The Truth Market.

The Scum also rises.

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Over the last decade, there has been an enormous flowering in the search for the Truth. I don’t mean by that, unfortunately, that philosophy courses are oversubscribed and that books on epistemology are best-sellers. Or indeed that large numbers of people are now genuinely fascinated by attempts to discover what “Truth” is, or that the Internet is full of learned and interesting discussions about it.

No, of course I don’t mean any of those things. As you would expect, I’m referring to the wild and sometimes hysterical accusations of untruth fling at each other by different political and media figures, and the almost painfully embarrassing antics of “fact-checkers” who set themselves up without apparent qualifications as arbiters of the true and real. My impression is that much of this effort has now perished from its own contradictions and excesses, but we still find ritual accusations of “lying” thrown in all directions in what might, in a poor light, pass for political debate these days. (I see that Robert F Kennedy Jr. is now a particular target.)

To an extent it was always thus. Politicians have always claimed the Truth for themselves, and denied it to their opponents, but for various reasons which we can only touch lightly on here, the problem has become a lot worse in recent times. So I thought that it might be useful try to dispel some of the resulting confusion. I take as my starting point the hope, no matter how optimistic it may be, that there are people out there who would appreciate a few suggestions for how to think about what “truth” means in a political environment. (I’m not a philosopher and I have no ambitions towards anything more ambitious than that.)

So where to start? I’m going to take, as an example, a recent controversial incident (if indeed it happened.) I’m going to go on to look at different kinds of”truth” and give examples. I’m going to look at what in practice “truth” means in a political environment, and at how the concept of Expertise has been undermined and what the consequences are. I’m finally going to look at some more philosophical approaches to truth and logic, from quarters that may perhaps surprise you, and argue that these can help us if we are interested in being helped. Thats a lot to get through, so let’s get started.

A good recent example is the allegation that Ursula von der Leyen’s plane was the target of a GPS attack by Russia recently. Like anyone who has spent an appreciable percentage of their life in aeroplanes, I was interested by the story, and tried to find out more about it. But a good 95% of what I read was by authors, commenters or journalists with no knowledge of aircraft and airport navigation systems: that did not stop them expressing extremely strong views about what happened and who was responsible. Some outlets simply gave the official story and blamed the Russians reflexively, others reflexively accused VdL and the assembled West of telling lies. There was no attempt to look at the allegations in any detail, or even describe exactly what they were. The best I could discover after several hours of wasted effort was that aircraft have other navigation systems than GPS (which I knew already) and that there has been a rash of unexplained GPS outages over western Europe recently.

It may surprise you that commentators and journalists who presumably wish to be respected behave like this. After all, these are technical issues of some complexity and the reading public presumably wants to know the truth. Except, unfortunately, it probably doesn’t. Rather, that public is divided into groups, and each group heads automatically for a news source which will tell them what they want to hear. Journalists and bloggers, as well as commenters who don’t want to be savaged by their fellow contributors, will therefore cluster together around one party line. I find this depressing, not least because, for all the drum-banging and chest-thumping about “truth” it seems that most people are simply interested in having their prejudices confirmed. Sometimes they don’t even wait for these prejudices to be articulated by others. I remember that on the occasion of the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the first I knew of it was a comment on an Internet site that must have appeared within five minutes of the official announcement of his death, claiming he’d been murdered.

I assume that readers of these essays are more likely than average to be interested in truth and facts. In which case, let me say a little about different types of each. To begin with, the idea that there are unchallengeable and complete concepts such as “facts” and “truth” would make many philosophers smile. Partly, of course, this reflects the wider cultural influence of deconstructionist thinkers since the 1960s. We have to accept, with Althusser, that stories about anti-immigrant violence in the UK refer not to “facts” but to “concepts of an ideological nature,” which are only “true” insofar as they are consistent with ideology, and may change as that ideology changes. Come to that, there is also a century-old history of defining “facts” as only those things which are logically or empirically verifiable: in practice, little outside mathematics, because many scientific “facts” are not verifiable empirically, or have been subject to change. But even then, you don’t need to be a philosopher to recognise that “facts” and “truths” are not simple things.

None of which gets us very far, because in our everyday life we actually need some concept of what a fact is and what truth is. So it helps to recognise first of all that neither “truth” nor “facts” are unitary things. I will attempt a short taxonomy, to give you an idea of what I mean, but I would also suggest, if you’re interested, the slightly different, historical, approach taken in Julian Baggini’s useful small book.

So let’s take a few concepts of Truth and see where we get. It’s easiest to start with Legal Truth and associated Facts, because the Law is essentially a truth-game, played with complex rules and an umpire. It’s a game like football, where technical criteria have to be met to score points and win, and where a referee rules on technical violations which could invalidate the result. A legal case is fought according to complex rules, which limit what can be included, which incorporate rules for judging truth, and which produce a verdict defined as an outcome of the interaction of the rules and the skill of the players.

Consider a real-life example. At a criminal court it is just before eleven in the morning. A convicted mass-murder is led in under heavy guard. It is legally “true” that she is a mass-murderer, and it is a “fact” that she committed certain murders. At five minutes past eleven, the Prosecution rises to say that, unfortunately, it turns out that the evidence is not very convincing after all, and the forensic evidence, in particular, is deeply flawed. The Prosecution is thus withdrawing its evidence and no longer seeks a conviction. The Judge has no option but to free the prisoner, and it and thus is “true” from that moment on that she is no longer a mass-murderer, nor are the murders “facts.” Indeed, they may not even be murders.

Now of course this has nothing to do with the question of whether she actually killed anyone, defining “actually” here as an existential fact, theoretically verifiable. This just a legal “truth,” based on “facts,” producing a verdict just as a football match produces a result. Rules in games are changed from time to time, and a goal allowed today may not have been allowed the year before, when the offside rule was different. The Law is the same.

I dwell on this point a little because it often has profound political implications. The public mood, from the most popular to the most elite, wants either punishment or exculpation, depending on its sympathies. “Justice,” —historically and conceptually different from “Law” — generally implies a result which accords with personal prejudices. If the evidence is confused, not reliable or simply unavailable, then in most judicial systems the accused may be found not guilty, often to public fury. (Notice that the term is “not guilty,” rather than “innocent.”) Yet this often happens: unsupported identification evidence is today regarded as virtually useless, eyewitness testimony is deeply unreliable, and even technical evidence such as fingerprints and DNA cannot always be counted on. The more complex the legal arguments for guilt, the more vulnerable they are to these problems. The ad hoc Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and and Rwanda tried as best they could to conduct legally-respectable trials, and thus incurred the violent hatred of the human rights industry, which regarded them simply as their own punishment arm: indeed, some argued that those accused of “war crimes”should not have the customary legal protections, since they were all obviously guilty. Acquittals, of which there were a number, were thus regarded as a “failure” by the judges, rather than the result of inadequate evidence or careless work by the Prosecution.

The situation with Scientific Truth is, on the face of it, rather simpler. At least in principle, science as an activity advances by hypothesis, experiment and theory, and is subject to review and modification. And it would be churlish to deny that Science does advance, and that our knowledge of certain subjects is greater and more accurate than it was previously. But this is not to say (and in my experience scientists don’t say) that they have found The Truth. This is why scientists talk, of Theories, even in well-established cases like Relativity and Evolution. At least in principle, therefore, Scientific Truth is an empirical process of moving from one position to another according to the evidence, which is often new. This differentiates it in principle from a closed system like Legal Truth.

The sociology of science and how it is practised is far too complex a subject to go into here, and in any event the fact that many scientists fail to live up to the requirements of Scientific Truth doesn’t invalidate it as a useful concept. Politically, though, the danger arises when scientists themselves become arrogant, or when governments make use of Scientific Truths that are beyond what those Truths can support. There’s also an unfortunate tendency for some scientists to regard “truth” as their unique preserve, and to apply disparaging labels to anything that is done outside their own narrow set of procedures. To say that a scientist is behaving unscientifically is a fair criticism. To call some outside process or theory “unscientific” simply means it obeys different sets of criteria. It used to be said that “science has disproved the existence of God,” which always struck me as highly amusing. It’s like two fleas in Plato’s beard deciding that there is no such thing as philosophy. Fortunately, scientists are less prone to such intellectual lapses these days, and so long as the essential modesty of Science is retained, the concept of Scientific Truth is useful.

However, paradoxically, the public understanding of Scientific Truth is still largely stuck in the nineteenth century. The term “scientism” (and would you be surprised to learn that there are competing definitions?) is generally taken to be an assertion by scientists that science can explain everything about life and the universe, as well as those subjects which are really the domain of philosophy and culture. There are scientists, especially popularisers of Science, who believe that Science does indeed know The Truth about everything. But as it finds its way into popular culture, and into the discourses and even the decision-making of the political class, this attitude no longer reflects the complexity and uncertainty of many branches of science today. (I’ve read quantum physicists expressing exasperation that even other physicists don’t realise just how weird their field is.) Rather, the popular understanding of Scientific Truth could have come from a century and a half ago: a totally materialist world-view, the classic “solar system” model of the atom, the belief in a fully graspable external world, in blind and invariable scientific laws … and so on. The fact that, as scientists like Rupert Sheldrake continue to show, science is considerably weirder than had been thought is slowly making its way into the mainstream, but it will be a long time, if ever, before political debates take account of that.

The next type of truth is Religious Truth, and here I refer not to personal belief and revelation, which are discussed later, but rather to Religion as an enforced belief system, a closed system like Law, where only certain concepts are allowed, and only certain ways of manipulating them. In monotheistic religions, there is actually a close connection with Law, both conceptually (in that they are closed systems) and functionally, in that one often supports the other. Indeed, in Islam and Judaism there is effectively little difference. Because this is a closed system, only evidence and arguments from within the system are regarded as acceptable. Commenting on his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco explained that all of the characters were limited in their understanding to what was known in the early fourteenth century, and all the debates were limited to the concepts and vocabulary known at the time. This accounts for the stifling atmosphere that readers sometimes experience. But it is a faithful attempt to portray debate (including political debate) in a closed system.

Monotheistic religions have far-reaching and often violent controversies about doctrine within and between them, whereas Buddhism, say, with its three main schools and many subsets, largely doesn’t. But this is because monotheistic religions require belief in a set of principles to obtain salvation in the world to come. The Christian Church persecuted heretics because their teachings were believed to threaten the souls of those who might be seduced by their doctrines. This is less of a problem today with Christianity, but is becoming a big political problem in European nations with large, and often pious, recent Muslim immigrant communities. Increasingly, for example, pious parents are demanding that schools should not teach their children anything that is not found in the Koran or even appears to contradict it: the Theory of Evolution, for example. The Islamic State and its franchises take the thesis that secular knowledge is at best useless and at worst sinful to its logical extreme, by destroying schools, killing teachers and burning books.

There are closed political systems as well, of course, in which Political Truth dominates. That is to say, certain assumptions have to be accepted as true, and certain facts have to be accepted as real, in order to access benefits or avoid penalties. I put it like that because the problem is not just one of dictatorial states like North Korea (or so I suppose: I’ve never been there) but of any community, of any size, which shares a common ideology or set of principles and beliefs. The more isolated and threatened that community feels the more it will try to enforce ideological conformity. We think, obviously, of examples like Stalin’s Russia where saying or doing the wrong thing could kill you, even if it wasn’t the wrong thing at the time. (One of the charges against Tukhachevsky in 1937 was that he had been in contact with the German military, which he had: it was part of his job.) There are softer versions, still based on ideology, like Iran, there are countries like Rwanda and Algeria where there is an official version of history, and questioning it will get you arrested, and just imprisoned if you’re lucky. But any structure that prizes ideological conformity will designate Political Truths that have to be accepted as reality, and will have, indeed, the ontological quality of truth in practice.

This applies at any scale. Take for example the British Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1970s. On the one hand numerically tiny and heavily infiltrated by the intelligence services, on the other hand strongly represented among the intelligentsia, scientists and writers of the time, the Party had no political influence, but was the absolute centre of life for its adherents. To be expelled was practically a sentence of death, so conformity to the bewildering changes of direction coming from Moscow was necessary for personal psychological survival. Independent Marxist groups began to split off after the death of Stalin and the crushing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, but those groups themselves developed their own Political Truths, and dealt equally harshly with dissidents. Ironically, the Internet has perpetuated and even strengthened the evolution of (competing) Political Truths. Frequent an Internet site dealing with controversial issues for very long, and you will find Truths that are generally accepted, or not openly opposed, and Facts that you question at your peril.

The last of the classic types of truth I want to discuss is Revealed Truth. Originally, this was related to divine revelation of some kind, but it can also mean a Truth grasped by contemplation and meditation, a huge mystical tradition running from the Gnostics and the neoplatonists, through Christian mystics like Eckhardt, to the Enlightenment of various Buddhist traditions,, which there is, unfortunately no time to discuss here. (Happily others have.) The tradition of mysticism is generally quietist, but there is a parallel history of inspired religious fanaticism and apocalyptic cults, usually based on a revelation of the Truth about the end of the world, and another, but more conventional, tradition of individuals who believe they have received a divine, or at least extremely special, call to greatness, frequently as the saviour of their country: Joan of Arc and Charles de Gaulle come to mind.

In more recent times, Revealed Truth has tended to manifest itself through cults and extreme political movements, often following charismatic leaders. (The Nazi Party can be seen as an apocalyptic death cult that got seriously out of control.) Such groups go beyond merely having strong convictions: they incorporate a sense of absolute certainty that no amount of contrary evidence can affect. Interviews with returned Islamic State fighters revealed that many had left for Syria as a result of what would traditionally be called religious conversion. They were (and in many cases still are) unreachable by any logical argument, or any appeal to ethics, of even religion, outside their own personal concept of Truth..

More prosaically, modern politics, and modern life, are full of people who “just know” things, and who are often popular and respected as a result. After all, asked to choose between someone who says “look, it’s all very complicated,” and someone who says “no, in fact it’s very simple,” who are you most likely to want to believe? Demagogues and cultists have always worked this way, but the habit has been spreading in recent years throughout the Internet, and many pundits have acquired influence and made good careers from it. You can usually tell them by their sweeping claims, and frequent use of words such as “always” and “obvious,” combined in some cases with a poorly-hidden implication that if you disagree, you must be stupid, or in the pay of some foreign intelligence service. Be specially wary of statements like “country X is always responsible for…” or “Institution Y lies all the time,” which, quite obviously cannot be pragmatically verified, and which serve as normative intellectual intimidation. In the past you could avoid such people in the pub or at a social gathering. Now it’s less easy. Whether it’s the “obvious” fact that the Moon landings were faked, or that the “Truth” about the 2001 attacks on New York has been hidden, or that Princess Diana was murdered by “British Intelligence MI6” or that this or that dark and hidden force was behind the latest government change in this or that country, there is an implicit bargain: I’ll give you a satisfying reductive explanation that excuses you from having to think or do any research, and you give me some money.

This approach enables people who don’t actually know anything about anything to nonetheless pundit on a whole range of subjects from first principles. Troubles here are always because of this or that country, things are never what they appear to be on the surface, everyone is in the pay of someone else, the involvement of this or that intelligence service is always to be assumed, because Revelation. Again, such statements are not vulnerable to rational analysis, because they are based essentially on faith. Professionally, though, this business model has the disadvantage that much of its product will be reproducible with the use of AI: indeed, I wonder if some of it isn’t already.

The final concept of truth I want to mention, though seldom included in lists like this, is the one that we actually mostly live our lives by: empirical or pragmatic truth. It works, it doesn’t work, it’s useful, it’s not useful. We make use of our personal experience and the experience of those we trust. Politically, a widespread reliance on empirical truth poses enormous problems for any ruling class, and especially today. Indeed, to a large extent the current alienation of the people from governments is the result of the difference between personal experience and managerial theory. When government tells you that inflation is steady, but you see prices in the shops rising all the time, you will start to disbelieve the government. When it is condescendingly explained that “inflation” in this sense excludes those things which you have to buy every week just to live, you probably just stop listening. Of course, empirical truth is limited by its very nature to personal experience and the experiences of those you can trust, and it is always incomplete and can be deceptive. But it remains the only Truth that many of us can count on.

In this quick survey, I’ve set out some of the main types of Truth that are circulating, often confused with each other, and I’ve tried in each case to show their political significance. What’s absolutely clear is that it’s not possible to have a dialogue involving different conceptions of Truth. “Immigration is a good thing,” is a Political Truth, whereas the pragmatic experience of ordinary people often tells a very different story. But because the custodians of Political Truth believe it dictates what the world should be like, pragmatic experience can be disregarded, because it cannot be true. Likewise, you can’t convince a pious Muslim parent that Evolution is a scientific fact, because for such people arguments from science can never tell the Truth anyway.

Before passing on to the next topic, I’ll just add that what attracts us to some Truths in this list is very largely emotion: indeed, it can be argued that Emotional Truth—something that satisfies our emotional needs—is the most powerful Truth of all. This doesn’t have to be positive, either. Indeed, if you really dislike a political leader, an institution or a country, then you want to hear the worst news possible, even if on reflection it’s completely implausible. And if it turns out that in the end the massacre didn’t happen, the scandal was manufactured or the death was from natural causes, you can always mutter about no smoke without fire, well, that doesn’t mean they didn’t do other bad things, or the good old standby, Whose Side Are You On? Which is pretty dispiriting, but does illustrate the way in which Truth in a political context is increasingly determined by which football team you support.

Perhaps it was always thus, but I’m struck today not just by the inability of even highly-educated people to reason and to subject propositions to the most minimal analysis, but by the widespread reluctance even to learn to do so. Maybe, as often, the frenetic pace of the Internet is partly responsible; maybe also the modern worship of feeling as opposed to logic, maybe there’s just no demand for such skills. After all, there are no rewards today for thinking and expressing yourself clearly and logically or subjecting propositions to rational analysis. Indeed, it can be dangerous, because once you start on a logical chain of thought, you can never be quite sure where you will wind up. Far better to start from an emotionally-satisfying conclusion, and work backwards.

All this leads fairly naturally to the questions of Expertise, and of the role of Experts, on whom we count not to produce transcendent Truths, but at least reliable advice. Now suspicion of “experts” has always been part of political arguments (unless they are giving advice you agree with, of course) but in the past it was mostly confined to certain types and classes of person (the bloke on the train who’d attended the University of Life and knew it all) or media predominantly serving the lower middle-class. What has developed in the last generation or so is a political assault on the concept of expertise (and thus knowledge) itself from other quarters. The ingredients are well-enough known: the narcissistic promotion of the ego, the primacy of emotion over intellect, the preference for “lived experience” over acquired knowledge, and of course the attack on the very possibility of objective knowledge itself.

Now of course Experts have not always covered themselves with glory, and anyone can cite many damning examples. But they are often ambiguous: in the case of Covid, for example, the experts on public health, who knew how to treat such diseases, knew what to do but were ignored. Nonetheless, the increasing perception of experts serving private commercial interests, of widespread fraud and plagiarism, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Science have not done the concept of expertise any favours.

The result has been an explosive growth in self-promoted “experts” on the Internet and on YouTube who, far from claiming the same qualifications and status as traditional experts, tend to glory in their lack of them, and their status as rebels. I refuse to give YouTube any money, so I have to suffer advertisements instead. What is striking about them is that they overwhelmingly adopt a populist, even conspiratorial, approach: independent researchers have found, suppressed results from scientific experiments have shown, your doctor is lying to you, electronics manufacturers are trying to suppress this product, food manufacturers are hiding the dangers of this chemical. And so on. Oh, and buy our product. Not being a stuffy, elitist traditional expert has always had a certain romantic appeal in some quarters but now, ironically, it’s becoming the norm, to the point where you wonder if there are any traditional experts left. No wonder people are confused.

And perhaps the supply of experts isn’t what it used to be, anyway. In many countries, degree standards are falling, especially in technical subjects, and in the West, at least, there is less interest in subjects requiring hard “expertise,” not least because de-industrialisation has reduced the need for them. (Does a degree in Computer Science, make you an “expert” on anything much?) And I’ve run into US students with Master’s degrees in International Relations on their way to work in a Think Tank, who don’t speak a word of a foreign language and who, until that point, have never been abroad. What useful expertise could they possibly have? There’s been a huge move in western countries recently towards degrees that promise lucrative careers rather than useful knowledge, and, frankly, to degrees that are easier and less challenging. The idea, after all, is to be credentialed, not educated, which is fine until somebody actually needs some authoritative advice. And credentials are only half of it: actually having relevant experience is often distrusted, because it might lead you to the wrong conclusions.

And for financial and career reasons, people want to be experts in currently hot subjects. But just consider, for example, how the handling of unexpected crises since the end of the Cold War has suffered from a lack of genuine expertise. Thirty-five years ago you would have been hard-pressed to find more than a few dozen academic or diplomatic experts on Yugoslavia in the whole of Europe. It just wasn’t a fashionable subject. I sat in rooms full of people earnestly debating what to do about a region that hardly any of us could find on a map. With the end of the Cold War, Soviet studies essentially folded up, with consequences that are painfully visible today. Bush the Smaller may not have known that there was a difference between Sunni and Shia, but surely somebody in the vast political swamp that is Washington must have known? Well, if they did, they were mere “experts,” and so not consulted.

And imagine what it takes to become a real expert on militant Islam, which no-one can say is a trivial issue. Degree (at least) in Modern Standard Arabic, familiarity with several dialects, possibly other languages (certainly French), familiarity with Islamic texts, especially the marginal ones, years of experience on the ground in dangerous places meeting dubious people, familiarity with the ever-changing movements of groups and groupuscules and leaders who change their names frequently and sometimes die bloodily …. or you can just sit at home typing, and turn out crud blaming it all on the manipulations of X, Y or Z and getting paid for it.

In any case, whilst in theory people seek The Truth, experience suggests that in practice they often don’t. Rather, they seek a reasonably authoritative-sounding confirmation of their own assumptions and prejudices. So the very concept of expertise is put in jeopardy, because today there is no “expertise” in the absolute sense, only expertise we agree with, and only experts we think are right. (And if that seems backwards, well it is.) Imagine somebody recommends a new Substack site by “an expert on Russia.” Your first question will be, Is this someone who will tell me what I want to hear? So you start reading and find that X is a former diplomat who served twice in Moscow, the second time as Deputy Head of Mission, and served in the delegation to the EU and at Embassies in Washington and Paris. So can you trust this person? How do you know unless you know what their opinions are? Perhaps you read on and it says that on retirement they became an adviser to a defence company and a board member of the Atlantic Council. One reaction. Or perhaps it says that they resigned in protest against western policy towards Russia and now run a small independent think tank. Another reaction. In the end, it’s the reader who judges the authority of the expert, therefore, which seems a little curious. But it’s a competitive market, and the crud rises to the top.

And it stays there. One of the most curious features of our culture is the continued influence of out-of-date books, whose main virtue is that they tell simple stories in bright colours with a clear moral. I find intellectual complexity interesting: many people find it threatening. So there’s a whole raft of subjects where popular understanding was fixed anything up to a hundred years ago now, and nothing new will shift it. There’s no point in saying, as I often do, “have you read ….” because there is no cause to do so. People already have their Truth. Why bother with a new one when the market is already taken care of? I’m not aware of any case where modern historical research has made explanations any simpler, but many where it has made them more complex. Who wants that? In such cases, expertise, experience and study have no place and no value. Likewise, the first time you hear somebody tell you “well, you may know the country and I don’t and you may have been at that meeting and I wasn’t, but I have the right opinions,” it can be a shock. But you get used to it.

Is there anything to be done? Well, I will suggest that it’s useful to keep two things in mind. One is the unavoidable nature of Truth in a political environment. One of the first things you learn is that with a little ingenuity, and some attention to nuance, it’s always possible for a government to justify what it has said or done. Conversely, most accusations of governments “telling lies” just mean that critics want to interpret the same set of facts in a different way. For any sufficiently complicated set of facts, many allowable interpretations exist. Demands for “the truth” usually amount to no more than confirmation of the prejudices of critics, and this is an inevitable function of complexity. Imagine, for example, that a varied group of experts with different opinions was asked to list all the “facts” that were relevant to the Kennedy Assassination, without “concealing” anything: the task is self-evidently impossible; where would you stop?

We have to begin by acknowledging this complexity. So maybe rather than “Russia is winning” (“No it’s not!” “Yes it is!”) We could nod a little in the direction of formal logic and say “I propose that for five enumerated victory conditions V1 to V5, Russia is more than 50% successful in three of them and more than 40% successful in the other two. What do you think?” Such an argument frightens people these days because logical, or even structured, argument is no longer valued, or even taught. When the emotional conclusion comes first, then either there is evidence for it, or that evidence is being hidden and must be “revealed,” or, if there is no evidence, that evidence must obviously have been destroyed.

In politics, we have to give up the search for absolute certainty, without agonising over doing so. Pragmatic, empirical indications are often the best we can hope for, and that will have to do. That’s why Intelligence agencies use words like “assess,” “judge,” or “believe,” rather than making firm pronouncements about the Truth, for example. But curiously there is some fairly heavy-duty intellectual support to help us live without the neurotic search for absolute certainty the it is not available.

Aristotle (whom I otherwise revere) did us no favours ultimately with his arguments about non-contradiction and the excluded middle. Not only must a statement be rigidly either true or false (A or not-A), but statements must be entirely true or false, with no middle ground. Now whatever advantages this has for formal logic, it clearly doesn’t correspond very well to everyday life, still less to politics, where the middle ground is often all you have. (Even Aristotle admitted that you couldn’t make definite statements about the future.) But we take this way of thinking completely for granted as we beat each other around the head with our rival conceptions of truth.

Some other societies don’t: much of Asia, for example. The case I want to cite goes back to Aristotle’s time, but in India, where philosophers were already using a different concept of Truth, known technically as the catuskoti, which had four potential values: the statement is true, the statement is false, the statement is both, the statement is neither. The Buddha referred frequently to this system, and the greatest work of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika, is written around it. And before we dismiss this as an Eastern curiosity, we should recognise that developments in modern non-Aristotelian logic over the last century have led in very much the same direction, as Graham Priest has shown.

I think the importance of this way of thinking is clear enough. Politics is messy and provisional, and deals often with ambiguities and half-truths. A logician would point out that a statement like “The Russians attacked the GPS system of von der Leyen’s aircraft” is not a single proposition, but a number, each of which has to be true if the proposition as a whole is to be true. Yet in practice, some things asserted about this incident may be true, some may be false, some may contain elements of both and for some there may be no evidence either way. “Russia is winning the war” contains an enormous number of explicit and implied propositions, and cannot in fact be reduced to a True/False dichotomy.

Lurking behind these four possibilities, although adjacent to the fourth, is the idea of ineffability, that some realities simply cannot be expressed in words, or even necessarily grasped as concepts, and that the only sensible response is silence. Mystics have always said this, and philosophers have sometimes followed them. Wittgenstein, a mystic of sorts, made this the last thesis of his Tractatus, which I like to translate, somewhat idiosyncratically as, “if there’s nothing useful you can say, then STFU.” As this is written, France has lost another government, and the airwaves and the Internet are full of little else but pointless speculation about the future, perhaps one per cent of which actually adds anything. Silence is a lot to ask of modern civilisation: imagine a blogger asking “can I justify a blog post on this subject?” Imagine a serial commenter on the same blog asking “is my comment really necessary?” Yet periods of modesty and silence would perhaps be welcome, not to say useful.

It’s often said that we live in a post-truth society. The reality is more complex: we live in a society which no longer finds the concept of objective truth interesting or useful, and sees truth itself as a commodity. We seek truths that comfort us in our beliefs, confirm our opinions of institutions and people, and most of all do not require us to think too much. When criticised for changing his mind on a question, John Maynard Keynes famously replied “when the facts change, I change my opinions. What do you do?” The implied ego-damage involved would be unacceptable today. Rather than changing our minds, we search and search until we find someone who will tell us that what we believe is still true, in return for money. Assertions of truth and falsehood are used as weapons, and as ways of safeguarding our own egos. In such a situation, the crud rises to the top. Truth is not what we objectively seek but what we buy. And that’s the truth.