Anne, for the days when journalists were or thought they were, gatekeepers of the truth, definers of purveyors of the truth. That's long gone.

Yeah, I'm not sure he was nostalgic though, Michael. I think he did acknowledge that there was uh too great a gap had opened up, uh perhaps b you know, between the journalism as a whole and a slightly high minded view view of of journalists.

truth tellers. There's a lot a lot of people in America at the moment like to call journalists truth tellers. What do they mean? Like they really like Donald Trump and they can tell you why. And I I think I in fairness I think he was a bit more nuanced, but I know exactly what what you're referring to that he's saying that so he did say something has changed. Something is

different. And I suppose what I was trying to press him on was is the nature of the truth we're telling different or we're perceiving where it had deficiencies or is it just well, life has moved on and we have to deal with it which I think is more like where he can go. thought it was quite fascinating from somebody who looking at it from a a a a journalist sort of world view to dislike the idea of truth and the singular, which I thought was a rather nice line.

Well, I think maybe one of the things that he's getting at is that there is an infinite number of facts out there and it is a journalist's job to select those facts in terms of what feels most representative or what's most interesting.

And it speaks to the fact that journalism is actually a hodgepodge discipline. So yes, there is verification and there's a degree of empiricism with it, but there are also social processes about narrative serving an audience, indeed serving the people who fund you. And I think all of us who've worked in journalism know that what's true and what's sayable

isn't always in alignment. And I've heard it from editors all the time when I've said, Well, why haven't you covered this story? or what about this aspect? And something that you hear back is, Well, that might be true, but it's not the story. Uh Giles, uh there was one of those moments w when you m when you stop and think, when somebody said I can't remember who who it was who actually said uh the difference between facts and truth.

And it made you pause now. I'm not sure we work that through. No, it's very important. I mean the truth is bigger than facts. Um it's it's it's not just a correspondence uh, you know, the a sentence how it corresponds with something out there in in reality, but there are all sorts of things that are true that may not be facts. Um truth is, you know, we got Mark Vernon, we've got it we've got it we've got uh

We've got the scientific truth which is facts, but there's other sort of poetic truths and so forth. But One thing Mark Vernon said it just changed my perspective on this whole conversation. These things sometimes happen in moral maze when he said this is really all about the love of truth. And when you get a journalist.

Talking about now we've got to you know, I don't really like the word truth. That gives me the heebie jeebies. Because actually the truth is something. The love of it, notwithstanding all these epistemological problems and the historical problems, that seems to me the absolute moral life blunt. of journalism. And the idea that you might have someone says

Oh, it's all a bit complicated now and there's always been change in philosophy, there's always been changes in history. We see things from different perspectives now. So I'm a bit queasy with the word truth.

I want journalists to really like the word truth so Yeah, no, no when I I was listening to Charlie I I you know I was thinking to myself, what is the purpose of journalism or a higher purpose of journalism is there is one indeed and and m maybe the idea The concept of shared truth is actually essential for a democracy, isn't it?

I think for me, um one of the questions we didn't ask with concrete examples, I asked him that question about fact and truth. Is In recent years where there are so many culture wars, how do journalism journalists manage to tell the truth, to tell at least facts, however they embellish it in different narratives to appeal to an audience?

And you if you look at newspapers, different newspapers have different audiences. They will take the same facts but tell a completely different story about that particular fact or that particular event. So I think it comes down to I think it's very healthy for a democracy, but I do feel that Th there is something that links truth to fact, which is you you should not distort fact. to sell a good story. And I think that's really important. I do think that's important.

It's it's sort of imp i it is important, though. You're quite right. The problem in the relationship between fact and truth is there are certain things that are a and this is a sort of philosophical point but it's important, is that there are certain sentences which are factually untrue but contain truth. It's like so a poetic like Juliet is the sun that Shakespeare says. So Juliet is not the sun.

Juliette is person, okay, but nonetheless to say so it's factually untrue. But actually it's not competing there. That's what I'm saying. is not used in this narrow sense of scientific truth. There's much more to truth than scientific truth. Oh absolutely, but this is about journalism. But even if you're talking about religious truth, you can't erase the fact that in the name of religious truth Horrible things have been erected.

It just to move it on a bit from journalism, I think it pertains in journalism history writing in some of the the areas where we were trying to apply our ourselves today. I wonder whether he gave enough weight to the I think that's hard enough. You know, there are certain people you would certainly my profession in in journalism and and in other

who like to talk a lot about truths or truth. I'm I've always found it hard enough just to not write or speak broadcast on truths. And we're laughing about it, but actually it it's quite hard. So I have taken myself most to task When I have chosen lazily or just mistakenly written or said uh something which I thought afterwards was untrue because I realized that that was where my kind of moral

filter had been missing as opposed to the big claim to truth, which I'm still a little bit. C can I just move it on. Professor uh Bandalberti, the historian

Uh of emotions. Now what did you make I didn't quite work out whether she thought there was no such thing as objective truths, but she certainly thought there were many different truths. I mean here's when there were emotional truths and perspectives. Here's what I think is really going on because I thought her answer about you know it doesn't matter if it's

It's true, well it depends on what you want. If you want people to come to the Richard the Third visitor centre then you know, that that takes priority. Is that I'm connecting different parts of what she said. And we're talking about this performative element of emotion. It's not enough to experience something in an embodied way. We try and create these proofs that we're experiencing what we're experiencing because

We feel as humans compelled to prove our humanity to other people. We need them to accept that we're human and we have an inner life. And I think that history is a part of that. So to be honest, I think that the value of black history or the history of the poor, it's actually about the social status of people in the present. And it's about saying, Well, I'm just as human as you and I have a past the same way you do and I have experiences of suffering and I have needs that need to be attended to.

Uh Jas, I I couldn't quite work out uh uh you know, it's th th the history of uh of emotions and so on. How you could be, as equally as she put it, rigorous about that when you're I mean I think it's perfectly fine that we there are there are truths you don't access in a quote unquote rigorous way. We have this physics envy. We think all truth needs to be accessed in a particular sort of way. I don't believe that's right. I mean that there is a sort of like You know, Sherlock Holmes.

had a sort of very narrow idea that you've got to take all the emotion out of it and you'll find the truth by being dispassionate and quasi scientific and so forth. But he was stupid because there was all sorts of things that he missed and you're shouting at him because he doesn't understand the realm of emotion that exists in the world. And that's

Real. That's why it's got Watson. Exactly what it's got. It's real. So emotions are real. I think it says there's something like Watson says that something like that in the sign of four, I think it is. So it isn't you don't always use the same techniques to access The truth and the idea that we only use For instance, scientific methods to find the truth gives us a very, very diminished idea of what can be a good thing.

S you and I fall out over something. We both hurt, but we both have very different perceptions of how we hurt each other. At some point it's not enough just to stop there. There has to be an element of accountability. Like why are you hurting when actually you did this to me, et cetera? Now a and I think it was Professor Ban Alberti who said history is bias. I I I know what she means, but it's rather depressing.

Actually I was m more taken with her argument than I expected to be because it was not it's not my default way of of thinking i uh about history. I'm perhaps a bit suspicious about this sort of multiple multitruth.

were on display when the professor said to to Giles, something along the lines of, Well, maybe you're seeing like this because you're a white man at which point I'm like, Yeah, and you're a white woman and like are we gonna just gonna we could keep going round the table. Everyone's privileged to a certain ex extent and i i in this debate. Uh but where she did um sort of catch my attention was I do think the history

of hidden things is important and the narratives that we don't hear I I've always rather liked uh I used it because I'm a historian of East Germany. Cato is pleased by the defeated thing. The thing that is gone, the thing that didn't work. I thought that was really interesting. Uh Mark Bernan was um uh was b w was brilliant. I'm not sure I actually kept up, but there you go.

Uh, too many degrees, I think. Beauty and truth, uh I don't s quite see the the the the uh absolutely direct connection between that And I also didn't quite work out what the distinction was between knowing the truth and loving the truth, uh Ash. Or so so the in lot the the the sorry, then Nash.

Sorry, th the the thing about the good, the true and the beautiful is that before the Enlightenment those three those three things were i were thought of to be connected. They were all all a whole and it was Kant and people like that in the separation of Um the three critiques they did they think that the that beauty has to be understood in its own terms, truth has to be understood in its own terms, and ethics does. And this is a massive mistake. Uh and it and it changes human history.

Um, I also think that if we acknowledge that what is beautiful is historically, socially and culturally contingent, it's then very difficult to locate truth in it. So I think Godfather is one of the best films of all time. It's not gonna resonate in every single cultural context. And so I it that means that I think you're undermining the value of the truth and our ability to connect with one another if you locate it in in beauty and artistic meaning.

I think coming back to the idea of the lie, which I think is really important, because I'm not always sure what the truth is, but I think we all have a felt sense of what a lie is and when we're being lied to, and that sense of betrayal is really important. um why do we feel so profoundly betrayed when somebody lies to us it's because our certainty relies on people around us. We need that validation from other people that what we think is true is true.

Because actually we're not enacting a scientific process all the time. Yeah, and we're running out of time, aren't we? But uh a last witness, Hillary Lawson, uh uh As a journalist I feel uncomfortable with the idea that truth is just a c a kind of construct of our stories and our sensations.

Well that was you know, it was an interesting thing to explore I mean you could say as a journalist we would, wouldn't we? You know, we've got a pro what is it called profess professional defamation o on that score. So I I take that challenge from the I think what we were trying to explore there is well, why did that in wha w what was the relationship between that and closure Because the closure seemed to rest the mean in this sense that you just had to accept multiplicity

i i while questioning it. And I I got a little bit confused there because I think that is perhaps where postmodernism has equal and opposite problems to our tendency as as journalists or as policymakers to to want certainty. The other view just seems to end up with so many open roots to definitions. And and therefore how could you possibly have closure? But I guess that was what he was also trying to explore. Mono, last word with you.

problems with the last witness was that he kept saying you can't say to people you're wrong and one of the things we didn't explore was actually accountability also matters. You can't just have competing moralities and competing views and saying all are equally valid, you just have to persuade people. You have to persuade people, yes, but you also have to make people accountable for their views.

That's it for this week and for this series. Uh from our panel, Giles Fraser and McKelvoy, Ash Saka and Mona Siddiqui, and from me, until the next series in March.