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Multiple Truths and Perception

Jason's argument that most interpersonal conflict is not about facts — it's about perception. Our brains construct reality from incomplete data filtered through past experience, cultural context, and expectation. Insisting on a single objective truth in a two-person disagreement is usually what makes the conflict entrenched, not what resolves it. The work, especially in cofounder and partnership disputes, is holding space for multiple valid interpretations at once.

Developed in newsletter #284 "No Objective Truth" (2026-01-10) and referenced throughout his cofounder conflict coaching practice.

The Seductive Trap of Objectivity

There's comfort in the certainty of knowing that you hold the correct view. The objectively right one.

The trap is that the comfort of being right is usually purchased at the cost of the relationship. In Jason's coaching work — especially cofounder conflict — he sees founders locked into positions where each is convinced the other is wrong about something important. A past event remembered differently. A choice that seems obvious to each person in opposite directions. A statement that one party heard as dismissive and the other meant as supportive.

Most conflicts between people are never purely about "just the facts." They are about perspective, interpretation, and meaning-making. In that realm, multiple truths can genuinely coexist.

The Evidence: Perception Is Constructed

Jason's argument moves through a series of concrete perceptual examples that make the abstract claim physical and undeniable:

Optical

  • The rabbit/duck image. The same drawing is a rabbit or a duck depending on how you interpret it. Both readings are valid; neither is "wrong."
  • The 2015 dress (black/blue vs. white/gold). A chromatic adaptation issue that consumed the internet because people could not agree on what they were seeing — not on what it meant, but on what colors it literally was.
  • Color-swatch illusions. The same shade of gray appears dark or light depending on the pattern surrounding it. The surroundings define the perception.

Auditory

  • Laurel vs. Yanny. People swear their version is correct. The split traces partly to higher-frequency hearing, which declines with age. Two people literally hearing different signals from the same recording.
  • The McGurk effect. The same sound is interpreted as "da" when paired with one set of mouth movements and "ba" when heard alone. Vision reshapes hearing.

Semantic

Once you know how to read, you can't see words or letters as mere shapes. They instantly have meaning. Show the same words to someone who can't read that language — abstract marks. The knowledge you bring to perception changes what perception delivers. Easter Island rongorongo script once meant something; now it looks like decoration.

Physical

Vision isn't a camera recording reality. It's your brain constructing a useful model from fragmented data.

On a biological level, what we see and hear doesn't arrive unfiltered. Light becomes electrical signals that the brain decodes into perception. Expectation, past experience, and cultural context all shape the output.

The Ladder of Inference

Jason references the ladder of inference (from his earlier piece on Fraught Conversations) to show how we build conclusions from selected data — and we rarely all have access to the same data.

More data available → more reasonable conclusions possible. Less overlap in data → more divergent conclusions inevitable. Different cultures looking at Orion saw a hunter, a canoe, or a hand depending on their stories. All of them were looking at the same stars.

The business version: millions of informed traders look at the same stock data daily and reach opposite conclusions about buy or sell. If they can't agree on publicly available information, why are you surprised when you and your cofounder disagree about the company's direction?

How Personal History Bleeds Into Interpretation

If you were bitten by a dog as a child, any barking dog feels threatening. If you were cut off in traffic before work, a neutral comment comes across as an insult.

This is where the optical-illusion argument becomes interpersonally dangerous. The "feels threatening" is a real sensation, not a cognitive error. But telling someone "you can't be scared of that cute puppy" is moral judgment (you're a coward), not factual correction (your fear is not real). The dismissal collapses real experience into wrongness.

Same dynamic in partnership conflict: "You can't really feel I was being dismissive" is moral judgment, not factual correction. The other person's experience is their experience. Disagreement about what the comment meant is legitimate. Disagreement about what they felt is not.

Why Objectivity Entrenches Conflict

Believing the other person is objectively wrong makes entrenched conflict inevitable. You signal disrespect for their judgment and show no empathy for their experience, which creates defensiveness. Now you've both dug your heels in, because who wants to admit they were incompetent or immoral for thinking what they thought?

The mechanism: treating your interpretation as objectively correct and theirs as objectively wrong forces them into a corner where conceding requires admitting character failure. Nobody concedes from there. The conflict calcifies.

The release valve is accepting that your "objectively correct" view is actually one of many reasonable interpretations. That's not moral relativism. It's perceptual honesty. Mathematical proofs and scientific measurements have correct answers. Most daily conflicts are not in that realm.

When two parties feel the other has empathy for their point of view, positions soften. The final working agreement is rarely where either of them started. That movement is only possible if both sides have stopped insisting the other is simply wrong.

The Physics Punchline

Jason closes with a nod to the wave/particle duality of light: even the most fundamental element of perception behaves differently depending on how you observe it. If light itself can exist in multiple states simultaneously, why expect human interpretation to operate under a stricter standard?

Like light itself, every interpersonal situation contains multiple valid interpretations. The question isn't which one is correct. It's whether you can hold space for more than one to be true at the same time.

The Coaching Application

This framework sits underneath much of Jason's cofounder conflict methodology. When he facilitates a dispute between two founders, he's usually not trying to establish what happened. He's trying to help each see that what happened for them is real and worth hearing, and that their version doesn't have to be the only one.

The practical moves:

  • Replace "you were wrong" with "I experienced it this way." Own the perception as yours, not as a claim about the universe.
  • Ask what data the other person had access to. Different inputs → different conclusions. Usually you don't know what they actually saw.
  • Stop trying to win the fact-pattern. The fact-pattern isn't where the fight really is. The interpretation is.
  • Look for the minimal overlap. What can you both agree happened? Build from that thinner-than-you'd-like foundation.
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