Saturday, 17 March 2018



Discovering a new truth causes everything you previously knew to rearrange itself, new patterns come into focus and old patterns dissolve. This is not like acquiring a new result for a growing body of knowledge and more like a complete reshaping of the world and of your place within it. It is referred to via the analogy of 'frames' in which truth is seen as relative to the chosen frame. This is not to say that the choice of frame is arbitrary; as long as the internal truth as grasped or imposed on you via the new frame is more compelling and inclusive, then there is no going back to the old one. Truth retains its primal force, but is no longer a matter of achieving a fuller correspondence with a fixed reality. It is clear, however, that a theory of frames is implicit in this experience, and that there is no predictable limit to possible reframings. You might hear of 'going meta' referring to the open possibility of a larger reframing than than what is currently accepted. It looks a lot like relativism, but it is not the same. Relativism is perhaps the flat interpretation of it. Truth is difficult to theorise in a manifestly perspectival cosmos, but it remains the one indispensable value. 

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