Project Five - Un/Fiction
Exploring truth
What is truth? How do we know something is true?
What are the ironclad guarantees of truth? The black and white? The clear as day dead certs of truth?
The writer and philosopher John D. Caputo argues that truth is a fiction.
But facts are facts I hear you say, and if it’s a fact we like to see it as true. The Latin word for fact is facere, meaning ‘to make’. So in the most literal sense, Caputo tells us “Facts are made”.
Humans make truth all the time, by our actions to show love, or to withhold love. From these beginnings, new truths come to light in every environ on Planet Earth where people are present.
This project uses the abstract and the macro as a creative expression to explore aspects of truth, fiction and human subjectivity.
Is it fiction, or is it un/fiction?
Framing truth
How truth is framed depends on the approach that you take to interpret the facts.
Under the lead of Martin Heidegger, French and German philosophers explored the place of interpretation in the way that truth is framed and the way truth is made.
An interpretation is a way of construing things, of having a ‘take’ as Caputo claims, within a framework of reference that provide a good interpretation. New situations can challenge our frameworks of reference and open up new possibilities.
Telling stories
Language games
The idea of language games was proposed in 1951 by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
You could say that there are many different games; the insurance game, the art game, the education game. Each game has its own rules, and you can’t judge one game with the rules of another.
By exploring language games we can see how truth might be formed, explored, discovered or unhinged.
Paradigm shifts
In the 1960, Thomas Kuhn rocked the scientific work in his exploration of the history of science. He invented a phrase that has become common place in different fields of study, namely Paradigm Shifts.
Science works within a frame of reference. But what happens when something new occurs that cannot be explored by our normal ways of describing truth?
Scientists hate bananas
Disorientation with the existing frame
As results occur that cannot be explained, we have to work within new boundaries of the possible which may lead to the development of a new paradigm. We move our thinking in light of the new information or truth.
This is deeply disturbing as worlds often crumbling under the strain of trying to weave in the new with the old. Sometimes we just have to move, to accept that our current thinking is insufficient and journey into a new frame of reference.
This journey often has no road map. That is why ‘scientists don’t like bananas’.
