An essay in which Mazur replaces the philosophical question of the essence of truth with an analysis of the process of informing, carried over directly from Jakościowa teoria informacji (‘A Qualitative Theory of Information’). It has four parts.
The first summarises the classification set out in that book. In an information path, originals turn into images; when the relations between the images reproduce the relations between the originals, we have transinforming, and the information received is faithful — like a map on which the proportions of the distances are right. Untruths divide into apparent ones (verbose: simulative pseudoinforming, and vague: dissimulative pseudoinforming) and false ones (fabricating: simulative disinforming, and concealing: dissimulative disinforming); to these are added conjectures (parainforming) and informing about informing (metainforming). The latter makes it possible to separate falsehood from lying: a lie is metadisinforming, which passes a falsehood off as the truth, so a novelist fabricates but does not lie.
The second part asks whether truthfulness is a virtue. The author shows that we demand it mainly from those who depend on us, because checking their words is cheaper than checking their work; mutual truthfulness between equals is an arrangement convenient for both sides. An absolute command to inform faithfully would do more harm than good; the author illustrates this with the example of a fire in a cinema, reducing the matter to a choice of the action with the least bad consequences, which is a decision task, not a matter of a command to tell the truth.
The third part divides statements into assertions backed by proof (science), assurances without proof (philosophy) and statements that make no claim to truth (art). In the concrete sciences proof is never complete, so integrity lies in disclosing the deviations, for example the measurement points beside the plotted curve. The fourth describes how researchers lost their former independence: when universities began to prepare people for professions, and later when research moved to institutes working to other people's commissions; it also distinguishes close dependences, on superiors and colleagues, from broader pressures on science, to which it attaches even greater weight.
Our own account, working version; definitions of concepts are in the dictionary, with their sources.