The issue with debate is not about who is right but what is right.

Um, is it?

Right gets tied with what is wrong, and I am not venturing into to moral conundrums here. Or, figuring the victors and the vanquished.

What I am getting to is not ‘What or who is right?’ but ‘What is true?’. What is the truth? This too, as we find, isn’t so straightforward.

In our daily experience, in our encounters with others, we deal with truth claims that have varying origins and persuasions.

The EUM framework* offers an interesting lens to examine notions of truth.

Origin  / Lens	Truth through this Lens
Received wisdom	Truth is what has been handed down from the past through stories, myths, lore, old wives’ tales, etc. They carry a certain force of truthiness, buttressed by the belief that these have survived the ages and must have served those who lived in the years gone by—well enough to merit recounting and sticking with.
Opinion	Truth is an opinion asserted with no obligation to explain oneself and is more a statement of relative power and dominance rather than the power of the argument. A challenger who argues for a different formulation does so at some risk. It is somewhat like the oft-quoted statement: History is written by the victors.
The Book	Truth is what is revealed and codified in the Book—the authoritative text that guides and brooks no doubt or challenge. Canonical texts (in the broadest sense, as applicable to a discipline) as the source of truth, and the dogmatic insistence on them make it hard to allow for evidence-based arguments and inquiry.
Science	Truth is the outcome of a process that is objective, verifiable and repeatable, and is governed by consensus on method, metrics and criteria to accept something as valid and true. This notion of truth rules the inquiry into the material world and much of what is seen as observable and measurable. All good, till we look and discover that many unsettled debates lack consensus, which we referred to above.
Subjective experience	Truth is a personal subjective experience. To therefore speak of one truth that echoes with all is unrealistic and a fiction. While, through science and the power of language, we might refer to an ‘objective world’ out there, we each experience it differently and shape our own ‘truths’. This is not a negation of the place of science or the immense value it adds to our lives, but is a reminder to ourselves that there are multiple realities, not all of which are necessarily amenable to the method of science as applied to the physical world.
Context	All truth is provisional. All truth is contextual. There is only the truth of the ‘here and now’. It is what you come upon when free from compulsivity, and all dogma and entrenchments in preferred/past patterns of seeing–thinking–being. It bears the quality of insight that flows from unclouded perception akin to a beginner’s mind, which is free and inquires.

What has become clear is that science in many instances does not offer unequivocal, unqualified truths. Often, they are circumscribed by context and are probabilistic; precision and certainty go out the window and we are left with our take on what the science seems to suggest.

It is a common claim made by most of us that we are rational and what we hold as true is well founded. One shouldn’t be surprised if, on critical examination, we find that many of our ‘truths’ originate from some of the above lenses, and the inconclusive debates we engage in arise from the diverse origins of our positions (besides incomplete information, of course) that cannot be settled until we acknowledge the real bases from which we are engaging.

*The Existential Universe Mapper (EUM) is a framework to examine the self, system, the larger context, and the relationship between them. Authored by Ashok Malhotra, it is an evolutionary framework inspired by Clare Graves, and many elements of Indian thought.

This article was triggered by Adam Grant’s meaningful piece, ‘“You can’t say that!”: How to argue better‘ in The Guardian on 30 July 2022.

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