An attempt to coin ?

About: cnn.com - 'truthiness' is word of the year - jan 7, 2006

Truthiness - giving wiggle room for lies ? When is a statement a lie & when is it an expression of false or bad information? To me a statement is true or false or indeterminate. A lie is a false statement which has the intent behind it to missrepresent what's so for personal gain in some domain. I believe the news media in the recent West Virginia mine disaster were at the cusp of lies by propagating something under the guise of expediency (the need for speed) when what was said did not fit what was so. When is enough fact-checking enough? Is there a preponderance of evidence or information sufficient to propagate miss-information?

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Seth says
Well to me "a statement is true or false or indeterminate to some agent" ... but that is another topic.

Did you hear the recording of the resque worker reporting that the miners were alive? The media just ran with that information. I see no no intent to mislead. Not even on the part of the rescue worker. He was just over zealous in a aquward situation. I think you are making more of this than the facts imply.

Mark de LA says
Please elaborate on the phrase "indeterminate to some agent" . I think a lie is a lie no matter who you are telling it to.

Mark de LA says
Sooner or later the facts will come out about what happened surrounding the mine disaster. For purposes of illustration I could just as well have used the Katrina reporting (most people killed were not black, but white) -OR-just about any breaking news report on a 24 hour news station. There are many examples (Gore won Florida long before the polls had completely closed - but he didn't). I have watched anchors on news stations speculate about what is happening (in the total absence of new information just to fill the space), then continue to broadcast the speculations more & more as fact until the story spins itself. The mine disaster was just the most recent media error that was high visibility.

Seth says
For the record ...

reports ...

source: ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (AP)

-- A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

So i would say that the resque worker's statement had, at the moment, truthiness. It was not a lie.

Mark de LA says

seth 2006-01-07 11:54:53 2468

mark 2006-01-07 11:51:06 2468

Please elaborate on the phrase "indeterminate to some agent" . I think a lie is a lie no matter who you are telling it to.

might go better on another node. in any case you parsed it incorrectly ... it should be:
(subject "a statement") (verb "is") (object "true or false or indeterminate") (indirect object "to some agent")

Yep, the "to some agent" makes no sense to me

Mark de LA says
note, I used the word "cusp" - have we defined truth in reporting down now to just "truthiness" rather than truth ?

Seth says

mark 2006-01-07 12:01:04 2468

note, I used the word "cusp" - have we defined truth in reporting down now to just "truthiness" rather than truth ?

NO ! There is no evidance that anyone is attempting to "define truth in reporting down now to just "truthiness" rather than truth". That is just the spin you are putting on this story. To me "truthiness" is another word for "wishful thinking".

There are two sides to that coin. Sometimes we create truth just by believing in something. William James, "The Will To Believe" comes to mind :

source: me on comp.ai.philosophy

Humans can make them true or false by changing their beliefs and attitudes. William James put it this way: "Believe that life *is* worth living, and your belief will help create the fact." That facts in this category behave this way can easily be verified.

Mark de LA says
Truth & belief are separate distinctions.
Yep, Elvis & the topic focus have left the building

Mark de LA says
The fact you have to believe something rather than witness it or see it demonstrated already casts doubts on whether it is real.

Seth says

mark 2006-01-07 11:59:31 2468

Yep, the "to some agent" makes no sense to me

Then, perhaps, you would be one who would state the velocity of a moving particle without mentioning a frame of reference

Seth says

mark 2006-01-07 12:35:42 2468

Truth & belief are separate distinctions.

But is that distinction quite so easy to make. I don't think so.

Mark de LA says
just trying to tease out what you mean with that phrase. I still don't grok it. When you describe a fact you should describe the context of it as well unless it is one of those things which is understood.

Mark de LA says

seth 2006-01-07 12:41:53 2468

mark 2006-01-07 12:35:42 2468

Truth & belief are separate distinctions.

But is that distinction quite so easy to make. I don't think so.

Where you collapse the two together is where you can get in trouble. In general a belief is a feeling of certainty about what something means. Truth is supposed to be a statement or expression which agrees with that which is so. The ease of making a distinction does not negate nor make the distinction. This conversation can go on and on & could be a subject in the group philosophy .

Seth says

mark 2006-01-07 12:42:14 2468

just trying to tease out what you mean with that phrase. I still don't grok it. When you describe a fact you should describe the context of it as well unless it is one of those things which is understood.

Not only do you need to record the context (usually that is obvious by virture of where and when the statement was made). But you also need to record who the observer of the "fact" was and what history and bias they bring to the observation. The logical predicate should be "X is true to A in the context of C" ... leave out any of those terms, and you are just kidding yourself. Now, certainly some of those terms can be implied, but the human process of groking those implications are frought with grave error.

Mark de LA says
[see also: item 2028]

Mark de LA says

OK , consider it grokked.

... see also definition of grokked and the wikipedia for grok .

winnie says

There is TRUTH there are LIES ...anything in between is partial LIE and therfore a LIE.

Seth says
Might there also be TRUTH in LIES ?

Mark de LA says
I like Bozo's CyberMind logic: True, False, Surprise & Error. I'm sure someday he would like to elaborate on what the latter two states might mean in the context of the low-priced meat computer.

Seth says

...

Oh shit

Mark de LA says

Hmmmm... is Oh Sit yet a 5th state of logic ?

Mark de LA says

Personally I like one of the other words in the article called wordinistas . I'm not sure what it means but I could bet that it is somewhat like the word police or PC.

Mark de LA says

M 2006-12-09 07:03:23 2468

'Truthiness' Pronounced 2006 Word of the Year !

I guess foxnews is behind CNN's forecast!

Mark de LA says

There is a Wikiality the truthiness encyclopedia of Colbert's here.

An attempt to coin ?

About: cnn.com - 'truthiness' is word of the year - jan 7, 2006

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