Sunday Seminar Series: Truth and Belief, Part II

Comet, or Dragon? Image via Wikipedi

Dear Readers,

  After the problems that occured with my "Great Expectations" Friday Seminar, I discovered that the response improved when I posted my seminars to time-normal Sundays rather than Fridays, and I've changed the schedule accordingly.

  If you are just joining us, my Sunday Seminars are a series of posts adapted from material for my first-year undergraduate Anachronism students, CHRN/AUG 100.  Last week we talked about different kinds of information, and I defined some terms for you.  It would be useful to go back to that, but I intend to move on from there, so foreknowledge should not be entirely necessary.

   The important point that I want you to take home from these two seminars is that there are different sorts of conclusions you can make about "reality."

   Let me give you an example.  There is a medieval source, from your history, in which a bishop describes his experience of seeing a dragon.  Historians (as you know them) and Anachronists both are interested in this account for a variety of reasons.  However, even time-normal historians consider this source in two ways.

  The first is literally.  The source gives us an account of what a dragon was to a medieval person.  For this bishop, whatever he saw really was a dragon.  And thus we come to interpretations of truth.  Pragmatist philosophy suggests that if an interpretive worldview is useful to someone, then it is true for that person.  What is true, thus, is not necessarily the same for everyone.  Because of truth-bias from his or her original worldview, the Anachronist has to realign his or her mind to that of the source author.  That is, if the Anachronist seeks a literalist, source subjective impression of the information available.  Furthermore, it gets very interesting when you consider that there are time streams where the objective reality would agree with the subjective reality of a dragon.  Keep an open mind!

   Of course, what if we don't take the source literally?  What if we want to figure out what "really happened"?  Was the dragon a comet?  Ball lightning?  It can be a lot more difficult, because to some degree we just have to trust in our sources.  We can't see these time streams via Augury.  So we often have to look for clues in the sources words that tell us what the different possibilities.  The take home message should be that you can never know what "really" happened or will happen in a time stream.  You just know what could happen.  And that's what Anachronism is all about.

   There is another way, however.  There are the people at the University, who still have their memories from a time normal life, but the perspective of interaction with those who have different perspectives.  When in doubt, consult a colleague.  Often, there is someone here who can tell you what their subjective experience in a given related time stream was, and that can help inform you as to the possibilities for your time stream of study.

  In the end, all we can really say is what our sources believed the truth to be, not the "real" facts.

  And yet, this does not matter.  There are so many possibilities out there, and the mere inspiration from a source provides us with something meaningful.  If a source can imagine it, there is likely a time stream where it will occur.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople