ThirstyFish

A back alley in Izmir.

A few days ago, I posted a quotation from the Native American Elder, Phillip Deere: "The native people are believers in the truth, and not in facts". Someone asked me what is the difference between "facts" and "truth". This questions becomes even more relevant when you consider that Science prides itself for discovering facts.

There are many ways to answer this. I would assert that, for the most part, individual facts are meaningless. Facts need context, a framework, and a meta-framework. Individual facts do not have a narrative, truth does. Science, despite its claims of "objectivity", does what it criticizes. It takes individual facts and builds a narrative around them and calls it a "theory". Sometimes theories pass the "truth test", sometimes they don't.

My criticism of Science is not about the facts it discovers, but about how it constructs a narrative. Science constructs "theories" through the marriage of a bunch of facts with a set of unverified or unverifiable assumptions. Human beings generally do not conceive in facts; we conceive in narratives...