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Emily asked:
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"What I tell you three times is true" — what are arguments in favor and against this? Is it not true that
if an individual hears something enough he takes it to be true?
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============
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It seems to me that you are mixing up three different questions here concerning what we can call the
"Bellman's maxim" (from Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark.")
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One question is whether it follows from the fact that someone tells you something three times, or one
time, or 30 times, that what he tells you is true. The answer to that is clearly, no. The truth of a
statement does not in any way depend on anyone's stating it is true no matter how many times. A
statement is true if and only if it states how the world is, or what the facts are. The facts are what
make a statement true.
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A different question is what might be called an appeal to authority. Could the fact that someone tells
you something be some evidence of its truth in the sense that you would have reason to believe what
that person says? The answer is clearly yes, but depending on who the person is, and on what he
says. If a person (say a scientist) tells you something about what he is supposed to know something
about (this has to do with his credentials on the subject matter he is pronouncing on) then you have
good reason to believe that what that scientist says is true (supposing, of course, you have no reason
to think he is lying or joking etc.) So if the great physicist Albert Einstein had told me (even once)
Earth describes an elliptical orbit around the sun, I would believe that what he said was true. But if an
untutored person stated to me (even thirty times) some abstruse chemical statement, I would not
believe it. And I would be right not to believe it on the untutored person's word even if it turned out to
be true.
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Another question you ask is whether it is true that if someone hears something enough, he will think it
true. Yes, very often, especially if the person is not very critical, he will believe something true if he
hears it enough times. The Nazi Josef Goebbels used to talk about what he called "The Big Lie" and
maintained that no matter how preposterous a statement is; if you broadcast it loudly and often
enough, people will come to believe it. If that is so, and it may be, it is a sad psychological
commentary on the credulous nature of human beings.
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Ken Stern
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93
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