The surveyor’s guide to reality

There is a fundamental difference between two questions we often confuse. The first is: What is truth? The second is: What is true in this specific case? The first question is surprisingly easy to answer: Truth is simply the correspondence of the mind with reality. The second question—the one that requires us to get our boots dirty - is the “hard” question. It is the work of the surveyor, the researcher, and the writer. As I look at the landscape of the American West, particularly the stretch of California State Route 46 I’ve been documenting 1, I find that “finding the truth” requires a specific set of tools. The Surveyor’s Toolkit: Axioms and Perception To determine what is true, we rely on two different types of foundations, as Aristotle first laid out. First, there are self-evident truths (axioms). These are things that are true by their very nature, such as the principle of non-contradiction: a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. If my map says a bridge exists at a…

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