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All Truisms Are False! Part Two
by Robert Archerd, January 3, 2023
Part One dealt entirely with the well-known and seemingly unassailable truism, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder. But weighing the claim against key principles of art and science led me to (largely) debunk it. True, individual tastes count, but art and science (including mathematical) precepts have to count for more. For example, people may prefer different music genres, but while our musical tastes differ, they likely include the same or similar chord and rhythm arrangements. And whereas taste may reflect nothing but individual choice, the chords and rhythms themselves, in addition to choice, reflect the pure physics of sound.
And while some truisms at first seem absolutely airtight, like the one above, others need only the slightest glimpse of daylight to disintegrate completely. In that sense, the one that comes most readily to mind is declaring something “the exception that proves the rule,” which has, to me, always sounded bonkers! The only thing an exception can do is challenge a rule, not prove it!
That should go without saying, but apparently not, as you’ll see from internet samplings I’ve found — the likes of which dominate the topic, coming up more than 80% of the time. Get a load of the following six representative examples:
