Before looking at the
importance of truthfulness, it is necessary to clarify first what truthfulness
is. We have a lot of notion of the word “truthfulness.” The main source of the
term’s ambiguity is the many ways we use the term, whether to denote
truthfulness of a belief or truthfulness of a person. Truthfulness of a belief
is how close your belief to the actual “truth.” I will not discuss the nature
of truth and its existence in this essay, but we will assume one view of the
truth throughout this paper: that there exists an actual “truth," although
it's still debatable whether human beings can achieve it or not. Since the conventional
definition of knowledge is "a justified true belief," truthfulness of
a belief connects the concept of truth and knowledge.
Truthfulness of a person,
on the other hand, is defined as one's character to always tell something with
a certain confidence that it is close to the truth. Truthfulness of a person is
different from being honest. Although both are related, truthfulness of a
person involves conscientiousness of a being towards his/her beliefs, while
honesty only involves telling what one thinks is true and doesn’t involve the
responsibility to be conscientious about it. It is clear that truthfulness of a
person also involves truthfulness of one’s belief. In this paper, we will talk mostly
about truthfulness of a person, yet we can still connect it to the concept of
knowledge because it still involves truthfulness of a belief. For the rest of
the paper, truthfulness will denote truthfulness of a person for simplicity and
convention of the reader.
When we talk about
truthfulness, it always revolves around an interaction between two or more
people. To state the importance of truthfulness, we will look at a certain
situation where person A said something to person B that is truthful. We will
call person A as the sender and person B as the receiver. Note that A and B can
also be a group of persons who assume the character of senders or receivers in
an interaction. We will look deeply at the benefits of truthfulness of person A
in the interaction both to the receiver and the sender. After that, we will enlarge
the scope of the situation to discuss about the importance of truthfulness in a
society.
From the given situation,
if person B doesn't know what person A had stated to him/her, the benefit of
truthfulness has a direct effect to the receiver. It is direct since the
benefits will come directly from the statement relayed by person A to
person B. The true statement is important to the receiver because it will give
additional knowledge for person B. Living in a world where a lot of things,
good and bad, happen all the time, knowledge is important because we use them
in practical purposes especially in decision making. You can come up with the
best decision in any situation that you encounter if you know something about
it.
The main source of
knowledge is our experiences. But then, we all know that we can't experience
everything that could be experienced by human beings, simply because we have
limited time in this world and we can't do everything all at once. Our
interaction with other people alleviates this specific problem; it gives way to
another source of knowledge aside from our experiences which is the experiences
of other people. For example, we need to decide what to wear based on the
weather for today. We don't need to
study the whole science of meteorology in order to predict the weather for
making the decision on what to wear. We just have to get weather updates from
meteorologists. Our inexperience to predict the weather was alleviated by them
and they become our new source of knowledge that we can use for decision making
on situations that involves the weather.
If person B does know
what person A had stated or knows something that is conflicted with person A's
statement, it still gives benefit for the receiver. It gives him/her the chance
to verify what s/he believes. Another problem imposed by acquiring knowledge
from our own experiences are the differences of perceptions created by our own
faculties from person to person. Most of the time in order to check the information
we got from one of our faculties, we use other faculties. This is not a great
gauge for the checking of the truthfulness of our beliefs, since we already
stated that these faculties are not always accurate in acquiring knowledge.
Interaction with other people gives us another "checking machine" of
what we perceived. Person B in our situation broadened his/her perspective to
that of person A. Not only does it give person B supplements for decision
making for practical purposes, but it also gives him/her a chance to make sure
that his/her belief is somehow close to the truth, which in turn gives relief
to the receiver that s/he is not living in a deception, either created by
oneself or created by others. This relief allows person B to live comfortably.
The truthfulness of the receiver's belief is more important if s/he has a high level
of epistemic demand about it. If our family are important to us, we tend to
value the truthfulness of the identity of our family. If we are made to believe
all this time that we are related by blood to our parents, and then there's a
sudden revelation to us that they are not really our parents, we have a
tendency to live uncomfortably. This aspect of knowledge is important even
though we don't use them in practical purposes because it affects our
well-being.
Truthfulness has indirect
and direct effect to the sender of information. Using the previous situation
where person A is sending an information to person B, if person A is truthful
to person B, that truthfulness will induce trust from B to A. This trust will
improve the connection between the two persons. This is an indirect effect
because it affects person A that is not related from the statement person A
gave to person B.
Trust is the attitude
towards another person expecting something good will come out of him/her. This
trust affects the way we interact with other people. The higher your level of
trust to another person, the more probable you will interact with him/her in a
comfortable way. Trust from a person to another person is affected by the
experiences between them and the truthfulness of them to each other when they
are interacting. The importance of trust is that it holds the relationship
between two persons, and if that is lost, then also the breakage of the
relationship.
Another indirect effect
of truthfulness to the sender is the ability to influence other people, which
just feels good for what it is. Aside from the trust that you earn from other
people, it will also earn you self-trust since it shows you your own power to
change other people's thinking and influence them to create decisions for the
betterment of many.
A direct effect of
truthfulness of person A is the same as that of its direct effect to the
receiver; it verifies the truthfulness one’s knowledge. We can classify
knowledge based on the persons involved in giving and acquiring it:
intrasubjective knowledge and intersubjective knowledge. Intrasubjective knowledge
is knowledge acquired by a person by oneself that will be understood more if
one thinks about it deeply. Intersubjective knowledge is the kind of knowledge that
you need to state to other person in order to have a deeper understanding of it
by verifying it with other perspectives. Verifying something that you believe
to someone else gives it a higher probability of being closer to the truth than
if you just let it to yourself.
We will now take away the
previous situation between two persons and look at the general point of view of
a society. We don't solely just become a sender or a receiver of information.
Most of the time we both do these things during interactions. We tell a person
an information, and that other person tells another thing back to us. Looking
at the bigger picture, we are an interconnected web of senders and receivers.
Since this is the case, everyone benefits directly and indirectly from the
truthfulness of everyone.
In society's perspective,
truthfulness is a key thing to the creation of the agreed sense of reality. We
already stated that different perceptions of human beings to a single thing is
one of the problems in acquiring knowledge based on our experiences. Because of
this, each one of us has different sense of reality. At a larger point of view,
truthfulness gives a solution to this problem by creating a conventional reality.
For example, if person A said to all of the people that s/he thinks that grass
has a specific color, which is green, and everyone agrees to him/her, then it
will be established that the grass has this specific color. Every one of us could
look at the grass and see it in different shades of green, but the society can
agree that the grass is green. It’s like a Venn diagram involving billions of circles
wherein some parts of every circle don’t fit with other circles, yet all of
them converges to a single point. Although there are parts of our faculties
that isn't exactly the same as that of other persons’ and we perceive grass in
different shades of green, there is still something in the grass that is common
for us all: the grass is green. These conventional truths about the color of
grass and other plant information that were agreed by everyone to be true allows
for the inner workings of the society that depends on plants such as
agriculture. A society comprised of people with conflicting beliefs who can't
agree about anything will not succeed to their common goals.
A society is always founded
on the interactions of human beings; if there’s no human interactions, then
there’s no society in the first place. And interaction based on truthfulness is
higher in form than mere interaction. We can tell lies to each other and we can
still call it an interaction. The thing that distinguishes interaction with
truthfulness is the inclusion of trust. We already stated that trust is the glue
that holds the relationship between two persons. Looking at the point of view
of a society, trust solidifies connection of every people in it. Since the
society depends in the unification of its constituents, a society with
interactions not based on truthfulness will not hold for itself and at a point
of time will no longer be considered a society. Additionally, interaction with
truthfulness ensures that the interactions will always exist. These truthful interactions
will then multiply the benefits we already stated for every one of us that is
both a receiver and sender of information.
If you are lying or just
telling bullshit to other people, even though it benefits you a lot, it
certainly will give the receiver of your statement harm. A special case, wherein
it feels like lying is the best path to resort to since s/he might not be able
to accept the truth very well, is still a bad thing since you are deceiving
him/her. The moment the lie was uncovered, the “bad effect” is multiplied since
s/he lost his/her trust to you, the decision s/he made would not be the best
one for any situation that involves something about the truth that you didn’t
say, and the receiver still found out about the truth anyways. It is a lot
safer to not take this risk and still be truthful all the time. There’s nothing
wrong about finding the truth, and we should accept it, because it is what it
is and we can’t do anything about it. What we need to do is change our attitude
about the truth because it will not mold itself for our convenience. The
bottom-line is this: truthfulness is always important since it will benefit all
of us as individual persons and as a part of a society all the time.
