Is truth dependant on the eloquence of the speaker? I am not an eloquent person my spoken English is pretty crap, I tend to be augmentative and confrontational but I suspect this is born out of frustration of not being able to put into words what I am wanting to say in a coherent fashion. I left school at 15, I am not using that as an excuse, and have pretty much self educated myself not from that day on, far from it. I think one day some years later that I was not using my brain as well as I could. But putting my point across verbally has always been a challenge with my brain racing ahead and my moth playing catch up. But I heard the sentence "Is truth dependant on the eloquence of the speaker?" and it got me thinking is this how politicians, lets single them out, can lie so well? The more eloquent you are the more convincing you are likely to be. I have tended to use humour when trying to get across a point which would again hide my frustration on not putting into words what I want to say. It is not that I do not know the words but finding them when I need them can be troublesome. On the plus side I can write a cracking letter to anyone from Prime Ministers downwards to great effect but my lack of formal education again lets me down as my punctuation is pretty rubbish.
Good ideas that are easy to communicate are likely to already have been accepted. Good ideas that are hard to communicate are the ones you generally have to get across. Edit: I think another problem is that we have a tenancy of listenine to what a person is saying rather than what they are trying to say.
Truth isn't universal. People have their own ideas of what constitutes truth and how they interpret other people's truth. For example, when you say something and they take one part of it, completely ignoring the main point; I think of that as bending or ignoring the real truth, like a half truth. Communicating isn't the real truth always, actions say more and body language speaks more about truth than words do. With letters, people only take one thing away, instead of reading the whole picture, people understand what they want to understand in my opinion.
Rather than pander to the fallacy that eloquent utilization of substantially impenetrable articulation is a prerequisite of elucidating your semantic veracity, as is habitual in the Rabbinical tradition, instead ask yourself "What would Jesus do?" and use a metaphor....
Is truth dependant on the eloquence of the speaker? In my opinion the short answer is no. It just influences what version of the truth you are getting or how you interpret it. I can't help thinking some people do this sort of thing in order to present a fabricated aura of authority. "Wow this bloke knows a lot of long words. He must be clever and well educated therefore I'll take what he says as true" Politicians, by deliberately obscuring what they are trying to say behind complicated language, allow room for interpretation. Basically they can argue their way out of a tight spot by claiming others are misunderstanding what they have said. I know a number of people who, when engaged in a heated discussion, will throw out every long word they can summon from their vocabulary and throw in some possibly made up statistics (they know I'm not going to bother fact checking them) in an attempt to make them sounds more knowledgeable than they actually are. They really **** me off! A good example is this girl I'm currently dating. She's not the most eloquent of people but when she says something it's direct, straight to the point and comes across as more heartfelt and honest. It's a breath of fresh air if I'm honest. I know where I stand with her without feeling the need to analyse everything she says. Well that's my thoughts anyway!
We are going to run into the problem of certainty here before long so before that happens I think some boundaries as to the limit to which something may be understood would be helpful. Are we talking about demonstrable truth or philosophical truth?
Here's my opinion. Whatever the interpretation one can do, the truth remain the truth and everything else is beliefs or lies. Truth is like a door, depending on the informations you have, you'll open one with the idea that it's the right one but if your informations are only partial or if you don't know how to read a map, you'll end up at the wrong place.
