Sam, Jordan, and Truth

I just listened to Sam Harris and Jordan B. Peterson debate TRUTH for 2 hours. It was nearly as strange as it sounded. Though I still found it fascinating; Compelling even.

Sam seemed to think more or less like my self. That truth is a simple positive or negative fact. "Up" is against gravity, while "Down" is with gravity. These are facts. Facts are true. Truth is simple.

Jordan is trying to say that truth isn't that simple. However he appears (to me) to be talking about Truth, with a capitol "T" for.. Trumpets. There are bigger Truths and smaller Truths; That kind of thing. This isn't a new idea, or even a controversial one. Lots of people have talked about this kind of Truth for ages. The difference is, Jordan tries to solidify this notion to something more real and less ethereal. He takes a remark from Friedrich Nietzsche about Truth being tied to benefiting life. He's trying to claim something like: The physics of the atom bomb aren't true, (little "t") because the very nature of the bomb is destructive to life.

This appear to me as an attempt to not only merge Truth with truth, but to then discard things that may be simply true as unimportant. One must consider the larger context in-which a fact exists, to determine if it's True. The same way Gravity is virtually the only force of consequence in cosmology, but effectively irrelevant at the quantum level. I'm not sure if Sam or Jordan is cosmology or quantum physics in this example, but I doubt it matters to my point; being that what's important in one context can be ignored in another.

The two of them were basically going back and forth, trying to convince the other that cosmology / quantum physics is unimportant to (T/t)ruth.

My view, is that trying to re-purpose words to new meanings, is always a bad idea when the the new meaning can be easily confused for the old. So Jordan should come up with a new term, letting truth keep its simple definition that everybody already knows and understands. Then, once he has that new word, try again to convince us that truth is relatively unimportant anyway. I still don't know if he's right, philosophically, but he'll certainly confuse fewer people that way.