Rashomon Cognition: Same Event, Different Truths
At fifteen I concluded that no account is objective. The harder question was what to do once you accept that.
At fifteen I arrived at the idea that the same event, seen from two vantage points, is not one truth with two descriptions. It is two truths. There is no bird’s-eye view from which the whole thing resolves into a single correct story.
I did not have the word for it yet. Years later I learned it was called Rashomon, and that a film had made the problem famous. The idea arrived quietly, the way a fact does when it has been true for a while.
What I Did Not Mean
The easy reading is that I had become a relativist. If all accounts are partial, then all accounts are equal, and the person who shouts loudest owns the story. That is where the idea usually collapses, and for a while I let it.
It took longer to see the crack in it. Partial is not the same as uninformed. A doctor’s account of a wound and a passerby’s account of it are both limited by where they stand, but one of them has seen the tissue, counted the stitches, and watched the healing. The limits are real. They are not equal. Evidence still narrows the field.
A story can be honestly told from a corner and still be wrong about what the corner could not have seen. Accepting no objective account is a claim about access, not about standards.
The disagreement, once I stopped trying to dissolve it, was rarely about facts. It was about which facts someone had, and what they were protecting by telling it that way.
What It Changes in Engineering
Any system with more than one observer has its own Rashomon problem. The user reports a crash. The log says the request succeeded. The developer reproduces nothing. All three are telling the truth from their vantage point, and none of them has the whole event.
The naive fix is to pick the most authoritative source and trust it. The better fix is to assume that each source is a partial witness with a specific blind spot, and design so the blind spots are visible. Logs that only record success are witnesses who never looked at the failure. Error messages written to satisfy the developer’s model of the bug describe the developer’s model, not the bug.
The practical lesson is to stop treating “the system works” as a claim. It is a vantage point. The question is always: from where, and what could that position not have seen.
What It Changes in Reading People
When two people describe the same event, I try to hold two things at once. Each account is true from where that person stood. Each is also missing whatever their position made invisible to them. Neither cancels the other.
Most social friction comes from skipping the first step, from deciding a person is lying because their version does not match ours, when both accounts simply had different vantage points and nobody compared notes.
I do not have a clean ending for this. The problem has stayed open since I was fifteen. Some days the plural accounts feel honest. Other days it feels like an excuse I gave myself for not working harder to find out what actually happened. I have not resolved it. I am not sure it resolves.