The Professor Who Trusts Truth More Than Certainty

There is a difference between a love of knowledge and a fidelity to truth. Most universities have confused them. We measure and reward one while struggling to even recognize the other.

Love of knowledge is generous and important. It drives research, discovery, and the accumulation of what we know. Knowledge is teachable. It is scalable. It can be stored, organized, and retrieved. It is precisely the sort of thing that large language models are remarkably good at helping us navigate.

A fidelity to truth is something else.

It is not primarily about accumulation, but encounter. It is the willingness to discover how you’re wrong. It is the pursuit of being unsettled. It is the capacity to remain open when your frameworks begin to fail and your categories no longer hold what you are meeting.

And here’s the problem: we’ve systematically confused the two.

We’ve built universities around the love of knowledge and often called it a love of truth. We measure knowledge. We reward knowledge. We publish knowledge. We have elaborate systems for evaluating knowledge.

We have far fewer ways of recognizing fidelity to truth.

The professor’s work, I think, is to help students distinguish between them and to cultivate the harder fidelity.

I want to be careful here because truth is anything but a simple concept.

Truth is not merely whatever the most powerful person in the room decides it is. Nor is it simply a collection of facts waiting to be assembled correctly. In Eucontamination, my sister Billie and I wrote of Truth as a person rather than an object. Truth is not something to grasp and possess. It is something to relate to.

I may possess knowledge.

I pursue truth.

This distinction matters because certainty is seductive. Without a stubborn refusal to settle for less, it becomes easy to convince ourselves that what we want to believe is true. It is not always easy to distinguish truth from desire.

Lacan helps complicate this picture. He distinguishes between the Symbolic and the Real. The Symbolic is the world of language, concepts, categories, and meaning. It is where knowledge lives. The Real is what resists our attempts to fully capture reality in language at all. It is what returns as contradiction, surprise, failure, or disruption.

For Lacan, truth is not identical with the Real. Truth can only ever be half-said. We encounter it indirectly, in the places where our knowledge begins to fail. The Real is what prevents our symbolic systems from ever becoming complete, while truth emerges in the cracks that failure exposes.

This means that knowledge and truth are not opposites.

Knowledge is necessary. We cannot live outside the Symbolic. We need concepts, language, theories, and explanations. We need maps.

But fidelity to truth requires remaining open to the possibility that our maps are incomplete, that our categories are inadequate, and that reality exceeds our current understanding.

Truth is not what we possess. It is what continues to unsettle us.

Think of the difference between hearing a piece of music that genuinely moves you and reading a music critic’s analysis of that same piece.

The review may be insightful. The critic may identify real patterns, structures, and nuances. They may even help you hear something you missed. But the review is not the music. The music exceeds the review.

A similar thing happens whenever we encounter something that disrupts us. We immediately begin translating that encounter into concepts, explanations, and frameworks. We make sense of it and place it within categories we can manage.

That translation is useful and even necessary, but something is always left behind.

Knowledge is not the enemy of truth. Knowledge is what happens when we try to make sense of what we have encountered. The danger is that we become so comfortable with our explanations that we forget there was ever an encounter at all.

We begin mistaking our maps for the territory. We settle for what is useful, graspable, and manageable, and call it truth.

This happens in universities all the time. We translate encounters with great texts, difficult questions, living traditions, and demanding disciplines into knowledge about those things. Then we teach the knowledge.

None of that is inherently wrong. But something gets lost when knowledge becomes the whole story.

What gets lost is the encounter itself and the willingness to be disrupted. What gets lost is the recognition that education is not merely about acquiring knowledge, but about becoming the sort of person who can remain faithful to truth even when truth unsettles what they think they know.

Perhaps that is where wisdom begins. Not in possessing the right answers, but in remaining open to questions that continue to exceed them.

And this is precisely where the professor’s work must reach beyond knowledge.

A great teacher does not simply give students information. Neither do they only curate meaningful experiences and call it formation. A wise teacher helps students encounter truth in a way that leaves them wanting more, straining at the limits of what current knowledge can illuminate.

This requires the professor to be knowledgeable and confident within their discipline. I tell my counseling students they cannot critique modern mental health discourse until they’ve first learned to understand it. The DSM is not the enemy. But it is at the gaps of what we think we know, in its failures, that truth begins to shine through.

The work of the professor, then, is to invite students to those limits. To help them see where knowledge reaches its boundary. To model what it looks like to remain unsettled at that boundary rather than rushing to close it with premature answers.

This cannot be done from a distance. It requires the professor’s own willingness to be disrupted, to revise, to refuse the comfort of mastery’s illusion or critique’s safe remove. The professor who remains unsettled themselves becomes both the model and the guide.

But here is the cost: if I’m helping students pursue truth, I cannot guarantee what will become of them. I do not know where truth will drive them. But I trust it will be good.

Our current moment with large language models helps expose why this distinction is so urgent.

LLMs can demonstrate a proficiency with knowledge that far exceeds any person. They operate almost exclusively within the Symbolic. But this means they have no access to truth. They cannot be genuinely unsettled. They cannot be changed by encounter. They cannot remain open to what exceeds their categories because they have no self to be exceeded.

If the professor’s role was purely knowledge transmission, we would have a crisis. But if the professor’s role is to help students encounter truth—to invite them to the limits of what we know and model fidelity to what lies beyond—then AI clarifies rather than threatens.

In fact, it makes the professor’s work more necessary. Because infinite knowledge will be available. Claude has infinite answers to answerable questions. What will be rare is the willingness to remain open to what knowledge cannot contain. What will be irreplaceable is the person who says “I don’t know” and means it. The teacher who trusts truth more than certainty.

A fidelity to truth leaves one incapable of settling for given knowledge. The person formed toward truth cannot help but yearn for more.

The commitment to remain unsettled, to keep reaching beyond what is known, to pursue truth even when it costs is, I believe, a holy calling.

It is a way of saying yes to reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. It is a refusal of idolatry: the worship of the image of truth (our knowledge, our systems, our certainty) instead of truth herself.

The professor who practices this fidelity, who stays faithful to it even when the institution rewards something else, is practicing something countercultural and sacred.

It is not the only calling, but it is one worth honoring.

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