According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the pursuit of truth is "the
quest for language that can match reality." He identifies four key methods
of determining the truth - what we feel, what we are told, what we figure out,
and what we observe. Applying the correspondence theory of truth, favoured by
Socrates, Plato & Aristotle, to those methods, if a message corresponds to
the actual state of affairs, then it is true.
Yet, each new day of the
pandemic brings more politicians making public statements which are either so
vague that they have no tangible content, or so demonstrably disconnected to
reality that it makes your head spin.
It’s probably fair to
say that waffling and lying are not new human character traits, but now we can all
do our own fact checking from the saturation media coverage. When Matt Hancock
denies the initial UK strategy of herd immunity, or when Trump claims to have
taken the pandemic seriously since January, it’s easy to find proof that they
are talking bollox. What’s more worrying is the question of why they think they
can get away with it.
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