A notable weakness in the scheme of things today is the extent to which people have adopted certain fundamental beliefs on the strength of the sales pitch of a believer, having received their information about the contrary position too, the view that they reject, from this very same person. It is as if all you ever heard about shoes was given to you by a salesman at American Sporting Goods, or as if all you know about food came from the waitress at the diner. This is the surprising origin of a great many of our most formative and consequential beliefs.

Even the deepest positions can be picked up in this way, casually handed to us and just pocketed. What examination did we subject them to before making them ours? At what age did we take these on, and how were we equipped, then, to assess them?

This book too is, perhaps, the sales pitch of a believer, but that is no problem for a purchasing people since we are not bothered by pitches. What we object to is a dearth of options, an artificially limited supply. Would it be satisfying to purchase an expensive piece of equipment without seeing the competitor’s model? Would it be enough to hear only what a promoter of the one brand spread all over the market has to say about his fine product? Not likely. Yet almost invariably that is the way in which you yourself have acquired your ideas about truth, the idea at the centre of this book – a costly piece of equipment if anything is.

This book counters the one-sidedness of the accepted view of truth by assembling from the history of thought a series of alternative positions that constitute a counter to the prevailing outlook on the understanding of truth. It presents an outlook on this issue that is much greener than the bare plot of the prevailing, unquestioned, presumptions.

The issues of philosophy, such as truth, are of actual earth-shaking significance. Why then are books of philosophy so often boring? Partly because of the decision to write philosophy in an academic way. That decision is unfortunate because academia is not the habitat of philosophy; that habitat is people’s lives.

Reduced to positions and arguments, with the habitat of ideas stripped away (the situation that has brought an idea to life, the thinking that shapes it), the substance of philosophy never materializes.

Ideas are like animals. You can see a tiger in the zoo, but it is not – or not quite – a tiger that you are seeing in a zoo. Certainly the zoo gives you the body of the tiger, and that distinctive body may be your idea of a tiger, but what about the behaviour? As the tiger is more than its body, an idea is more than the bare formulation, the one-liner that concludes an argument. The rationale is of the essence. (It is surprising how easy it is to find defenders of reason whose real passion is for positions not arguments.)

Like zoo animals, the views examined in the zoo of academic philosophy were not born there. They arose in their natural habitat, in people who hold them and in actual circumstances capable of generating them. To escape the alienating effect of abstraction (which drives some away from philosophy) this book introduces the views it examines through characters who hold them and in circumstances that generate them. It is through the life-situation in which an idea about truth arises for a person, and through the issues with which it engages in that person’s life, that the very nature of the view often becomes clear. Cicadas interweaves academic philosophy with a fictional treatment of people encountering philosophical questions in their everyday lives, so as to give the available views (the good and the bad) the life they really have.

There is a sense in which this book on truth is actually an introduction to philosophy. It is not an introduction in the usual degraded sense of the word, which distorts the meaning of the word (a general survey, a series of answers to the questions ‘covered’ in philosophy texts, etc.).

An introduction to philosophy introduces philosophy into your life. It is like a vaccination: it puts something into you, and that thing changes your awareness to certain things, makes you resistant to certain things. It is philosophy that does this; because it is philosophy that is introduced.

Are there not things in life that you need to know about in order to live, to stay alive? How about, to live properly? Ignorance about these things is dangerous to you. You can get disease from ignorance: smallpox, for instance, if you don’t know what you are dealing with. But you can also be protected. Philosophy is a form of protection, if it ‘gets into you’.

Few ‘introductions to philosophy’ do that. This book is a serious attempt to introduce philosophy as what it truly is, and for that reason it moves away from the bias toward abstraction that characterizes philosophy books.

Knowing the truth (about, say, the truth) is not simply an affair of reasoning; more of the soul is involved than that. How and why that is is difficult to explain briefly; it is, however, something that this book aims to show by its focus upon actual people encountering philosophical questions in their everyday lives.