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Are You Really Certain of Your Opinion? Probability, Certainty, and Truth
A Sense of Certainty
Many people claim to be holders of the “truth”. Many claim their words as “truth”, and they speak with certainty, as if there is no possibility whatsoever that their words are not true.
John K. Samson, of the Winnipeg band Weakerthans, sang of “a certain sense of certainty”, and it seems everyone has this certain sense these days.
These days, everyone has an opinion. These days, everyone has a strong opinion: about what is real, what is Fake News, what is the nature of truth itself. WB Yeats wrote a century ago “the centre can’t hold”. Indeed, it can’t. The comforting certainty of metanarratives has fallen away. For some, these metanarratives were never comforting in the first place, but rather cold, hard, brutal and murderous oppression. Postmodernity stepped in and offered relief from metanarratives, which often serve mostly those in power. As the postmodern world progressed, historians may one day say, people became less comfortable with shared truths, and more certain of their own truths.
If postmodernity was about “post-Truth”, I would argue we are now in the “post-post-Truth” era. Whereas Truth was to a certain extent replaced with individual truth, we are now in an era where anything can be true, but at…
