Maggie's Farm

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley 

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
Mark Twain

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
Bob Dylan

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
Dr. Karl Menninger

What is Truth? 
Pontius Pilate

We posted briefly on this new word "truthiness" a couple of months ago, but it deserves more attention. The word stands more or less in contrast to the non-word "factiness," as I understand it. It brings to mind the comment of a friend who once described the processed cheese we were putting on burgers as "a remarkably food-like substance." "Truthiness" is a truth-like substance.

The Mixing Memory blog (which deals mostly with Cognitive Psychology) has a nice short piece on the subject, and I quote here:

"Truthy, not facty" strikes me as a pretty good way of describing the way we usually think about things. Most of the time, when we're thinking about the world, we're not trying to determine whether the information we're receiving from it is factual, but instead working to integrate it with the representations we've already got. The information that we're likely to notice, and keep, is just the information that fits with those representations, regardless of whether that information happens to fit with the facts. If something is truthy because it fits with our beliefs, but not with facts, then a lot of what we'll end up believing with be truthy, not facty. It's because of this that you get things like cognitive dissonance or the confirmation bias. Those involve searching for and emphasizing truthiness over factiness.

Thus a cognitive psychologist, or maybe any psychologist, might find the new word handy because it has to do with the way our minds deal with things - in a rule-of-thumb, experience-based way which expects or wants  things to fit our existing ideas and images. (A "representation" is what psychologists and psychoanalysts call a package of memory, image, idea and emotion. It's called a "re-presentation" because it's constructed on the inside, and thus necessarily colored and distorted to varying degrees for all sorts of psychological reasons.)

I suspect that, for a long time, the idea of a round earth contained fact but lacked truthiness for many people who walked around all day on flat surfaces. Indeed, it lacks truthiness to me that my flight from New York to Paris flies over Newfoundland. How many things are apparently facts - the existence of quarks, a curved universe, the flight of the bumblebee, the movement of electrons in a copper wire - yet all lack truthiness.

For another example, I think Dan Rather, this fall, was trying to tell us that the CBS forged records "lacked factiness but contained "truthiness". Similar to the Al Sharpton-Tawana Brawley business, if you recall that story.

So it seems to me that Mixing Memory has the correct idea: What feels "truthy" is something that fits our preconceptions. And our preconceptions aren't bad things - we could not function without them, but how many of them can we prove to be True? (We live in a world of ambiguities, but crave certainty and solid ground so as not to go nuts. As in Huxley's quote: "You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you mad.") On the other hand, things that feel "truthy" can just as easily be lies, as happened this month with the Oprah Book Club's Million Little Pieces.

If we plan to use this word (which I do not, unless I use it with irony), let's use it with the connotation of an untruth or a lie - a "truth-like substance," and not as a watered-down version of truth. And let's view the professional purveyors of truthiness to be what they are - con-men, manipulators, and propagandists - whether they be advertisers, politicians, trial lawyers or journalists.