Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Let us now consider the nature of truth. Relativists claim that truth is highly subjective; each man may have his own truth which is completely separate (and even in opposition to) the truths of others. Essentially, they argue that anything a human being sees, feels, or believes, has an element of this personalized, relativistic “truth” to it.

However, we must concede that there are thing that human beings cannot see, hear, experience, or grasp. A human may never see infrared or ultraviolet light, for example, or touch an atom. And there are things that we cannot grasp, if only because of the sheer limitations of biology. Just as a cockroach will never be able to grasp the concept of a pneumatic drill, there are–must be–things beyond the pale of human experience. We may even be aware of them–just as a cockroach would notice and avoid the noisy, spinning pneumatic drill–but their governing mechanics are beyond our grasp.

Thus, there must be things that cannot be assigned a relativistic truth, because they cannot be experienced or grasped by a human being. We can therefore divide all things into two groups: those which may attain a measure of relativistic “truth” through human experience, and those that cannot. The former group is as true as relativism allows anything to be, and the latter is as false. To wit: if a thing cannot be experienced, and cannot be grasped, it is outside the pale of human experience and may as well not exist.

We can therefore say, even allowing for the most liberal relativism, that some things are true and others are false. That we cannot name the falsehoods is irrelevant–were they things man could name, they would be things within his pale, and therefore “true.”

Working inward from this, let us now consider the category of “true” things established above. Suppose something can be experienced and understood to be true by a human being, yet it never is. Suppose, out there in the cosmos somewhere, that there is a sensation waiting to be had by the human race. There is a creature in the deepest ocean that will never be seen by human eyes or touched by human hands. We can conceptualize its existence in the abstract, perhaps, but it is not “true,” since it has never been subjected to the lens of human interpretation.

We can therefore see two cases of falsehood: those things which cannot be experienced and understood, and those things that can but never will be. Add to this a third: if an object that humans interact with–and is thus considered to be “real”–can be perceived in different ways by different people, each of those interpretations would be equally correct, according to relativism.

Take for example the cinder block in my wall, which many people have experienced over the years. It is cream-colored now, but may have been other colors in the past…and of course, each person would see it differently, since some may have been colorblind, and there is no guarantee that two people seeing “cream” are experiencing the same color. The “true” color, if such an objective fact could exist and be known, might be purple with hot pink stripes.

If a person saw it like that, if they saw the purple block, that impression has gained the status of “truth.” Yet suppose no one ever sees the cinder block as purple. Suppose that, from the moment it is cast until the moment it is crushed into dust–its “existence” as experienced by people–no one sees it as purple. No one sees the block to be their conception of the color purple, or the “true” color as you prefer. It can then be said that someone claiming that the block is indeed purple is telling a lie. No matter what color they believe purple to be, if the block does not appear that way to them or anyone else, ever, then the block can for all intents and purposes be called “not-purple.”

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