Putting together a story that represents the truth is not an easy process.
What we think we know about what happens to us or around us is clouded by our limits of perception, memory, previous experiences, imagination and biases. Multiple people can witness the same event and have very different stories about it. And it takes great care and respect for those involved to discover how those stories overlap and to reconstruct something like the truth.
Professions where getting to the truth is important require careful training and procedures. A criminal investigator follows strict rules of evidence gathering, interviews as many witnesses as she can find, and is careful to not jump to conclusions. A scientist follows strict rules of experimentation in an effort to isolate cause and effect. She writes about her conclusions (and her doubts) in great detail so others can try to repeat her experiment and test her conclusions. A journalist is careful to check sources and corroborate facts.
Approximating truth requires a disciplined approach, but in our everyday lives we treat truth as something obvious. We imagine we know the character of the driver who cuts us off. A coworker ignores us and we think we know what they’re thinking and how they feel about us. That’s not truth. It’s mostly guessing.
In reality, most of what we think we know is assumed based on past experience and conjecture. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as we understand that we don’t have a direct line to truth. It allows us to give others the benefit of the doubt, and it helps ease our tendency to confuse our fears with reality.
