Truth is not the same as Fact
Why the Humanities are dying and why we must save them
I pared this essay down from 15,000 words to 1,500. It was initially a long and involved tour through the history of the concept of truth. If you want the nuanced version, let me know at zohar@lightningstudios.ai and I’ll publish it.
Why read the Bible or the Iliad or Plato? They don’t say anything “true” in the sene of “factual” and whatever facts they provide are trivial. The historic details of the Trojan War or the Davidic Kingdom or Plato’s adventure into the politics of Syracuse are not the reason most read the Classics.
This is an essay about truth, not in the sense of fact, but in the sense of significance. I will try to make the case for a more expansive definition of truth because it is core to my intuition for why religion, art, literature, and philosophy, continue to matter even in a scientific and rational age.
We can sequence genomes but struggle to say what makes life meaningful. We generate more data than any civilization in history yet feel uncertain about what’s worth knowing.
This isn’t accidental. It’s the consequence of a quiet philosophical victory: the idea that “truth” means one thing, correspondence to measurable facts. If a claim can’t be empirically verified, this view suggests, it isn’t really true. It might be meaningful to you, aesthetically pleasing, culturally significant, but not true.
This is scientism, and it’s the reason people like SBF boast that they don’t read literature.
Take two statements: “Water boils at 100°C” and “King Lear reveals something true about pride and recognition.” Both use the word “true,” but they mean different things.
The first is correspondence truth: my claim matches observable reality. This is the backbone of science, engineering, medicine—domains where verification matters and lives depend on accuracy. It’s extraordinarily powerful, and it’s given us antibiotics, airplanes, and the internet.
The second is disclosure truth: the play reveals something about human existence that was previously hidden or inarticulate. There was no actual Lear, yet we’re not speaking metaphorically. We mean the play genuinely discloses how pride blinds us, how love demands recognition, how insight often comes too late.
The Greeks had a word for this: aletheia (ἀλήθεια)—literally “un-forgetting” or “un-concealing.” Truth wasn’t primarily about matching propositions to facts but about revelation, bringing-into-presence what matters. A great play, a profound philosophical argument, a sacred text—these “set truth to work” by opening dimensions of reality we’ve lived but never articulated.
Here’s what we’ve forgotten: disclosure came first. Etymologically and historically, truth-as-revelation preceded truth-as-correspondence. English “truth” derives from “troth” (as in betrothal)—a pledge, a standing-by. Hebrew emunah (faith) means faithfulness, steadfastness. Truth was about authenticity, commitment, revealing what matters—not primarily propositional accuracy.
Then something shifted. Perhaps with scholastic philosophy’s emphasis on propositions, perhaps with modernity’s scientific triumph, “truth” narrowed to mean only correspondence. This created our current world: science monopolizes truth, and everything else must either justify itself in scientific terms or accept second-class status as “merely subjective.”
When truth means only correspondence, the humanities face terminal crisis. Philosophy produces no falsifiable hypotheses. Literature makes no testable predictions. Religious wisdom offers no measurable outcomes. On these grounds, defunding humanities and converting them to STEM training is rational.
But here’s what we lose: the language to say that moral claims can be true, that beauty reveals truth, that some lives are truer than others in ways that matter more than facts. We lose the ability to defend humanistic inquiry as truth-seeking rather than mere cultural preservation.
More practically: when administrators ask “What do the humanities produce?”, we have no good answer if truth means only correspondence. We can’t say with confidence: We seek truth. We stammer about “critical thinking” or “cultural literacy”—defensive postures that concede the essential ground.
The obvious objection: doesn’t this invite relativism? If disclosure is truth, can’t anyone claim anything “discloses truth for them”? I can’t really shake this critique, but that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Below I’ll lay out some standards that might help us intuit whether we’ve lost the plot.
Disclosure has standards, even if they’re not correspondence standards. Five criteria work together:
Depth: King Lear grapples with multiple dimensions simultaneously, refuses easy answers, rewards repeated engagement across centuries. A greeting card might resonate, but it’s shallow. We can argue about depth, but the distinction isn’t arbitrary—it’s why great books remain great.
Fruitfulness: Darwin’s evolution, Freud’s unconscious, Hegel’s theory of the master-slave dialectic, proved generative. They opened inquiry, enabled explanation, created traditions of interpretation. Conspiracy theories prove sterile by comparison.
Intersubjective sustainability: Genuine disclosure creates communities of interpretation across time and culture. Torah has sustained millennia of commentary. Buddhist sutras generate endless insight. “My personal truth” that convinces no one else is suspect.
Existential commitment: Truth-as-troth means more than “this resonates.” It means: I’m willing to stake my existence on this. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov cannot live in a world where God permits innocent suffering—that’s a disclosure-level truth-test, though not a correspondence test.
Coherence with lived experience: While disclosure doesn’t reduce to correspondence, it can’t systematically contradict actual experience. Worldviews requiring constant compartmentalization fail this test.
These standards let us distinguish profound disclosure from shallow sentiment, wisdom from delusion. They’re qualitative rather than quantitative, but they’re rigorous. Like legal reasoning or aesthetic criticism, they involve judgment—but informed, disciplined judgment that can be cultivated and debated.
I must acknowledge the force of the rationalist objection: My standards for disclosure are themselves contestable. “Depth” and “fruitfulness” require judgment shaped by education and culture. I cannot offer a measurement that settles disputes decisively the way a thermometer does.
But here’s the question: Does this make the judgment arbitrary? When judges interpret “cruel and unusual punishment,” there’s no measurement for cruelty, yet interpretation isn’t arbitrary. We have principles, precedents, reasoning, even when judges disagree. Similarly, depth-judgments involve cultivated sensibility, but they’re defeasible: I’d revise my assessment if shown that Lear collapses under scrutiny or that critical consensus is groupthink.
I must also concede: Correspondence-methods achieve cumulative consensus in ways disclosure-methods don’t. Physics converges on answers; philosophy doesn’t, or not in the same way. This reflects something real about their different domains and questions.
So why resist the clean division: science seeks truth (correspondence), humanities seek meaning (not truth)?
Because this division implies questions of meaning, value, and purpose are less about reality than questions science addresses. It suggests “What makes life meaningful?” is ontologically different from “What is reality’s structure?”—as if meaning were less real than mass.
I reject this. Meaning is part of reality. Value is part of reality. Scientific method’s inability to capture these shows its limits, not their unreality. Both science and humanities seek truth—different aspects using different methods. Science seeks truth about causal structure and measurable properties. Humanities seek truth about meaning, value, significance. Neither monopolizes “truth.”
Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book makes a crucial point: genre determines how to read. Read physics as poetry and you’ll misread it. Read poetry as physics and you’ll also fail. The text’s truth depends on recognizing its genre.
This extends beyond books to truth-claims themselves. “God is love”—what genre of claim is this?
As correspondence, it’s empirically problematic (God isn’t observable, love isn’t measurable). As disclosure, it attempts to reveal reality’s fundamental structure—that being is characterized by self-giving, that love is essence not accident. This invites existential testing: Does living as if this were true disclose a world worth inhabiting? Does it enable flourishing across generations?
Genre-awareness means recognizing that demanding correspondence-verification of disclosure-claims is a category mistake. But it cuts both ways: we can ask what standards do apply, what makes one disclosure better than another.
We’re at risk of losing disclosure’s language and practice entirely. A generation educated only in STEM will be technically proficient but existentially impoverished—able to manipulate reality but unable to articulate what makes manipulation worthwhile.
Great books aren’t museum pieces. They’re technologies of disclosure: tools for revealing structures of existence that remain hidden in ordinary experience. When you read Plato’s Republic, you’re not just learning ancient opinions. You’re engaging with disclosure about justice, truth, and soul that has proven inexhaustibly rich for 2,400 years.
This is why projects like Alexandria matter. Significance is real, and disclosure-truth deserves the same status as correspondence-truth.
An AI tutor can help navigate these texts—not by extracting “correct answers” but by facilitating genuine encounter with disclosure.
We shouldn’t choose between correspondence and disclosure.