Mike Sanders yesterday responded to Doc Searls' response to Thomas Friedman's column in the NY Times with a blog entry that asks some of the basic questions about truth. Mike asks:

Is it true that the only truth is that there is no truth?
Is there such a thing as truth? If yes, where does it apply?
Is the truth what a given person believes?
When Is it important to determine truths?
How can we go about determining the truth in a given area?

Today he posts a bunch of responses. I'm a day late because I was on the road, but here goes.

I want to pursue this along two tracks.

First, Mike's questions are so damn hard because the reigning theory of truth is problematic. We think of truth as a correspondence between a statement and state of affairs. This has gotten mixed up with a representational view of consciousness, that is, the view that we know the world by creating an inner representation of it. There are millions of examples of this way of thinking, starting with our view of insanity as having ideas in your head that don't correspond to the world, but I happened upon some just yesterday in the book about Douglas Englebart, called Boostrapping by Thierry Bardin. Englebart wrote that language is "the way in which the individual parcels out the picture of his world into the concepts that his mind uses to model the world..." (p. 36). This view of consciousness and of our relation to our world is - IMO - insanely wrong, but it is the basis of our theory of truth.

Second, Friedman's column says that the great world religions have to accept that none has the one and only truth. In particular, he chastises Islam for not yet accepting the validity of other religions. But Friedman is wrong, I believe, in lumping Christianity and Judaism together on this issue. Becoming Christian means accepting a body of beliefs as true. Becoming a Jew means having a Jewish mother. Jews are a people. That's why Jews traditionally have not proselytized; suggesting that you ought to become a Jew is akin to suggesting that you ought to become Italian. And that's why Jews have not maintained that their scripture needs to be accepted by everyone and that everyone needs to keep kosher. Thus, the "truths" of Judaism are different in type than the "truths" of Christianity and Islam: they are a set of practices more than a set of beliefs, and they are practices required only of those born as Jews. (I'm over-simplifying, of course. There are some practices - not killing, not lying, etc. - that Jews do hold are required of all.) Further, Judaism is thoroughly hermeneutic; it's baked into the religion that scripture always needs to be interpreted. In fact, it needs to be interpreted not by individuals who randomly proclaim the Truth as they see it but by an historical community of thinkers and talkers. This multi-thousand year conversation among learned and thoughtful Jews is one of the truly distinctive marks of this religion.

So, where does this leave us with regard to truth? I'm going to state a position and not argue for it because: the argument is too long and complex for a blog and it's too long and complex for the likes of me. Nevertheless, it strikes me as obvious. (Note: I didn't make this up. I'm summarizing and interpreting a clump of thinkers that are generally called Continental Philosophers.) Truth is a way of uncovering the world. "Uncovering" is a good word to use because it implies that you are seeing what was there all along even though you weren't aware of it. There are lots of ways of uncovering the world. Not all are equally good. Some are just plain stupid or loony. There are some tests that work for some types of uncoverings; science works real good as one way of uncovering the world. But there isn't one killer test that can ride roughshod over all others: science works, but so does poetry. It's important to recognize that we are not alone in our uncovering of the world. We do it together on the basis of a history of thought and art and stories and language that we cannot escape. Truth is not simply what anyone happens to believe. It is the way we - our culture and our history - have uncovered the world. It is not something in our head; it is the way our language allows the world to show itself to us.

Or, like, anyway, that's my truth. Whatever. Dude.

Response from and to Tom Matrullo

The always insightful Tom Matrullo has responded to the above on his estimable site. After saying some nice things about my post, he concludes with:

..."the way our language allows the world to show itself to us" appears to remain, as they say, "inscribed" entirely within the realm of the eye, a system that seems ineluctably to entail a notion of truth as the relationship between a representational model and an underlying something that is real.

Or am I missing something here, David?

Is the problem that "show" sounds like it refers only the visual? My bad. The world shows itself to us through touch, sounds, and smells as well as through sight. But even if it were confined to sight, that wouldn't mean that the model has to be representational. The Continental philosophers - more precisely, the phenomenologists - started from the insight (there's that "sight" word again!) that the attempt to discern what was certain and knowable had led our philosophical tradition to over-emphasize raw perception. When you consider your relationship to the world in terms of perception, you are stripping out what's meaningful in that relationship. We normally are not in the world as perceivers but as act-ers and care-ers. So, while we can seem to achieve a state in which we are forming mental images of an external world, that state is the exception and shouldn't be taken as indicating the truth (there's that word again!) of our relation to the world.

Dan B. replied to a recent email with a friendly note that ended by suggesting that I help readers skim my articles by using typography to flag the most important ideas. Dan is one of the computing industry's Good Guys: brilliant, thoughtful, innovative, ethical, human. And I'm not saying this just because he gave this blog a nice plug in his own weblog. Really. But, this is not the first time Dan has stared at the endless, gray cliffs of my verbiage and begged for a handhold. I'm not relenting.

I think Dan's advice is good. It certainly works for Dan. He puts key ideas in bold and generally keeps his entries short. Trellix - Dan's company's product - is well set up to help authors do so. But he and I seem to be writing weblogs for different reasons. Dan's interest in making his writing skimmable indicates, I assume, that he sees his writing as a way of conveying information. The reader wants to take in that information as efficiently as possible and thus benefits from font variations that pull the eye towards the key points. I, unfortunately, have no information to convey. I want to draw readers in and pull them through. I suffer from author's arrogance; Dan is far more considerate of his readers.

Or perhaps it comes down to something simpler and less interesting: Dan's use of typography helps readers find what they want to read in depth. I happen to write in longer chunks, so I use headlines and opening paragraphs to let the reader make a go-no-go decision. Once a reader is in, my job is to entice the reader all the way to the end. Eruptions of boldface makes that job harder.

Dan isn't suggesting that Anna Karenina could have been improved by the judicious use of bold face. The issue is the nature of weblogs. Purveyor of information? Writing that generates interest in what otherwise would go unnoticed? Or something else? There's no one answer to this.

Believe me, If I had salient points to make, I'd make them in boldface. But my aim is not to make it easier for readers to get the information they need and get going, but to pull them through ... best of all, against their will.

Note to e-merchants: If you want to make your sites "sticky," write better.

Graeme Thickens reports that the high tech investment world isn't as moribund as it's often made out. He's back from Red Herring's NDA conference and has sent out his observations via an email newsletter that expands on the coverage he provides at www.conferenza.com. (You can sign up for his newsletter here.)

Among his positive observations (each of which I've whittled down):

$45 billion is now sitting in VC coffers waiting to be invested, just from funds raised last year...

Security technology is suddenly mega-hot...

Nanotechnology, a growing new area of VC investment, will provide major advancements in a whole raft of industries...

Internet usage is still doubling every year...

The portable computing device market will continue to grow rapidly...

Neurogenomics, which addresses the causes of central nervous system disorders, is one of the hottest new drug therapy sectors in biotechnology...

This is a weblog, right? So I can surface ideas half-baked at best? Ideas under development? Ideas that may not make it through their difficult teen years? Well, here goes...

The word "horizon" became important to some philosophers in the second half of the 20th century. "Horizonal this" and "the horizonality of that" are sure signs that you're dealing with a so-called Continental philosopher. They're also the ones talking about silence, gestures, and, occasionally, nothingness. There's a reason for this. It's a reaction against a traditional ontology that equates "real" with "present" - "present" in both the sense of what exists now and in the sense of being present and not absent. Reality in the traditional ontology is what's here now, a big clump of matter.

The problem isn't that what's here now isn't real; the problem is that this definition excludes too many things that either aren't now or aren't matter. It's not just fluffy stuff like dreams and emotions that the traditional understanding of reality excludes, it's also things like potential (future) and tradition (past). Continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger say that we can't understand our experience of the world without seeing that it is imbued with a sense of future possibilities and potentialities. We can't even understand a simple hammer without taking it as something that can be used to accomplish some project; we understand things in terms of their future, potential use to us.

Horizon becomes an important term to these Continental philosophers because - although they don't always put it this way - the horizon is not only the limit of what we can see, it indicates that there is more beyond it. The horizon isn't simply where the sky meets the earth; it also points beyond itself to the hidden rest of the world. (Gesturing does the same thing. So does language. Different topics.)

So, does the Web world have an horizon? Since it's not a physical world, it well might not have a structure analogous to the horizon. But I think it does: hyperlinks. Hyperlinks point to a page beyond itself. They are a quite explicit gesture - far more explicit than the real world horizon in suggesting what lies beyond.

So, who cares? Maybe no one. But I think one - tenuous - result is the Web helps make clear (Heideggerians would say "uncover") the true nature of the real world. The real world isn't really a big clump of matter. It's a context of signficance, the present illuminated by its possible futures in light of the language that comes from the past. The real world is horizonal not just where the sky meets the earth but also in every thing that is understood by reference to the context and its possibilities that are beyond the thing itself. We can ignore that fact in the real world - and traditional philosophy has made a career of ignoring it - but we can't ignore it on the Web, for at the heart of the Web's nature are horizonal hyperlinks.

According to today's Boston Globe, based on a careful analysis of the letters' content and handwriting style:

FBI behavior scientists have said they believe the person sending the letters is a reclusive adult male with a tendency to hold grudges.

Stop the presses! This just in: FBI announces its analysis of the writer's handwriting indicates that he does not have hooks for hands. Repeat: No hooks for hands.

Also, there's evidence that the writer was probably subject to the law of gravity at the time he wrote it. More details as they develop...

How many Harry Potter reviews are we going to read that are based on some pun about "Wild about Harry"? And how many reviews of "Legally Blonde" twisted "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in one way or another? I have nothing against writers (including headline writers) taking the easy way out. In fact, I'm all in favor of it. But - and here's the point - no one has heard the songs these puns are based on in fifty years or more. The songs live on now only in punning headlines.

Whoix.com, the Thinking Person's Alternative to Whois, responds to malformed queries with the following error message:

Bitte geben Sie den Domain-Namen ohne "www." an

Ach, ist jetzt die Sprache vom der Internet Deutsch ? Ausgezeichnet!

Besides, if Whoix is smart enough to see that the name I entered begins with "www." why isn't it smart enough to remove the "www." and do the lookup I requested? "To dial the number you requested you must first dial 1." If you know what I did wrong, why don't you dial the one, you a-hole!

General category of this picked nit: The Petty Revenge of Resentful Robots.

Or so it seems. The BBC video report features a quick glimpse of the document that supports the claim that Al Qaeda is building nuclear weapons. The few words visible do indeed seem to come from the parody document. It also seems that CNN has been taken in.

Hey, Osama, time to start rehearsing for your IG Noble Prize acceptance speech next year!

Personal Web Publishing Communities. Four very key words. Let's go through them one by one...

So says Dave. No argument here. Dave nails it.

Of course, there's more to say about weblogs; that's why they're hard to reduce to a definition, even with the expansion Dave provides for each of the terms. Weblogs are a rich phenomenon.

For example: Weblog communities are different than communities formed around discussion boards or mailing lists. The nature of the conversational bonds is different. Even weblog time is different - the fact that blogs have a daily feel isn't incidental to what they are and what they're becoming.

And, they hit a middle ground in terms of their publicness. For some of us - me - that's been an inhibitor, since in the 2x2 matrix (I've gotta stop writing Powerpoints) of publicness and formality, emails are in the lower left (small, intimate group and highly informal), zines are in the top right (large group, formal/reviewed/drafted writing) and blogs are in the upper left (potentially a lot of readers, but generally pretty informal because they're so timely). Some of us, because of our own neuroses, find the upper left an uncomfortable place.

Our blog has only been up for 8 hours and it's already won it's first award!

Well, we haven't quite won it yet. We've been nominated, but that itself is the real award, isn't it? Yes, we are proud to announce that our site has been nominated for the prestigious Deco-Website Awards!

The exciting news arrived be email just minutes ago. At first we thought it might be spam, but at the bottom it said explicitly:

THIS EMAIL IS NOT SPAM YOUR SITE WAS SELECTED BY
HAND TO TAKE PART IN OUR 2001-2002 AWARDS, WE NEVER SEND SPAM. IT IS BAD.

And it was all in caps! They couldn't do that if it weren't true!

The fact that we received the message twice and it doesn't quite mention which of our web sites has been nominated also made us a bit suspicious, as did the fact that the mail was addressed to "[email protected]." While I own the domain name evident.com, I don't actually have a site up. So, I'm sure they mean the award to go to this blog. After all, although I'm normally quite humble, it's clear that I deserve it. Well, not me alone, but the team of people who labored over the past 2 hours to build this site. I dedicate this award to the little people.

Paranoid me, I still thought it might be a scam or maybe some of my "friends" (you know who you are) pulling my leg. But the Deco Website Awards site tells you just who the Evaluators are. These three folks are Web heavys ("heavies" just reads too funny)!:

David Collinson
David is working as a freelance web designer in Japan and has an extensive experience in web design, HTML and Java programming As of his education, he is the post graduate in computers/ graphic design of a Tokyo collage and he is the Webmaster of this web site and the Award program.

John Roberts
John is an office worker as a Senior Programmer Analyst, but his important interest is the internet and web site design. He has excellent skill in HTML, Java, He has a very good experience by working in several countries like England, Holland, Japan, and right now living in Paris, France
He is a graduate in computer graphics and has more than 8 years of experience in Web Design and Programming.

Mary Richards
Is a graphics designer. The Deco Website Awards is a part time job for her, And in the new year planing to go to japan to study more.

(Keep it up, Mary. You're going to make it after all!)

Another couple of signs that these guys are the real deal: First, look at their URL: http://www.deco-websiteawards.co-inc.com. You can't get much more legally incorporated than to be both a Co. and an Inc. ... these guys must be rock solid! Also, when you go to the site, not one but three popup ads appear, each a vote of confidence.

Best of all, if I win, they're going to allow me to buy a trophy! Do you think I should put it on top of my monitor, or is that too ostentatious? Maybe I should just put it on a bookshelf and half hide it behind some old paperbacks so that when people notice it, I can be all humble like.