My previous posts have suggested a strong, even dominant, influence of our socialization on our experience of the world.  After all, I have suggested that our experience of and conduct in the world depends on our abilities and we acquire these abilities through a process of socialization.  Such a position however would seem to be at odds with our intuitive sense of truth.  For example, if you tell me “There is a scorpion under that stone”, if you are telling the truth, first, I better lift the stone carefully so I do not get stung, and, second, I will indeed find a scorpion when I do so.  The statement corresponds to the situation in the world, it is true.  What is more, the truth of that statement does not seem to have anything to do with our socialization.  We have the strong sense, the conviction even, that our socialization, our abilities, are irrelevant to whether the statement about the scorpion is true or false.  What is going on?

This apparent contradiction is not a minor concern.  We depend on each other for the passing on of reliable information about the world, that what we are told corresponds to what we find.  We depend on it during our socialization of course, for constructing an initial map of our world from only limited experiences, and later during our daily lives, to avoid scorpions, to eat and drink safely (“This is good to eat!”, “The water is contaminated!”), to get well (“These antibiotics will cure your infection”).  We express the correspondence of statements with what we find in the world by calling the statements true, and, unsurprisingly, we value truth and appreciate and trust the ones who speak it.

But sometimes things get complicated when we encounter people from other lands and cultures.  Imagine, for example, being told by a Hanunoo to bring over the fresh bamboo, you know, the green stuff, and getting rather confused.  Or a friend of mine who has never before seen and has no clue what a scorpion is, telling me that there is a small lobster under the stone – and I love lobsters!  Other times things just break down, or they just don’t work as expected.  For example, I find that the antibiotics did not cure my infection – oops! I am infected by a resistant strain, or, perhaps, my immune system is weakened.  Or people disagree which foods are good to eat, or whether the water supply is contaminated.

Such encounters or breakdowns bring forcefully to the fore our abilities, our link to the world.  How do you tell green from red?  How do you tell a scorpion from a lobster?  How do you tell whether the water is contaminated?  And so on. Or, perhaps, the world has changed (rise of antibiotic-resistant strains, weakening of my immune system) and our knowledge and abilities do not match sufficiently with it any more.  We all more or less realize that to resolve such disagreements or breakdowns we have to refashion our abilities, learn how the Hanunoo tell green from red, how to recognize a scorpion, how to assess water contamination.

Disagreements and breakdowns reveal the abilities that support the truth of the statements that we make about the world and use to communicate with each other.  When everything is working out as expected, we simply forget about our skills, and their link to the regularities of the material world.  It is these skills and regularities that the smooth flow of daily activity hinges on.  These hard-earned and easy-to-lose-track-of skills are the basis of our intuitive sense of truth.   But when we are good at something, when things go on smoothly, then our bodies go on auto-pilot, we stop paying attention to what it takes to engage smoothly and successfully with the world, and the truth of statements about the world appears to us to be independent of abilities or socialization.

So, there is no contradiction.  Different knowledge and abilities are associated with different ways of being in, of engaging with the world, and these abilities support different truths about the world.  What is more, for each one of us, our truth will be intuitively obvious and at the same time experienced as independent of our abilities.