## Resilient Koan 08 - Truth and Truisms ### Koan: How do you make comprehensive truth claims of the whole from examining only a partial aspect? ### Discussion: We discussed the construction of ecologies of inquiry and the distinctions between the common criterion in levels of inquiry. The organism, community, population, habitat, landscape, ecosystem, biome, biosphere continuum is actually a confusion of different dimensions. If we discern between content, context and scale - we can see that these are very different aspects that only reveal truth claims for the inquiry made. For example, an inquiry into community reveals nothing (of validity) about individuals. An inquiry into landscape reveals nothing (of validity) about ecosystem functions. ### Inquiry: The question to ask is: Where is my theory of change focussed and what is important to look 'for' and 'at' and 'with' in that? ### Insight: If we are examining social qualities of the community, we may want to make truth claims about its effect on the wellbeing of the ecosystem or the psychosystem. The reality is we can only make claims about the truth that is inquired into. The rest (i.e. that healthy communities lead to healthy environments) is merely a truism. ### Process: The process is simply one of avoiding the assumptions of naive realism (i.e. that what appears to me is a reality) and to consciously observe - really to consciously choose what is being observed, to decide what is being looked for and why what is looked at was selected. See and change that. Leave the truisms and the naive assumptions to others. Their truth claims are invaluable, but are extensions in hopefulness, rather than inquiry. ### Resolution: All truth is a construction, yet rather than decide that there is none to construct, do so with care. Truth is not as it presents itself to us, particularly if our process used easily falsifies our claims made (e.g. Statement: "All these people want X" - Test: "How do you know, did you ask them, individually?" Response: "err, no." ). Truth is as discovered, by what is asked for. Ask well ... --- This is one in a series of 25 'Resilient Koans' documenting "an apithologue into the koans of practice discovered while creating resilient sustainable communities", in 2010.