If you started out searching for truth, you may have read a lot of philosophy. I did, when younger, and eventually drifted toward science, because philosophy seemed too abstract and circular.

You can’t read a better argument for what truth is than is presented by John Searle, in The Construction of Social Reality. He delineates truth and fact in his explanation of “institutional facts” and facts in general.

Some facts, he says, are brute facts, true no matter what anybody thinks. The summit o...