by Joe Miller
Should we care about the truth? That sounds like a question with a fairly obvious answer. Of course we should care about truth.
But like a lot of the questions that vex philosophers, this one is more complicated than it initially seems.
Consider the proposition, “At 12:59:59 p.m. on 23 February 2026, there are 7.4981 quintillion grains of sand on Earth.” I neither know nor care whether that statement is true. I doubt anyone reading this piece does either.
If we cared about truth as such, then knowing the exact number of grains of sand on Earth just before midnight on 23 February 2026 would be exactly as important as knowing any other true claim.
In practice, though, we care very much about some truths and very little about others.
As the philosopher Sam Dresser puts the point, “[T]hat something is true doesn’t justify our interest or commitment. Instead, we care about truths that inform specific enquiries or projects.”
We care about the truth of an answer if and only if we care about the question.
I’ve been thinking about truth lately because I’ve been experimenting with writing fiction, and one of the biggest ways that fiction differs from nonfiction is that fiction isn’t true.
I’d guess that I’ve written at least a million words of nonfiction across my career thus far. With that many words, I’ve made more than a few mistakes. That is, some of the things I have written have claims that later prove to be false.
But writing an email that gets the date of a meeting wrong isn’t the same thing as writing fiction.
For example, in 1996, the psychologist John Bargh published a paper alleging that if you prime someone by asking them to think about words stereotypically associated with the elderly, then the person will walk slower than normal.
That turns out not to be true. To date, no one has been able to repeat Bargh’s findings.
But I don’t think we’d want to reclassify Bargh’s work as fiction. Instead, we’d probably categorize it as bad nonfiction.
There is plenty of bad nonfiction in the world. Outdated science texts. James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces, in which he chronicles events that didn’t happen. Colin Powell’s UN Security Council testimony about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Every episode of Tucker Carlson podcast.
These things are not fiction. They’re just false.
But saying false things is different from what we do when we use the word “unicorn” or the name “Merlin.” The philosopher Gottlob Frege describes these as words that lack a referent (that is, there is nothing in the world that corresponds to Merlin) but have a sense (we have a way of understanding the name Merlin.)
I’m partial to a framework developed by an American philosopher named David Lewis. Lewis introduces a concept he calls possible worlds, an idea that is meant to help understand something called modal logic.
Modal logic attempts to distinguish between two levels of true claims. Consider the following:
1. It snowed in Marlinton on February 15, 2026.
2. A triangle has three sides.
The first sentence is true, but we can easily imagine it not being true. The temperature is slightly warmer and precipitation falls as rain. There’s slightly less moisture in the air, so no precipitation falls at all. In other words, it did snow in Marlinton on February 15, 2026, but it’s possible that it did not.
The second sentence is always true. A thing with two sides or with four sides isn’t a triangle. A triangle without three sides is impossible.
Lewis says that when we say “it is possible that it did not snow in Marlinton on February 15, 2026” what we mean is that there is a world (not this one) for which that statement is true.
When we say that a triangle without three sides is impossible, what we really mean is that triangles have three sides in every possible world.
Interestingly, philosophers have used possible worlds as a way of describing modal logic since at least 1710, when Gottfried Leibniz argued that God must create the best possible world (a claim that Voltaire would later satirize in Candide).
Lewis differs in that he posits that these possible worlds are real, just inaccessible to us. Somewhere around a quarter of physicists accept something like modal realism as an explanation for quantum mechanics—that, in Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, the cat is not both dead and alive until observed, and instead the universe simply splits into two worlds with the cat alive in one and dead in the other.
Physicists call this the many worlds interpretation, and it’s the basis of all kinds of science fiction, including the recent Apple TV+ series, “Dark Matter,” based on the Blake Crouch novel of the same name. It’s worth checking out either/both.
Lewis can also help us make sense of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction.
Nonfiction is a set of claims that are meant to describe the possible world in which we actually live. Fiction, by contrast, is aimed at describing a different possible world.
That account ends up putting a lot of weight on the author’s intentions. And that’s a whole new can of worms…
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
