Elephants

  • Blind men and an elephant - wikipedia
    • The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it.
    • Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk.
    • They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other.
    • In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows.
    • The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.[1][2]
    • The parable originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent, from where it has been widely diffused.