Our investigation of truth as among the things of reality calls our very deliberation into question when that deliberation is in terms of what is and is not true. We proposed in Underneath Not an understanding that takes truth as better seen as naming. Naming is a free act, and so this understanding of truth is a free convention of our own. This understanding is the creation of a stable platform from which to launch our investigation of the very undeniable presence of truth. It is not a solved issue, for truth by convention leaves truth as something arbitrary. Indeed truth does appear to change. A thing can be more than one thing. A book is an archive of information in one use and a conveyor of information in another. It is daytime on one continent and nighttime on another. There are varying contexts for resolving the truth of which thing each is. If we can fix our context, we can fix our truth. But we don't have to. We do have multiple contexts, and so do seem to be able to change our truths. What is lost in those contexts when we untether their truths?
In Choice, Self and the External World we argued that the views of life as produced entirely by the individual and as produced entirely by external reality are equally relevant. However, we ended the piece asking how it could possibly be that external reality isn't first and foremost. We didn't balance that by asking why it shouldn't be that the individual is first and foremost. The reason this second question doesn't compel itself more strongly is that we do in fact take our own thought and choice to be first and foremost, but there is no explanation in that. When we seek explanation for a thing, we look for another thing prior to it. In foundation is the explication of one thing as found within another. All our explanations are found in the external world. Our explanations are where we find truth.
In the self and the external world we have extremes of context. We have the self, entirely without context, and the external world, the final explanatory, fully disambiguating context. The fact that we have truth, yet still have choice, puts us at varying points between extremes depending on context. We will say here, as we give up our self and accept more and more of the imposition of the external world, we create more and more truth. Essentially we give ourselves greater and greater definition, externalizing our self, placing ourselves in communities. If I am tall, I find myself among a community of those who are or would be tall. If I am corporeal, I partake in that attribute that makes me among the community of the embodied. When seeking explanation of the external world, as we are when explaining truth, we are left only with ourselves to externalize. And so it is that we see variations of ourself—find them—in communities. That these variations each resolve our facts, otherwise contradictory, makes community our context.
And indeed this is born out in more than just the differing points of view so clearly found in different social communities. A great deal of philosophy defines truth by what we are as humans. If we really wish to find answers to problems such as the mind-body problem, we must move to contexts wider than humanity. It is hard to envision a community wide enough to solve this problem. The view of external reality as produced by the self overcomes this limitation at once, but at the same time leaves the problem that it, as we pointed out earlier, isn't actually explanatory.
The truths of experimental science are too found in the community of humankind. It is by definition of scientific method that among hypotheses, we accept only those that can be and are independently confirmed by different people. We don't include elephants or institutions as those who's confirmations or denials we accept. There is a scientific variant of reality as created by the observer in the Anthropic Principle. By this principle, our very existence as humankind places bounds on externally observable facts such as the values of fundamental constants in our scientific theories of cosmology. By untethering these constants, we remove ourselves from the context of the merely human.
A truth is untethered in the Liar's Paradox. The individual uttering, “I am lying,” clearly doesn't include you and he as among a community of individuals discriminating facts. More clear is the statement, “this statement is false”. It is debated what category this statement falls into. Is it among the community of propositions?
We've reached for the bounds of this approach to explaining truth in The Strange and Beautiful. To maintain a self in the widest community still observing external truth, we take together the seeming fixed and particular external world with the seeming arbitrary possibility of the distinguishing individual by holding fixed the truism that all we discern is real and all that is real is discernible—in effect holding the two disparate views to be the same. Holding the two opposing views to be the same, we should expect not only that the particular imposing world is implicit in our own free creation, but that anything we might choose to distinguish can be found already present in the found external world. In such a view, the very communities we partake in are our alternates, putting ourselves into an exceedingly wide community leaving room for almost all individuality. Our fellows, our alternates, are all those possible worlds we see here before us.
If we direct our consideration of community to the conflicts in which we participate, we can recognize that when we allow the unpredictable to direct our lives we give up our selves—our individuality and freedom—to enact the external truths of the communities that define those truths. When we exercise choice in those areas least predictable—as in the considerate, assertive life of our own will—we are living the freest part of our lives. Our communities contradict each other, but without them we have no truth in which to participate. So when we find ourselves tugged or tugging to no apparent avail, certainly there is something to be gained simply by distinguishing communities upon and on behalf of which we act.