"Truth is a tendency"
About this Quote
Fuller reframes truth as a directional vector rather than a finished object. Calling it a tendency shifts attention from static certainties to patterns that persist across time, scale, and circumstance. A tendency is what reality keeps doing when you vary the conditions. It is not a snapshot but a trajectory, a repeatable bias in the way systems behave. Truth, in this sense, lives in regularities of behavior more than in declarations about them.
This view fits his career as a systems thinker and design scientist. He sought what he called generalized principles, reliable behaviors of the Universe you can test, model, and use. The geodesic dome did not assert a metaphysical truth; it revealed a tendency of structures to achieve maximum strength with minimum material through triangulation and spherical distribution. His notion of ephemeralization, doing more with less, described a technological tendency seen across centuries. These are truths not because they are indisputable, but because repeated experiment, across contexts, keeps pushing observations in their direction.
Understanding truth as tendency also echoes scientific fallibilism. Models improve by converging on better approximations; evidence aggregates; anomalies refine the vector. What matters is whether the long-run drift of inquiry validates a claim. This encourages humility and vigilance: strong trends can reverse under new constraints, so you keep measuring and iterating.
There is an ethical edge here too. Integrity means aligning choices with demonstrable tendencies instead of wishful thinking. In design, policy, or personal conduct, you ask: where are the forces actually heading, and how can we cooperate with them? Climate patterns, demographic shifts, energy efficiencies, network effects all present tendencies that wise action acknowledges and leverages.
Seen this way, truth is not owned, it is courted. We do not arrive at it once and for all; we navigate by it, revising our course as the signal clarifies and the noise recedes.
This view fits his career as a systems thinker and design scientist. He sought what he called generalized principles, reliable behaviors of the Universe you can test, model, and use. The geodesic dome did not assert a metaphysical truth; it revealed a tendency of structures to achieve maximum strength with minimum material through triangulation and spherical distribution. His notion of ephemeralization, doing more with less, described a technological tendency seen across centuries. These are truths not because they are indisputable, but because repeated experiment, across contexts, keeps pushing observations in their direction.
Understanding truth as tendency also echoes scientific fallibilism. Models improve by converging on better approximations; evidence aggregates; anomalies refine the vector. What matters is whether the long-run drift of inquiry validates a claim. This encourages humility and vigilance: strong trends can reverse under new constraints, so you keep measuring and iterating.
There is an ethical edge here too. Integrity means aligning choices with demonstrable tendencies instead of wishful thinking. In design, policy, or personal conduct, you ask: where are the forces actually heading, and how can we cooperate with them? Climate patterns, demographic shifts, energy efficiencies, network effects all present tendencies that wise action acknowledges and leverages.
Seen this way, truth is not owned, it is courted. We do not arrive at it once and for all; we navigate by it, revising our course as the signal clarifies and the noise recedes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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