Truth vs. Truthiness (updated)

[Update 24 Feb 2012]  The book discussed below  is to be reviewed, and the underlying issues wrestled with,  in this Sunday's NYTimes Book Review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/books/review/the-lifespan-of-a-fact-by-john-dagata-and-jim-fingal.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1

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[originally posted 16 Feb]]

The Koran is often printed with a standard commentary running around each page.  In the center, the dramatic, exhortatory, exclamatory text of the Koran itself, presented as the Word of God.  In the margins,  scholarly parsings of grammar, textual variants, etc.   The format does not really create dialectical tension, since the commentary, though straightforward and fact-based, does not intend to upset any apple-carts, nor to so much as bruise any individual apple.   And indeed, at UC Berkeley, where I sat in (for a while, before dropping out in disgust) on a Koran class for students in the Middle Eastern Studies department, “taught” or rather doled out  by a dour Scottish convert to Islam, the instruction -- unusual for a graduate-level class -- consisted almost entirely of first reading aloud a verse of the Koran, and then the commentary:  verse, commentary; verse, commentary.  No meta-commentary was either given or solicited by our dominie;  from the wall of his cramped and airless office, a giant poster of the Ayatollah Khomeini glared down  as if to reinforce the point.

A quite interesting publishing phenomenon has now revived the format:  text in the center, commentary around the margins.  But now the text is that of a magazine bloviator, a dude of truthitude; the commentary is that of a relentless fact-checker, a veritable Inspector Javert of the Correspondence Theory of Truth; and it is published in the margins  along with an acerbic anti-commentary or surrejoinder  by the original author.   The text itself -- typical journalistic syrup -- does not in itself merit such attention;  but the dialectical approach is quite interesting, and far above the norm of smug journalism.  You can read all about it here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/02/the_lifespan_of_a_fact_essayist_john_d_agata_defends_his_right_to_fudge_the_truth_.single.html

I posted a satirical version of this sort of thing awhile earlier:

Text;

Commentary plus anti-Commentary (not to mention some “readers’” “Comments”).

For our other posts on Truthiness, click here.

For serious philosophical examinations of Truth, here.

[Update:] A commentor at the Slate site points out that the Talmud as well is published in such a format;  and that this exemplar may even have inspired this latest publishing venture.

Another valuably observes:

Herzog famously rejects the "truth of accountants" in favor of something he calls "ecstatic truth", the proper target even of his documentary films.

While such an approach can certainly be abused, there is indeed a time for non-actuarial veracity, as you may learn from the Murphy Brothers  here:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2010/01/murphy-on-double-entry-bookkeeping.html

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The older and more classic  a text becomes, the more likely it is to appear in scholarly editions with festoons of footnotes -- usually not wreathed around the margins, Koran-fashion, but relegated to the bottom of the page.   And yet one such edition, undertaken  in all probability  with no inkling that controversy would arise,  winds up taking issue with the object text in an unsettling way.  Henri Chamard, in his édition critique of the celebrated La deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (sic; such is the diplomatic spelling) by Joachim du Bellay, is brought nolens volens to the conclusion that du Bellay pretty much plagiarized the bulk of it from an essay by an Italian, one Speroni.  The footnotes thus often consist of the source-quotations from that earlier work, the scholar functioning, not so much as a fact-checker, but as a veracity-checker, or honesty-checker.

[Update 16 III 12] More truthitude:
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/this-american-life-retracts-episode-on-apples-suppliers-in-china/?ref=global-home

[Update 1 Nov 2012]

Mitt Romney: more like "subtruthiness" or "hypotruthitude":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romneys-kamikaze-strategy/2012/11/01/27ca3140-2435-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html?hpid=z3
"There's been quite a bit of consternation among reporters lately about Mitt Romney’s refusal to answer their questions. And rightly so. But let’s be clear on why Romney is refusing to engage reporters. If he did, he’d face questions about the mounting instances of dishonesty his campaign has resorted to in the final stretch ...
In the race’s final days, Romney has adopted what you might call a Kamikaze strategy. His campaign is cranking out a startling number of falsehoods and sleazy attacks..."

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