A friend has alerted me to an essay on "truthiness" by Dick Meyer, the editorial director of CBSNews.com based in Washington. Truthiness is a new word. Meyer writes:
Webster's has now sanctioned truthiness with two definitions: "truth that comes from the gut, not books" and "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts of facts known to be true."
Meyer does us the service of noting its philosophic pedigree:
Truthiness actually has a long philosophic pedigree. It is called "emotivism," a term resurrected by a Scottish philosopher who lives and works in America, Alasdair MacIntyre. In 1981 he published one of the most influential works of moral philosophy in the later part
of the 20th century, "After Virtue." MacIntyre defines it this way: "Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and, more specifically, all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling. …" In this view there is no difference between saying "the death penalty is wrong" and "I don't like the death penalty
Meyer's essay unpacks all this in a somewhat light-hearted way, but he spotlights a genuine characteristic of the prevailing mindset of our time.
Truth today is just what you feel. For deep and serious truth-tellers, truth is what they feel strongly.
Click here for the whole essay. I realize I'm coming to this discussion a little late, but so be it. I use my blog many times as a kind of personal filing system. Here's the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry.
Truthiness is a satirical term coined by television comedian Stephen Colbert[1] to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively, instinctively, or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual factsbellyfeel", a Newspeak term from George Orwell's (similar to the meaning of "Nineteen Eighty-Four). Colbert created this definition of the word during the inaugural episode (October 17, 2005) of his satirical television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called "The WØRD". It was named word of the year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster.