What is truth (and what isn't?)
Is truth everything objective? Or can subjective things such as memories be truth as well?
Does truth have to be factual or could it be (partially) fictional as well? — Kevin Tan
Does truth have to be factual or could it be (partially) fictional as well? — Kevin Tan
1. All we ever have is beliefs.
2. We [ mostly ] use 'true' to say that we have or share a belief. — plaque flag
I find your approach interesting. I remember someone saying something like truth is subjectivity we share together. I guess that expresses the notion of the often maligned intersubjectivity. — Tom Storm
Like many, I don't think we can ever arrive at an Archimedean point - a value free, prefect position of revealed reality. — Tom Storm
How do you classify various types of truth claim? I guess truth is an abstraction and isn't a property which looks identical wherever it is said to exist. To say Jesus is the truth is one thing. To say technology via science provides working mobile phones is quite another type of claim. — Tom Storm
And a belief is merely a name for a kind of articulated feeling. I feel this sort of way and when I express myself about it this is my belief. I believe this because I feel believe-y about it. It is the same with certainty and knowledge, which are all biological acts of one sort or another, vaguely described. — NOS4A2
Truth is reality. Reality is what exists regardless of what we believe. — Philosophim
Truth is reality. Reality is what exists regardless of what we believe.
— Philosophim
How do you know when you are looking at it ? — plaque flag
According to (correspondence) theory, truth consists in the agreement of our thought with reality. This view ... seems to conform rather closely to our ordinary common sense usage when we speak of truth. The flaws in the definition arise when we ask what is meant by "agreement" or "correspondence" of ideas and objects, beliefs and facts, thought and reality. In order to test the truth of an idea or belief we must presumably compare it with the reality in some sense.
1- In order to make the comparison, we must know what it is that we are comparing, namely, the belief on the one hand and the reality on the other. But if we already know the reality, why do we need to make a comparison? And if we don't know the reality, how can we make a comparison?
2- The making of the comparison is itself a fact about which we have a belief. We have to believe that the belief about the comparison is true. How do we know that our belief in this agreement is "true"? This leads to an infinite regress, leaving us with no assurance of true belief. — Randall, J. & Buchler, J. - Philosophy: An Introduction, p133
Although it seems obvious to say, "Truth is correspondence of thought (belief, proposition) to what is actually the case", such an assertion nevertheless involves a metaphysical assumption - that there is a fact, object, or state of affairs, independent of our knowledge to which our knowledge corresponds.
"How, on your principles, could you know you have a true proposition?" ... or ... "How can you use your definition of truth, it being the correspondence between a judgment and its object, as a criterion of truth? How can you know when such correspondence actually holds?"
I cannot step outside my mind to compare a thought in it with something outside it. — Hospers, J. - An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, p116.
Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognising it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object. — Kant, Lectures on Logic
Kant, Lectures on Logic — Quixodian
take into account what are the cognitive conditions such that we can establish such a category as "truth" and be somewhat confident it is correct. — Manuel
But that we are able to establish truth…..is…very trivial — Manuel
How do you establish the truth of the correspondence theory of truth?
If we conceive of conceptual structuring as a universal feature of the mind, then there is no threat to objectivity, because questions of objectivity simply cannot arise. Sense organs and the brain do not just register the world. Our minds structure our experience and our thought in fundamental ways. To think that this in itself could compromise objectivity is to imagine that we could think without brains, see without eyes. To the extent to which this is Kant’s point about our perceiving the world only as phenomenal (as it is structured by our minds) and not as it is in itself (as it is in its unstructured form), then this is just to say that we cannot think without minds any more than we can see without eyes. Unmediated perception (and thought) is not objective perception: it is not perception at all...
So that we are not misled into simply associating objectivity and truth, it is worth highlighting one very important difference between them. Whereas truth is absolute and does not come in degrees, objectivity only comes in degrees. The idea of absolute objectivity is a misconception, encouraged by thinking of it as a view from nowhere. If there is no view from nowhere, there is no limiting case where, having progressively become more and more objective, a theory can finally attain absolute objectivity. Objectivity does not become like truth in the limiting case. Indeed, some of the deepest and most persistent problems for understanding objectivity arise when one tries to make it absolute, or at least inadvertently thinks of it in absolutist terms.
What we are seeking to do in imposing standards of objectivity in our judgements in modern science is to identify and separate the informative and the uninformative, with a view to producing reliable results. Objectivity is more mundane than ‘the search for truth’, and it is in its very mundaneness, by contrast with the ‘search for truth’, that its value lies.
Objectivity - A Very Brief Introduction
I cannot step outside my mind to compare a thought in it with something outside it," is making the mistake of thinking that objectivity becomes equivalent to truth at the limit. — Count Timothy von Icarus
And what of principles, which are necessary truths proven post hoc by but not derivatives of, empirical cognitions? — Mww
That tapwater fact that reality is given perspectively seems to imply this. What can we even mean by 'seeing around all perspectives' to get reality 'pure' ? It's like seeing a spatial object from no perspective at all, absurd. — plaque flag
Extending this, I put forth the following bit of speculative thinking. If a person were able to see the stick from every possible perspective (humanly impossible I know), then the combination of all those views, is the objective view. — PhilosophyRunner
That’s kinda the whole can of worms, innit? We’re going to bother with establishing a category, calling it “truth”, demand a certainty from it….then only be somewhat confident in it? Nahhhh….I want my truth indisputable, at least at the time I determine it, and from the same system from whence it came. If your truth is better than mine, on the other hand, then I got a whole different set of problems. — Mww
Absolutely. We do it all the time without ever granting to ourselves the very power by which it is done. Apparently, we’re satisfied understanding no truth from empirical conditions is at all possible, thereby no truth at all is possible. Which is catastrophic in itself, for in such case, there is no legitimate reason to attribute moral agency to humanity in general. — Mww
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