How to Tell the Truth

A PhD student recently explained to me that her difficulties with academic writing stem from her being "too honest". She was certain that the relevant journals would not publish what she "really thought" about the central issues of her field. This elicited what I still think is a profoundly insightful remark from me.

Maybe, I proposed, she simply does not know how to tell the truth. She may be as honest as she likes, but how does she know she is competent to speak truthfully about what she knows? She may want to tell the truth, that is, but she may not be any good at it. After I said it, it occurred to me that good academic writing is simply the truth well-told. That is, the art of academic writing is the art of telling the truth. Research, after all, is intended to discover truths and research writing is intended to write them down.

The naturalistic fallacy is the error of sliding from "is" to "ought" and we might say that the "intentional fallacy" is the error of imagining that there is an easy path from "ought" to "do". In literary criticism, after all, we make this mistake when we imagine that what the author intended to say, rather than what the author actually said, determines the meaning of a text. That is, we assume that the author succeeded in realizing the intention—that we can pass easily from "do" to "succeed". What we forget is precisely that writing is a difficult business and that we may fail to express what we honestly set out to say.

The fact that we know what the right thing to do is does not guarantee that we will do it, and certainly not that we will do it well. Honesty, i.e., the desire to tell the truth, does not guarantee mastery, i.e., the ability to tell the truth. You spend your studies developing that ability. Indeed, even late in life, when working on a particular set of problems, researchers are only in part setting out to "discover" the truth. Much of the work required of a particular research project goes into finding a way to speak it. It is by no means easy.

Here's a simple way to appreciate the difficulty. Suppose you are visiting a foreign country and you don't speak the local language. Obviously, your honesty will not get you by. That is why it is so useful to think of research as a second language; it reminds you that you are learning how to talk in a way that you do not already know how to talk. The honesty you manifest in your first language, must now find expression in another one. It will take time before you can confidently say what you mean. Whether you intend to lie or speak the truth, you will need a new set of skills.

It is of course true that our personal opinions are not necessarily "publishable", but I think it is a mistake to think that our honesty, as such, is a barrier to publication. Rather, think of telling the truth in a particular area as a difficulty that your doctoral training is equipping you to face.