'"School Stories" and Media Distortion a Greater Fiction than Fiction'

16 posts / 0 new

Wed, 2012-07-25 14:46

Kaitlin McNabb Kaitlin McNabb's picture

Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines.- C.S. Lewis

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t - Mark Twain

Brain Picker writer Maria Popova discusses the ideas of truth and agenda in fiction and how the idea of truth in fiction has long consumed famous writers.

A short read, presented without much context, but makes some your brain think about the concepts of reality in truth in reality verus written word.

Which one do you believe more or find outlandish? Sometimes I seem to be far more critical of writing and stories than of the realities in my own life. But, then again, I am super critical in general, so I am cynical of most things anyway.

Thu, 2012-07-26 13:16

Timebandit Timebandit's picture

What about fiction masquerading as truth?

Thu, 2012-07-26 13:42

Caissa

Which leads us to the question of what is truth.

Thu, 2012-07-26 13:43

Catchfire

Interesting divide. It's a very old fashioned view of truth and fiction, of course -- appropriate for both C.S. Lewis and Popova. What's interesting about the passage by C.S. Lewis is what happens if you read it against the grain: it's true that no one can decieve you if you don't believe they are telling the truth -- but while Lewis still appeals to some Enlightenment ideal of an objective truth, if we reject that idea (as we should), his advice takes on some radical power: don't believe in truth and you cannot be decieved.

As an aside, I think it's rather ironic that the author of The Chronicles of Narnia wrote these words:

The real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’

The dynamic between what we call truth and fiction (can't fiction be true?) came out most interestingly in the whole James Frey/Million Little Pieces/Oprah fiasco. Not to mention numerous literary hoaxes since. The public was "outraged" at Frey's perfidies, and Oprah demanded that he publicly apologize. He did. And there was much rejoicing.

My own view is that if there is something that's like whatever we call truth, we can't get at it. All we can do is tell stories about it. This might come in the form of fiction, or it might come in many other forms we usually conceive of as enjoying a closer relationship with truth: journalism, judicial practices, medical diagnoses, environmental science -- but they are all stories we tell using the genres, techniques and rhetoric available to us. How we can call one form "false" and one "true" seems to me to be an entirely misguided practice. Do what ol' Clive says: don't believe in truth, and you won't be deceived.

Thu, 2012-07-26 18:03

Timebandit Timebandit's picture

I suppose it comes down to how you define "true". From my perspective, Frey's work was not factual and his flaw was that it was protrayed and marketed as a factual work. Maybe the term "factual" should be employed instead of "true" - there's less for the philosophers to fuck with.

Once you start asking questions like "Can't fiction be true?" you are drifting down a road that will only lead you to the estimation of angel populations on heads of pins. It's my considered opinion that this sort of definition of "true" is entirely too squishy to be useful and isn't what most people mean by "true" in any case, so it's misleading. Amusing, sure, but ultimately impractical.

For my own part, when I am working on factual projects, I have to spend a lot of extra time and attention on making sure that what I'm portraying as "true story" is factual. It irritates the shit out of me when factual filmmakers play fast and loose with the facts. Spin is one thing, opinion is okay, but if you're making claims that don't line up with reality, that's no kind of truth.

Thu, 2012-07-26 18:39

ygtbk

Catchfire wrote:

-- but while Lewis still appeals to some Enlightenment ideal of an objective truth, if we reject that idea (as we should),

I agree 100% that C. S. Lewis playing the propaganda card is a bit rich. His science fiction suffered from it as well - maybe worse than The Chronicles of Narnia. But I believe that some things are objectively true - either tautologically, as in mathematics, or empirically, as in physics or engineering. I hope that the person who designed the bridge that I drive over had good reasons to believe that it would hold up.

Fri, 2012-07-27 11:37

Caissa

When writing in the historical genre I was always trying to understand what happened and why. The facts I had to work with were in essence the artifacts that survived telling less than the whole. It made it very difficult to try to know and understand what truly happened. I agree Timebandit that "true" and "fact" have general working meanings in every day life. They take on additional meaning depending upon the discipline we may be working on at any given time.

Fri, 2012-07-27 13:20

Catchfire

ygtbk wrote:
But I believe that some things are objectively true - either tautologically, as in mathematics, or empirically, as in physics or engineering. I hope that the person who designed the bridge that I drive over had good reasons to believe that it would hold up.

These two sentences are not compatible. The first is problematic in and of it self: empiricism has nothing to do with objective truths, only evidence based on what is observable, while mathematics is an imaginary system concocted to make sense of the world. The second has nothing to do with obejective truths, but indeed what the engineer "believes" based on what she thinks she knows. As we know, sometimes this makes a good bridge (but not a perfect one) and sometimes it doesn't.

We are pretty sure that if we drop an apple from a great height, it will fall to the ground every time. We didn't need Isaac Newton to tell us that. Newton showed us that the apple falls because bodies tend to attract one another proportional to their masses. Is this an objective truth? Isn't it possible that one day we could have an understanding of what we now call gravity that is even more detailed and complex? Will that be the objective truth, then?

This is all a bit off topic, of course, since I think we're talking about truth in journalism and fiction (send those other thoughts to the Magic v Science thread).

Timebandit wrote:
Once you start asking questions like "Can't fiction be true?" you are drifting down a road that will only lead you to the estimation of angel populations on heads of pins.

I don't know what you mean by this, nor do I see any evidence of it. To me, it's quite plain that fiction can be true. It teaches us things, it evokes real emotion, and it can show in very real ways how the world works in ways that "real life events" routinely occlude. Moreover, not only can it be true, it is true, it's part of the discourse that helps humans communicate, understand and persist. I don't see how, when Kevin O'Leary and economists or venture capitalists in general are considered experts in how the world works and most centre-left North Americans get their news from a comedy show, we can pretend to think that some kind of objective truth exists that we can touch or even approach.

I'm reading Aristotle's Rhetoric right now, and he has a lot if interesting things to say about the distance between truth and persuasion. We like to think about medical diagnoses as "true," for example -- but anyone who has ever asked for a second opinion should realize that they are acts of rhetoric before they are scientific proofs.

Fri, 2012-07-27 14:36

Timebandit Timebandit's picture

My point, Catchfire, is that you are using the word "true" in a sense that is very abstract and in a way that most people don't. Deeper, philosophical truths can be a long distance away from facts, and sometimes the philosophical truth is less true than we'd like it to be.

Largely, I agree with you about fiction. However, evoking emotion doesn't have anything to do with truth one way or the other. Meaning, sure. Is that meaning necessarily true, or does it just strike a chord in you? Is that chord about the way the world is or the way you'd like it to be? I think it really depends. It's a more complex question.

If you read past the quoted line, you'll note that I didn't talk about objective truth per se. I talked about factual information. I also said that such information can be "spun" or arranged in a non-objective way and that opinion plays into it - but when we start fucking with the facts and don't make it clear that we are doing so, we are not serving any greater truth. It's not that Frey's work spoke to people or made them feel something that I take issue with - it's that he wrote fiction and fraudulently presented it as fact. If he'd called it fiction in the first place, no one would have had boo to say to him.

I'm making a doc right now that has a lot of information and points of view and sifting out the facts from the opinions and the spin is really challenging. I've got my own opinions in there as well. The tricky part is acknowledging when you run up against the fact that goes against the "truth" as I'd like it to be. I've been making films for over 20 years and wouldn't claim a single one was an objective film, although I will stand by the facts contained in them. I've no quibble with interpretation, and some subject matter is less factually objective than some other subjects. But if you say you went somewhere and did something and wrote feelingly about it in a way that struck a chord in your audience, but you made it all up and weren't clear about that, then I feel like that's abusing your audience. The effect of the work is as powerful from fiction as from purported fact - just be honest about what it is or isn't.

Love Aristotle, too. Yes, there's an enormous gulf between fact and persuasion, fact and opinion or belief. That's where interpretation comes in.

Fri, 2012-07-27 15:54

#10

MegB

Somehow my post got lost ... or my browser upgrade is messing with me. Regardless, while I have a great deal of interest in what Aristotle has written, he is, and always will be for me, Mr. Hospital Corners. Physics shows us that there is no completely objective reality. That would indicate that the line between fiction and "truth" is blurry at best.

Fri, 2012-07-27 16:23

#11

ygtbk

Catchfire wrote:

ygtbk wrote:
But I believe that some things are objectively true - either tautologically, as in mathematics, or empirically, as in physics or engineering. I hope that the person who designed the bridge that I drive over had good reasons to believe that it would hold up.

These two sentences are not compatible. The first is problematic in and of it self: empiricism has nothing to do with objective truths, only evidence based on what is observable, while mathematics is an imaginary system concocted to make sense of the world. The second has nothing to do with obejective truths, but indeed what the engineer "believes" based on what she thinks she knows. As we know, sometimes this makes a good bridge (but not a perfect one) and sometimes it doesn't.

On the contrary, empiricism has everything to do with objective truth. If you have a hypothesis about something, you act on it, and you're wrong (meaning that subsequent events show that your action was incorrect), and you do that 20 times in a row, then it's pretty clear that your hypothesis is wrong.

Mathematics is about mathematics, not the world. What's astonishing is the number of times that it turns out to be relevant to the world. See Eugene Wigner's essay at:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

And I repeat that I don't want to drive on a bridge designed by someone who does not believe in objective reality.

But to get back to your point -- why, exactly, should we not believe in objective reality?

Sat, 2012-07-28 02:43

#12

Fidel

But what if others do the same experiment and discover your hypothesis is true one time in 30 experiments?

Truth is a close approximation to the provable. Mathematical proof is a formula open to scrutiny by others. Truth depends on the person or group doing the verifying. Truth isn't knowable if there is absolute truth regardless of there being anyone to acknowledge it, because logically, at least one person has to verify it.

Definitions for truth rank up there with, What is reality? - the meaning of life - Is truth circular? - Do qualia exist? - What is consciousness? etcetera ad infinitum.

The perfect bridge designed by the perfect engineer was a sturdy bridge 60 years ago when it was built. And you feel good knowing it was probably designed by the most qualified people. You are totally unaware, though, that deregulation was cause enough for the city to stop paying qualified engineers to assess the physical state of bridges. And what was true 60 years ago is no longer true. They've been painting over the rust and decay for years. And then one day...

Sat, 2012-07-28 03:12

#13

ygtbk

I'll go with Tarski's theory of truth: the statement "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. It may not be glamorous but it's adequate. And I completely disagree that truth depends on the person doing the verifying - I think you might have meant that if it's not verifiable it's not true, and that's a bit more believeable.

Sat, 2012-07-28 14:53

#14

Fidel

Has science never disproved what was previously thought to be true? In those cases whatever was thought to be true was never absolutely true. And science text books have been edited and rewritten a number of times in recent years. Some think that science is on the verge of discovering new laws of nature which will dramatically alter what we "know" or understand to be true.

Imagine, for example, that Canadian Frank Greening's attempt to explain Zdenek Bazant's crush down crush up theory for the collapse of WTC buildings make no scientific sense today. Greening's sequeing off into quantum physics as a feeble attempt to explain how collapsing buildings violate Newton's laws of nature might not be widely accepted truth in the here and now but could be some day if the laws of nature allow for his elaborate theories currently defying comprehension for some 1700+ certified and licensed architects and engineers for 9/11 truth with more than 25,000 years of combined on the job experience. Bezant, Greening and the NIST might some day be recognized for their contributions to absolute truth instead of for being the bought and paid-for pseudoscientific scapegoats they are now.

Sat, 2012-07-28 16:21

#15

ygtbk

Fidel wrote:

Has science never disproved what was previously thought to be true? In those cases whatever was thought to be true was never absolutely true.

You are right, with the replacement of Newtonian gravity by General Relativity being a classic example. Newton's laws explained planetary motions quite well but not perfectly, with the precession of Mercury's orbit being a bit off. So these days we would think of Newtonian gravity as an approximation to GR, valid for low speeds and small masses.

Sat, 2012-07-28 17:03

#16

Fidel

Yes, and the current laws of motion still apply to our earthly confines as far as the legal system and engineering are concerned. The current theory of gravity still good enough to measure the rate of falling objects and the forces at play here on earth. Newtonian theory was good enough to send rockets to the moon and solve motion problems on terra firma. Frank Greening and the NIST's argument is not with A&E's for truth nor even Einstein. Greening and the NIST's argument is with Isaac Newton.