As I See It: On ‘facts’ and ‘truths’

Jon Huer

Jon Huer

By JON HUER

Published: 07-11-2025 1:54 PM

Nowadays most people believe that “facts” and “truths” are similar, almost identical: They say truths are based on facts and facts lead to truths. Dictionaries further confuse them as close cousins, if not twins.

They are all wrong. In this column, I am going to separate facts and truths as two completely unrelated — and certainly not interchangeable — concepts.

All facts are tautologies, as in “one week has 7 days,” where the subject (one week) and the predicate (7) are identical, making it redundant. All so-called “facts,” verifiable scientifically, historically or logically, are meaningless reiterations about our material world of “things.” Because of their meaningless nature, only scientists, children and trivia players get excited about them. Although they serve our practical purposes — inventing wheels and nuclear bombs — they remain socially meaningless (we never use gravity to explain plane crashes). All dictionary definitions, always being circular, are “meaningless” tautologies and if you want to find out what “love” is, you will never find it in the dictionary.

“Truths” are anything we say (both truthfully and falsely) about people — as opposed to things — as our feelings, opinions, biases, whatever, that can never be fact-checked. A moon rock means nothing as a rock, but it becomes meaningful if it is auctioned off as “a rock from the moon.” As a rule, we rarely say or do anything in society without a purpose that deals with specific “social” issues such as money, love, peace, power and so on. Facts serve no “social” purposes; only the meaning we attach to them (truths) does; and the two are unrelated as we can assign any meaning to anything we want to.

In our social life, facts and truths are not always available for our use. So, we deploy many non-sense devices to serve our purpose. Poetry, propaganda, advertisement, proverbs, among others, belong to this nonsensical-but-useful substitution for facts and truths. Many people want their “love relationship,” another non-sense device, to be factual and truthful, when it is neither. What we normally call “a lie” is a statement deliberately spoken against facts — but not truths — that can be immediately verified.

Often we try to substitute “probability” (or guesswork) for our lack of knowledge about certain facts or truths. We say “it probably rains today” but never “God probably exists,” indicating that probability allies more with facts than truths: Facts, even incomplete, serve our convenience; truths guide our moral life.

While all human knowledge is made up of either facts or truths, they are confusingly used in our everyday life. We demand facts when we mean truths, and vice versa. Sergeant Joe Friday wants “just the facts” for his criminal investigations, but the presiding judge demands “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” which obviously means more than Sgt. Friday’s facts. Investigators collect all the facts they can, but it is the judges and juries who, according to their own biases and feelings (truths), put meaning into these meaningless facts. (That’s why the best model for judges is King Solomon, not Einstein.) In all human judgments, facts are meaningless by themselves, which explains why the final jury decision — with all the facts already available — is always in suspense. Otherwise, verdicts should always be as predictable as “2+2” always leading to “4.”

All truths are “self-evident” and can never be “wrong.” The Recorder retracts errors of facts, but never on opinion columns. Likewise, honest people apologize for their factual errors but never for their “truths” and the First Amendment protects truths, not facts which need no defense or protection. Here the word “truth” doesn’t mean it is “true.” It simply means it’s not a tautology, subject to fact checks.

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With no fact checks available, how are truths ultimately judged? All truth-statements can be judged only by the test of time and repetition. In that time testing process, however, some of the truths we utter become “the Great Truths.” While facts can never inspire you to become believers, some truths can change you into their followers (even martyrs) of lasting significance. Among the many competing “truths” in religion, politics, or philosophy, certain statements stand out and are transformed in time into powerful beliefs and movements as Great Truths.

Trump lost big on facts (“35,000 lies”) but won handily on truths as, on Election Day, America’s majority trusted his “truths” more than his opponent’s. In our practical lives, how can we tell if someone is telling truths that are rejected or telling untruths that are accepted? My own experience with human nature has a simple but clear answer: Selfishness is the best yardstick of truth or falsehood. Persons known as “selfless” (like Socrates and Jesus) tend to be “true” with what they say and “just” with what they do. Likewise, we easily forgive human errors if they are caused by selfless (well-intended) motivations and appreciate utterances or deeds done, although highly disagreeable, in good-faith selflessness.

On the other hand, people with avowed “selfish” intents, such as capitalists and power-mongers, are prone to untruths with their words and injustice with their actions. If you are into pursuing money or power, forget truth or justice. You can never utter truth and do justice to others while you are plotting to steal their money or votes the whole time.

Can science and Google help us? No, because they deal only with facts. Truths, especially Great Truths, which are always about people, not things, are simply above science and beyond Google: Understanding truths requires that we see the invisible, hear the silence, and feel the spirit of humanity.

That’s also selflessness in its barest essence.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.