Preliminary Questions

The Way Things Really Are

One of the most confusing things for many people is the difference between fact and truth. Hold on! Aren’t facts and truth the same thing? No, they’re not. Indeed, mistaking one for the other is a root cause of many of our world’s present confusions.

Just the other day, in a hilarious instance of Providence, my son Ethan walked into the room and asked: “Dad, what was the highest mountain in the world before we discovered Mount Everest?” I love being asked questions like this. And I really love showing off my talent for useless trivia to my wife and kids. But this time my selfish motivations joined forces with the clever way Ethan asked the question, and they conspired together to defeat my reason. What happened next?

I set a course for confusion and engaged at Warp-9. I began racking my memory for the highest known mountain in the ancient world. As I was working my way through the continents and comparing their geographies to the Roman and European expansions, Ethan saw my mental gears grinding and grinned. Then he went dead-pan and said: “Dad, it was Mount Everest.”

I burst into laughter. There I was, the intrepid philosopher “fools-mated” in two moves by a clever teenager.

There’s a lesson here for all of us. Our desires and assumptions always motivate our thinking. We assume certain things, and our brains take short-cuts based on those assumptions. The riddle takes advantage of these mental short-cuts, and more often than not succeeds in embarrassing us for not noticing something obviously crucial.

Notice this carefully. Nobody begins by understanding reality objectively. We each perceive the world through our own senses, and then try to make sense of it with our own mind. Likewise, we all form presuppositions and assumptions that may or may not be true. Working to discover whether our assumptions are warranted or not is essential to discovering the way things really are—the facts.

If we're not continually careful, even the most educated among us can stumble over their selfish desires and unwarranted assumptions. When they do, they'll make educated fools of themselves. This happens all the time. It happened to me just three days before writing this essay. "Thank You God for teaching me humility."

"I think, therefore I am."

Rene Descartes, 1596-1650 AD

Making a category mistake is like a fools-mate in chess.

The Category Mistake

I made what's known as a category-mistake. I confused one kind of thing for another. We all make this mistake when we confuse fact and truth. Notice this carefully. Facts are facts whether they've been discovered or not. Facts are the way things really are. Mount Everest really is the tallest mountain on Earth—and was long before Sir Edmund Hillary stood atop it. Likewise, the world didn’t change course when Galileo looked through his telescope. It has always orbited the sun. Neither did the world exchange trigonometry for calculus and curve itself into a sphere when Columbus set off for “India.” Earth has always been a sphere.

Oh! And what you identify as right now—it has no power to change what you really are. Because if you exist in an objective real-world, you're a fact too—whether you accept it or not. You see, facts aren’t respecters of persons and their opinions—not even yours. Facts are the way things really are.

Rightly understanding facts is the most difficult project in all of philosophy. Of course it is! If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have anything to argue about. The search for facts asks preliminary questions like: What is the world? What am I? What is my relationship to the world? Does anything exist beyond the world? What is a person? Facts are the most basic things there are. That's why they're such "stubborn things."

So how do we learn about facts? To know about facts we have to have a relationship to them in which information can be sent, received, and rightly interpreted. Learning about facts starts with noticing something that you're doing right now.

You are thinking.

Two facts may be established from this preliminary observation.

Fact 1: Meaning exists. (The crucially obvious fact that we all take for granted).

Fact 2: You exist to sense and think about Meaning.