"Suppose," I said, "that at time t0 some surgeons have done a biopsy on you and two groups of pathologists are inspecting the tissue-sample slides. Everyone in the one group (call it group A) strongly believes that the cells are cancer; everyone in the other group (B) strongly believes that the cells are not cancerous."

"At t1, 3 months later, the cancer has metastasized; you have all these horrible growths all over your body; you clearly have cancer, and you are dying." "Now clearly everyone in group B was simply wrong. It's clearly nonsense to say that at t0 you did not have cancer. You did have cancer then, as became crystal clear at t1, and that fact is independent of the strong beliefs of the members of either group A or group B.

"Yes, the members of group A were seeing the slides through the filters of their previous experience and training; and maybe the members of group B were seeing it through a filter of different experience (maybe inadequate) and training (perhaps also shoddy). But that didn't prevent group A from getting it right."

We were crossing the street, going back from lunch. We carefully looked to see if a train was coming before crossing. No train hit L, but for a second he did look as if he had received a jolt of electricity. My thought was: 'I did it! I've convinced him!'

Whatever rhetorical force my argument had boils down, I think, to this: that truth is relative seems more plausible when a fact seems abstract, or remote, or difficult or even impossible to establish with certainty. But when the fact is no longer any of these, when it is highly concrete, in the here and now, and striking one personally, it seems much more difficult to deny that, yes, group A had it right, and group B was simply wrong. Completely, totally wrong. Hit-by-a-bolt-of-lightning wrong.

For several days L. made no public pronouncements that all truths are relative. There was a small temporal interval of truthiness-silence.

Next