2. Beyond Truth, An Invitation To Conviction Formation Theory

It's Easy To Agree On Trees

Imagine you go to a park to read a book.

You sit down under a tree, watching clouds move through the sky. A breeze. The soft rustle of leaves. Something solid. Something shared.

A friend passes by and asks, gently, in conversation: "What tree do you mean?"

Not as a joke. No metaphor. They simply don't see it.

That would feel absurd. Mad. Kafkaesque.

You see the tree. You can touch it, walk around it. This is the old, shared world we live in. All of science, the rule of law, cooperation, responsibility, and planning presuppose that we inhabit the same world, and that we can talk about it together.

In such cases, truth seems straightforward.

"There is a tree."

"The tree is sixteen meters high."

We can go there. We can check. We can measure.

It is easy to agree on trees.

And abandoning truth here is not an option. Truth is not an abstract ideal we could simply give up. It carries our practices, our coordination, our sense of reality itself.

The difficulty begins elsewhere.

What about justice? Love? Purpose? The very things that orient our lives.

Here the question is no longer only how our words relate to the world, but what these things even are, if anything at all. What would it mean to be wrong about them? What would it mean to be right?

We rely on truth in practice while lacking clarity about its reach. Not because we are careless, but because there is no neutral standpoint from which to resolve this once and for all.

This tension has consequences.

People can succeed by every external measure and still feel lost. When you no longer know what truly convinces you, or feel forced to perform conviction, you begin to disappear from your own life.

Others grow silent, not because they have nothing to say, but because disagreement feels like a fight. As if every opinion were either a weapon or a confession of ignorance.

And then there are cases that reveal how deep divergence can run without us noticing.

Some years ago, a psychological study by Russell Hurlburt made headlines: some people don't have an inner monologue. At all. No voice in their heads. No running commentary. Just silence. They function perfectly well. They're articulate, thoughtful, successful.

They simply don't narrate their lives internally the way many others do.

And many of them have no idea that others do.

A similar pattern appears with aphantasia. People grow up assuming that phrases like "mental image" or "visualize it" are metaphors. Only later, sometimes decades later, do they realize that others actually experience mental pictures.

They don't. They never have.

These differences can remain invisible for a long time. When they are discovered, they often reframe a person's understanding of themselves. Not because something was wrong before, but because something that had always worked was never examined.

Such divergence exists at the most basic level of experience. What is striking is not that these differences exist, but that everyday life proceeds so smoothly without anyone needing to notice them.

We are good at doing things together. We are less practiced at reflecting on how that coordination is possible.

What else might function reliably while remaining poorly understood? What else about ourselves might matter, without yet having found a clear language for it?

And how could questions like these be connected to talk of a "demise of truth"? What would such a phrase even mean in a world that works as well as it does?

The Enduring Allure Of Truth

Truth has always held us.

From ancient philosophers to modern scientists, we have appealed to it across centuries, not only in theory, but in courtrooms, classrooms, family arguments, and quiet moments of doubt.

Truth is not just a philosophical ideal. It organizes our daily lives. We act on what we take to be true. We react sharply to dishonesty and deception. Relationships can end over the loss of trust, over the sense that something true has been violated.

Much of this rests on a simple picture. That our statements and thoughts relate to the world by matching it. That they say how things are. That others, given the same situation, should be able to see this too.

This is the picture at work when we cannot imagine that there are trees for some people, but not for others. It is the assumption that the world is simply there, shared, and available to be described. In most everyday situations, this works remarkably well.

The difficulty begins when we extend this picture beyond the domains where it quietly succeeds. When we expect truth to settle questions of meaning, value, purpose, or direction in the same way. When disagreement no longer looks like a difference in perspective, but like error, confusion, or bad faith.

At that point, truth can begin to feel less like a guide and more like a constraint. Not because it is false, but because it is asked to do more than it can reliably do.

What if the problem is not that truth has failed us, but that we are looking in the wrong place?

What if, instead of trying to reinterpret truth once more, we shifted our attention to something more basic?

To what convinces us, and why.

The Limits Of Truth

Truth carries an extraordinary amount of weight.

We invoke it in science and law, in education and planning, in personal relationships and political disputes. Few concepts are as central to how we coordinate our lives.

At the same time, it has proven remarkably resistant to clear definition.

Across centuries of philosophical debate, no account of truth has managed to settle the matter decisively. Competing theories illuminate different aspects of how truth functions, but none resolves all tensions. This persistence of disagreement is not a sign of carelessness. It points to something structurally difficult about the concept itself.

This difficulty would matter little if truth played only a limited role. But it does not. We rely on it constantly, often without noticing how much work we expect it to do.

When truth seems to guide us reliably, this causes little trouble. But when it no longer provides orientation, familiar patterns emerge.

One response is nihilism: the sense that meaning and truth were never really there to begin with, that they are inventions rather than discoveries.

Another response is relativism: the idea that truth is always relative to perspectives, cultures, or frameworks, and that no standpoint has priority over another.

A third response is skepticism: the persistent doubt that asks whether any belief can be justified at all, or whether certainty is ever more than an illusion.

These are often treated as philosophical positions to be defended or rejected. But they can also be understood differently: as ways the strain on the concept of truth becomes visible.

They arise not because truth is unimportant, but because it is asked to do more than it can reliably do. Fundamental to our practices, yet unclear in its limits, truth becomes a point of pressure.

Doesn't the concept of truth invite these responses precisely because it is so deeply embedded in how we live, while it also remains difficult to define or delimit?

A Different Perspective

It may be time to shift our perspective on truth.

Not to reject it, and not to claim its problems are insoluble, but to loosen its grip on questions it was never meant to answer on its own.

Much of what we call "truth" actually bundles together two different concerns.

One concerns how convictions form and change. How people come to hold certain beliefs, how those beliefs gain force, how they stabilize, conflict, or collapse. This is a question about mechanisms, histories, and structures of conviction.

The other concerns how, and under what conditions, convictions relate to the world. Whether what we believe corresponds to what exists, what happens, or what would happen under certain circumstances. This is the traditional domain of truth theory.

These two concerns are closely connected. But they are not the same.

Here is the surprising part: in many situations where we reach for truth-talk, what we actually need is clarity about conviction formation. Invoking truth does not always help. Sometimes it obscures what is really going on.

We do not usually lack a metaphysical anchor. We lack insight into how convictions arise, how they gain authority, and how they change.

Conviction Formation Theory focuses on that prior layer. It does not begin by asking whether a belief is true. It asks how it becomes believable. How it persuades, resists doubt, shapes action, and survives encounter with alternatives.

One might object that truth is precisely what makes beliefs believable. That conviction and truth cannot be separated.

That thought has a strong pull. And it points to a real connection.

But we do not, in fact, have a settled account of what truth is. That is the difficulty that has followed us throughout this discussion. Conviction formation, by contrast, exhibits recognizable patterns, even though its outcomes vary widely.

Convictions are personal. They depend on experience, context, exposure, and risk. No two people arrive at what they hold most deeply in exactly the same way.

Conviction Formation Theory offers a way to examine these processes without pretending to resolve the question of truth first.

Instead of asking, "Is this true?" it asks, "How did this come to convince us?"

What Are Convictions?

A conviction is something a person is convinced of. It may take the form of a factual claim ("This car is green", "This food is good") or a rule that guides action ("One should keep promises", "Lying is wrong").

To be convinced of something is not merely to assent to it verbally. It is to rely on it. Convictions show themselves in how we plan, decide, act, and think.

Can we examine our own convictions directly? To some extent, yes.

We can list what we currently believe about what we see, hear, remember, or expect. But the deeper rules we follow are rarely given to us explicitly. Identifying them takes effort. It requires self-observation, attention to patterns, and often deliberate reflection.

We come to recognize our convictions by watching what they do. How we defend certain ideas, where we invest time and energy, what risks we take, and which options never seriously occur to us all reveal what we are convinced of, whether we would phrase it that way or not.

After all, we did not construct these rules from first principles before using them.

Understanding oneself is not easy.

We recognize convictions in others in much the same way, though without direct access. Signs include genuine consent or resistance, instinctive defense of an idea, and the willingness to take risks, whether in argument, commitment, or action.

Convictions often become most visible in moments of authenticity, when action is less filtered and less strategic. In such moments, we may even notice convictions in others that they themselves have not yet articulated.

Convictions are not fixed. They can shift gradually, or change abruptly in response to powerful experiences. Under strong emotion, they may fluctuate temporarily, only to settle again once the situation passes. A person may feel justified in an action during anger or despair, and later judge it differently.

Even so, convictions are usually stable. They are not chosen at will. They persist until something genuinely convinces us otherwise.

You have your convictions.

And they change when something succeeds in changing them.

How Do Convictions Relate To Truth?

Truth and conviction are not the same, but they often take the same form.

A statement like "The car is red" can be approached as a truth claim and examined in terms of correspondence with the world. Or it can be approached as a conviction, examined in terms of how it arose, stabilized, and came to guide action.

What changes is not the sentence itself, but the mode of engagement. Are we asking whether it matches the world, or how it emerged as something we rely on in the first place? Sometimes we describe that reliance in the language of truth, sometimes we do not.

Truths and convictions share important features. Both shape our understanding of the world, guide our actions, and help us navigate reality.

Both also exhibit a kind of resistance. A conviction, like a truth claim, does not usually feel optional. It presents itself as something we cannot simply set aside at will. In this sense, both truth and conviction are binding.

Both are also connected to justification. When we claim something is true, we offer reasons, arguments, or evidence. When we hold a conviction, we do the same. In everyday practice, these justifications often look indistinguishable.

Finally, both truth and conviction can be shared. Societies develop collective convictions just as they develop accepted truths: about laws, morals, scientific principles, and historical events. These shared structures allow coordination, continuity, and collective action.

Truth and conviction are not identical. But they echo each other in structure, in force, and in function. Recognizing this resemblance without collapsing the distinction is the key to understanding how they interact.

How Are Convictions Different From Truth?

Truth and convictions are both binding, but they bind in different ways.

A truth presents itself as binding because it claims to reflect a reality that is independent of us. It is supposed to hold whether anyone believes it or not.

A conviction, by contrast, binds because we hold it. It guides our thinking and action because nothing has yet convinced us otherwise. Convictions are not chosen at will, but they can, in principle, be replaced when something succeeds in changing them.

Despite this difference, convictions often carry a sense of independence as well. When two people disagree about something that matters to them, they usually try to reach a common understanding. Each brings convictions about how agreement should be reached, what counts as a good reason, and what should settle the matter. If they disagree there, the discussion simply shifts to a higher level.

In this way, convictions can feel as firm and resistant as truths.

A crucial difference lies in stability. Truth claims present themselves as fixed. Even when we say "nothing will ever convince me otherwise", what we usually mean is that we cannot imagine such a change. History shows that imagination is a poor guide here. Convictions do change, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, often in ways we could not have predicted.

Truth claims are meant to be true independently of who holds them. Convictions, by contrast, bind first and foremost the person who holds them. They have psychological, social, historical, and rational dimensions. They are shaped by experience, learning, trust, and exposure.

This also explains a difference in plurality. There is supposed to be one truth, but there can be many convictions. People can hold incompatible convictions and still function together in the same world. Tension arises not because plurality exists, but because coordination sometimes requires alignment.

Contradictory truth claims generate tension by definition. Contradictory convictions generate tension primarily when they coexist within the same person, or when cooperation demands resolution.

This difference becomes clearer in cases often considered paradigms of truth.

Take mathematical statements like the square root of two is irrational or in a right triangle, a² + b² = c². These are commonly treated as unquestionable truths, supported by proofs.

And yet, most of us do not relate to them through personal verification. We have not worked through the proofs ourselves, and many of us would not know how to begin. We rely on teachers, textbooks, institutions, and a chain of trust. Over time, repetition and reinforcement turn these statements into convictions that feel certain.

This does not make them false. But it shows that, for most of us, their binding force comes from conviction rather than direct rational grounding.

If this is true even in such cases, it is worth asking how many of our other "truths" function in the same way.

Convictions are the resistant material of our thinking. They are what we actually rely on. They do not always form through processes we would later describe as fully rational or truth-aimed.

In fact, we hold convictions about what "rational" and "true" mean, which usually did not form rationally or through direct access to the meaning, but in a similar way our convictions about the irrationality of the square root of two did.

Understanding this shifts attention to the processes by which reason, truth, and certainty come to matter to us in the first place.

The Social Nature Of Convictions

Convictions do not form in isolation. Personal experience and reflection matter, but the influence of others is pervasive. Authority figures such as parents, teachers, experts, and peers shape convictions early on. Social groups reinforce them through shared assumptions and unspoken norms. Even repetition alone can strengthen a conviction, whether or not it has been critically examined.

And critical examination itself is never neutral. It relies on rules of thinking we are already convinced will lead us in the right direction.

Convictions leave traces. They shape behavior, decision-making, and communication. For this reason, they are not purely private. At least in part, they are accessible to empirical study.

We can observe how convictions manifest in action: in decisions made under pressure, in patterns of consistency or inconsistency, in responses to moral dilemmas. We can probe their strength by looking at what people are willing to risk for them, how they respond to counterarguments, or how their views shift over time. Indirect questioning can sometimes reveal convictions that are not explicitly acknowledged, especially where stated beliefs diverge from action.

Still, convictions are not always easy to isolate. Some remain deeply embedded and unarticulated, shaping behavior in ways that are difficult to trace back to a single source.

Convictions are also historical. They emerge within social contexts that themselves carry histories. What we take to be normal, rational, or self-evident today is often the sediment of earlier debates, decisions, and practices that continue to shape us long after they have faded from view.

The Idea Of Truth And The Reality Of Conviction

But is the abstract notion of truth dispensable? What allows us to distinguish reliable convictions from unreliable ones? On what basis do we justify such distinctions?

To approach these questions, it helps to look at how things actually work in practice.

Science, for example, does not require access to ultimate truths in order to succeed. It advances by developing and refining conviction structures that predict, explain, and withstand challenge. Scientific claims gain strength by surviving scrutiny, resisting refutation, and proving useful across contexts and over time. Whether they correspond to reality in some final sense is a further question, one that scientific practice itself does not settle.

Something similar holds in ethics, law, and governance. What is enforced are not abstract truths, but shared convictions that function as guiding principles. These convictions can be tested, revised, and replaced. Their authority depends less on metaphysical grounding than on their ability to orient action, resolve conflict, and endure reflection.

Truth appears, at first glance, to offer a clean way of distinguishing valid beliefs from invalid ones. And yet, we do not have direct access to truth itself. What we have are convictions about what is true, and convictions that some of our convictions are likely to be true. These are not arranged in a system that guarantees truth preservation from first principles downward. They rest on a broad, largely unexamined background of convictions that guide everyday reasoning and action.

Truth theory remains a legitimate and distinct philosophical endeavor, and it should remain so.

At the same time, the remarkable success of science, and even our modest success in navigating daily life, would be hard to explain if there were no underlying correspondence at all between thought and reality. For this reason, the idea of truth tends to reappear within Conviction Formation Theory, not as a proven foundation, but as a powerful and widely shared meta-conviction: the conviction that our convictions are, at least in part and often enough, answerable to a world that exists independently of us.

This meta-conviction is compelling.

Consider a simple case. You remember an event one way. Someone you trust remembers it differently. If you assume that one of you must be mistaken, you are already relying on a higher-order conviction: that the world has a single, coherent history, and that incompatible convictions about it cannot all be correct.

If philosophers or scientists were ever to establish a final and unquestionable link between thought and reality, this conviction might become knowledge. Until then, it functions as an ideal we rely on, not a certainty we possess.

Until we learn to fly, we live off the land of convictions.

The Power Of Meta-Convictions

We do not only form convictions. We also form convictions about convictions. We develop beliefs about how convictions should be formed, how they should be defended, and what it means to act in accordance with them. These higher-order convictions can be called meta-convictions.

As individuals, we acquire many of them implicitly, long before we can articulate them. As a species, we inherit them through culture and history, embedded in philosophy, science, religion, and law. They shape how we think long before we think about them.

For example, many of us share the meta-conviction that evidence and reasoning matter when forming beliefs. At the same time, we hold convictions about what counts as evidence and what qualifies as good reasoning. These standards are not fixed. They shift with education, experience, and historical context. Some appear to be widespread across cultures; others are clearly contingent.

Meta-convictions shape which convictions we treat as better or worse, stronger or weaker, more or less defensible. In practice, they often do the work we expect truth to do: they guide evaluation, criticism, and revision.

We do not have direct access to truth itself. What we have are convictions, and convictions about how to handle convictions. If there is a correspondence between thought and reality, which seems neither unreasonable nor guaranteed, then our most stable and widely shared meta-convictions are what orient us toward it, however imperfectly.

Conviction Formation Theory is itself a collection of meta-convictions: claims about how convictions arise, stabilize, and change. Like all convictions, these claims are open to examination and revision, using the very meta-convictions that guide inquiry and critique.

In this sense, meta-convictions function like an immune system for belief. They help filter out unreliable convictions, resist harmful ones, and adjust our understanding when circumstances change. A weak immune system lets in anything. An overactive one attacks everything, including itself.

Beyond Nihilism, Relativism, And Skepticism

Nihilism, relativism, and skepticism can be understood as systems of meta-convictions. Each arises from a similar source: the combination of abandoning absolute truth while still treating truth as the only possible validator of belief.

In this sense, they resemble overactive immune systems. Faced with uncertainty, they respond not by recalibration, but by rejection: rejecting value, rejecting distinction, or rejecting judgment altogether.

This raises an important question. If truth-talk is vulnerable to nihilism, relativism, and skepticism, is conviction language vulnerable in the same way?

Convictions do not require absolute certainty to matter. They are meaningful because they are embedded in experience, relationship, and aspiration. They enable action, coordination, and self-understanding. Even when proof of truth is unavailable, convictions provide orientation.

Crucially, convictions cannot all be discarded at once. Even rejection relies on convictions. To abandon one conviction is always to rely on others in its place.

Nihilism: If Convictions Aren't True, Are They Worthless?

Nihilism holds that if convictions cannot be proven true in an absolute sense, they have no value. Historically, this stance gained force as a critique of rigid institutions that claimed truth in order to silence dissent. The impulse to "strike out right and left" was, at first, a tool of liberation.

But once proof of absolute truth is made the sole criterion of value, the logic does not stop. If nothing can meet that standard, then everything collapses, including the nihilistic principle itself.

From the perspective of Conviction Formation Theory, nihilism rests on a single sweeping conviction: that what cannot be proven true has no worth and must be dismantled. This one belief is then used to override all others.

Ordinary conviction structures do not work this way. They are not monolithic. They are webs of interdependent beliefs, shaped by experience, reinforced by practice, and revised over time. Nothing in them is absolute, but neither are they arbitrarily dismissible.

Nihilism is therefore not the absence of conviction, but a severely impoverished conviction system: one that reduces all meaning to its negation without showing why such a reduction is necessary.

Relativism: Are All Convictions Equal?

Relativism says, "No conviction is better than any other, yours, mine, or anyone else's."

The reason usually given is that none of them can be proven true in an absolute sense.

From the perspective of Conviction Formation Theory, the reply is not a dismissal but a clarification:

"For me, they are not equal. My convictions guide my actions, shape my identity, and structure my life. In a very real sense, they are me. In the absence of proven truth, your generic conviction is simply another conviction. By what force would it override all the others that bind me?"

This response does not deny disagreement. It makes its structure visible.

Relativism raises an important point: if truth were simple and directly accessible, moral and political disagreement would largely disappear. We would discover the correct answers and converge on them. But that is not the world we inhabit.

Instead, societies are shaped by overlapping and competing conviction sets: shared beliefs about law, morality, and governance that arise within groups and across traditions. These convictions interact, conflict, and sometimes align. Some gain influence not because they are proven true in an absolute sense, but because they prove more coherent, more stable, or more capable of sustaining collective life.

This is why politics exists. It is the space in which conviction sets encounter one another and where rules emerge through negotiation and consequence, not through the revelation of correspondence.

History suggests that certain basic convictions, such as commitments to peace and the rule of law, allow societies to endure, while others undermine their own conditions of possibility. This does not establish their truth in a metaphysical sense. It shows their viability over time.

For this reason, even in a conviction-based framework, not all convictions can be treated as equal in practice. Some must be constrained or excluded from power when they threaten the conditions that allow people to live together at all.

What distinguishes convictions here is not correspondence to an external truth, but evidence drawn from historical experience.

Skepticism: Can We Really Suspend Judgment?

Skepticism suggests that since nothing can be proven true, judgment should be suspended. In its mild forms, this stance can be intellectually healthy. It resists dogmatism and invites humility.

But complete suspension of judgment is not practically sustainable. Convictions assert themselves constantly: in perception, in action, in relationship. One cannot meaningfully live while continuously withholding belief about whether fire burns, whether others exist, or whether decisions matter.

Suspension of judgment therefore becomes an ongoing effort, not a neutral position. And it is unclear what it ultimately aims at, beyond the hope of avoiding error or achieving peace of mind.

Conviction Formation Theory begins from a similar acknowledgment of uncertainty. But instead of attempting to eliminate conviction, it asks how convictions arise, how they stabilize, and how they change. It shifts the focus from escaping belief to understanding it.

Reclaiming The Right To Hold Convictions

One shared danger of nihilism, relativism, and skepticism is that they can undermine our sense of standing in relation to our own convictions. In different ways, they suggest that belief requires a kind of permission it can never quite obtain.

In this respect, they resemble certain uses of truth theory itself. When legitimacy depends on external validation by an ideal that remains out of reach, conviction begins to look suspect by default.

From the perspective of Conviction Formation Theory, the idea that one is not entitled to one's own convictions is itself a conviction. It does not stand above the rest. It carries no special authority.

Letting go of absolute certainty does not mean letting go of engagement, responsibility, or care. It means acknowledging the conditions under which conviction actually forms and operates. This can make room for a more honest relationship to how we think and believe, one that allows for revision without paralysis and commitment without pretense.

Seen this way, nihilism, relativism, and skepticism can be understood as symptoms of a meta-conviction system that has turned against itself. They emerge from an attempt to purify belief by demanding more than belief can deliver. Instead of protecting conviction, they weaken it.

Whatever their philosophical merits, they do not relieve us of the need to rely on convictions. No conviction has ever been proven beyond all possible doubt. And yet, we all live by them.

The question, then, is not whether our convictions can be justified absolutely.

It is how they function, how they came to be, and whether they help us navigate life with coherence, openness, and integrity.