False Notes on Truth

2,340 words

[A] uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

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Newspaper headlines tell the truth. Not today, necessarily, but if you have ever found a very old newspaper in a drawer or an old suitcase, there is something thrilling about reading the huge, Railroad Gothic print telling of the Suez crisis or Watergate. You feel the thrill of being in the presence of a very important type (literally) of truth.

Assuming that we have a future beyond the day after tomorrow, what will someone finding an old newspaper several decades hence, and reading the headline from last week’s Daily Telegraph, “Trans women are not women”, think of us?

Hardly the D-Day landings or the death of Marilyn Monroe, certainly, and quite mystifying to our future finder of old newspapers. The headline refers to a ruling in a Scottish court concerning an action brought over the legal definition of the word “woman”, with specific reference to whether “transgender women” are included in that definition. A Scottish Supreme Court Judge recorded a verdict on April 15 stating that the gender of a woman was biological, and therefore that transgender women are not women. It is no longer enough to be “certificated” as a woman, and “self-elective” gender is no longer admissible. Legally, the verdict is being celebrated throughout the land. Philosophically, no one has said a word.

There are two things going on here, and there are two truths involved. If talk of “two truths” sounds dangerously “woke”, bear with me. One truth established by the ruling was the sole focus of all media coverage, the other was entirely passed over, but it is the more important of the two. We’ll come back to these truths and return to our future archivist, trying to understand what it was like to be alive in 2025 and puzzling over the announcement that “Trans women are not women”.

The word “Trans” might faze her. She might associate it with something different and other, but not really know why. Words often have only a very vague meaning until you start looking at their history. The English used to call someone who had what is now called “attitude”, and was perhaps politically uppity, “bolshy”. It took me years to learn that this came from “Bolshevik”. I wonder if anyone has ever been called “menshy”. But I digress.

Our future reader of old broadsheets would know that the attribute “trans” must be abstract and not something physical. What kind of society would pass into law, for example, that short women are not women, or that blue-eyed women are not women? So, what could this “Trans” be, and why was the attribute denied to the concept of womanhood in one legal sitting? Our reader would be intrigued to learn that, had the Telegraph run that headline the day before the UK Supreme Court ruled that gender was now biologically based in law, the newspaper could quite possibly have been sued for it.  Actually, the ruling was a confirmation of the 2010 Equality Act, and not new legislation, which has opened up a huge can of worms, and which is a story for another day. We’ll leave our future media studies student (Classics department) amusing herself with old advertisements for AI voiceover packages and motor-cars, and go back to the two truths that came out of the Scottish ruling. Firstly, though, we ought to ensure that we have an idea of what we mean by “truth”, and some concept of how it functions.

There’s an urge to get a little misty-eyed and come over all noble and martial whenever “the truth” is under discussion.

“We must fight for the truth!”

“The truth will out!”

“You can’t hide from the truth!”

“You can’t handle the truth!”

But we should dry our eyes and re-sheath our swords, because truth is not all that dramatic. What it is that a particular truth concerns – that which is being held to be true in any given case – is a different matter entirely, and might be worth riding into battle for, but truth in and of itself is rather more dull concern, a relatively mundane affair. It’s less like some divine ideal and more akin to a series of operative principles, like the rules of chess. And, just as it is possible to learn the rules of chess by watching the game being played, so too we are able to look at truth in action.

I have used this formula before (albeit slightly modified here) but it works, so I’ll use it again. It involves 4 truths involving the number 4. (I’ll stick to using the digit “4”, contrary to the typographical style of spelling it out ordinarily used in publishing):

1. 2 + 2 = 4.
2. There are 4 cardinal points of the compass.
3. There are 4 horsemen of the apocalypse in the Bible.
4. There are 4 points in this set of points concerning the number 4.

It’s clear that all of these are true statements, but also easy to understand that they are not true in the same way. They each function differently, despite sharing in the integrity of being true.

The first is a mathematical truth, and it doesn’t give us much information besides unpacking a mathematical signifier. The second is an interesting one, because although it is not really tenable to say “north exists”, the four cardinal points create something like existence. The four horsemen exist truthfully in a textual context, the same way Macbeth or Charles Swann exist. The 4 Dark Judges – if you know your Judge Dredd – exist in just the same way. The fourth truth is auto-contextual, and provides its own proof of its truth. (It is quasi-mathematical, but we don’t want to get into Russellian set theory. We might not get out).

So, all four statements have the same basic function (to express something that is the case), but they don’t do so in the same way. Similarly, the bishop and the queen on a chess-board are both able to move about the board, capture other pieces, be captured themselves, and so on, but they don’t do so in the same way (even though one of their operative functions, that of the ability to move along a diagonal line of squares – neither rank nor file – is the same).

Different operative truths can affect one another, and their functions interact. Let’s add a fifth statement to our 4 truths concerning 4:

1. The country of Japan is composed of 4 major islands.

(I am aware that there are also minor Japanese islands, which is why I use the term “major”). Now, this fifth point invalidates point 4 because of a logical contraindication between the two, rendering point 4 false. Also, now our set of (truths concerning 4) is back to 4 points (although it was never 5 and could not have been from the moment the fifth point was added). After the Japan point has been added, if we reinsert the original point 4 as point 5, it would again be untrue, despite being exactly the same sentence. We begin to see that all truths may be true at the time they are stated, and false later despite being formally unchanged. This a basic principle of British law, although never really stated in philosophical terms. There are obviously many other epistemological modes to take into consideration apart from the simple truth of any given statement.

We can also see what a conceptual thicket we wander into when we ask not “what is the truth?”, but rather, “what is truth?”, much like Pontius Pilate did. If this all seems like ridiculously pedantic, conceptual hair-splitting, welcome to philosophy. The important point about truth as an operative principle (and discarding actual truths) is that it is not one but many – asking the same question the ancient philosophers asked about the world – and its different functions can interact. Let’s finally get back into the courtroom and look at the two operative truths that came into being at the moment of the verdict’s being given.

Women exist, as do men, in two important ways. They exist actually – they have what Latin writers call actualitas and quidditas. They are existent entities. They also exist as legal entities. These are different types of existence, but seem to have been conflated. Before the April 15 ruling, the truth about women as legal entities was that trans women (ie. men) were contained within that category. Since April 15, the truth about women as legal entities is that trans women are not contained within that category. Two different truth values with the same operative principle are dependent on situation in time. That’s how the law works. What of the other truth, that of women as existent entities?

Before April 15, some women had penises, and some men could have cervixes. That was the truth because politicians told us so, and so did the law. There were penalties for dissenters. David “Mastermind” Lammy, Britain’s most important black person, and by some margin the most stupid, stated that men can grow a cervix, should they so wish, presumably much like one might grow an orchid or a pumpkin. After April 15, no women have penises. Here is the pair of truths as a before and after:

Before April 15: Trans women are women

After April 15: Trans women are not women

Until the verdict, the first headline would have been consistent with de facto government policy: “Trans women are women.”

Now, as politicians scramble to deny they ever said what they actually did say on the subject, de facto government policy is the second headline: “Trans women are not women.”

Such a subtle typographical change, but what a change in consequence. Tiny changes in the written word can have amplified effects in the real world. Take the simple comma, for example, whose employment might save the day by making the difference between, “Let’s eat, Grandma”, and, “Let’s eat Grandma”. And consider the following linguistic meme currently doing the online rounds. It’s a conceptual jingle you will hear a lot (I think it might even have replaced “the elephant in the room”): Repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

It’s debatable, but it makes a sound point. Now, remove two words from that formula and replace them with three others, and we get a very different cargo of meaning: Repeating the same action over and over again and preparing for a different result is the definition of science.

As Sinatra sang, “That little touch that means so much.”

This piece is rather disjointed, but I am still thinking all this through. Paul Klée described drawing as “taking a line for a walk” and the same metaphor applies to ideas. Nietzsche wrote that he had his best ideas while walking, and he once walked a 30-mile round trip to attend a Beethoven performance. But some ideas start out almost blind, and are not always sure where they are going. What is happening at the linguistic and therefore epistemological level is what is holding the political right in check. That’s how important this is.

That something is happening to modern language which is both changing reality at the epistemological level and being tightly ideologically controlled is something I’ve written about several times. What seems increasingly of much more urgency is that tinkering with value systems by tampering with meaning is very, very dangerous. The left – let’s use Jonathan Bowden’s “intellectual shorthand” – are making changes at the level of perceived reality. That’s the point of 1984. I know we have smoked the book down to the filter, but Orwell’s masterpiece is rightly celebrated. One of its great aspects is that Winston Smith is not just tortured physically and psychologically, he is tortured epistemologically. But that’s not the most dangerous thing. No, the most dangerous thing is that the Left have no idea they are doing it.

The left are not grounded in philosophy. It’s too white and it’s too Western (and it’s much too hard). But the corollary to that does not quite work out. The right are not particularly grounded in philosophy either, although the discipline has a far greater presence on the dissident right than it does on the hard Left. But the right should be versed in at least the basics. Philosophy has been hugely attacked and neutered in the universities, and there is a reason for that. It’s dangerous stuff, in the wrong hands. If you are a creature of the right, and you do not understand the most basic philosophy, you are an amateur.

So, this piece is not intended to render all previous epistemology redundant – I don’t suppose you will find one new idea here – and is composed very much of notes and investigative sketches, as the title suggests. I wanted to search for, not truth or the true, but the truth about truth, meta-truth. It’s a risky business.

What with all this apparent instability, are we entering the dreaded “post-truth society”? Not at all. We just need to be aware of which operative truth function does what, in the same way we have to understand the moves different chess-pieces are able to make before we can play the game in any meaningful sense. And we need to understand how these different types of operative truths are being employed. And by whom.

Thousands have already taken to the streets to protest the verdict. We recall the scene in The Wild One in which James Dean’s parents ask the tearaway biker, “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” Dean replies, “Whaddya got?” It’s much the same for the trans protestors. What are they rebelling against? Whaddya got? How about reality? You’ll take it? Sure, rebel against the real world. Reality is over-rated anyway, and it’s about time we had a new fashion. We recall Nietzsche, as we always must when the cordite smell of nihilism is in the air. “Why truth?”, wrote the German (who, raised Lutheran, would have thought much about the subject before he became a man). “Why not rather untruth?”