History is fables agreed upon. - Voltaire (1694-1778)

A short discussion about history and truth:

MB   History is fables agreed upon. - Voltaire (1694-1778)

CM   So is all truth, come to that...
Truth, like history, comes from the barrel of a gun. Vae victis.
Mind you, the more logical, economical and explanatory your hypothesis, the better your gun :-)

SSh   Are you saying there's no way of getting at objective truth? If so I shall have to ask you to step outside.

MB   there's no such thing as truth. but the history - fables/myth/fairy tales is. they're all the same story, and history is just as repetitive. I seriously do not understand why humankind hasn't found a less primitive, less destructive way of dealing with conflict over all those aeons.

CM   SSh, objective reality and objective truth aren't the same thing. By using reason we're gaining a better and better understanding of things around us and things within us. But our understanding of reality is an asymptotic trajectory -- it approaches closer and closer but never actually touches. Frustrating, really... Our understanding put into words is truer and truer the closer the statements cover the reality they're referring to. In other words, reality exists (yay!) whereas truth is pretty much a social thing. It didn't help Gallileo or humanity much while the Church forced a majority of people to vote for geocentrism. Just as it doesn't help the born-again maggots that most of us vote for a solar system that's more than 5000 years old.
Science is a social institution, and doesn't exist outside social constraints. Powerful social forces are at war to control this institution, its methods and output. So truths are different at different times in different places, even if reality is the same.