Truth is less straightforward than might appear. More often than not, if you try to establish truth on some divisive question from first principles—honestly, wi

Truth is less straightforward than might appear. More often than not, if you try to establish truth on some divisive question from first principles—honestly, without any hidden agenda of your own—you arrive at the unknown (no consensus in the field) and/or philosophical matter (out of scope of natural science) before you can blink. (Of course, that’s in addition to the fact that all science is inherently flawed and biased, because we are.) In case of politically divisive questions, as an example, these two sentences can contradict each other and be true at the same time: 1) “abortion is killing a living being”, and 2) “abortion is a free person exercising control over her own body”. The host of questions you’d need to explore in order to make a point of truth is vast and includes the definition of life, whether there is free will, whether consequentialism is better than deontology, etc.; and if you claim that this does not matter then congratulations—you have already adopted a position on some politically divisive question. In philosophical terms, truth in absolute sense would require having some hypothetical access to underlying reality; since we can never have that (as all of our access to reality is mediated by our mind), we only have access to lossy models or maps; and because there is always more than one model or map that can be useful depending on the purpose, there is always a subset of claims where one has the opposite truth value (or no truth value) in one of the maps. In short, not only no one “owns” the truth, but anyone who claims to actually “know” it is being delusional or misleading; the solution to alienating political divisiveness is not obtaining unobtainable objective truth but finding common ground.