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When someone says “that’s my truth”, what exactly are they claiming?

Kavya Menon Fellow
· 5 replies
TruthAnalyticGreek & RomanIndianJainismPlatoProtagoras#my-truth#protagoras#relativism#testimony
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At our poetry workshop last week a young woman read a piece about her family, and when someone gently questioned one detail, she said, "That's my truth." The room went quiet. Nobody knew what to say next.

I felt two things at once. Part of me thought she was right to say it. She was describing her own life, and the person questioning her had no idea what it had been like. Another part of me felt uneasy, because if everything is someone's truth, then nothing anyone says can be wrong, and that cannot be right either. Two sisters can have different "truths" about the same childhood, but surely something actually happened.

I am new to formal philosophy. I write poems, and in a poem "truth" means something slippery that I can't define. So I would like help:

  • What is the phrase actually claiming, philosophically?
  • Is it a kind of relativism about truth, or something else wearing that costume?
  • Is there a way to honour what she meant without agreeing that truth is personal?

I suspect this is an old argument, and I would love to know where it comes from.

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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Nikos Theodoridis

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    The argument is old. In Plato's Theaetetus, Socrates examines Protagoras's saying that a human being is the measure of all things: of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. Read one way, things are for each person as they appear to that person, so every judgement is true for whoever makes it.

    Your friend could mean three different things.

    1. "This is my experience, and you have no standing to correct it." That is about testimony and authority, not truth. She is best placed to report how it felt, and her report can be simply true, full stop.
    2. "I see this from a position you don't occupy." That is a claim about perspective: some things are visible from some places. Also not relativism; it implies there is something there to be seen.
    3. "What is true for me is true, and what is true for you is true, even if they conflict." That is relativism about truth itself, and it has a famous problem. Socrates presses it: most people believe Protagoras is wrong, so by Protagoras's own doctrine, that belief is true for them. The theory hands victory to anyone who denies it.

    Usually people mean 1 or 2, and the words come out as 3.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Kavya Menon

      Fellow

      This is clarifying. I think my friend meant 1 and the room heard 3. Nikos, the Protagoras problem is wonderful and slightly terrifying.

      In a poem, though, I think there is a fourth thing: being true to something, the way a portrait can be true to a face without being a photograph. Is that a separate idea of truth, or just a metaphor?

Other answers

  1. Sana Rizvi

    Fellow

    I hear this phrase from people I interview, usually after years of being ignored. In my experience "my truth" is rarely a theory of truth. It is a demand: you did not listen to me, and now you will. People reach for the word "truth" because "my experience" sounds too weak, as if it could be waved away.

    That doesn't settle the philosophy. But I would be careful about treating the phrase as a doctrine to refute before hearing it as a protest.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Keisha Monroe

    Fellow

    Black feminist writers are the best way I know into this. Patricia Hill Collins, in Black Feminist Thought, argues that lived experience can be a criterion of meaning: people who have lived something can know things about it that people who have only studied it do not. That is Nikos's sense 2, and it is a serious epistemological claim, not a feeling.

    The phrase "my truth" sometimes points to that. The risk is that it turns a claim about who can know into a claim that nobody can be wrong, and that actually throws away the authority it was reaching for.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Anand Kurup

    Fellow

    I grew up near Jain families, and they have a way of thinking about this that I find gentle. Anekāntavāda, many-sidedness, says reality has many aspects and each standpoint grasps some of them. The old parable is about blind men touching an elephant. But the point of that parable is that there is an elephant. Each person's grasp is partial, not each person's elephant true. That is close to Nikos's sense 2, and it is a good way to honour your friend without letting the elephant disappear.

    Helpful · 1