In my view, yes, Giuliani is at worst merely guilty of blurting out a response without thinking through how it might sound, but that is not to say it has no significance. The chief spokesman for a President who has made his bones on the art of the terse, pithy putdown, essentially handed his enemies a soundbite for the ages. Fair or in context or not, who can resist quoting again and again three little words that so succinctly sum up Trump’s attitude toward public expression? This quote will live forever.
He should have.
But, as noted above, “truth is truth” was the interviewer’s term, and the interviewer used that term in the specific context of saying “there’s no issue of determining objective truth”, so when Giuliani counter-asserted “truth is not truth”, he was contradicting the specific meaning with which the interviewer had imbued this phrase.
I need to know what ‘Is’ is. And if there is any ‘there’ there.
If truth is not truth, does that mean false is not false? Then yes is not yes and no is not no. A new world order. Oh joy.
“I am he, and you are me as we are me, and we are all together”
I am the Walrus, the Beatles.
No, it was a longish clause stripped from a sentence. I wish I’d made a note.
What’s your position on Obama’s “You didn’t build that.” ?
F-P: Context matters!
Also F-P: Context doesn’t matter!
I think we found Ghouliani’s SDMB account…
It’s important to understand the context of FP’s analysis.
He’s dumb.
Probably. But F-P’s little green light is on. Why doesn’t he answer? Is he Googling Hannity or Limbaugh to see what the party line is on this question?
Context always matters. But sometimes context changes the meaning and sometimes context doesn’t change the meaning.
Waving the word “context” like some magic shield is a refuge for the simpleminded.
ETA: the Obama quote was raised in another current thread and I addressed it there.
Giuliani has lost much of whatever credibility he might ‘ve still had simply by becoming Trump’s attorney. But clearly, here he is trying to articulate that in a case like this, objective truth may be hard to find or define, and that therefore even if the president doesn’t lie, he could still expose himself to perjury charges. Especially since Trump is not as fantastic a master of the English language and all its nuances as one of his predecessors: remember “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”?
Yup, its going right up there with “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”. Which also made sense in context but so epitomized Bill’s weaselly handling of the Lewinski scandal that he will never be able to escape it.
You know, I think Clinton DID manage to escape it after all. These days, I’m sure a lot of Americans dearly WISH the only presidential scandal was a blowjob in the Oval Office. By comparison, it’s practically a golden age.
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.
Live music is better.
While I won’t deny it can be abused, I’m gonna hold fast that no, “objective truth” does not exist.
Well, okay, let me backpedal. Objective truth exists, but we are soft, fleshy beings with limited, flawed perception and we don’t have access to that truth. The best we can hope for is a fuzzy, approximate, collective truth such as the one that things like science offers us. But even then, fundamentally a scientific paper is just an argument that observed phenomenon will be consistently observed again under certain conditions, and is affected by biases and our limited perception as much as anything else.
Our understanding of reality is notoriously flawed and subjective, and I feel like it’s a disservice to claim that anyone really “knows” objective reality. The best we can get is things that are very probably true, such that a lot of people can vouch that they too find the argument that it’s very probably true compelling.
(Yes, this is an insufferably post-modernist viewpoint, I’m guilty of that)
On the one hand, I absolutely agree with you. The quasiBuddhist position that all of this world is an illusion is unfalsifiable, and there’s no reason to think it’s any less accurate than the logical positivist position that objective reality may be somewhat reliably understood through our senses.
But the “no discernible objective truth” position leads to no reasonable social structures. Giuliani’s argument–that we can never know the truth, so we shouldn’t bother trying–is deeply, deeply pernicious.
And of course he doesn’t believe that. Of course he believes that prosecutors can examine conflicting testimony and conflicting evidence and arrive somewhere near the truth. He spent a great deal of his career doing exactly that.
But his mob boss now demands he baffle 'em with bullshit, so he’s doing this hand-fluttery “truth isn’t truth” song and dance to convince people to give up on figuring out what the truth really is.
That isn’t what perjury is.
Giuliani meant to posit a situation where one person lied and another told the truth. If everyone believed the lier, then the tables would turn and it would be the truthful person who would be viewed as a lier. So “truth would not be truth”.
This is not a concept that is difficult to understand. It just isn’t.
It’s certainly not a concept of Giuliani’s that Giuliani can express coherently.
Well, take a look at the quote:
“Truth isn’t truth”
which really is:
“Truth is not truth”
Clearly, the veracity of that statement depends on what the definition of is is.