Three Kinds of Truth & the Common Ground Between Us
Article and art by Staff Writer Claudia
Our village is home to people from many countries and cultures. We speak different languages, practice different religions, carry different traditions and hold different political beliefs. Some families have lived here for generations; others arrived only recently.
That diversity can be one of our greatest strengths. It can also make communication difficult, especially when we assume that everyone sees the world exactly as we do.
Astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson has popularized a useful framework for understanding these differences: personal truths, political truths, and objective truths.
Recognizing the difference does not require us to abandon our convictions. It can help us listen more carefully, identify our biases and find enough common ground to work together.
Personal Truths
Personal truths grow from individual experience, faith, family, culture, and conscience. They help answer deeply human questions: What gives my life meaning? What do I consider beautiful? What responsibilities do I have toward my family, my neighbor or God?
A person's religious faith may be central to understanding the world. Another person may draw meaning from a different spiritual tradition or from a secular philosophy. These convictions can be profound and sincere even when they cannot be tested in a laboratory.
Our personal truths also include the stories we carry. A lifelong resident, an immigrant, a business owner, a farmer and a young family may experience the same village very differently. Those perspectives deserve to be heard.
The danger arises when we assume our experience must be everyone's experience. A personal truth can reveal something important without telling the whole story.
Political Truths
Political truths are the ideas a group accepts about how society works, who should be trusted and what should be done. They are shaped by ideology, history, media, leadership, and group identity.
These truths are especially vulnerable to confirmation bias, the tendency to embrace information that supports what we already believe while dismissing evidence that challenges it.
Political identity can intensify this problem. Once an opinion becomes part of our identity, changing our minds may feel like betraying our friends, our party or our community. We begin defending the group rather than examining the claim.
This does not mean every political belief is false. Politics includes legitimate debates about priorities and values. Two people can agree on the facts and still disagree about how money should be spent or which community need should come first.
Trouble begins when facts themselves become partisan property.
Objective Truths
Objective truths do not depend on who we are, where we were born or how we voted. They can be observed, measured and independently tested.
A bridge can carry a certain amount of weight. Water either contains a contaminant or it does not. A budget has particular revenues and expenses.
A medicine produces measurable benefits, risks or neither. Our feelings about those findings do not change the underlying reality.
Tyson captured this principle in a memorable line: "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
That line does not mean scientists are always right. Scientists are human and remain susceptible to ambition, error and bias. Scientific conclusions can also change when better evidence becomes available.
The strength of science is not that individual scientists are infallible. Its strength lies in a method designed to expose mistakes: transparent evidence, testing, criticism, replication, and correction. Tyson makes this case at length in his own writing, arguing that selecting only the scientific findings that serve our existing political, cultural or religious objectives weakens an informed society.[1]
Objective truth is therefore not the confident declaration, "I am unbiased." It is the willingness to show our evidence and allow others to test our conclusions.
A Village Needs All of Us
A healthy community does not demand that everyone share the same personal truth. Our different languages, religions, customs, and life experiences are part of what makes a village vibrant.
Nor must we agree about every political decision. Respectful disagreement can reveal overlooked problems and produce better solutions.
But we do need a shared commitment to objective reality. When a community considers roads, water, public safety, development, education or environmental protection, values help us decide what we want to achieve. Reliable evidence helps us determine what is actually happening and which solutions are most likely to work.
Both are necessary. Evidence without compassion can become cold. Conviction without evidence can cause real harm.
Coming together does not mean pretending our differences do not exist. It means refusing to let those differences make cooperation impossible.
It means listening to a neighbor's experience without immediately questioning that person's motives. It means examining claims from our own side as carefully as claims from the other side.
Before sharing a story or entering an argument, we might ask:
Is this a personal conviction, a political interpretation or a testable factual claim?
What evidence supports it?
Am I considering the information fairly, or only looking for confirmation?
What evidence would cause me to reconsider?
Can I disagree without treating my neighbor as an enemy?
We may never speak with one voice, and perhaps we should not. A village made from a myriad of backgrounds will naturally contain many voices.
Our challenge is to become a community capable of hearing them: respecting personal truth, questioning political truth, and seeking objective truth together.
We do not have to believe the same things to care for the same place.
Notes
Neil deGrasse Tyson, "What Science Is, and How and Why It Works," neildegrassetyson.com/commentary/2016-01-23-what-science-is