Distinction

[supergee]

The English language thinks there is a difference between fiction and nonfiction. Others disagree.

Thanx to Metafilter

Comments

[arlie]

It's sad enough that huge quantities of English discourse use the modes appropriate to non-fiction while stating untruths.

I lost a friend over her "true experience" article in a pagan/neo-age venue, that was in fact nothing of the sort. She didn't understand why I felt disillusioned and betrayed, by her, by her publisher, and by what was clearly a shared understanding among such writers that their articles only needed to be "True", not factual, accurate, etc. etc. She probably felt I was judging her unfairly - and in a way I was. (She wasn't the only one, just the one I'd "caught".)

And this is small potatoes compared to the utterances of advertisers, politicians, executives, etc.

Fundamentally, when anything can be said in the mode of truth, nothing can be believed. You know only things you have personally experienced, plus (to an extent) those claims from sources you can reasonably surmise to be accurate on a given topic. Of course that's always true, but in a world of unlabelled fiction, the set of likely-to-be-valid sources is drastically reduced - e.g. nothing written is reliable. Those with good "soft skills" may do better at finding potential accuracy than others - and those who are well tuned to their social milieu may believe in the accuracy of many of their sources, quite possibly falsely.

Now maybe that's always true - the newpaper is no more likely to be accurate than a work of scripture, or a story unabashedly written to entertain. A text book is no more likely to be accurate than an advertisement. But I don't believe so, not even with recent online developments ;-(

And as for truth with a capital T - the sort of thing that's supposed to be true to some higher reality, while factually grossly inaccurate - frankly, I call "bullshit". That's the sort of "truth" that shows females delighting in being raped, and minorities being stupid/evil/etc. It merely has to ring true to its (prejudiced and/or wishful thinking) authors and primary audience.