Why Do Many People See Truth Differently?

I have been re-reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and it struck me how his search for what quality is seemed to have a direct relationship to the quest for Truth.

So what I have done, with complete recognition and admission, is I have used much of Pirsig's own words from ZAMM and replaced the word Quality with the word Truth. Many of the sentences I will present are taken verbatim from the book with only the word Truth substituted for Quality. Others have been paraphrased or completely altered to express the point I am trying to make.

I have included a PDF link to the book for those who wish to see what alterations I have made and to give ample credit to Pirsig.

This is rather long so I will present it in parts.

 

When searching for the truth of any matter we often find that different people have different ideas of what the truth of any one particular matter is. This raises the question,
“Why does everybody see Truth differently? "

The following is adapted from ZAMM:

If we ask ourselves what we mean by truth and how we discern what the truth is we must recognize that Truth in the abstract, is shapeless, formless, and indescribable.
To define what truth, or the Truth, is we must intellectualize. Intellectualization is the process of considering the form or shape of an experience. Truth is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Truth depend only partly on the experience we are trying to define as True. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find the relationship of the True event to our analogues and previous experiences. If we didn’t we’d be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.

Summation:
1. Truth has no form and is indescribable.
2. To define what we mean by Truth we must intellectualize.
3. Intellectualism relies on analogies we have been taught from childhood.
4. Our entire understanding of the world is built from these learned analogies.

More latter.

 

1. I'm not interesting in getting into Deities in relation to truth. As Pirsig was not interested in discussing Deities in relation to Quality.
I am relating Truth to our sensory experiences and the interpretation of those experiences.

2. To define is to intellectualize, in that sense it is a tautology. But not the other way around, to intellectualize is not necessarily to define.
But be that as it may, the point is we can't relate what we view as the truth to others without resorting to thought processes such as language, symbols, pictures, etc. that we all agree upon.

3. I didn't mean to say all analogies derive from childhood, but that is where they begin.

4. The understanding of evolution is based upon analogies. Evolution would be the truth of what is occurring every moment in the biological world. Our understanding of the truth of evolution is based on the analogies we use to describe and understand the world. As we shall see.

 

Yes, the different set of life experiences both forms differing analogies and is filtered by those differing analogies built from life experiences.

 

Part I continued:​

The reason people see Truth differently is because we all come to it with different sets of analogues. To give a linguistic example, to us the Hindi letters da, dah, and dha all sound identical because we don’t have analogies to them to sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish between da and the, because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity.

This explains why different people arrive at different ratings of Truth in the media. They all have relatively different backgrounds and knowledge. In a sense it’s the people’s choice of Truth that defines them. People differ about Truth, not because Truth is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.
If two people had identical a priori analogues they would see Truth identically every time.

 

I am enjoying all the responses.

 

Part II; ​

a continued explanation of Part I​

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Any attempt to find Truth is going to be both successful and unsuccessful precisely because it is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. But what I mean (and everybody else means) by the word Truth cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Truth is so mysterious but because Truth is so simple, immediate and direct. The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Truth that people in our environment can understand is that Truth is the immediate experience of an organism in its environment. In attempting to understand the experience a person seeks analogies, that is, images and symbols from its previous experience, to define the nature of its experience and thus ‘understand’ it. In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent the earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of Truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Truth. Truth is the continuing stimulus, which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.

As Lao Tzu said, “The Truth that can be defined is not the Absolute Truth.
The names that can be given it are not Absolute names. It is the origin of heaven and earth. When named it is the mother of all things”.

1. The only real Truth that can be encountered is the immediate experience of an organism with its environment.
2. The understanding of this immediate experience requires comparing that experience to other direct experiences through analogies.
3. All that we can know other than what we directly experience in the present moment is nothing more than analogy.