A Pandemic of Conjecture: Truth, Reality, Consciousness and How Epistemic Tribalism Divides Us

One of the most corrosive habits in modern public discourse is the tendency to decide whether something is true purely by assessing whether we approve of the person saying it. Society increasingly evaluates information through identity before evidence: Who said it? What political camp are they associated with? What have they said before? Do people like me approve of them? Only after those questions have been answered do we decide whether the claim itself deserves to be heard. That is almost exactly backwards. Truth is a property of propositions, regardless of the social identity of the person who happens to communicate them. That is not ideological weakness; it is what independent thinking actually looks like.

There is no universal reality, but there is universal truth. The reason there is no universal reality is because reality exists in a fluid context. Reality is conditional. It changes with position, scale, time, biology, available information, and the system doing the perceiving. The reality of an animal is not the reality of a human; the reality of someone standing inside an event differs from that of someone reconstructing it twenty years later. Neither difference means that truth itself has changed. Truth can be understood as what remains invariant across those contextual realities. Truth is an accurate account of what is, while perceived truth is what we believe to be true.

Truth itself is not socially constructed, but what individuals, institutions or societies present and accept as truth can be. The difficulty is therefore not necessarily defining truth, but accessing it without distortion.

Reality is context-dependent; truth is context-transcendent.

Saying there is no single universal reality does not require saying that every account is equally true. Different realities can contain incomplete perceptions, distortions, or contradictions. Universal truth is precisely what allows those realities to be evaluated against something beyond themselves. What appears to be a contradiction between two realities may sometimes arise because each is sampling a different part of the same underlying truth. In that sense, truth need not correspond to one privileged perspective; it is the structure capable of containing all legitimate perspectives without contradiction. Everyone occupies a contextual reality and perceives it differently, but they do not have their own truth. What is, simply is; truth corresponds to what is.

People encounter their perceived realities through information, language, institutions, media, memory, sensory perception and interpretation. If those channels are selectively controlled, distorted, censored or falsely contextualised, then the underlying truth remains unchanged, but the perception of it can be significantly altered.

If you alter the representation of reality, you can alter how people understand it. Alter their understanding, and you can influence their behaviour. That behaviour can then produce material consequences, meaning manipulated perception can eventually contribute to changing reality itself. This is why distinguishing truth from perceived reality is important. Reality may be contextual and fluid, and our perception of it may be highly vulnerable to influence, but truth remains the reference point against which those perceptions can ultimately be tested.

A distorted world does not usually hide truth by removing all evidence. More often, it overwhelms people with competing narratives, selective information, emotional framing, repetition, incentives and social pressure. The danger is unexamined perception. Consciousness creates the possibility of interrupting that process. It allows a person to notice: What am I being shown? What am I not being shown? Why does this framing feel persuasive? What assumptions am I carrying into this? What evidence would change my mind? The critical step is awareness. Without it, perception tends to become belief automatically. With it, perception becomes something that can be inspected.

Consciousness alone, however, is not enough. A highly conscious person can still be mistaken. Steering toward truth also requires epistemic discipline: tolerating uncertainty, separating observation from interpretation, seeking contradictory evidence, checking independent sources, recognising emotional investment, and being willing to revise a preferred explanation. There is also an important paradox here: The closer someone believes they already possess the whole truth, the less likely they may be to test their perception against it. Consciousness needs to include awareness of one's own fallibility. Truth is always the reference point; consciousness is the navigational capacity.

A person can be wrong about many things, yet still be right about others. Someone whose politics I dislike can expose something important. Someone I respect can misunderstand evidence, repeat misinformation or simply make a mistake. This is what it means to be able to hold complexity. Human beings are not internally consistent repositories of truth or falsehood. We are complicated, fallible and context-dependent. Treating people as either trustworthy or untrustworthy in their entirety encourages us to outsource our thinking to social allegiance.

Of course, source credibility matters. If someone has repeatedly fabricated evidence, that should affect how cautiously we approach their claims. Expertise matters too. A specialist speaking within their field likely deserves a different evidential weighting from someone speculating outside it. However, credibility should influence how carefully we investigate a claim; it should not determine the claim’s truth in advance.

If a controversial person posts a court document, the question is not whether we like the person. The question is whether the document is authentic and whether it supports what is being claimed. If somebody we dislike cites a scientific paper, we can read the paper. If somebody we admire cites one, we should still read it. Evidence does not become stronger because it was shared by our allies or weaker because it was shared by our opponents.

There is another layer to this that comes from genuinely knowing a subject. I do not mean intuition in the vague sense of simply feeling that something is true. I mean the kind of understanding that develops after years of reading, comparing evidence, following claims back to their sources, noticing patterns, testing assumptions and building a coherent picture of what is already established. Cognitive labour changes the recipient’s capacity to evaluate information. The identity of the messenger becomes contextual information rather than the foundation of judgement.

That does not mean expertise confers certainty, nor does it remove the need for verification. It means that accumulated knowledge gives you an independent framework against which to assess plausibility, coherence and evidential fit. You no longer need to ask whether somebody is socially approved, institutionally legitimate or personally agreeable before deciding whether their claim deserves consideration. You can compare what they are saying with evidence you already understand and then verify where necessary. The question shifts from, Can I trust this person? to, Is what they are saying actually true?

There is a peculiar cognitive discomfort in encountering something well-supported or demonstrably true from a person we regard as profoundly unreliable. The mind wants coherence: trustworthy people should say trustworthy things and untrustworthy people should say untrustworthy things. When those categories collide, cognitive dissonance appears. Accepting the statement can feel, irrationally, like rehabilitating the speaker, while rejecting the speaker can begin to bleed into rejecting the statement. This creates an extraordinary vulnerability in public discourse because information can become contaminated by association with its messenger. Whether deliberately exploited or occurring organically, attaching a truthful proposition to a sufficiently polarising or discredited spokesperson can make that proposition socially radioactive. The proposition itself has not changed; only its social packaging has.

We already recognise the inverse phenomenon when charismatic, prestigious or institutionally trusted people make weak claims seem more credible than they are. Intellectual independence requires resisting both effects. A villain can tell the truth, just as a hero can lie. The key is to know the difference without needing either character to tell us what reality is.

We have become extraordinarily good at identifying which tribe a person belongs to and remarkably poor at remaining curious once we have done so. People increasingly treat disagreement as information about character. If someone disagrees with us on one issue, we begin predicting what else they must believe. This is what it means to have lost the ability to hold complexity.

I believe this is one of the most fundamental mechanisms underlying human division, and quite possibly the primary one: once identity becomes attached to belief, disagreement ceases to be merely disagreement and becomes a threat to belonging, character and self.

Real intellectual pluralism requires something much harder than simply tolerating people who agree with us. It requires being able to say: I disagree with you profoundly about this, but I think you are right about that. It requires being able to challenge somebody without dehumanising them, hear an uncomfortable argument without adopting it, and change our minds about one proposition without feeling that we have betrayed an entire identity.

Disagreement should not automatically terminate curiosity. In fact, disagreement is often where curiosity becomes most valuable. Instead of asking, How do I prove this person wrong?, we might ask, What are they seeing that I am not? What evidence would make their position reasonable? Which part of their argument is strongest? Which part is weakest? Where exactly do we diverge?

Those questions do not require neutrality or passivity. We can still criticise bad reasoning, expose falsehoods and draw moral boundaries. Curiosity is not the absence of judgement. It is the refusal to make judgement before understanding.

There is also an important difference between challenging an idea and reducing a person to that idea. Respectful disagreement does not mean pretending all viewpoints are equally supported. Some claims are demonstrably false. Some arguments are incoherent. Some behaviour deserves condemnation. However, none of that requires abandoning intellectual discipline. In fact, the stronger our disagreement, the more carefully we should distinguish between evidence, interpretation, rhetoric and identity.

The alternative is epistemic tribalism: my side tells the truth, your side lies; my experts are credible, yours are compromised; information from my group is examined sympathetically, information from yours is examined suspiciously. Once that pattern becomes entrenched, evidence itself becomes secondary. Every new fact is processed according to whether it threatens or reinforces the group. At that point, conversation become limited to defending identities.

Curiosity offers a way out of that trap. Curiosity says that hearing an argument does not mean endorsing it. Reading someone does not mean joining them. Sharing one statement does not mean subscribing to everything that person has ever believed. Changing your mind is not humiliation. Finding common ground with an opponent is not betrayal. Admitting that somebody you dislike has made a valid point does not diminish you. Quite the opposite, it demonstrates intellectual independence.

A healthier information culture would therefore teach people not simply to ask, Who said this?, but to continue: What exactly is being claimed? What evidence supports it? Can I verify it independently? What has been omitted? What alternative explanations exist? What would falsify this conclusion? Those questions protect us from misinformation far more effectively than loyalty ever could.

One of the most radical things we can do in an increasingly polarised world is retain the ability to remain curious about people with whom we disagree. Not because every opinion deserves acceptance, but because no political faction, institution, profession or individual has the monopoly on truth.

We should be capable of calling one another out, sometimes forcefully, while still listening. We should be capable of saying you are wrong here without concluding therefore everything you say is worthless. We should also be capable of recognising truth wherever it appears, even when it arrives through someone we would never otherwise choose to stand beside.

Truth is a property of propositions, regardless of the social identity of the person who happens to communicate them. That is not ideological weakness; it is what independent thinking actually looks like. We may never perceive truth completely, because perception is often necessarily partial and contextual. Curiosity and conscious examination can reduce distortion and move our model of reality closer to what actually is.

Image: An eye in a star, the spokes of which divide the spectrum of colours; putti hold a prism, a telescope, a rod refracted in water, and a camera obscura; representing optics. Engraving by J. Chapman, 1820, after A.D. Macquin. Wellcome. Public Domain.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain.

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