From Truth in a Toga to Truth as Insulation

Although I profoundly disagree, let’s start with Protagoras, who said it first, and said it cleanly:Man is the measure of all things.He said this in the fifth century BCE, in Athens, in what we might now call a seminar room, and Plato spent a good part of his career trying to talk him back off the ledge. The argument Protagoras was making — that truth is perspectival, that what is true for you may not be true for me, that there is no fixed point outside human perception from which reality can be adjudicated — was not a fringe position. It was the position of the Sophists, the professional thinkers of their day, and it was taken seriously enough to require serious refutation. Twenty-five centuries later, we have arrived, apparently, at the same ledge. Now we call it “my truth.”To Lie and to “Truth”Before tracing how we got here, it is worth pausing on something the language itself reveals. English has a verb for deception that is native, Germanic, bone-deep: to lie. Old English lēogan,…