Types of Truth
Most arguments a man loses, he loses before the first point is ever made, because he never figured out what kind of claim was actually on the table.
The mother's kitchen, nine days after the funeral, three of them and the coffee going cold. The sister says Mom wanted her to have the house. The younger brother says the will splits it three ways, and he has the will. The man, who is the oldest, says the oldest keeps the home place, that is how it has always gone in this family, and his grandfather would have said so from his chair. Three sentences. Each of them is certain the other two are lying, and none of them is.
He wins. He and his brother have the will, and the will is a document, and the sister has a conversation nobody else was in the room for. The house is listed in March. She does not come at Christmas, or the Christmas after.
It is two years before he hears what she said, and he hears it in his truck, not in the kitchen. She never said the will gave her the house. She said Mom wanted her to have it. He had answered a sentence about his mother's heart with a photocopy, and he had been right about the photocopy. When he finally drives over and asks her what Mom said, and when, it was the kitchen, the last month, and it was true, and the will was true, and the thing about the oldest was true too. None of the three had been the same kind of true, and he had swung the only one he could hold.
A man who has come down through the three layers knows how fixed a truth is and where it is grounded, and he was told at the last door that the current cannot show him what is lying on the table between two men. This room is the first of two instruments, and it is the one that names the thing on the table. The word true does at least four different jobs, and a statement belongs to one of them whether or not the man making it knows which. He can be right and still lose, if he answers a kind of claim that was never made. The sister was not lying. The will was not wrong. The man was holding a measurement in a room where two other kinds of truth were being handed to him, and he did not know there were other kinds.
Types of Truth
"When the accusers stood up, they brought no charge in his case of such evils as I supposed. Rather they had certain points of dispute with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus, who was dead, but whom Paul asserted to be alive" — Acts 25:18-19.
A Roman governor, trained in evidence, briefing a king on a prisoner he could not file. Festus had expected a crime, a thing with witnesses and a date, and he got instead a claim he could not sort: a dead man asserted to be alive. So he did what a man does with a claim he cannot classify. He put it in the drawer marked their religion and moved on, and the drawer was the wrong drawer, and the prisoner had spent the whole hearing telling him so. That is this room's subject in one scene. A man cannot answer what he cannot name, and what he cannot name he will file wherever it bothers him least.
What Would Make This True
Philosophy sorts truth into four kinds, and the sort is done by one question put to any sentence: what would make this true? Not is it true; that comes after. What kind of thing would have to be the case for this sentence to hold?
If a measurement would settle it, the claim is objective. If only the man's own interior can vouch for it, it is subjective. If it holds because a people agreed it does, it is normative. And if it is all three braided together, the way claims actually arrive in a kitchen nine days after a funeral, it is complex. These are not four rival theories a man chooses between. They are four categories of claim with four different tests, and the sister's sentence, the brother's sentence, and the man's sentence were in three of them. The three layers behind this room answered how fixed a truth is and where it is grounded. This instrument answers a different question, what kind of thing a man is holding, and the two maps are not the same map. A man uses the layers to know how much weight a truth can bear. He uses the four kinds to know what he has picked up.
Out There
Objective truth is what is the case outside anyone's experience of it. Water boils at the same temperature whether the man watching the pot believes in thermodynamics or not. The will said what it said. It is settled by evidence, observation, and the kind of reasoning that produces the same result for whoever runs it, and it does not bend to sincerity or consensus.
Luke opened his account of Jesus as a man making exactly this kind of claim, and he said so in the first sentences: "having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught" — Luke 1:3-4. Followed closely. Orderly. Certainty. That is the vocabulary of the objective, and the man who wrote it knew which drawer he was writing for.
Two errors run against this kind, in opposite directions. The first says that only the measurable is real, so that whatever an instrument cannot detect is demoted to opinion: love, conscience, meaning, God. But an instrument's silence is a fact about the instrument. The second error is the fashionable one, that nothing is objective and every claim is finally a vantage point. It survives in a seminar and dies at the edge of the first cliff the man decides not to believe in. Objective truth is the floor a man cannot argue with, which is why he finds it first, and it is the kind that reaches down to the layers below this room. What is genuinely objective is pointing at the pattern and the bedrock under it.
In Here
Subjective truth is what is the case inside a man and nowhere else. This tastes bitter to me. I am afraid. Mom wanted me to have the house. None of it can be checked from outside, and none of it needs to be, because it is an honest report of an interior, and an interior is real data about a real person.
"For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him?" — 1 Corinthians 2:11. Paul is not saying the interior is unreal. He is saying it has one witness, and the witness is the man. That is both the dignity of this kind and its limit. Job's friends understood neither. They sat across from a man in the worst week of his life and corrected his theology, and he told them what they had done: "I also could speak as you do, if you were in my place; I could join words together against you and shake my head at you" — Job 16:4. If you were in my place. They had answered a report from inside Job's skin with arguments from outside it, and he named them for what they were, miserable comforters — Job 16:2, which is the title every man earns who hands a photocopy to a grief.
The errors here also come in a pair. The first is the subjective dressed as the objective: this is my truth, therefore it binds you. A man's experience of a thing is true about him, not automatically about the thing; the feeling is evidence of the feeling. The second error is the one men of a logical bent make all day: dismissing a report from inside as worthless because no instrument reaches it. A wife who says she feels unseen in her own house is handing her husband accurate data, and the husband who answers by proving he did the dishes has won an objective argument and is losing a marriage, in the exact way the man won the will and lost two Christmases. The mature man honors this kind as real without granting it an authority it does not have. He takes the report seriously as information and still knows the difference between what a man feels and what is the case.
Between Us
Normative truth is true because a people agreed it is. Laws, customs, standards, what ought to be done, which side of the road, what the oldest son gets. These are real in their effects; everyone under them lives inside them, and a man ignores them at a cost. They are also revocable by the same people who made them, which is the thing a man forgets when he says that is how it has always gone.
Scripture records this kind without embarrassment. "Now this was the custom in former times in Israel concerning redeeming and exchanging: to confirm a transaction, the one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other, and this was the manner of attesting in Israel" — Ruth 4:7. A sandal closed a land deal, because Israel had agreed it did, and the writer notes it was former times, which means the agreement had since moved. Even the words moved: "Formerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he said, 'Come, let us go to the seer,' for today's 'prophet' was formerly called a seer" — 1 Samuel 9:9. Same office, new word, by agreement. The man's claim about the home place was this kind. True in his family, binding on the men who had agreed to it, silent on whether the family had been right to agree, and not what the will said.
The danger of this kind is the one men commit constantly: mistaking the normative for the absolute. What is legal is not therefore right. What a culture has normalized is not therefore moral. A whole society can agree on something false, and the agreement does not thin the falsehood. The prophets spent their lives on that sentence, and it is why a man needs a standard above the vote to measure the vote by. Normative truth tells him what his people have settled. It cannot tell him whether they should have. For that he climbs past it, into the current's room on consensus and culture, and finally into the third column, where law stands above any show of hands.
All Three at Once
Complex truth is what the other three make when they arrive together, and it cannot be reduced to any one of them without breaking something. It is not a rare category. It is where most of a life is actually conducted.
A Syrian general with leprosy came to a prophet's door with his horses and his silver, and was handed a message through a servant: wash seven times in the Jordan. He turned around. "Behold, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the LORD his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper. Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?" — 2 Kings 5:11-12. Read what is braided in that speech. The leprosy is objective and so was the cure on offer. I thought he would surely come out is subjective, an insulted expectation. The rivers of Damascus is normative, a general's honor and a nation's standing. Naaman could not separate the three, so he was about to drive home with the disease, and his servants did the separating for him: if the prophet had commanded you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? — 2 Kings 5:13. They pulled the objective thread out of the knot and handed it to him by itself, and he went down to the river.
A man loses his job. The layoff happened and the income stopped; that is out there. He feels worthless; that is in here. He lives among people who price a man by what he earns; that is between us. Flatten it to one kind and the help misses every time. Think positive treats only the interior. Go get another job treats only the ledger. Real men provide treats only the norm, and it is the cruelest of the three. The discipline of complex truth is refusing the clean single answer when the situation is honestly layered, and holding several true things at once without letting one crowd out the rest. It is the kind that asks the most of a man, and it is the kind the kitchen was full of.
Naming It Before Answering
The four are not for labeling and moving on. They are for the half second before a man opens his mouth, when he asks what kind of sentence he was just handed.
Is this man stating a fact, reporting his interior, citing what his people hold, or describing a knot of all three? Most conflict between reasonable men is a category mistake: one answers a wound with a ledger, the other answers a norm with a feeling, and each is certain the other is being unreasonable when neither was ever addressing the same kind of claim. Paul described the result in a different context and the description holds: "if with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said? For you will be speaking into the air" — 1 Corinthians 14:9. Into the air. A true sentence of the wrong kind lands nowhere. The man who can name the kind before he answers ends half of every fight before it starts, because he stops contradicting what was never in contradiction with him. A proverb catches the mismatch from the other side: "Whoever blesses his neighbor with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, will be counted as cursing" — Proverbs 27:14. The blessing was objectively a blessing. Delivered to the wrong kind of morning, it was received as the opposite.
And the instrument is turned inward, which is its harder use. A man catches himself about to walk a preference across the border as a fact, or to hand his family's custom the weight of the bedrock, or to answer his wife's interior with a receipt. The man in the truck, two years late, was doing that audit for the first time. He had been right. He had been right about the wrong kind, and he had been right at her.
How Men Answer the Wrong Kind
The man with the photocopy. He has the document, and the document is accurate, and he produces it against a sentence that was never about documents. He wins the will and loses the sister, and he will tell the story for years as a story about being right.
The man whose feeling is a verdict. His interior is real, and he has promoted it to a ruling that binds everyone in the room. I feel it, therefore it is so, and anyone who asks for the measurement is accused of not caring.
The man who files it under religion. He met a claim he could not sort and put it in the drawer that bothered him least, as a governor once did, and the drawer was wrong, and the claim is still there.
The man of the single answer. Every layered situation gets one kind of response, the kind he is good at, and he calls the other two kinds excuses. He has given a hungry man a lecture and a grieving man a plan.
The man in the truck. Two years late, he heard the sentence as it was said, drove over, and asked what Mom had said and when. The house was already sold. The table was not. She has it.
Three Questions at the Table
TRUTH: What kind of claim was just made, and what would settle it? Not whether the man believes it. Whether it is the kind a measurement settles, or a kind only one witness can vouch for, or a kind a people voted into being. If he cannot say which, he is not ready to answer.
LOVE: Which kind did I answer, and which kind was handed to me? The sister handed him her mother's heart and he handed back the county's copy. A man who keeps answering the kind he is good at is loving his own competence, not the person in front of him.
LAW: What have I called binding on others that only my people agreed to? The home place went to the oldest by custom, and he said it the way a man says a law. A norm enforced as bedrock is a weight he has no right to put on anyone, including himself.
Not Done in a Corner
A man can do all of this. Put the sorting question to every sentence before he answers it, learn the four kinds and the pair of errors on each, pull the one thread out of the knot the way Naaman's servants did, and run the audit on himself in the truck before it is two years late. He should. The next instrument assumes he has.
And he should go back to the governor's drawer, because something was in it. The prisoner's claim had been made in all four kinds at once, on purpose, by men who knew the difference. It was made as a thing out there: "this has not been done in a corner" — Acts 26:26, said to a king who had the records. It was made as a thing in here, by a man who had walked a road with a stranger and felt his own heart burn. It was made as a thing between us, a confession a whole people took up and were killed for rather than amend. And an old man who had been there wrote the braid down in a single sentence that refuses to be filed under feeling: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands" — 1 John 1:1. Heard, seen, looked upon, touched. The instrument in this room was built for that sentence before it was built for the kitchen. Festus had a measurement, a testimony, and a confession in front of him in the same afternoon and sorted all three into their religion, and the man in chains kept trying to tell him which drawer it belonged in, because it had been put on the table for Festus too.
Where the Table Leads
A man who has stood in this room can put one question to any sentence and say what kind of thing he is holding. He knows the four kinds and the two errors each one invites, and he knows that the knot in a real kitchen is usually all three at once. He has an instrument he can turn on the room and on himself, and he knows what it cost the man in the truck to learn it late.
He should also know what the instrument does not do. Naming the kind of claim tells a man what would make it true. It does not tell him whether it is. A sentence can be sorted perfectly, into the right drawer, with the right test attached, and still be false, and some of the men who have thought hardest about what makes any claim true at all have never once stood in a kitchen. They live a long way out.