Dreaming Is Easy -- by Alexis Anne Mackenzie
Dreaming Is Easy – by Alexis Anne Mackenzie

The Ciyuan dictionary (Commercial Press, 1979) says, “To prove is to establish truth or falsehood based on fact.” Breaking that down simply: the “fact” is the necessary condition, and “truth or falsehood” is the result. For a careful “prover,” this process is already fixed in advance, so how one goes about “proving” becomes the key to establishing the final truth or falsehood. Arguing with a classmate recently, we each used reasons slanted in our own favor to “prove” our own “truth.” Under such conditions, with everyone’s judgment “clouded by self-interest,” what correctness could there possibly be?

This kind of proof method shows up constantly in the news – many vicious incidents get “proven” using exactly this technique. After briefly recounting the course of events, the reporting moves smoothly into the perpetrator’s broken family history and background, as if to declare a fact: that everything he has done now is simply because his family was such-and-such a way. But what about the influence of society? Why does this era keep producing so many of these “special” individuals, one after another?

Looked at this way, proof turns out to be quite unreliable. Its starting point is never anything more than supporting certain things, or opposing certain things. Perhaps certain facts do confirm it, but unfortunately we’ll never know exactly which facts those “certain” ones are. The Shanghai Classics edition of the Cihai dictionary adds an explanation to the entry for “proof”: “Proof, also called argumentation, is the thought process of establishing the truth of one judgment based on another judgment already known to be true” – which seems to explain the first definition in greater detail, but doesn’t this, too, amount to protesting too much?