Process Imagining

What is truth? Consider the following idea: the significance of a statement does not depend on its correspondence with reality or its truth or falsehood, but rather on the effect the statement has, what this statement does, what this statement produces. Since this idea was proposed in 1962 by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words it has become possible to look at the idea of truth not as a settled matter, but as an array of possibilities similar to the idea of parallel universes, but with all those parallel universes in one universe.

We intuitively know that truth-reality, no-nonsense hard fact- has to do with a contract, an agreement, a convention. It does not belong to a person, but to a society, a group of people who have agreed that things are a given way because that way is more convenient to their present interests or more conducive to their survival. This convenient truth could be about the flat shape of the Earth, the existence of God, the indissolubility of marriage the need for (and characteristics of) progress, the superiority of European culture, or the need for the total destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end the war. In the face of such commonly accepted truths-and it is from these that the tissue of history is formed to propose, to present, to describe and to tell a different version of the story, a different truth is sometimes a courageous act of dissidence and resistance. Or an act of lunacy, or both. This resistance has its source in the need to protect ourselves from the truth. But not, or not only, because this truth is too painful or too boring to bear, but because it is imposed on us.

dora garcia, “to protect us from the truth”, fiction as method, 172