(Originally posted 30th April, 2004)
Truth is a funny thing. It’s something that a lot of people can get quite bent out of shape over because they believe that they have to defend the “truth”, sometimes to the death. The thing is though, “truth” is a completely relative concept. Whether or not something is true depends entirely on how you look at something.
To give you an example, let’s take the rain. Some people would say that rain is good. It provides the plants with moisture that encourages them to grow. It also allows people to have water to drink they have a way of collecting it. So, you could say that “rain is good” is a true statement.
But what happens when it rains torrentially for days on end and the everything is flooded: buildings are destroyed, roads and other infrastructure are ruined, lives are lost. Is rain still good? Most people would argue that, no, this sort of rain isn’t that crash hot.
Now, even though this was a particularly inane example, I’m hoping that it shows that the truth of a given statement is only valid when it’s taken in comparison to something else. If you look at something in an entirely different way, it might not be true any more.
That’s what this principle is all about. If you want to determine if something is true or not, you need to figure out how effective it is in comparison to your frame of reference. If it answers your hypothesis successfully, then you could say it was true. If it doesn’t then you could say that it was false.
But even “true” and “false” are relative terms. For the past couple of thousand years, mankind has laboured under the belief that things are either true or false. It has to be one or the other and it can’t be both. But this in itself isn’t a particularly effective position to take, because there are a whole range of situations where something is partly true and partly false at the same time, when it’s measured in a particular way.
Aristotelian logic calls these things “paradoxes” and they tend to break systems based on bivalent logic. But in recent years, there is a new field emerging in computer science — the traditional bastion of bivalent logic — fuzzy logic.
Fuzzy logic says that something can be both true and false at the same time (when compared to a particular premise) and it’s the degree of truth that’s what’s important, not whether it’s true or not. Fuzzy logic systems have been able to achieve amazing things that until now have been impossible with traditional programming techniques. Fuzzy logic has been most widely accepted in Asian countries where it is closer to traditional Buddhist and Taoist modes of thinking.
This brings us back to the corollary to the first principle: that all systems are arbitrary. In order for you to measure the truth of something, you need to have some sort of a system or frame of reference to measure it against. But the choice of a measurement system is basically an arbitrary decision at the end of the day. If you arbitrarily choose a completely different frame of reference, then something that was true before might not be so true any more.
This is a bit of a tough concept to come to grips with, because it implies that there is no one Universal Truth. As soon as you define a frame of reference, you’re automatically limiting your scope to make something false.
What it does mean is that if something isn’t working for you, then it’s usually a sign that perhaps your frame of reference isn’t being particularly effective at the moment and you might be better served by looking at the situation from another angle. By being flexible and choosing the most appropriate frame of reference in different situations can make your life a whole lot easier.
There are good and bad aspects to everything, regardless of what it is. Change your viewpoint and you change what is and isn’t true.