Silent assumptions: those pre-conscious refrains that haunt our lives, insidiously, sometimes perniciously, creeping along the side-lines of awareness. They are the truths amassed along the way, always there, like old friends, we don’t have to hear from them often, but they’re always there, keeping things consistent, secure, we’re old friends my assumptions and me. Silent assumptions whisper to us, they are fervent and insistent. Silent assumptions serve to preserve ‘the truth’, as we know it, they are the colours that stain our experience of life.  

‘Everything will be fine, so long as I’m…’ , ‘do as you would be done by, be done by as you did’, ‘bad things happen to bad people’, ‘The world is a simple place, beware the over-complicator’.  But what if your assumption was…‘there is no truth’? How do we preserve a version of a truth that doesn’t exist? 

Six little words, with assonance, ‘the pursuit of the truth is futile’, six little words with cadence ‘the pursuit of the truth is futile’, six provocative, but frankly rather depressing little words. I heard this brazen phrase when I was 20; thrown into the air like a bag of feathers. I loved the way it jerkily, ambivalently floated in the air, ‘the pursuit of the truth is futile’. I trapped it in my mind. Like an iridescent bug, with a pin straight through the middle, I trapped it like a Victorian naturalist. I pinned it for examination, 21 years ago. 

A rather apt analogy given its provenance: Lundy Island, Exeter University, second year animal psychology field work. Our dear deceased lecturer Dr Denver Daniels is the man responsible for etching this mantra in my mind. A scientist. 

‘Denver loved Lundy’, I remember reading of his passing with great sadness a few years after I graduated and his ashes were scattered at the North End.  Yet his words linger on. As scientists our mission surely is to move closer to truth, to eliminate that which is not true, to chase that which increasingly may be? But maybe this is what Denver was getting at, maybe this is why social science has an ongoing struggle.

Just as we move closer, within snatching distance. Just like that feather wafting on a warm breeze. Just like the scuttling iridescent bug, who tantalisingly stops, just long enough to let you think you can capture him, the truth shifts. Life is on the move, moment to moment, person to person. The truth that we are aiming to pin exists for just a moment. But, then maybe the pursuit of the truth being futile is a red herring?! For what is the point of the science that we love, if there are no truths to reveal? 

When ‘the pursuit of the truth is futile’, does this make life uncertain? Is uncertainty okay? Does uncertainty make us weak in the face of those who are certain, but arguably wrong? Does truth equal meaning? And if ‘the pursuit of the truth is futile, what in God’s name ought one to be doing instead? So many questions Denver, you left us with so many questions…and thank goodness for that! For if there is one thing of which I am sure, I will forever be glad to be uncertain!

So what is truth? Truth is consensus, truth is emergent, truth is dynamic and truth is trust. And how shall know it? I will ask each person I meet to draw the truth on tracing paper and I will collect the truths and stack them together, I will watch and truth will emerge.  And I will endeavour to meet many people and I will ensure I keep my stash of tracing paper well stocked. I will expect the truth to wax and wane like oil on water and I will lay blotting paper on the surface and catch a fleeting image of truth. And I will repeat this experiment over and over again, seeking patterns in the swirling truths. And then I will look upon the truth I have captured and I will say this is the truth as I saw it. It will be my version and I am happy with that. 

As we draw to a close I would like to share one of my favourite aspects of psychology; the term is drawn from the qualitative side of this wonderful pursuit; reflexivity, which comes in two flavours, personal and epistemological.  Reflexivity is about allowing your reader an insight into who you are, the scientist behind the science, the maker behind the made, the constructor behind the construct. 

Reflexivity is about humility, it is about allowing the reader to understand the biases that you know may have affected your research. You may not be aware of how, but you are transparent enough to lay bare some possibilities. Personal reflexivity is about your story, it demonstrates that the research question you have chosen to ask is just one of many but this was yours and here’s why. The reader is left to make his or her own decisions about the extent to which your version of truth is a useful match for his or her own areas of interest. 

Epistemological reflexivity acknowledges that as pursuers of truth, psychologists take differing approaches and use different methods which will determine the nature of the truth unveiled. 

We are all prone to ‘partisan bias’; selecting and storing evidence which fits with our expectations and that confirms our version of truth. I call it the ‘fly paper’ theory.  And so may we continue to cast our net into the world, blindly imagining how terribly objective we are, gathering together a collection of percepts all of which coincidentally confirm that, guess what, we were right! Unless of course we believe, that ‘the pursuit of the truth is futile’, in which case we’re just going to enjoy the ride, for what else is there to do!