Jane Cooper 15 May 2026

Revision 4

Both realism and relativism usually treat truth as something an account either gets right or wrong. But this overlooks how judgement is actually formed under time pressure.

In real situations, people rarely have complete information before acting. They stabilise a situation quickly by forming an early closure: a compressed-time explanation of what is happening and what is causing what.

Within this compressed-time frame, causality is simplified. What appears as an effect may now isolated in snap judgements - be treated as a cause - simply because the effect is most visible at the time. This fixes a provisional causal structure before the situation has fully unfolded.

As time goes on, two things can happen.

Either the early time-compressed closure breaks, and the account is revised as new information forces a reorganisation of cause and effect back to its origins.
Truth is disclosed.
Or the time-compressed closure persists, and all new information is interpreted through the distorted or inverted cause and effect frame, without changing it.

So truth is not just about whether an account matches subjective or objective reality at a moment. It is also about whether that account remains open to revision as the situation unfolds fully, or whether it solidifies closed early and absorbs all later information without changing its basic structure.

Jane Cooper 15 May 2026

Revision no 3

The dispute between realism and relativism often assumes that the main question is whether truth is objective or constructed. But this framing misses something more basic about how judgement actually happens in time.

In real situations, people rarely wait for full clarity before deciding what is true or what caused what. When pressure is high, groups tend to stabilise an explanation early because uncertainty is socially and practically uncomfortable. The first coherent story becomes fixed not because it is fully accurate, but because it allows coordination and reduces tension.

This produces a compression of time in judgement: a developing situation is treated as if it is already complete. In that compressed moment, effect and cause are often assigned too quickly. What is most visible or most emotionally salient is treated as the cause, even when it may only be one surface point in a longer chain of conditions that has not yet fully appeared & namely an effect in reality. Later, as more of that chain becomes visible, earlier time compressed judgements are often revised - not because truth has changed, but because more of what is the case has become accessible.

This is often missed when truth is treated as a purely abstract debate about objectivity or construction. Both framings assume that the relevant structure of a situation is available in principle at the moment of judgement. What they do not capture is how often judgement is forced to stabilise (close) before that structure is visible at all.

Truth, in that sense, is not opposed to interpretation, and it is not dependent on it either. Truth is what remains when early closure is no longer sufficient to contain what the situation turns out to involve.

Jane Cooper 15 May 2026

Jane Cooper revised post no 2
What stands out in debates about truth - such as between Searle’s realism and Lawson’s critique of it - is not which side is correct, but how quickly both assume that the relevant shape of a situation is already available for judgement.

In practice, many situations are not immediately readable. They become intelligible only over extended time, as consequences accumulate and hidden dependencies or hidden structures become visible. Yet groups tend to treat early appearance as if it were already structure.

This creates a recurring pattern: the first stable explanation is often treated as the correct one, even though it is simply the first one that can be formed under pressure.

For example, when something goes wrong in an organisation, the earliest explanation is often that a particular person “caused” the failure. That conclusion is attractive because it is simple and actionable. But later, as more information appears, it is often clear that the individual’s action was in fact effect not cause as it was shaped by earlier constraints, conflicting instructions, or structural / system pressures that were not visible at the moment of judgement.

The initial explanation does not disappear because it is disproven; it disappears because the situation eventually becomes too complex for it to contain.

Something similar happens in public or political interpretation, where early / fast narratives often stabilise complex developments into single-cause stories. These explanations persist not because they are fully adequate, but because they arrive at the right speed for social consumption.

The issue is not that early/ fast judgement is always wrong. The issue is that judgement often arrives before the relevant time-scale of the situation has completed.

Truth, in this sense, is not separate from time. It depends on whether interpretation is fixed before or after the structure of a situation has had time to appear.

Jane Cooper 15 May 2026

I think both John Searle and Hilary Lawson are partly right, but both miss something important about how truth actually works in human society.

Searle is right that truth cannot simply be whatever each person wants it to be - a purely subjective solipsism. Reality exists outside our opinions. If a bridge is structurally weak, it will eventually collapse whether people believe it is safe or not. If a workplace has hidden dysfunction, the consequences will eventually appear even if people deny it for a while. Reality eventually pushes back against false narratives. In this sense, I agree with Searle that truth cannot simply be socially invented.

But I also think Searle underestimates how human groups distort truth socially and psychologically. Groups often do not discover truth slowly and carefully. They frequently close narratives early because uncertainty is uncomfortable. People want quick certainty, quick blame, quick action and results, and emotionally simple explanations.

For example, if someone in a workplace or government reacts badly under pressure, the group may quickly decide “this person is the problem.” But over time it may become clear that the person was reacting to manipulation, exclusion, stress, or wider dysfunction within the system itself. The group compressed the narrative too early and effectively flipped the real effect into the assumed cause.

This is where I think Lawson is partly right. Human beings do not access reality directly or neutrally. We interpret reality through language, culture, emotion, institutions, memory, and social narratives systems. Groups create “closures of truth” - simplified ways of holding a reality together so they can function socially and psychologically, seemingly stabilised.

However, I think Lawson weakens the idea of objective truth too much. Some interpretations of truth genuinely work better than others because reality eventually exposes weak narratives through consequences over time.

For example, an airplane either flies safely or it does not. Engineers may have different theories, assumptions, or models, but eventually physical reality reveals which interpretations correspond more accurately to the structure of the world. The same applies socially and politically. A political or economic system may survive for a while through narratives, propaganda, or emotional loyalty, but over time rising instability, distrust, corruption, inequality, or collapse can expose deeper structural problems that the simplified narratives were hiding.

My own view is that truth is real, but human access to it is often delayed, time compressed, and distorted by premature social closure.

Truth is not just about logic or isolated facts. It is also about time.

Many truths only emerge slowly through unfolding context, long-term patterns, contradictions, and consequences. But modern societies increasingly operate through forms of time compression. Social media, political polarization, attention capture and digital culture reward instant judgment, repeated narratives, emotional certainty, and simplified explanations into fast narratives whether time compressed into a single sentence, repeated across thousands of short videos simultaneously, or stretched into long emotional performances presented as contextual truth.

This means societies often mistake fast narratives for truth before reality has fully revealed itself.

For example, modern politics frequently turns complex structural problems - such as inequality, housing pressure, economic insecurity, declining trust, or social fragmentation - into simplified identity conflicts between “far right” and “extreme left.” These labels create emotional certainty and group cohesion stability, but they often hide deeper structural causes and longer historical processes. Namely the true cause.

So I think truth exists, but human societies frequently struggle to hold it properly because modern social systems reward rapid closure, emotional engagement, certainty, and attention capture far more than patience, reflection, or long-term understanding.

Reality unfolds slowly, but human groups often judge quickly. My view is that truth is found in the tension bridge between those two timescales: the slow unfolding of reality and the fast human need to close uncertainty into a narrative that can be immediately acted upon.

Zlatko Zvekic 11 January 2017

Reality is not a democratic process where people vote for their favorites and elect representatives. It is something that we, human and other living beings, have evolved thru. All brutality and necessities have crystal clearly cut out and enabled many features that supported our survival as a specie. That is reality. Our senses have evolved to give us ability to protect and defend from the perils. That is real. We have learned to build shelters, grow food, love, and hate. Real. We have developed language and we are capable of communicating about events that have happened, that are happening as well as those that may happen. That is reality. The most interesting concepts, fantasies, and possibilities are part of the inventory of our thoughts and guess- works and speculations. As if by talking about reality we could change it to fit our wishes.

mickofemsworth 9 November 2015

If you take the view that relativism debunks the idea of truth, then the question of whether relativism is true is a silly one. Similarly, why should incoherence be the ultimate sin? It gives one's perspective that little bit more flexibility. Philosophy is the business of finding convincing reasons (in the sense that they do a good job of convincing other philosophers) for what one is determined to believe anyway. I think that quantum mechanics (the two slit experiment, etc) demonstrates the incoherence of the idea of objective truth. It's a useful working hypothesis in many contexts but over-extending it is just silly.

blank 30 October 2015

'the fact that there is a reality being described from that point of view and that indeed, from that subjective point of view we can make epistemically objective statements.'

In plain English he's saying that we can say things that everyone who is now living understands, even though in the long run these facts are arbitrary. It means rationality is the rationality of this society, the essential concern of us who are now living. But the mere fact of knowing that what is relevant now won't be in a billion years is of crucial importance for philosophy, it means philosophy is defective, and no ultimate truth can ever be established.

Ergo, the practical situation is largely indifferent to this discovery. Except that if it is learned that that is what the most serious students of the matter think, if that becomes known, as it is, it changes the atmosphere of human life. As it has.

Searle is making an argument that was accepted by Nietzsche over a hundred years ago, Searle simply does not care about truth in the ultimate sense.

Raoul Adam 11 August 2015

Subjective and Objective are entangled 'opposites' on a loop of consciousness. One can only defeat the other by consuming so much of it that it ends up looking like the very thing it claims to have defeated. This is not middle ground fence-sitting fluff - it is the recognition that the truth lies simultaneously and co-definitively at both extremes. It's the rabbit and the duck and everything in between and beyond them. The real struggle is not between sophisticates likes Searle and Lawson; the real struggle is between Searle and Lawson and those who appropriate Subjective or Objective from an exclusively binary oppositional position that admits no phenomenological meanings or relational truth. Lawson appreciates the essence of objectivity because he appreciates the idea of better and worse metaphors to describe and construct reality. He argues that it was hyper-rationalism that led him to see the constructedness of all reality. Perhaps it's time to look at the brilliance of both philosophers and the longevity of the philosophical struggle and to wonder if there may not be more encompassing and productive ways to conceptualise 'who' is right? For me, the onto-epistemological truth is that the coordination of subjective and objective is one of life's defining developmental tasks in complex mental terrains. As Dr Suess reminds us, 'be dexterous and deft and never mix up your right foot with your left'.

jeremyholmes 9 August 2015

Relativism may appear 'democratic', but in fact it is individualistic -- if implies a word full of solipsistic -- albeit aspirationally politically correct -- relativists. It is objectivism that is democratic -- the way we overcome relativism is through the 'wisdom of the crowd' -- when a whole lot of relativists come together to discover that their 'relativistic' truths correspond one with another -- then we have reached epistemic truth. This all starts in infancy: the baby has 'epistemic trust' vis-a-vis (literally -- lots of eye contact) the mother and although they are looking at the same object -- e.g. the family cat - from different perspectives, and it subtends different images on their retinas, depending where they are standing (i.e. it's relativistic), when the baby says, looking at mother "Meaow...?", the mother says "yes, cat" they have arrived at epistemic truth.

Maximilon Baddeley 8 August 2015

Then what for ontological objective statements?