In this episode of the podcast, N.J. Enfield, professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, joins George Miller to discuss What Is Truth For? — a book that sees truth not as a battlefield but as a shared practice of collaboration, error correction and trust. Together they explore what it takes to keep words and reality aligned when confidence in institutions and expertise is low and misinformation rife.
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N. J. Enfield is professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney.
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What Is Truth For?
by N.J. Enfield, is available for £8.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:33 – Has there been a shift in ‘The Truth’ over the last 20 or so years?
05:59 – Can you tell us about the ‘Fighting Truth Decay’ project?
09:03 – What does a linguist bring to a project like this that’s different from other specialists?
13:56 – Is the truth always going to be contingent and to some degree subjective?
28:58 – What do you make of the apparent loss of credibility accorded to institutions such as universities?
33:43 – What about people who have very different belief systems from our own?
41:01 – How do you retain your optimism and what would you say to someone so that they don’t themselves give up hope?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press.
My name is George Miller, and I’m the editor of a series from BUP that asks perhaps the most searching question about the ideas, institutions and other phenomena that shape our world: What is it for?
The latest addition to the series is What Is Truth For? by N.J. Enfield. Nick is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney and an award-winning author, speaker, and researcher working on the ecology of language power, and its role in mind, culture, and society.
In his new book, Nick argues that truth isn’t a private possession or an abstract ideal, but a shared practice — something we build and maintain together through collaboration, error correction, and trust.
In our conversation we talk about why he believes truth still matters, even in a time when confidence in institutions is low and misinformation travels at lightning speed; about why he resists both relativism and dogmatism; and about the difference between asserting ‘my truth’ and seeking the truth.
I thought I would begin with something I heard on the BBC this morning. I was listening, waiting for the news to come on at eight o’clock, and the BBC was doing a self-promotional ad for its own values. And the tagline was, the fight for truth is on, trust is earned, this is our BBC. It was done in a kind of dramatic, hard-hitting, almost like a movie trailer kind of tone.
And I thought, you know, you wouldn’t have to go very far back in history, 10, 20, 25 years. It would have been quite baffling or surprising for the BBC to feel the need to put out that sort of declaration on its own behalf.
And I think that points up how truth is very much as a concept, very much centre stage and is felt to be both contested and under challenge and really something that an organisation like the BBC has to declare its commitment to, and not just commitment to but actually to phrase it as ‘the fight is on’, to frame it in terms of a struggle or a battle and I thought that was very telling and maybe it suggests the kind of context in which your book has appeared and some of the climate which surrounds it and makes the need for the book the more pressing as compared to, I guess, 20 years ago, maybe a philosopher might have written this book and it might have been a different kind of book entirely. Do you think I’m right that there’s been quite a pronounced climate shift in the last however many years?
N.J. Enfield: Yeah, I do in part. So yes and no. I think that it’s pretty clear that the problem of truth and trust and reality and so on has become quite pronounced in the last, let’s say, 10 years especially, or I suppose it’s getting on for 10 years. So the real sort of spike recently was around the Brexit campaign and the Trump first term. And that’s when this term post-truth started being used and people were putting it out there as a topic, as a problem that needed to be solved, that, oh, God, we don’t trust experts any more. We don’t know what’s true any more. People don’t care about the truth.
And I think that what we have to tease apart is like how much of that was actually reflecting a reality of changing kind of climate of things like what we believe and how much we care, and how much of it was really just about a fashion in what we’re concerned with in social movements. And I think there’s a little bit of both in this case.
So if you look kind of historically at the problem, you find, so there’s a really nice book called Truth Decay, which is a report from Rand Corporation by Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael Rich. And in that book they start out by saying, well, we’re targeting this apparent wave of disrespect for the truth and so forth. But when you look historically, you see, well, there’s been waves like this before. And they track some of those associated, for example, with print, you know, the emergence of print and certain ways of practicing journalism earlier in the 20th century.
And these things are often associated with new technologies. And so obviously social media and so on are really key to what we’re dealing with right now, the democratisation of information and all that sort of thing. So I think in part you’re right that there is a real wave of concern, partly for good reason, because there’s just so much more access to information and it becomes harder to filter. But also it’s a cyclical thing.
And I think the problem of truth is it’s very foundational to human affairs and it’s never going to not be a concern to us. You know, we don’t want to be lied to in our lives. And that’s one of the most fundamental aspects of trust and social relationships. So I think truth goes up and down in terms of how much we make of it as a topic, but it’s always important.
GM: You mentioned Truth Decay, the title of a book, and the way that you came onto my radar was because of your involvement in a project in Australia called Fighting Truth Decay. So clearly you felt something was worth standing up for and getting involved with rather than just studying it dispassionately as an academic. Can you say something about what that programme or that campaign or that initiative was about and what motivated you to get involved with it?
NJE: Yeah, so this was a collaborative project at the University of Sydney, which was really, I can’t recall the exact year, it might have been 2017, something like this. And it was in the wake of the concerns that I was just raising earlier to do with things like the Brexit and Trump campaigns. And a group of very different academics at Sydney were concerned with this same issue. So myself from linguistics, there were people in philosophy, there were people in international relations and political science, and also people in public health who were very concerned with all of this. And we got together and we got some funding from an initiative in the university and then also some external funding and created this network.
So it’s been through different phases. Now it exists within a public health research institution within the University of Sydney called the Charles Perkins Centre. And the people who are really, I guess you were hinting just before at the application of this and the sort of social impact of these problems. People who’ve really been looking at this for a long time are looking at how much we can trust outcomes of research.
So this is sort of really at the centre of not only are academics interested in studying things like access to the truth and these social movements, but also we are supposed to be producing truth and knowledge. And so there’s all sorts of ways in which bias creeps in and trust is eroded. And in the public health space, you’re looking at things like the impacts of corporate support for research. You’re, for example, a pharmaceutical company and you’re giving money to researchers, well, are those researchers going to be completely objective, or are they going to be sort of coming up with findings that the funding company would prefer to see? Of course, there’s massive amounts of money involved. So there’s incredible conflicts of interest.
So it was quite an interesting initiative, the Fighting Truth Decay one, because it brought together, and it’s still continuing, it brought together, as I say, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, public health, political science. And so I think it’s just a great topic, and it’s one that affects all of us precisely because we’re in the business of knowledge generation.
GM: You mentioned the fact that you’re a linguist. And I guess some people listening to this might be surprised that a book on truth is being written by a linguist rather than a philosopher. If you would ask people in the street, who would you expect to write a book on truth in a series like this? They might say, well, probably a philosopher. Now, I happen to think getting a linguist to do it was a very good idea. But can you say why it appealed to you and what you think a linguist brings to a project like this that is different from what a philosopher, say, might bring to it?
NJE: Well, of course, it does all depend on the linguist or the philosopher that you choose. There are many different kinds…
GM: Of course, yes. I’m not suggesting they’re interchangeable! But yes, maybe you can say that. You as a linguist, what was it that appealed to you as a linguist and made it seem like quite a good match for your own interests and skills and background?
NJE: Of course, yes. So I guess if you’re looking at a kind of a philosophical analysis of truth, it might come across as quite abstract, or perhaps technical, but quite abstract. And in linguistics, linguistics can also be extremely abstract and oftentimes people sort of pigeonhole linguistics in that way. But my interest really is in the fact that, you know, we cannot access or evaluate questions of truth without going through language pretty much 100% of the time.
So let me just give you an example. One of the chapters in the book is called something like, Is There Snow on Mount Everest? and this is refers to work by philosopher John Searle, who actually says in his work on not on truth but on reality he says there’s different kinds of reality and one is the social realities that we build through kind of common agreement but then there’s what he calls brute reality and that’s just atoms and physical facts and his example of a piece of brute reality is that there’s snow on Mount Everest.
And so if you ask a linguist, a linguist knows that English is just one of 7,000 different languages in the world. And it happens to have the word ‘snow’, and lots of languages have a word which refers to snow. But like most words, they actually don’t have exactly the same meanings. So if you wanted to go and test the claim – now this might seem ridiculous because of course there is snow on Mount Everest – but if you wanted to go and test the claim you’d have to not only go there and inspect the place you’d also have to know what that word means, the word ‘snow’, and that actually begins to be an interesting problem when you’re trying to settle on things like legal decisions. You go into a courtroom and there is one team trying to say that I’m trying to paint the picture of what happened in one way and the other team is trying to paint the picture of what happened in another way and they’re doing it through choice of words.
So one of the examples that I analyse has to do with a rape case in a trial where there are different ways of talking about what happened So, for example, you know, the lawyer says, ‘did he sit with you?’ This is referring to the evening before the incident. ‘Did he sit with you?’ And the victim says, ‘he sat at our table.’ So these are two different linguistically framed versions of what happened. ‘Sitting with you’ has all sorts of implications about that you were, you know, there’s a relationship there and so forth. ‘Sitting at our table’ uses language to reframe the situation and just point to the physical location of the person and sort of bracket out there’s a relationship there or anything like this.
And as soon as you start to think about that, you see the power of framing is really all about linguistic choice and that is partly your choice within a language to choose different words or different idioms. But then outside of a language, you of course have thousands of different languages in the world. So truth really becomes filtered through linguistic choice. And there’s really no way to get out of that, given that truth is something, as I say, not abstract, but something that is often has consequences for social relationships, social interactions, and decisions that we make together, often quite consequential ones, such as, you know, is a person found guilty of a crime or not?
GM: To pursue that example, if we had CCTV footage of that bar, would that help us in arriving at something we could agree was the truth? Or would that, would as soon as we step into language, would we instantly have been applying our own frameworks to it? In other words, Is the truth somehow recuperable or is it always in some way, when we’re talking about this kind of situation, is it always going to be contingent and to some degree subjective?
NJE: It’s not going to be entirely contingent because we can agree on certain observed phenomena. So you have CCTV and you can indeed see, well, let’s say the accused is sitting at the same table. So this, in the example I gave, is already acknowledged by the victim. So you’d be having to look for other evidence. So as soon as you start doing that, then you’re pointing at things that you see on the screen and then you are articulating what it is about those things that you deem to be important.
And so it’s not that you’re making up reality. What you’re doing is you’re directing people’s attention and you’re characterising what you see in a particular way. And so there’s something very different about just pointing at something versus pointing and characterising it.
So there’s a lovely study that was done going back quite a few years by a sociologist, Charles Goodwin, who looked at the footage from the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles, so early 1990s, there was an initial trial, you may remember, for those younger listeners, they might want to go online and look up Rodney King. The initial trial, the police officers who were clearly from the video badly beating King were not convicted, they were allowed to go free, and this led to the riots.
And so what Chuck Goodwin did is he looked at the evidence from the court proceedings and the way that the legal team were pointing out things that were happening in the video. So if you look at the video, this man is on the ground getting kicked and beaten. He makes these very tiny movements and then these are being described as resisting arrest, for example.
So we can all see that his body is making a movement. That’s not really what’s important in this particular, I mean, that’s a crucial piece of information. But what really is important is, how do we describe that? What becomes the accepted kind of characterization of what that movement is? And then that’s really something that’s achieved through language. So saying something like he’s resisting arrest, or, you know, putting the officers in danger, all of these things are matters of framing, which come from linguistic choice.
GM: And we’re very used to hearing lawyers engage in that kind of reframing and politicians do it all the time on a bigger scale. Things you think you see with your own eyes, they say, ‘well, no, that’s not how we should read this situation. You must take this into account.’ But that doesn’t lead you to a counsel of despair. It doesn’t, you know, the conclusion you draw from this is not, well, we should just, you know, we should give up because your truth is different from my truth is different from their truth. And therefore we’re just trapped in this web of language arguing about interpretations.
Having taken stock of the way we operate as social beings, you know, as a linguist, where do you go from there? How do you move on from this feeling of the framings and the contestation could be as far as we can reach as linguistic beings who will see things slightly differently?
NJE: Yeah, so a couple of things. I mean, one thing is that I wouldn’t say it’s all just lawyers and politicians. So all of us, all the time in everyday life are busy with exactly this type of linguistic work. I don’t want to portray people in some inherently negative way, but we’re certainly very sensitive to how we frame the things we say in the most everyday circumstances, given our purposes and given our, you know, what we’re trying to achieve.
And what that means you know oftentimes we’re being highly cooperative with language, we’re working together, we’re trying to solve problems, we’re thinking about the best framing not because we’re trying to exonerate ourselves from a crime but because we’re trying to cooperate and collaborate and so usually it’s in the choices we make are in the mutual interest. But there is this gray area or this area of kind of contestation.
And so to your question about what the solution is to, you know, to being somewhat unmoored or to everything being kind of filtered through language is that we need to be, I guess, mindful about how language is being used. And that’s a big theme in this book is being mindful about that fact.
So most of the time we’re not particularly mindful about how we use language. just words come out of our mouth. We hope that they get understood the way that we want them to. We don’t really reflect all that consciously, but we can. And that’s something special about people is that we can choose to slow down. We can choose to think about the words that are being used either by ourselves or by others.
And so first thing I think is really important is mindfulness around language use. ‘This thing I’m saying is a fact’ – could it have been described in some other way? Or am I describing it in this way for some, you know, what’s the reason I’m choosing this way of describing it or what have you. So mindfulness, I think, is the first really important step.
And then I guess secondly, language is very useful because it allows you to triangulate. The very fact that language gives you alternative ways to describe a single situation allows you to see that situation in more than one way. And then you can refine your understanding of what’s the case, right? So doing that requires a little bit of humility, because it requires you to back away from your assumptions of what was going on there.
So back to the example of the ‘sitting at our table’ versus ‘sitting with us’, instead of, you know, you might have very important reasons to strongly resist one of those, but in a more innocent kind of circumstance, you might consider, well, you know, was this person sitting with us or were they not? It might be the case. So you need to be open to thinking about the alternatives and languages of real sort of alternative generating engine.
GM: So we could think of it as like a social technology which used at its best can produce common ground, agreement, consensus and therefore some kind of action which is positive. But that depends on us being good faith actors, doesn’t it? And I guess that’s maybe, you know, going back to what I was saying at the beginning, this feeling of being in a more polarized time, a time when the truth is contested and where there seems to be less willingness to look for that kind of consensus and to share common ground. It’s a matter of one side’s truth being opposed to the other side’s truth. So social technology, great, but you have to enter into its use in a particular way if it’s going to work.
NJE: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s like any technology. I mean, language is really a foundational technology in human affairs and, you know, older than all the rest. But, you know, this is exactly what happens with any kind of technology is that its power can be put to different uses. And that fact that it has power usually raises kind of ethical questions and raises the possibility of abuse.
Lots of technologies can be used as weapons as opposed to constructively. So the real puzzle then becomes, how do you maintain a culture where there’s an expectation or there’s a desire to use that technology in a productive kind of way? And this is, I guess, one of the themes of the book is really picking up on Karl Popper’s kind of philosophy of knowledge and his idea that what’s crucial is a culture change or a culture sort of mindset where what you really want is to change your own mind and to correct your own misunderstandings and to see the problems in your own versions of reality.
And the way that we do that is by valuing the opportunity to be challenged on our ideas and to change our beliefs. And that’s obviously difficult because it’s a, you know, it’s a willingness to be uncomfortable and it doesn’t come naturally. And I quote Popper on this where he says, he has this wonderful chapter called ‘The Myth of the Framework’. And he says that we need to create a clash of cultures in order to correct our errors where possible. And it’s not necessarily fun but we can learn to enjoy it and I love this way of putting it because firstly we can learn that but not only you know learn to engage in that sort of practice but to actually come to enjoy it to seek it out to savour it.
This is easier said than done, but I think the solution is cultural and precisely this sense that people if they come to understand that this this clash of cultures, this exposing oneself to challenges, to one’s own worldview, that if that becomes valued, if that becomes part of our identity in some sense, then everybody benefits.
GM: I mean, I’m wondering if Karl Popper ever had to debate with someone who denied the validity of evidence-based Western medicine, for example, and how he would engage with that. And so I’m wondering if there are limits to that method for trying to expose your beliefs to something which is quite radically different and to use that as a process for working towards something which won’t be consensus. I mean, it’s unlikely to be somewhere in the middle between belief in Western medicine and discounting it. Again, are there points where this sort of proper method actually just breaks down because there is no possibility of common ground and using the method?
NJE: Well, I don’t think there’s no possibility. You know, there’s a certain optimism in my account that I draw on from others that’s, you know, discussed in the book, that it’s always possible to improve. But it can be very difficult. And so there’s a couple of things there. I think one is that culture change, you have to acknowledge it’s hard. It takes a long time. It takes a lot of effort. You know, it requires eternal vigilance to use that term, to keep resisting these kind of threats to a good culture around kind of self-correction. And that’s part of the problem – that there really are important forces that go against the desire to correct dangerous ideas or harmful ideas.
And this is something I explore in the book around the idea that certain beliefs are professed, not because people think they’re true, but because people want to signal something. And so very often religious movements, for example, are based around asserting a belief in something which is highly unlikely, you know, that somebody died and raised from the dead or that there are supernatural entities that can go through walls and things like this.
These things are patently not true, but they’re very powerful in forging group identity around these kinds of things. And so there’s a very strong sense in which it’s socially cohesive to join around unlikely claims. And that’s something you’ve really got to work against. In the end of the book, I argue that the only real solution is to identify socially with the idea of seeking error correction.
And I think this is the essence of what the whole enlightenment idea is all about, but you’re working against very powerful forces that run against that and in the book I give the example of religious movements that – I think you were hinting at in your question – religious movements where parents withdraw medical care, they don’t give their children medical care that they need. And so in some cases this means that young children die and can never seek justice for this, but sometimes they don’t die. And there are people who I mention in the book in the States who are campaigning against the communities that they were from because they were physically harmed in their childhood by these beliefs.
So I give one case where the medical treatment is actually very, it’s almost trivial and people’s wellbeing would have been completely guaranteed from a young age. But because of these beliefs, that wasn’t the case. So all of that is to say that there are incredibly strong counter-pressures that come from human psychology and that come from very important. It’s not that we are defective and we’re bad at thinking. But it’s more that we have very strong competing factors like social cohesion and the desire to be identified with a group of people around us.
And so I think that’s really an important part of this is to try to diagnose what those forces are and then try to kind of address them at that level. I think it’s a little bit too easy to set up this whole problem as being a battle between smart people and foolish people, for example. And that’s not what this is about.
GM: What do you make of the apparent loss of credibility accorded to institutions such as universities? You spoke about universities being interested in, you know, the truth value of what they produce. And we began today talking about the BBC, which a few decades ago would have been regarded as a bastion of truth pretty widely. You know, there might’ve been some people on the fringe who challenged it, but it seems to me that that has shifted quite considerably. You know, experts are regularly castigated by different sectors of society, even politicians. Michael Gove, a politician in the UK, famously said, ‘I think we’ve had enough of experts’ around the time of Brexit. So you talked about cycles, but do you think that’s quite a profound shift? If we’re looking at trying to work towards some kind of consensus that we can live with about what the truth is, one of the main means of getting there in the past was that sort of institution. That sort of institution seems to me to be under greater and greater challenge today.
NJE: Yeah. I mean, the Michael Gove thing is fascinating. I recently visited London and saw posters of him advertising his podcast and I thought, well, who wants to listen to you? You know, I’ve had enough of whatever it is you’re going to say. So it’s very corrosive, this view that, ‘oh, we don’t want to listen to experts’.
But at the same time, there’s something very important in that kind of argument. I don’t really know what Gove actually was saying in that specific instance. It was a throwaway line, I think, in an interview during the Brexit campaign. But I think that on the one hand, it is very important to be sceptical. It’s very important not to believe what someone says purely on the basis of their authority. And that’s a classical kind of enlightenment move. That’s a classic Karl Popper sort of stance, which says, ‘you can’t tell me that this thing is true because you say so, because you’re an expert’. And that’s very different from saying it’s true because here’s this bit of evidence, right? So that is a kind of a really important point, which says you cannot establish truth just by authority.
GM: I guess we had the church doing that for centuries, didn’t we, saying this is true because we say it’s true?
NJE: Because we say it’s true, but that’s not what expertise is. So expertise is not, you know, that’s not the function of expertise, just to declare something is true because you say so. Experts are in subcultures, and we’re all experts in one thing or another or multiple things. And, you know, we live in a society that has this in a radical division of labour. So we’re relying on experts 24/7. You know, we get an expert to fix our plumbing and we don’t complain about that. [Or maybe] it depends how much they charge us…
But expertise is inherent in living in the kinds of societies that we live in. So sometimes this discourse around experts is highly selective and, again, serves more of a signalling purpose than showing really a genuine distrust in experts. So that’s one piece.
But I think to finish the thought about expertise versus authority, the key thing is to recognise that a well-functioning community of experts is a group of people who are not declaring facts to be true but who are holding each other to account, who are doing this error correction, engaging in this clash of cultures seeking to improve through holding each other accountable.
And if we trust in the culture of having that property, then yeah, we definitely want to talk to experts because we know that they are actually keeping each other in check. The problem is when you don’t have that kind of culture clash, when you have only people who have the same view or people who are not allowed to challenge each other. That’s when it becomes harder to trust what they have to say. And of course, that is the claim. I don’t know, conspiracy theorists and sceptics of various kinds will argue, well, the press, for example, is all controlled by such and so special interests and that kind of thing. That’s where trust and expertise gets eroded when you can’t be confident that the experts themselves are in a mutually error-correcting environment. And that’s what we need to have.
GM: Nick, I wanted to ask about another area of potential clash, which is when the belief system of a people might be radically different from our own. It might be an indigenous culture, which takes a very different view of the natural world and our place in it and the operating laws of it. And when that, as it sometimes does, comes into conflict with our enlightenment, rational, legalistic view of how things are and how things should be. And then we’ve got, it’s not just a question of respecting beliefs, but there are real world implications if it’s, you know, for example, about the status of a river or a forest or a piece of land. And sometimes people say, well, this is their truth and it has to be respected in exactly the same way as we might want our truth to be respected. What is your take on that kind of situation, which on the face of it seems irreconcilable?
NJE: Yeah well it’s complex and it’s kind of fraught in many ways, but I think that this is another area where a lot of signalling and quite selective sort of attention to certain aspects of the problem get in the way of making progress. So I write in the book about a couple of cases where indigenous groups have certain ideas, certain beliefs, certain assertions, certain knowledge that may be different from, let’s say, scientific knowledge or the knowledge of the kind of local education system or what have you.
And there is a really important question of, what do we make of that? So one kind of example has to do with, for example, an indigenous claim to, as you suggested, to land rights based on some myth, for example. So this is a point that’s been made by a philosopher, Paul Boghossian, who looked at statements being made about the origin of indigenous groups in Native America who say, well, you know, we, they were disputing archaeologists’ historical claims about people coming across the Bering Strait, you know, 10, 15,000 years ago, whenever it was. And they said, no, that’s not true. We we came out of the ground in this particular place. And we used to live in the underworld and that sort of stuff.
And this philosopher is saying, well, you know, there’s a problem here, because one of these things is true, and the other one is not. And I don’t think there’s a problem in disputing that claim. On what basis are you disputing it and for what reason was the claim being made in the first place? Now, I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of indigenous people in Laos, which is my area of research, and while you started out saying, well, indigenous groups have different beliefs about the way the world works, I think actually most of their practical knowledge about how the world works is not different at all from, you know, anywhere else in the world, that we understand how things work. We have very sensible expectations. We look very carefully at the world around us and learn from it, and we can predict how it’s going to work.
So ideas like our people came from under the ground through such and such a spirit, that’s actually a pretty small part of the whole knowledge and belief system of a group of people. Now, why would we want to respect a claim like that, that we think is not factually true. Well, it might be because we think it’s really important that the land claims of these people are acknowledged and respected.
So in, for example, legal proceedings, oftentimes these claims are used as evidence with the desired outcome that people are then able to make that claim. But that’s different from saying, I believe that this group of people came from under the ground or something at this time. It’s really more about getting the opportunity for a group of people to give evidence about their connection to that piece of land. And I don’t think that there’s any need to say, you know, we are going to treat as true this claim.
So I talk in the book about something that we’re very clearly capable of doing, and that is distinguishing between what a book or a story is about versus what it’s really about. And I give the example of Orwell’s Animal Farm. And we all know that there wasn’t a farm in England where, you know, animals got together and engaged in this story. Obviously what the book, as we all know, is really about was the politics of the time and the personalities of the time.
So I think it’s important to not kind of be distracted by the surface level claims that a story has. You need to distinguish that from what the real claim is about, which is this is our land, this is where we’ve been since living memory and it should be respected in that way. So that’s one kind of, I think, big piece of the question that you asked.
There’s another big piece which I talk about at some length is actually related to the cover illustration of the book, which has got to do with indigenous knowledge of the natural world. And that’s only partially related to things like mythical beliefs. But the example I go through is the example of the tides. And that is something that when you look at, let’s say, if I just started out by saying, well, Newton had a theory of the tides which was based on the force of gravity and the movement of the moon and the sun and the earth. And the Torres Strait Islander people of northern Australia have a theory of the tides, which has got to do with the moon is a certain person and the sun is another person. And there’s these interactions between them.
That is the least interesting thing, I think, about the indigenous knowledge of the tides, because what they really know is incredibly detailed information about the correlations between the size of the moon, the phase of the moon, and what the tide is going to be like. that can predict very well whether it’s a good day to go fishing or not. This is incredible practical knowledge which is quite independent of whether our cover story for this is a mythological kind of person, you know, anthropocentric kind of story. But underneath it, there is this incredibly fine-grained, accurate understanding of how the world works. So I think, you know, I’ve sort of come at your question in a couple of different ways, but I think there are plenty of ways to reconcile and to interpret the kinds of claims that are made under the rubric of indigenous knowledge that I think need teasing apart to make better sense of this.
GM: And you go into these things in the book in fascinating ways. And I hope this conversation will inspire people to go and get the book and read about them in more detail. I wanted to end today, Nick, you said earlier in the conversation, you’re an optimist. What would you say to someone who’s a little bit more on the pessimistic side of the spectrum to kind of nudge them in a more optimistic direction, or at least make them think that their pessimism shouldn’t be too ingrained that there are there are if you look at the news you might and you see the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world the kind of things he says and he’s got a network called Truth Social and you think, goodness, is all lost? Has all meaning of the word ‘truth’ been lost? So how do you retain your optimism and what would you say to someone so that they don’t themselves give up hope?
NJE: Well, I talk in the book about optimism in a quite specific sense which is not ‘everything’s going to be all right’. It really is a commitment to the idea that the world can be improved and that our understandings of things can be improved and that is actually the foundation for trying to correct oneself and trying to improve one’s own kind of knowledge. So there’s a sort of a kind of self-help component to that, if you like.
And I think that’s why I would really impress on people to adopt a kind of an optimistic stance, which is to say, you know, you might not be able to change Donald Trump, but you can change yourself, you can improve yourself. And that kind of stance can spread and can become part of a sort of shared value, which over time, social change is slow and difficult, but it has to come from somewhere. And over time, one would hope that it becomes less likely that people who are not committed to truth in this sense or to optimism in this sense are going to make progress. So that’s what optimism really is. It’s a commitment to the idea that we can correct our current understanding and get a better one that will allow us to take steps that we couldn’t take before.
GM: Thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today
NJE: Thanks very much.
GM: That was Nick Enfield, whose book What Is Truth For? is available now.
You can find more details about it, and all the other titles in the What is it for? series, on the Bristol University Press website, bristoluniversitypress.co.uk. The other two new titles this season are what is drug policy for and what are nuclear weapons for.
That’s it from me for now — thanks for listening, and goodbye.
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