THE TRUTH...........WHAT IS IT?.......SOME THOUGHTS.

And the 'truthiness' shall set you free.

'Feeling' the truth might be as good as thinking it.

School taught one and one is two, but by now, that answer, just ain't true.—

The Moody Blues long before Stephen Colbert happened along to give the world "truthiness" — voted last week as word of the year in a poll by Merriam-Webster's dictionary — there was a certain Pontius Pilate, circa the first century A.D., who is said to have asked a relevant and seemingly urgent question:

"What is truth?"

He never did get an answer, which is scarcely surprising since, in the ensuing 2,000 years, we've yet to provide anything like a simple one.

Theories abound, of course, "Truth" being the big game for hunter-philosophers — the definitional trophy everyone would love to hang in their study, just above a brass plate with his or her name on it.

Any philosopher worth his salt has tackled the issue.

There's the ancient "correspondence theory" (Plato, Aristotle; a proposition is true if it corresponds with the real world), and "coherence theories" (a variety, most of which say statements are true if they "cohere" with other statements accepted as true), and even a "consensus theory" (if most of us agree something is true, then it is).

To each of those theories — and countless others — have come objections small and large. We could get close to discovering what truth is but never close enough to satisfy most of us.

It turns out we may have been tackling the problem the wrong way. As a Polish logician named Alfred Tarski started emphasizing in the 1930s, we'd been bundling together two questions without worrying about how one related to the other: "What is true?" and "How do we know what we say is true?"

Separate those two questions, and a lot of intellectual fog starts to lift. We remove unnecessary complications."There are huge numbers of statements that are true and we just have no way of finding them out," says Norman Swartz, philosophy professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University.

For instance, someone must've been the architect of York Cathedral in England, says Swartz, but his name is lost. There could now be competing claims about who the architect was, but we would have no way of knowing which claim is true. Yet one of those claims has to be true.

History is loaded with situations where we still don't know all of the facts, adds Tom Hurka, philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. "The truth about why the dinosaurs went extinct, we may never be able to find, but there is a truth."

In other words, an external reality and truth do exist, even if we can't always grasp it, much less like it.

"Truth is a matter of what the nature of reality is, and reality is what it is regardless of what anybody thinks about it or would like it to be," says Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus in philosophy at Princeton University and author of the best-selling On Bullshit and the just-published On Truth.

"So it's independent of our responses, or our expectations or hopes or gut feelings." What, then, are we to make of "truthiness," hailed by the Merriam-Webster people as, more or less, their word of the year?

The expression was popularized by Stephen Colbert, who first used it on his satirical television show The Colbert Report while skewering U.S. President George Bush over one of his judicial nominees.

Said Colbert: "If you `think' about Harriet Miers, of course her nomination's absurd. But the president didn't say he 'thought' about his selection. He said this: 'I know her heart.' "Notice how he said nothing about her brain? He didn't have to. He feels the truth about Harriet Miers."

The same basic narrative was at play when Bush opted to invade Iraq, Colbert suggested. That decision might not stand up to rational analysis, but hey, "doesn't taking Saddam out feel like the right thing?" For Colbert, "truthiness," not blue states versus red ones, is the real divide south of the border.

There are people who rely on their intellects and think things through in their pursuit of truth. And then there are those who simply go for "truthiness" — shorthand for gut feeling — with scant (or no) regard to facts, intellect or logic.

Truthiness, in short, seems to hail from the same dark alley as "bellyfeel," the Newspeak word George Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four to denote "a blind, enthusiastic acceptance."

Truthiness also has an arresting echo in former president Ronald Reagan's verbal misstep when he declared, "facts are stupid things." (He'd misread "stubborn" on the teleprompter, and seemed truer to himself in the process.)

But has Colbert, on sober second thought, actually captured an essential difference?

Is intellect and analysis the only path to truth, while mere truthiness and gut feelings lead to foolishness and falsehood?

Shouldn't we bear in mind Tarski's distinction between what's true and how we know what we're saying is true?

As 21st-century humans, we still tend to admire heroes who, faced with a complex or threatening situation, listen to an inner voice that seems more heart and soul than mind. We see it in the television detective who just knows someone is lying, even if he or she can't articulate why the (presumed) villain is lying.Is this conclusion wrong because it's been reached via gut feeling or gut instinct?

In casual conversation, we tend to use the two expressions interchangeably, and they seem to be in the same hamper in Colbert's definition of truthiness.But maybe we need to think about a distinction between the two.

A gut feeling implies something raw, an emotion.

In his book Blink, which is all about first impressions and instant decisions, Malcolm Gladwell expressly avoids using the word "intuition," on the grounds that it implies emotion.

A gut instinct, by contrast, seems to go beyond emotion, even if it includes an emotional element. There's something rational backing up an instinct, although we don't immediately recognize it that way.

Consider what happens in baseball when the team manager has to decide which pinch-hitter or relief pitcher to send in. There are two competing theories about how he should make this decision, how he should seek the right choice, the truth.

The manager can use his head, scan vast tables of numbers about a player's past performance and come up with an answer based on statistical probabilities.

Or he can rely on what we sometimes cherish as a hunch, a gut instinct.That hunch, it turns out, is a lot more than momentary emotion, notes Frankfurt.

"If he has a great deal of experience with this sort of thing and has many, many times sent pitchers up and seen what they do, and many, many times compared the statistics of a pitcher with the actual performance of the pitcher on a particular day, I suppose that his gut instinct may be more reliable than the conclusions to be drawn from statistics."

"He may, without realizing what he's doing, perceive aspects of the situation that aren't reflected in the statistics: a sparkle in the eye or the way the guy walks or whatever it would be.

"It's based on experience — a decision that is now completely instinctive, but is informed by some prior analysis that is no longer front-of-brain. More often than not, the player who looks hungry or hunted on a particular day will exceed the expectations his record might otherwise suggest — and the coach knows it. He just reaches this conclusion by picking up on body language and mixing that with great experience.

Hurka offers an automotive analogy: "When you learn to drive a standard-transmission car, you've got to go through the sequence of events — depress the clutch, put it in gear, give it a little gas, release the clutch — and you go through them in sequence, thinking about what you're doing."

But once you learn how to drive, you just do that automatically without thinking. Your sense of when you should change gears is just based on what the engine sounds like. It's not by the seat of your pants. It's just because you've done it unconsciously many times. It's become second nature.

"We do a lot of things that way. When we first meet someone, for instance, we come to a whole bunch of conclusions about whether that person is apt to be trustworthy or loyal or a potential friend. That's usually because we've previously encountered that "type," or unconsciously recognized some familiar body language that either warns or reassures us.

But just because we've arrived at this "truth" by something other than an explicitly intellectual, fact-based process doesn't make the conclusion untrue.In some cases, going with your instinct may even be preferable, says Hurka, such as the daunting prospect of choosing a spouse.

"The idea that you're going to sit down and draw up a check list of pros and cons for different possible spouses, you're not going to do a good job doing it that way. In that circumstance, it's much better to just let yourself either respond or not respond to people.

"The problem is, we can't immediately know whether someone using gut instinct has actually arrived at the right decision and captured the truth. Nor can we fully understand how they've reached this conclusion — the second, Tarski question.

Not even the person making that gut decision can articulate the process, says Frankfurt.

"For people who rely on their heads, at least you can check up on them, you can investigate their thinking and decide whether or not their thinking is rational, whether the evidence they've relied upon is sufficient to warrant their conclusions.

That may be why so many of us, Colbert included, prefer the more overtly intellectual path in matters of state.

As Frankfurt puts it: "In a face-off between people who rely on their heads and people who rely on their hearts, my inclination is to favour the people who rely on their heads.

"But I recognize that some people, their hearts are very reliable. The trouble is, you can't be sure which people those are.

"At least not until it's too late.

Dec. 17, 2006.

KENNETH KIDD

FEATURE WRITER

The Toronto Star