“On Tyranny” - Chapter 10: "Believe in truth"
Following on growing more protective of language is part one. Part two is keeping in front of us why it’s important.Words and the concepts that they represent show how we interpret the world, and in to that degree, are themselves the world. But if you go around saying that “up is down”, “black is white”, and “solids don’t exist”, you are operating on levels of semantic confusion and while metaphysically interesting, these are not factual statements. They are not, in this world, true. I am not interested here in assertions that words are merely labels and are not the things themselves. I am not interested in being told that solids do not, ultimately exist. I am very invested, as we all should be, in stating the case that the world exists as a shared reality, a constellation of relationships between people navigating a very real, experienced container of objects and events that we call “world.” Following from that are natural iaws discovered by science via replicable experiment. Thi...