Maybe there is truth---real truth, pure unequivocal, irrefutable, unchanging truth.

Unfortunately, we learn about the world through the foggy windows of our senses. We reflect on it with the imperfect instrument of our reason. And we rely on the accounts of others, which we are so poorly equipped to evaluate. Other minds have their own motives and agendas, and they make honest mistakes as well as concoct outrageous lies. Even the best and most reliable witnesses have their stories distorted in the retelling. So what CAN we really know about the world? The answer: very little. An what we do know is subject to constant revision and questioning.

We try to come up with formal systems, or procedures, to minimize the possibility of error. We have the rules of legal evidence as they are applied in the law, scientific method and experiment, logic, peer-reviewed publication in learned journals, consensus of the leading practitioners, but any of us can come up with multiple examples of how all of these mechanisms has failed at one time or another. And those failures aren't always the malicious lies of villains, very often we just miss something, or misinterpret something. Or we are innocently biased by the invisible or the unknowable.

We are limited, not only by the crudity of our bodies and minds, but by the fact we are restricted in both space and time. We are part of the universe, a subset of it. How can we possibly understand it? We exist only briefly in a very tiny piece of it, we directly experience neither the subatomic realm of the particle physicist, nor the cosmic overview of the cosmologist. And at right angles to those axes of space and time there is the spectrum of complexity: what really concerns us is not the building blocks of the universe. We deal instead with human concerns, with relationships and connections, historical events, spatial arrangements. How can a knowledge of Newton's Laws or Maxwell's equations teach you how to raise your children, or live in a community, or conduct yourself in your profession?

You can stare at the chess pieces all you want but they can't tell you how to play the game. If they are properly placed on the board you still don't know the rules. If you learn how they move and under what circumstances, you still know nothing about tactics or strategy--how to win or at least force a stalemate. And there are deeper levels still, a chess scholar can study the record of a past game he has never seen and still recognize the style of the play; "this is a young Lasker playing Botvinnik in his prime. Lasker was White.". Sometimes we know things and we don't even know how. Even our own intelligence sometimes operates in ways we can't begin to understand or predict.

So does this mean there is no truth, or that there is no point in seeking it out? Of course not. Its our job to try. Just don't believe anyone who tells you he's got it all figured out. He's either lying to you, or he's just plain wrong.