The Little One and I continue to have a raging debate about "Truth". I argue that social scientists don't understand truth, because they refuse to believe it exists. Scientists on the other hand understand truth, simply because there is only one truth. If a particular experiment (properly undertaken without any bias) is conducted, repeated and then repeated again,then if the result be the truth - should the same result irrespective of the number of times it is conducted and thereby the same conclusion irrespective of the person evaluating the result. In essence,truth cannot be subjective.

Anyway, thats the short story. We once spent over an hour and a half on an international call conducting a thought experiment which was a combination of Armageddon, War of the Worlds and I am Legend. Fortunately, it was cut short by a family member who was thoroughly perplexed by our version of a romantic conversation.

Anyway, today I came across a paragraph from a New Yorker article which probably encapsulates what I want to do and what the Little One can't. It is from a review of a book on World War II by Nicholson Baker (who I don't know). The book attempts to answer a rather simple question: Was WWII good? and answers it by providing us with documentary evidence of that period. Notes, letters, newspaper clippings etc. with no view of the author expressed at any point except the afterword.

The reviewer writes
"It’s an interesting experiment: Baker is trying to eliminate the historian’s interpretive gloss in the interests of respecting the rawness of the primary experience. He seems to think that the facts speak for themselves. But facts never speak for themselves. We speak for them. The historian’s gloss matters (not to mention all the facts that are left out): it provides the reader with intellectual traction, an ability to weigh the claims being put forward to justify the selection of facts. Baker’s presentation may seem empirical—these things happened, you can look them up, no varnish has been applied—but the effect is entirely emotional, because there is no nesting argument, no narrative, to give events a context. It’s a tabloid technique: a six-word quotation or a single image is all you need to understand any issue. The pretense of no manipulation is completely manipulative."

I think where the Little One and I differ is purely on the idea of "selection of facts". Surely, any selection undermines the fundamental principle of any experiment: that the initial conditions are unequal, controlled or removed of any systematic bias. Its like conducting an experiment of the efficacy of oral contraceptive pills on post-menopausal women and saying the drug doesn't work. That's not the truth - it cannot be. The result of that experiment is correct but needs to be justified in terms of its context - but it is not the truth!


Let me just make one last statement. I agree that the truth sometimes is impossible to achieve, but it doesn't mean it does not exist or that it is open to anybody's interpretation!