An Explanation Of Truthiness

 

 I recently saw a hilarious episode of The Colbert Report. In this particular episode Stephen Colbert talks about truthiness and its implication in our current political world. But what is truthiness and can it be used as a source of knowlge? Well more after the jump.

          
          Truthiness is defined as concepts or facts one wishes to be true rather than concepts or facts known to be true, or as Stephen Colbert defines it as truth from the gut. The issue of truthiness is that it is incoherent with today’s common knowledge. Truthiness has a tendency to contradict information that is supported by evidence. Furthermore, truthiness is not necessarily supported by evidence but rather by individual ideologies. Truthiness is also easily affected by emotional factors and has an inability to improve upon itself. For these reasons truthiness as a source of knowledge is both inadequate and unreliable.

For something to be considered knowledge, it is essential for it to be supported by evidence. Information that is not supported by evidence is called a belief, when you add evidence to belief it is then considered knowledge. Reliability can be obtained through experiments and tests that prove your ideas. Truthiness completely lacks this, and promotes making claims without evidence, hence its unreliability. Proving a claim with another unproven claim is inadequate because at the end you still have not proven anything. Claims without support are just that claims nothing more. Truthiness is just that a claim.

Emotions play a factor in the overall definition and inadequacy of truthiness. Reflecting on the original meaning of truthiness I can see now that it was about the control emotions had on people’s judgment and beliefs - and conquering over the calmer, more rational reasoning. Colbert explains it better himself by saying:

Truthiness is, ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true. ‘It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.

By considering Colbert’s elaboration, we can see that truthiness also has an individual quality. Each truthiness varies for each person hence the accentuation that the truth I have corresponded to me and me alone. So how can this knowledge based on truthiness be disseminated if it only corresponds to one person.

Natural knowledge has the capability of being improved on and evolving. Furthermore, knowledge welcomes criticism and wants to be proven wrong to improve its accuracy. However, truthiness condemns this skepticism and does not want to be proven wrong. Knowledge is as ambiguous as the reality it represents. Therefore, if truthiness cannot be improved then it looses its ambiguous quality. Resulting in the conclusion that truthiness is not knowledge, but simply a belief.

In conclusion, truthiness is an insufficient and unreliable source of knowledge due to its lack of evidence, influential emotional factors, and finally its static quality.