What is truth?
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?
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?
Comments (108)
Here are some of my beliefs on this matter :
1. All we ever have is beliefs.
2. We [ mostly ] use 'true' to say that we have or share a belief.
3. My belief is how the world is given to me ---reduced to its conceptual aspect, because I can't put the world in its sensual fullness in my talk.
4. The world is only given to individuals who experience it as meaningfully structured (who 'live' in those beliefs as simply the concept-aspect of world for them.)
5. All we can do is try to get better and better beliefs --- get a better 'view' on the one world we share -- often by discussing our beliefs with others to discover biases and inadequacy in those we currently have.
Note that truth doesn't matter. No one sees around their own perspective to some naked reality, because that reality would not be meaningfully/linguistically structured.
Belief is the intelligible structure [conceptual skeleton ] of the world as given to or grasped by a person.
Some think of truth as a predicate. It tells us something about a statement. It's troublesome to say exactly what it tells us because the concept is so basic. It seems you have to use the concept in the process of explaining what it is, so some would say we can just rest there.
For thousands of years, Aristotle's take has expressed what to some is intuitive: that to say that P is true is to say that P is the way things are.
Quoting Kevin Tan
A number of writers, Stephen King included, say that you can get closer to truth through fiction than you can by saying something straight out.
"Pilate crucify him! Crucify him! Remember Caesar, you'll be demoted, you'll be deported, crucify him!"
---
Sorry, the question always makes me think of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Per the question we have a few main options:
Correspondence - a proposition is true if it corresponds to the world. There is some sort of "truthmaker" that makes a statement true. E.g., "Theseus is standing," is true just in case there is a entity called Theseus and he is indeed standing.
Coherence - Truth is the explanation that best fits with all our other beliefs. That is, a proposition adequately explains phenomena and makes sense with everything else we know. Propositions are true when they cohere with our view of the world.
Axiomatic - finding an absolute truth is likely impossible. Truth has to do with propositions, something grasped with thought, often with language. Something is true just in a case it accords with the fundamental axioms we hold to be true. These tend to go along with a deflationary account of truth, where truth is not a property of being, relating to propositions as real abstract entities, but are linguistic or thought phenomena. Truth then relates to our beliefs and their formalization. For something to be absolutely true under this definition requires that there be essential axioms of being; I am not sure this makes sense to posit.
Pragmatism - truth is the end of inquiry. Truth is when the facts of some state of affairs have been so fully explained that we have no need to ask further questions. This doesn't mean we might not have questions in the future based on some later observations, but for now we are content. We can use the pragmatist view in concert with correspondence, axiomatic, and coherence definitions.
I do not totally buy into a deflationary account of truth. However, I do think our epistemology must necessarily be fallibilist (we may always be mistaken, even seemingly secure truths may look different when seen from another light) and circular (we must base our knowledge claims on other knowledge claims, there is no way to build an absolute foundation for knowledge).
I agree with Hegel that "the truth is the whole." There are many ways to explain my car. How it came to be, what it does, what it is for, etc. We could go into the history of the automobile, the natural history of the materials that make up my car, the personal history that led to me owning it. A mechanic, an engineer, a chemist, and a physicist could all give different true answers explaining how my car works. At some point, I won't have time for more information, and pragmatism wins out. No answer will be complete. For example, we can't create an accurate phase space map of my car showing where every last "fundamental" bit might be and what it is doing, and even if we made such a map, no human being has the cognitive capacities to truly fathom all that it says.
But I also think our pragmatic truths evolve through history based on an underlying truth. Does this imply a world of true noumena underlying appearances? I don't think so. This artificially truncates being into subject and object. Rather, truth is built from the ground up in the world. It progresses with our understanding.
Truth is in incoherent concept without the possibility of falsity, so it can not lie behind subjectivity, only above it, as a dialectical fusion of subjectivity and the nature from which it springs.
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.
Truth is that which persists beyond doubt. :grin:
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.
Like many, I don't think we can ever arrive at an Archimedean point - a value free, prefect position of revealed reality.
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.
To me it was a huge clarification to move from thinking of consciousness as a private dream-stuff to thinking of consciousness as a view on the world.
Consciousness is just the being of the world which is only given perspectively -- so far as I [can ] know --and I can't make sense of the 'round square' alternatives.
But why isn't it just private dreams ? Seems to me that rational discussion presupposes a shared world, or what are we talking about ?
Quoting Tom Storm
:up:
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.
Quoting Tom Storm
In my opinion, the cleanest way (ignoring secondary uses) is to think of 'P is true' as equivalent to the assertion of 'P.' Truth mostly gets mystified by those who forget our tapwater mundane perspectival situation. Their beliefs are true of course. And they speak to others in their agreeable peergroup about their 'truths' rather than their beliefs. We hold these truths to be selfevident. Mystification for a good cause. Sounds better than We hold these beliefs to require no justication.
If it's articulated, it's not just a feeling. If the world is given perspectively, then my beliefs about the world just are the world, for me. I think this claim might be offensive because we are so used to experiencing ourselves as 'we the sane people' who see obvious truths directly and don't therefore merely believe them. But I'm using belief as the meaningstructure of a world given perspectively. I'll readily grant that the world is given in a massive fullness of sensuality and feeling and meaningstructure, so that this meaningstructure, which we can put into words, is related to a kind of trust or feeling.
I'd say also that the world is given in modal intensities. We live in a field of possibility, with relatively solid actuality at its center. Actuality is what we are most certain about, the least blurry part of the world, the most well lit and stable.
How do you know when you are looking at it ?
Shouldn't we have a single, perpetual thread for this question?
@Jamal?
I like to suggest a different view on "What is Truth." Instead of appealing to Platonic Essences, psychologism, or analytical formulations, I like to take a roughly thought-out Naturalistic position. Truth is just a manifestation of the brain's interaction with its environment through language, to put it as general as I can. It is not a property of propositions, sentences, the world, the mind etc... The human brain has the ability to recognize stimuli "as true" because it has evolved over many eons the innate ability to condition itself to respond to environmental stimuli in ways that have proven valuable for the host. The brain recognizes its conditioning in particular ways, which in turn, we get a manifestation of this recognition in language by saying, "that's true." From this recognition, the host may act as it sees fit.
Let's look at the example, "1 + 1 = 2". All of us who have learned mathematics would say, yep this is a true statement. But not because we all have some strange ability to look into the Platonic realm of Ideas and see that it is true. But because we have conditioned ourselves to react to the symbols "as true". A child has no idea before learning mathematic what these symbols mean, but after proper conditioning, the recognition of it "as true" happens.
Could the brain mess-up, of course. Could the brain set-up conditionings that are not useful, of course. And that is what we exactly see in humanity.
The expression "Truth" may be as primitive as the expression "Ouch".
Truth is a word that comes straight from the heart of logic. Truth is the result of a logical operation and symbolically represents the realized condition of a thing, event, or concept; tantamount to saying 100% probability. Truth is arrived at through reason (ratio, part, fraction), and comparison of those parts, and is the essence of logic. To speak of truth without resorting to logic is false.
Humans are notoriously bad at processing logic correctly, we are ill equipped due to our present evolutionary larval state as a species. Digital computational systems will be more efficient and effective at this task, and that is where our future with truth lies. Until then human truth will be in a state of controlled confusion.
The fact that you are looking at something is truth. That exists despite what you believe.
According to naive realism, when we see, hear, touch, taste, or smell something, we are perceiving the actual objects as they are themselves, and our perception is a faithful representation of the objective reality. This perspective implies that there is a one-to-one correspondence between our sensory experiences and the external objects that cause them.
Challenges to naive realism point out that our perception can be influenced by various factors, such as cognitive processes, cultural and individual differences, and the limitations of our sensory organs. Illusions, hallucinations, and other perceptual phenomena also demonstrate that our senses can sometimes deceive us or misrepresent reality.
As a result of these critiques, critical theories of perception suggest that our sensory experiences are not direct reflections of the external world but rather involve complex processes of interpretation, integration of sensory data, and cognitive filtering. These theories take into account the role of the brain, neural processing, and the mind in shaping our perception of reality ~ adapted from chatgpt response.
I take a correspondence theory of truth, so I would say that truth is a relationship between subject (viz., mind-dependence) and object (viz., mind-independence) such that truth is the uncovering of what is.
As Aristotle put it, to say that which is is or that which is not is not, is true; and to say that which is not is or that which is is not, is false.
Truth, according to this view, is neither purely objective nor subjective, but is absolute.
[quote=Randall, J. & Buchler, J. - Philosophy: An Introduction, p133]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.[/quote]
[quote=Hospers, J. - An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, p116.]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.[/quote]
[quote=Kant, Lectures on Logic]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. [/quote]
Gotta be careful here. The nominal definition of truth, indicating merely an example of what may be a truth, is not the same as the logical criteria indicating what truth itself must be. What is true is not the same as what is truth, insofar as the former presupposes the latter. This shouldnt be, and probably isnt, the least contentious.
The key here is compare the object with my cognition, which makes explicit the object being compared is the perceived object, re: the object outside me. On the other hand, the agreement of a cognition with its object, is a product of understanding, for as empirical cognition necessarily follows from the perceived object, it is never of it.
And what of principles, which are necessary truths proven post hoc by but not derivatives of, empirical cognitions?
The problem here is enormous for some monistic metaphysics, re: Leibniz, in that experience alone can never give the answer to what is truth, but logic alone can never give the answer to what is true, and any theoretical doctrine which attempts to dismiss the rational a priori/empirical a posteriori dualism must overcome this problem. Or, typically post-modern, pretend there isnt one.
Not that important; just sayin
I fear replying you to you on occasions, your sophisticated way of expression could make it easy to misunderstand (or rather misstate) what you are saying, but, I will risk it.
Granted, what you point out I think is correct, we have to distinguish what is true, with truth as well as 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.
What is all quite puzzling here, despite it being trivial as well, is that whatever truth is, is established by us, it's not as if we can measure "the world" with "the world" and say "Aha! Here it is, look at the world corresponding to itself."
Which brings out very complicated questions, why do we choose one specific theory over another one, when both can explain similar phenomena? Why are theories radically under-determined by the evidence, that is, why do we leave so much stuff out? We need to of course; we cannot explain everything in one theory.
But that we are able to establish truth (or an approximation) based on something within ourselves, is, as I said, very trivial (what's the coherent alternative?), but also flabbergasting...
Thats kinda the whole can of worms, innit? Were 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.
Quoting Manuel
Absolutely. We do it all the time without ever granting to ourselves the very power by which it is done. Apparently, were 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.
As for one theory over another .parsimony? Whichever has initial exposure? Whichever has prevalent exposure? And I agree no one theory can explain it all, but ahem ..there is one theory that lays the groundwork for where to start.
Oh. And thanks for being so kind. Most of the time I get, or most of the time Im more apt to get, youre so full of shit theres no way your eyes cant be brown. (Chuckles to self theyre not. Neither of em)
I welcome your learned steerage.
Hello Tom Storm,
One does not, under any theory of truth, establish truth of the theory of truth without any circular logic. I only claim that the evidence is stacked in favor of truth itself as being equivalent with this theory, which, of course, entails that I will interpret the truthity of a proposition via the lens of this theory. This is no different than epistemology: how does one know what it means to know, without divulging in circular logic? They dont.
I think the realist response to this would be that our perceptions map to the world, that there are morphisms between them and the world. If the world is intelligible and rule-governed then the way in which our sense data comes to us is also intelligible and rule governed. We may not perceive those rules, but we can learn them through tools like the methods of science.
The world seems to be intelligible and behave in a rule-like way, so, barring radical skepticism, it seems fair for us to roll with the idea that studying nature can tell us about how we, as natural beings, come to experience the world. Presumably, our sensations do not spring up acausally, we aren't solipsists, and so there must be morphisms between the set of all our sensations and the states of affairs in the world (and this explains why different minds can agree about facts).
Obviously, our senses are quite fallible. When we stick a stick in water in looks bent, when we draw shapes on a 2D piece of paper a certain way they look three dimensional, etc. However, this doesn't mean we are forced into relativism. We don't think ships actually shrink as they sail further away from us; our friends and family don't cease to exist when we are separated. The entire project of cognitive science is to understand the causal processes at work in our perceptions, while evolutionary biology strives to tell us how we ended up with the sensory systems we have. Together, these paint a picture of how our senses map to the world, a picture verified via many ingenious experiments, the application of statistical techniques, etc.
The rational, the underlying rules that guide nature, the intelligible part of the world, this is our bridge between subject and object. Both subject and object are part of a larger whole governed by general principles.
The weakness I see with some of those quotes is that the seem to fall into the trap of thinking that objectivity = truth. That is, the truth of the world must be what it "looks like" when no one is watching, the view from nowhere/everywhere." It is a mistake to conflate this view with realism writ large. There is no reason to think that objectivity is actually equivalent with truth, nor a prerequisite for attaining it. For example, you can know that "I feel tired," is true without any need to seek an objective frame.
The view from nowhere just seems impossible. "What does an apple look like when it is unseen?" sounds more like a Zen koan then a legitimate question.
Re objectivity:
Basically: "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. This is an attack on the view from nowhere, not realism.
History is a great example of the falsity of this proposition. Is the truth of World War II something that is best expressed by stripping down the experiences of all those involved to only the elements that can be seen from anywhere? By no means. Personal experiences are all we have access to. They are part of nature and thus part of the truth. "I am unhappy," can be a true statement. The relativist errs by thinking only such radically subjective claims can be true while the positivists erred by thinking only the most objective statements, those boiled down into abstractions, could be true.
Actually, it's not making the mistake, so much as pointing out the mistake. I think the same can be said with the other passages I mentioned (although of course to really verify that would mean going back and looking at them in context.) I agree with every word in your cited text, but then it does capture the critical Kantian point. (I also note how thoroughly the phrase 'the view from nowhere' has become part of the lexicon, thanks to Thomas Nagel, I think.)
So when you say 'there is no reason to think that objectivity is actually equivalent with truth', then you're articulating the critical attitude, not the attitude of those for whom there is no criterion of truth other than objectivity - that being the naive realist!
Quoting Mww
And where are such principles to be sought? 'Sense organs and the brain do not just register the world. Our minds structure our experience and our thought in fundamental ways (op cit). Perhaps correspondence is to be sought when the order of things corresponds with the order of thoughts. Could it be said that that concordance is neither in the mind nor in the world but in our experience-of-the-world? Which points towards coherence, rather than correspondence.
I agree that seeing something from no perspective is meaningless and absurd. I do find something interesting in the different claim that objectivity is seeing something from every perspective. Now I am not claiming that this the answer to finding an objective perspective, because i am not sure it is. But I think exploring this avenue is somewhat useful and may reveal something.
In another thread I was debating about how a stick that is partial submerged in water appears bent in one direction from a particular perspective. Is the stick actually bent? Well we could move around to the other side of the pool and now the stick appears bent in the other direction. Interesting. We could jump in the pool and look at the stick with one eye out of the water and one eye inside. We could feel the stick with our hands so that we are not only "seeing" with out eyes.
Is it not the case that the person who sees the stick from all those perspectives has in some way a better understanding of the stick than the person who only sees it from one perspective?
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.
That's an enticing frame. It would seem, however that when it comes to a simple object like a stick this could make sense. But how does one apply this to more complex notions of truth in human life - morality, politics, art? Is it possible to see every possible perspective and how does one unify this, or not? How many possible perspectives are there and does truth become meaningless when it is prodigiously multifaceted? Thoughts?
I see a problem, because I think Sellar's distinction between the Manifest Image and the Scientific Image to be quite right, yet the truth of a theory in physics, say, general relativity, is quite different from truths given from testimony, say, a witness describing a crime.
I will grant that they must share (the notion or category of truth that is) a resemblance. If there are several witnesses describing the same event, we might very well get different descriptions, how do we determine which one to take a true?
General Relativity is, once established, considerably easier to verify.
So we likely have different cognitive faculties working in different domains of life, with one that overlaps on both of them, the notion of "truth".
Quoting Mww
Sure, quite a catastrophe, but thankfully we don't go that far (denying truth).
It's obscure to me honestly. Some echoes of hints here and there, but no genuine insight as to how it is done (attain truth), even if we manage to reach it, some of the time.
What do you think of Meno's paradox?:
"If you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary. If you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible. Therefore, inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible."
Sounds nice, but is problematic. If you don't know what you are looking for, it will "find" you eventually and is necessary in so far as you have questions that seek elucidation.
Even if you know what you are looking for, you may not know what about it is making you curious.
You have the searchable CPR, so for your own sake, check out Of Reason in General, around A299/B356 or so. For your own sake because I probably wont explain it worth a damn.
Briefly and hopefully somewhat coherently, principles are to be sought in reason rather than understanding, because principles, while synthetic cognitions a priori, do not apply directly to experience as understanding does in the unity of phenomena according to rules. The point being to distinguish a cognition employed as a principle, which understanding can do, from a cognition that is a principle, which it cannot. In the Kantian tripartite logical system, sequentially understanding, judgement, reason, and, synthetic a priori cognitions barred from either of the first two, and at the same time being absolutely necessary for syllogistic reasoning, reason is the only faculty capable of them, and makes them the criteria for being principles.
Thanks for not asking what they are. Dodged a serious bullet right there, no doubt.
I can see that. Technically, we might say one is the aesthetic domain, one is the discursive domain, truth overlapping both, from pure practical reason in the first, pure speculative reason in the second. In the first, the truth is in the form of subjective principles called maxims, in accordance with laws of the will, in the second truth is the correspondence of cognition with its object in accordance with mere rules of the understanding.
Quoting Manuel
Considerably easier to verify, but not going to be ever entirely proven by direct experience. I mean .whats the chance of attaining the SOL or entering a black hole? Thats where the equations lead, right? Gotta do the extremes in order to nullify the principle of induction. The Twins Paradox, however, witnessing that is within reach here pretty soon, I bet.
Tell me a little about Sellars Images? And how it relates?
Fun times at ridgemont high.
Yes you ask some probing questions. I might reply in more depth when I have the time to think it over, but a quick reply to one of the question you asked.
In terms of morality, this could be seen as a an extension to Rawl's veil of ignorance. Instead of not knowing your place in society, you have the perspective of every place in society. That which you would do if you had the combined perspective of everyone in society, is the moral thing to do. Just food for thought.
To me, it seems that truth is a human phenomenon. It is something created by human brains and therefore linked to human experiences. Without humans no truth.
Any thoughts?
I think there's merit in Rawls thought experiment. The only thing I wonder about it is that it doesn't teach morality so much as use self-interest as an organising principle.
Makes sense to me. Context is tricky in that way.
[Quote]So when you say 'there is no reason to think that objectivity is actually equivalent with truth', then you're articulating the critical attitude, not the attitude of those for whom there is no criterion of truth other than objectivity - that being the naive realist![/quote]
Well this is the other tricky part. The direct realist is not necessarily the naive realist. My biggest gripe with many versions of indirect realism is that they seem to assume that "we" exist, sitting somewhere inside our heads, to view images created by some sort of unconscious "representation creation apparatus." But cognitive science doesn't favor such a homuncular explanation; there is no "consciousness center" that has all sensory information flowing to it. Rather, there is a lot of parallel processing and interconnectedness at every step of perception. Moreover, what we're consciously aware of depends heavily on what we're paying attention too, so the elements of incoming sensory data that gets "represented to" consciousness varies quite a bit. This makes it seem more like we [I]are[/I] the representation more than being something that observes it.
And I can see an argument for a more direct form of realism that says that, while of course one doesn't think without a mind of see without eyes, what we experience [I]is[/I] nature, of which we are a part. Indirect realism then draws a false distinction between representation and the "I" that experiences the representation on the one hand, and the mind and nature on the other.
Plus, if things exist through their interactions with other things, relationally, then our knowledge of a thing [I]is[/I] part of its being (and ours).
As Big Heg puts it:
Or as Harris puts it more readably:
The truth of absolute cognition is rather that "experience" is actual and objective, while the unchangeable absolute object is the concept of subjective rationality; and since it is absolute and unchangeable this truth of absolute cognition enforces itself in the obstinately inverted concept that natural consciousness has of its cognition, by continually driving it to despair, and so to the experience of self-inversion. Only when the identity of the actual and the rational is fully grasped--only when we finally see that "experience" is objective and the "object" is our subjective concept--only then will the concept of truth as experience, and experience as truth, finally comprehend itself.
Thus the seemingly insoluble difficulty created by the fact that consciousness cannot "get behind the object as it is for consciousness" and test its knowledge of the object by the standard of "how the object is in itself" is a pseudo-problem created by our looking at things the wrong way round. Knowledge of the object is "for us" another moment.
But there is still an overarching mind that makes judgements about what constitutes truth or not.
I think it would be both coherence and correspondence within our experience. It seems to me that if by 'the world' is meant 'the world as experienced' then there is no problem with correspondence. To claim that what we say could correspond to something not within our experience seems somewhat strange to say the least.
On the other hand, I think we can safely say that our actual or possible experience does not encompass all that is or was, without making any claims about what is or was not included in our experience.
Ha, is that so? Is it true? Or is it just your belief? And if it is just a belief of yours, why should we pay it any attention? And if you believe it, don't you by that very fact believe that it is true?
We do differentiate between what folk believe and what is true. A pragmatic account such as you present loses this distinction.
Quoting Kevin Tan
I suggest you already have quite a good understanding of how to use the word "true" correctly but that you begin to have trouble when you try to articulate rules for using "true".
You might forgive me for being somewhat formal, but one way to set out what "...is true" does is found in a very simple construction, the T-sentence. Take an arbitrary sentence, say "The beans are cooking". That sentence will be true precisely in the case that the beans are indeed cooking. We can write:
Notice that on the left hand side, the sentence "The beans are cooking" is being talked about, but on the right hand side it is being used.
Pick another sentence, this time one that is false: "London is the capital of France". We can write
It looks odd, but consider it careful, and you will see that it is true. London is not the capital of France, but if it where, then "London is the capital of France" would be true.
Generalising this, for any sentence you might choose - let's call it "p" - we can write what's called a "T-sentence":
...where what we do is write any sentence we like in to the place occupied by p.
A couple of other points. Notice that this works for sentences, and not for other uses of "...is true" like "The bench top is true" or "Jeff is true to his friends". And notice also how little this tells us about truth. Other definitions will say that truth is this or that, and provide profound expositions - philosophers call these the classical or sometimes the substantive theories. What these have in common is that they are wrong. The T-sentence approach, and others related to it, downplay the import of "truth", saying it is a performance or it is redundant or that it needs to be deflated.
One final point. Notice the difference between "what is truth?" and "which sentences are true?" Your OP asked the former. The latter is much harder, and there is good reason to think no general answer can be given.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/#TarTheTru
And yes, to those who have been here before, there are complications, but the first step is to move away from substantive approaches to the issue. Lies to children.
A good series of posts.
But I'll take issue with this bit. It's what I do. Don't feel obligated to reply.
I gave a brief intro to deflation above. I think these the most useful accounts of truth.
I think that an over reliance on fallibilism comes about from considering too few examples. Usually those from the sciences.
First, it's true that the bishop stays on her own colour squares on the chessboard. There - there are truths. One can deduce that she stays on her own colour squares from her initial position and the rules of chess.
Suppose that you got half way through a game, and you protest when your opponent moved the Red Bishop to a black square. "But," your fallibilist opponent says, "Your theory that the Bishop always stays on her own colour is subject to fallibility; indeed, my move disproves that theory!"
Would you acquiesce? I think not. Fallibilism has little to do in this situation.
Sure, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the homuncular elements of indirect realism, i.e., the conception that we experience the world by "watching, hearing, etc." representations and thinking about them. Of course we have an experience of an overarching mind. Then again, a lot of evidence suggests this "unified whole," is a lot less unified than we suppose, the result of cognitive blind spots. This idea has been around in philosophy for a while too: Hume's "bundle of sensations," Nietzsche's "congress of souls," Buddhist anatt?, Blind Brain Theory, and is built off experiments with split brained individuals, blindsight, etc.
The second side of arguments against indirect realism argue that they simply throw up a false dichotomy between experience nature. Nature is "out there," while representation is "in here," and representation is directly accessible. It's the old Kantian dualism, perhaps now framed as only an epistemic dualism. But where is the delineating line here? Does representation start at the retina? But photoreceptors do their thing the same way even if they have been removed from the animal they are a part of or are grown in isolation.
So the renewed view on direct realism mostly is about whether the indirect part of indirect realism is actually useful for understanding sensory systems at all. While at the same time there is the question "in what way does it make sense to attempt to separate things in this way in the first place."
What Hegel is saying in the quotes is that, the very idea that "here is my image of the tree, and out there is the tree in itself," is a moment, a representation, that occurs [I]within[/I] consciousness, for consciousness. There is no such divide outside consciousness. If you look at mechanistic accounts of neuroscience for instance, you're seeing the same causal processes and information flowing in the same ways "inside" and "outside." That the brain is "doing information processing," is completely unexceptional in the information theoretic conceptions of physics, and neither is the essentially relational nature of the interactions; these principles show up everywhere.
While I absolutely agree with your example being a sort of special case, I think it is special for different reasons. It is a case where we can say "given A, B, C, D... Z," where that gives us a fully enumerated set of rules, the game works like "this." But that's because we are taking the rules as axiomatic, infallible to change or challenge regardless of changing states of affairs in the world.
Since, in any deduction, the information in the conclusion must be in the premises, these sorts of special cases amount to cases where: "given X is true, x must be true."
But of course some Chess rules do vairy by locale, the 3/6 rule, the hand-piece move, etc., because Chess is an actual game in the world.
Since Chess has had its rules radically changed over the centuries, I don't think it's impossible that they'll keep changing, but the game will still be Chess, just like basketball will still be basketball if they ever add the four point line they have tested.
We can be fallible about Chess because people might play differently in different areas. This happens all the time with Monopoly, which I feel like everyone plays slightly different. When I was a kid we used to play Chess in school, but we had it so you could capture the king if someone neglected to move out of check. I told them this wasn't legal, but no one liked victory by checkmate because it made games last too long. So local Chess there involved capturing the king (which Chess used to allow anyhow).
USCF actually does have slightly different rules than FIDE, and FIDE has found itself forced to do moratoriums on changing the rules of Chess as recently as the 80s and rules do still change, although these tend to be not very important for low level players. FIDE actually tried and gave up on developing a universal set of rules that wouldn't vary by region and interpretation of translations of their rules.
Division by zero flipping from being infinite to undefined, while still remaining infinite in some use cases and coding languages is another such a example where the formalism seems rigid until it isn't.
I see a similarity between the physical and moral example I gave, in terms of how we go about learning abut the world. I stand on the side of a pond, looking at a partially submerged stick. It appears to me the stick is bent. I come up with a theory that water bends sticks - a theory that explains what I perceive.
However I can do better. I can move around and look at the stick from many different angles, from under water, I can feel the stick with my hands, etc. I can then come up with a theory that explains what I perceive from all these views, which is refraction.
I would say the theory I came up with from many views (refraction) is superior to that I came up with from one view (water bent the stick).
Similarly, I can consider whether an action is moral from my viewpoint, and come up with a moral theory to explain this. However, if I were to consider the same action from everyone's viewpoint, then I would come up with a superior moral theory that just my viewpoint.
In both cases, perhaps the view from many viewpoints is a superior view to that from only one viewpoint.
In neither case am I teaching physical or moral behavior, rather in both I'm trying to understand physical and moral behavior.
Interesting topic.
There's no single thing that can be called "truth". There are different kinds of "truths" depending on what you are examining and from what aspect you are examining and wish to find if it is true or not. And the best way to get an idea about the concept of truth is to start with how the terms "true" and "truth" are applied to situations in life and compare it with its opposite, which is "false", "lie", etc. From there one can generalize to have a better idea of the concept of truth.
So, e.g. if I say "My name is Alkis Piskas", this can be true from one aspect and false from another. It is true that it is my name in this place --I have registered to TPF with that name. Everyone knows and agrees with that. It is a fact. What it might not be true and a fact, though, would be the case that this is not my real name, i.e. in life, the name one can see in my ID card, etc., but it is only an alias name that I use in TPF.
So, we can see already that "truth" is contextual.
Now, if I say "I am not young", it will be true but it won't show my age. Neither would, if I say "I am old", which is also true. What age must one have to be considered "old"? So, another characteristic of "truth" is that it can be relative. I might also specify that my age is between 62 and 68, which may be true but it would still leave out my exact age. Then I could say that my age is 66, which may be true, but it still does not indicate my exact age which can be any of the 365 days of the year I was born in. And then we have the hour of the day and so on.
So, another characteristic of "truth" is precision.
Then, I may suppose that I know well my exact age, the day and hour I was born. This would me that I know the truth about my age, wouldn't it? Well, what if I am too old or my memory fails me for one or the other reason? Even if I feel I know the truth, I'm actually deceiving myself; I have an illusion about my own age. (Of course I could check my ID card or passport or other pertinent document and find out my exact day of birth, but why should I do that, since I "know" my age? :smile:)
So another characteristic of "truth" is that it is subjective.
And I will stay on this last point, asking a question that we often meet in philosophical discussions: "Is there an objective truth?" (Or some version of it.) Maybe, a more common question is "Is there an objective reality?" Because we often see the terms "reality and "truth" be used alternatively to mean about the same thing. And this brings me closer to the question "What is reality?" For me, reality is what we agree to exist or have happened or is happening. Reality is agreement. It is true and real to me what I consider as true and real. The same thing applies to you. And if we both have the same or a similar viewpoint about something, it means we have the same or a similar reality about it and we more or less agree regarding that something. And on the contrary, if we have a different viewpoint about something, it means that we have a different reality and we disagree about it. This of course is too simple for most people to grasp! :smile: Joking, I mean, to accept.
I could go on, but I think I have covered the subject. Don't you?
I'd actually need to see an example of how such a superior moral theory arises in practice to accept this. To me this looks like you are just obtaining a range of perspectives and what's missing is how this leads to an overarching and still coherent moral position. Perhaps you could demonstrate the model in action with an example, say euthanasia?
I would also think that many acts can be called immoral without the need to consult other perspectives. (Although post-modernists might disagree). Take ethnic cleansing. We can say this is morally wrong. But the people who conduct the ethnic cleansing probably think they are doing 'difficult' work that will ultimately improve the world. Would we incorporate this perspective in any final formulation?
That's helpful and succinctly written. Appreciate it. I read a paper and saw a lecture by Simon Blackburn on the deflationary account of truth and was immediately interested in this approach. Seems to arrest endless theoretical postulations about the 'nature' of truth and gets to the practical business end.
So this approach seems to combine a linguistic account with an empirical account of matters. Is that fair?
How does this apply to claims like, 'it is true that Jesus rose from the dead'? The approach would seem to say this fact is true, if it is true (that JC rose from the dead). But establishing the truth of some claims is fraught. We have no way to verify such a claim. Uses of the word true are all over the place in our culture. Would you say that deflationary truth relies upon an evidentiary approach?
Yeah, I think the deflationary approach tells us a lot about how "truth" works. But what it doesn't do, and what folk want, is not what truth is, but which sentences are true and which are false. As if philosophers could tell us such things.
Philosophers don't know anything that non-philosophers don't know.
But they might help you ask better questions.
So yes, "JC rose from the dead" will be true if and only if JC rose from the dead. This tells you exactly what you need to know in order to know that "JC rose from the dead"; is true; but it does not tell you if JC rose from the dead.
And for that some empirical information would be needed - like seeing Jesus rise from the dead.
But not every such question relies on empirical information. See the chess example above. where it's shown not to be an empirical issue that the Bishop stays on her own colour. Or consider 7+3=9; "7+3=9" is true only if 7+3=9. That's not an empirical fact, but it is true.
And half of the folk who read that will be thinking "But 7+3 isn't 9, so Banno is wrong".
So not evidentiary, so much as truth-conditional. That is, what is on the right hand side sets out the circumstances in which (...exactly when...) the sentence is true. And so if it is true only when certain things are evident, it will be evidentiary.
I think the really important part here is the way this account shows the other accounts hereabouts to be erroneous. So far I've tried to show that for the pragmatic account, but it should also show how the idea that we can throw out truth and just have belief is flawed; or that it's just a feeling; or reality; or some evolved reaction; and so on, through pretty much the whole gamete of BS hereabouts.
But @Frank made another good point, that truth is very basic; so basic that most folk have trouble seeing how basic it is and insist on more complex explanations.
So I'm sorry, but good philosophy will not tell you if Jesus rose from the dead. But I think you knew that.
Cheers.
Truth is judgement about something - proposition, knowledge on facts or situations.
What truth is not, is it is not some solid material object such as drinks or food. That's what I used think. but I was wrong. In some culture, people say truth to mean solutions to their needs or problems. They say, on hot days like this, cold beer is truth.
When one says "Tell me the truth", one is demanding the fact or situation as happened, not distorting it or adding lies or exaggerations into it. You can tell the truth from your knowledge, but whether the other party would accept it as truth, is up to his judgement.
Your past memories can be true to you, if it is vivid and certain. You only know it is truth, and all memories are subjective.
Is truths objective? Can you define what "objective" is?
And so long as we agree that fallibilism is not the whole of epistemology, we have some progress.
Nice! Thank you again.
Interesting. I think a lot of theories of truth tend to deny this to some degree. A proposition is true or it is false. A proposition cannot be neither, and it can't be more of less true, unless we're talking about complex propositions where some percent of the atomic propositions that compose it are true and some false.
I have never liked this explanations though. You can have sets of propositions that are both true, and both describing the same phenomena, but one can have more precision and detail. We could think about this in terms of the more detailed description eliminating more "possible worlds," or in terms of our getting closer to "complete information," about the phenomena, i.e., the point where no future observation of or information about that thing will ever surprise us. This would be a more "the truth is the whole view."
But of course, a good critique of this "holistic" definition is that, because everything is interconnected, the whole truth about anything seems to require the whole truth about everything. Granted, this sort of argument is more often leveled against the idea of causation, but then the "truth is the whole," tends to imply that the cause of a thing is part of the truth of it.
On the other hand you have paraconsistent logics that allow for propositions not to be true or false, which I find enticing as well. After all, does any proposition about who will win the 2024 election actually have a truth value yet? This is going to depend partly on metaphysics and one's philosophy of time. This is fine, but I don't like to see concerns over logical system's rigor driving decisions about metaphysics, which is what I've always felt I was seeing when Russell starts making neo-Eleatic arguments against the reality of change and cause (i.e., he goes after a specific view because it saves the logical project).
I don't know if I would go along with this, but I would agree that a useful definition of truth requires subjectivity. After all, what does it mean for something to be true as opposed to false outside the context of beliefs? Non-beliefs don't seem like they can be false, and something's being true without falsity being an option seems to make truth a superfluous concept.
Right. It seems to me outside of radical skepticism on the lines of "maybe I'm having a stroke and my reasoning abilities have gone totally belly up," we can be absolutely confident about the truths of certain things provided we are willing to hold some things constant. I mean, I suppose we could always be afraid of evil demons forcing us to hallucinate certainty, but that seems like a little much.
Normally, this is true. But there may be cases that a proposition is ambiguous, or incomplete in some way, as I explained. So in these cases --and in general, if a proposition is ambiguous-- we cannot decide about its truth or falsety. I didn't say that a proposition must be always absolute (i.e. non-relative) or precise. Indeed, in philosophy, logical statements is not as precise as in Math.
The following examples will maybe make my point more clear:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I know. Most people don't, as I have mentioned at the end of my message. :smile:
I like to give as many examples as possible (w/o tiring the other person.) The prove points better than staying with abstract ideas and theories. People rarely do the first; they usually do the second. As if it is "safer" that way.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A prognostic cannot be true or false. Only what exists or has happened or is happening can. A prognostic is about possibilities and probabilities. It's a guess. One has to wait the situation that is prognosed become an actuality --i.e. true-- or not. Isn't that right?
This is a good opportunity for me to mention what I thought I should, which is, that philosophy does not actually deal with "truths" as an end product, even if truth is considered a central element in philosophy (according to SEP and other). This might shock a lot, but I believe they have to consider the following:
A truth is a fact or something in accordance with fact. A truth can and sometimes has to be proven. Philosophy does not actually prove anything. And when the words "proof" is used, it is used figuratively rather than literally. Philosophy proposes, positions itself and it shows (explains, describes) why things are what they seem to be and how they work. Take e.g. Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum". He didn't prove the truth of this proposition, he describes why this is so. If he did provide a proof, then there would be no ground for doubt or negation about it. In their turn, those who object to that proposition could not and didn't prove it is false. They also provide explainations and arguments why this proposition does not work. The don't and cannot provide a proof that will render this proposition false.
Proofs belong to Science. Philosophy uses Logic --which does involve truth-- but only as a means. Not as an end.
In fact, all the examples I provided in my previous message where based on logic but they actually didn't have anything to do with philosophy or --if uou like-- they didn't refer esp. to philosophy! :smile:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You can be absolutely certain that you are a cat, if you like. That doesn't make it true. But the bishop stays on it's own colour, or we cease to be playing chess.
Foundationalist approaches to truth might be seen to work along those lines: by holding certain things to only be true if some "hinge" propositions are held true.
One of the problems with pragmatism might be characterised as a failure to acknowledge the hinges on which it hangs.
The entire idea behind the the radical skeptic's demon though is that they have manipulated you such that you are certain the bishop doesn't change its color, but the bishop actually does change its color. That is, your faculties of deduction have been manipulated.
I don't find this impossible to imagine as I have definitely written code that I'm 100% certain should do one thing based on the rules that are in place, and then, turned out to be doing another thing. Being sure of an answer to a mathematical equation that you actually have wrong would be another such example.
As for Chess, in some article, R. Scott Bakker uses the example of the fact that there can only be one line parallel to another line. This was considered as solid of a fact as the idea that the bishop never moves off its own color. Then we got new forms of geometry.
So, my point would be that we can say "in this specific form of Chess, as defined by these rules/axioms, X is always true," just like we can say that, "given Euclid's axioms, there is only one line parallel to any other line." But in the real world stuff is always more complicated. You could promote a pawn, and your opponent could throw the previously captured black bishop onto a white spot for you, because we reuse pieces in the real world.
The truths we can be sure of are a particular type of truth where all the information about what we can deduce is already included in our premises. But when we move to the real world, we see Chess has a set of rules that are decided socially and which have changed a great deal over time. So our absolute certainty gets relegated to a closed version of the game where the rules don't change.
As if triangles, parallel lines and chess were not real.
There are profound difficulties with approaches that include words such as "absolute". What's the clear distinction between certainty and absolute certainty, between truth and absolute truth? Folk stick words together but that doesn't necessitate meaning. What's the difference between certainty and green certainty? Between truth and pentagonal truth? At the least, if these notions are introduced they had best be given a role to play, one on which we might agree. But the game so often is first to invent the term then look for it's place in the game, and the result is an interminable dialogue - as seen in these forums.
There's also profound problems with the level of scepticism that relies on demons. It's worth pointing out again that doubt requires certainty doubting that the bishop stays on her own colour relies on colours and bishops and chess and so on; doubting a piece of code relies on code and an expected outcome; doubting the number of sides of a triangle relies on sides.
The demons also indicate an irrational level of solipsism. We will check if your faculties have been compromised by comparing them with our own and those of others. It's not just Chess that has a set of rules that are decidedly social. The whole enterprise is social.
Again, I'd be happy if these considerations induce a small doubt as to the ubiquity of pragmatic epistemology.
I agree.
With your bolded bits too. But that should not be a surprise.
Mostly using this as an opportunity to say that in spite of my various misgivings I'm not a pragmatist, and not even tempted by it.
Again, it's perhaps the problem of considering too few examples that leads our engineering friends to conclude that pragmatism is the whole answer to issues of truth. It underpins their ubiquitous scientism. They come at philosophy from far to narrow a background.
So the task for us might be to get them to see beyond cantilevers and databases.
By real I just mean, "out in nature." There are no observable one-dimensional lines with no thickness that can contain an infinite number of points, are perfectly straight, and endless. Sort of like you won't find a Hegelian Taco at a food truck:
I think there is a useful distinction between the ways mathematical objects exist and the way concrete ones do.
I mean, imagine in the next several decades Berolina Chess or Ultima get so popular that 95+% of Chess tournaments and games are played in them. This becomes what Chess is, our current Chess being now a game refered to as Old Chess.
Despite this possibility, we can still be certain about what is true under the rules of Old Chess; this has to do with it being closed.
But this represents a pretty small sample of all things we can know about. "All triangles have angles that sum to 180 degrees," is the sort of thing that seemed to be a truth of that sort, and turned out not to be, because it was a proposition about "all triangles," as opposed to "all triangles given Euclid's axioms." The certainty comes from introducing something to the effect of "given X is true (or X are the rules), then Y is true (where Y is something that follows from X)." You can be certain of this, but that's because it's contained in the premises, which are taken as a given.
"If Chess refers to a game where the Bishop never changes their color then in Chess the Bishop never changes its color," essentially, although obviously the full rules of Chess makes this one consequence of them less obvious.
I completely agree. Its much the same stuff as I went over in the thread on Searle and intentionality. WE can be more specific by adopting his counts as... terminology; moving a bishop counts as a move in Chess only if certain rules are followed.
Now the weird part is that what you wrote here does not seem to me to address the body of the three fairly specific arguments I presented:
So thanks, and I'll leave you to consider the issue further.
Your Hegelian taco came over as a blue square with a question mark in it.
Sorry, I didn't mean anything technical by absolute. Just in the sense that we can be relatively certain of things. Like I know 100% that the Royals won the 2015 World Series because they beat the Mets, where as I am fairly certain that the Cards won in 2006, the last time the Mets made it to the NLCS before that, but maybe the AL team won.
Agree 100%. It doesn't make sense to doubt something that you don't think is at least likely. Radical skepticism in this way is more like "a flight from all definiteness," a sort of epistemic rioting lol.
You cannot be absolutely certain that you are a cat, if you are not. You might feel absolutely certain about it even though you are not a cat. On the other hand, you could be absolutely certain that you are a human being, even though you might not be absolutely certain about that, because being absolutely certain must entail feeling absolutely certain, whereas feeling absolutely certain need not entail being absolutely certain.
Then the kind of 'sticky' truth we are referring to is something else! Then the kind of gospel truth (Logos, Jesus Christ) is something else. Then the truth of Chess is something else :)
Just saw this. Thanks for the heads up that nLab has Hegel articles.
Quoting Banno
I shared some beliefs about belief. how I understand belief. I of course call them 'true,' for this (as I make explicit) is simply to trivially agree with myself. My beliefs are roughly the articulation of my perspective on the world, the way I see things which I understand to transcend me, to be things in our one shared world.
Quoting Banno
I've already answered that question: All we can do is try to get better and better beliefs --- get a better 'view' on the one world we share -- often by discussing our beliefs with others to discover biases and inadequacy in those we currently have. I expect that you read newspapers or their modern equivalent, the 'mere beliefs' of various philosophers.
Quoting Banno
We differentiate between what we do and do not believe. My account does not lose this distinction. It seeks to clarify what 'true' means. To take 'P' for true is to 'have' the world in a certain way.
You may believe in something like a world from no perspective that makes statements true, a world of things in themselves, apart from human cognition and language. But such a view seems paradoxical and confused to me. As Peirce saw, the game is settling beliefs.
What is familiar to us is the modification of our beliefs. Entire communities (we rational, scientific ones) end up 'knowing' this or that, accepting various statements as premises in arguments. Certain interpretations become obvious and dominant, pretty much unquestionable. We probably agree here about the massive background of shared beliefs that make ordinary life and conversation possible.
Quoting plaque flag
I don't think so. You just hid truth in "better and better". You are just paraphrasing "A statement is better if it more closely approximates the truth".
Or will you say that a statement is better if it is more strongly believed? Disney method: Just believe with all your heart, and it will come true.
Quoting Banno
So, even though I am not a cat I can still be certain that I am? Just not absolutely certain.
The two of you are breaking new philosophical ground here. :cool:
No, you can feel certain that you are a cat, but you cannot be certain that you are a cat if you are not. The point was to draw a distinction between being certain and feeling certain. I say you can only be certain of those things which cannot be, without contradiction, denied or which can be directly observed. On the other hand, you could feel certain about all kinds of things you cannot be certain about.
That's just you reading in your own biases, as far as I can tell.
Some philosophers have imagined that to start an inquiry it was only necessary to utter a question or set in down upon paper, and have even recommended us to begin our studies with questioning everything. But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real and living doubt, and without this all discussion is idle.
https://www.bocc.ubi.pt/pag/peirce-charles-fixation-belief.pdf
Sometimes we aren't at ease with our beliefs. We don't know, ultimately, how we should behave (and this includes what we should call 'true,' but even more so whether we should ACT this or that way in the world.)
[i]It is a very common idea that a demonstration must rest on some ultimate and absolutely indubitable propositions. These, according to one school, are first principles of a general nature; according to another, are first sensations. But, in point of fact, an inquiry, to have that completely satisfactory result called demonstration, has only to start with propositions perfectly free from all actual doubt. If the premisses are not in fact doubted at all, they cannot be more
satisfactory than they are.[/i]
Strong beliefs are enough. Calling our strong beliefs 'true' sprinkles no magic dust upon them. Get a gang of verbal primates together, and you'll have all the 'truth' you can stand.
Calling beliefs 'better' is, I admit, similar to calling them 'true.' But that doesn't defeat the perspectivist point here. Of course (usually!) my beliefs are true and better. We tend to write Whiggish histories of our sets of beliefs. 'I know better now.' Moving from an anguished state of doubt to the resolution of a fixed-for-now-belief is sweet relief.
In short, you haven't shown any role for 'true' after all, beyond mere endorsement (the prosentential (pronounish) use I don't deny, but it's not that exciting here.)
[ Note that I don't follow Peirce all the way, but I endorse what's quoted here.]
I'm sorry you can't see the arguments. Here's the first, set out explicitly.
The first argument is simply to note the difference between truth and belief. Belief is between someone and a supposed state of affairs, it is an attitude towards a proposition. It is dyadic. Truth relates to a proposition (sentence, statement...) and is monadic. They are not the same. But further, the attitude adopted is that the proposition is true.
A corollary of this is that to say that you believe p is to say that you believe that p is the case; that p is true. Hence belief presupposes truth.
Your reply is that all we have is better and better beliefs. This does not actually address the point made above. But further, a better belief is exactly one that more closely approximates the truth. This was Peirce's view, he did not drop truth entirely, the way you propose.
You might suppose (and at times seem to propose) that you can get by this by working with what is most useful, regardless of it's truth. Here you have dropped both truth and belief, in favour of what is expedient. The trouble here is that what is useful depends directly on one's goals, and you are immediately thrown into a trumpian relativism. The consequence of rejecting truth is that anything goes, which of course means that the nature of the world is determined by those with power.
One cannot speak truth to power if there is no truth.
The next argument is simply to point out that there are things you take as true. That you are reading this post, for example. The list from there quickly become innumerable, everything from that you love your partner to that you have a body through that the bishop in Chess stays on it's own colour. There are things that it makes no sense to doubt, that you admit you take as true by your very actions, say in replying to this post.
The next argument is a simple ad populum; very few of the folk who have paid attention to these issues have come to the conclusion that you have. Correspondence and semantic theories of truth hold the high ground, with pragmatics making a small appearance in response to scepticism.
And so on. I think the underlying issue here is giving too much import to truth, so much that it becomes frightening, inspiring the desire to dislodge it altogether. Truth is, after all, a small thing, as shown by deflationary and semantic analysis. It has a small role, but it is indispensable, since it sets the place of our words in the world.
None of this presents the classical arguments against pragmatism, which might also be addressed.
Belief presupposes a belief in truth, not the possession of it. If the truth cannot be determined, it is a mere human presumption that says there must nonetheless be a truth.
Sure, Janus, if you like. The salient bit is that to believe that p is to believe that p is true.
Quoting Janus
Yep. the presumption that truth is divalent. The alternative is anti-realism. Help yourself.
I say only that we tend to settle beliefs, when troubled by cognitive dissonance, and that we often tend to understand ourselves as making progress, that we 'know better' now --- we write Whiggish autobiographies. The 'race realist' finally 'sees the light.' Someone is 'red pilled' or 'black pilled' or whatever) and understands themselves to see the world more correctly or completely now. An observer might see decline and ruin. But 'ground truth' presupposes someone infallibly in touch with the mystic Real, someone who isn't just another believer.
I've explicitly rejected this pragmatic criterion in many posts. Note that I don't need to get around anything in the first place. Purveyors of mystic truth syrup are in the position of having to make a case. To call P true is basically [only] to communicate (and, secondarily, reason about) [ one's belief that ] P.
I think this gets it pretty much right:
https://iep.utm.edu/truthpro/
I suggest understanding belief as the intelligible structure [conceptual aspect ] of the world as given to or grasped by a person. To be troubled by doubt is to have a blurry or flickering world. Did I forget to set my alarm ? Does she like me ? Will I get caught if I only take a little bite ?
That we seek 'better' beliefs is not so problematic, for many of us have beliefs about what makes beliefs better. A closer walk with God, whatever.
It seems to me, that no one sees around their own perspective to some 'naked' reality, because that 'reality' would not be meaningfully/linguistically structured. So reality-from-no-perspective is mystic nonsense, at least for creatures like us. Our beliefs (the current linguistic-conceptual structure of the world from our perspective) might always change, some more plausibly than others, of course.
Maybe we aren't that far apart after all. My belief is (I claim) just the 'meaningstructure' of the world from my point of view. I live 'in' that structure. It may change, but it is real now. It is 'my truth.'
I am my world...The world is all that is case.
I'd make assertion or conceptual structure itself fundamental. The world is 'always already' meaningfully ( logically, linguistically ) structured, at least for sentience which is also sapience. This world is 'for' that sapience, and its meaningstructure is the belief of that sapience. It's a minor detail we could debate, but I'd include silent realizations. I can update my beliefs without telling anyone right away.
I think Wittgenstein was something like a perspectivist in this way:
[quote = TLP]
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits... In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. ...That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.
[/quote]
I choose this is a mere sample. Maybe 2/3 of your post was just (I'm sorry ) sentimental sophistry. I agree with some of your criticism of pragmatism, but they are irrelevant here. My 'rejection of truth' was a clarifying explanation of the concept truth in terms of what I suggest is a more basic concept: belief. I take belief to be something like the conceptual dimension of a perspective on the world. The [my] world is [when reduced to such a dimension] 'all that is case.' Something 'being the case' is fundamental. You might have this in mind when you try to derive belief from truth. Perspectively, they are the same thing. I call my own beliefs true, but I say perhaps that you are deluded.
The unaddressed point remains: to believe the p is to believe that p is true.
We add belief to truth because what we believe is not what is true. Sometimes we are mistaken, or we have a different opinion to someone else, or we find out new things. These three things rely on there being a difference between what is believed and what is true.
This one seems trivial. There are two senses of "knowing what you are looking for", which you might label the "question" sense and "answer" sense.
Question: Where are my car keys?
Answer: In the drawer.
Both of these can be referred to as "knowing what you are looking for", but of course they mean totally different things. To begin an inquiry, you need to know what you are looking for, but only in the question sense. And knowing the question obviously doesn't make the answer irrelevant.
Sure. I've long found Meno's paradox to be a powerful argument for innateness. The topic is a little more nuanced than some take it to be. :grin:
I recently took up the structure of a moral truth. It is a bit technical but it doesnt have to be, though that may take some reading through everything.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11976/the-structure-of-a-moral-claim-to-truth
Quoting Banno
Actually I second this motion. @Jamal @Baden @fdrake
Not to be necessarily punitive in this instance, but it is hard to be helpful if someone isn't even taking a position. @Kevin Tan, I think those are actually just six questions.
1. Exclusive subjective truths e.g. your thoughts, your dreams, your hallucinations, your pain, your pleasure, etc. Only you have access to them.
2. Shared subjective truths e.g. things two or more sentient beings can experience e.g. standing on the planet Earth, looking at the stars, eating at a restaurant, flying in a plane, etc.
I'm not sure what your definition of "objective," is here, but it seems like the objective should be a subset of number two. The objective is the view of things with biases removed, accounted for, or flattened out.
Objectivity cannot exist without subjectivity. For a world without any experiencing beings, talk about the "objective existence of things," becomes meaningless. Without the possibility of subjectivity, "objectivity" is a contentless term, seemingly applying equally to everything and nothing. "Objective," just becomes equivalent with "is," the term doesn't delineate any possible distinction.
There is, of course, a tendency to make "objective" a synonym for "without reference to mind," "noumenal," or even "in-itself, relating to nothing else." I don't think this is a helpful redefinition. If anything, it seems like a conflation, and it becomes particularly pernicious if combined with the idea that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," or "the true view of things is the view from nowhere/anywhere."
Of course, it's true that a knowledge relationship cannot exist "without reference to a knower." But then it hardly seems like "without reference to a knower," should be the gold standard of knowledge. This is the incoherence at the center of positivism, whose ghost lingers on as a sort of voodoo strawman held aloft by post-modern thought as the foil that can be defeated to show all notions of objectivity and truth are relative or empty. But that the idea that "the truth of things is how they are conceived of without a mind," is simply broken doesn't really say much about truth and objectivity as a whole.
Including your merely "subjective" claim that "we can't ..." :roll:
And therefore it's imaginary at best (i.e. not a true "claim") or self-refuting at worst.
:roll: (e.g.) Start counting ...
This is only datum, not "knowledge" (i.e. a historical and/or scientific explanation), that is more-than-subjective insofar as (a) you can actually eat the bananas and (b) you cannot actually eat the fruit bowl and, even more so, (c) you can actually measure (e.g.) the resting masses of the bananas and fruit bowl, separately and together. What grounds, Seeker, do you have to doubt that "two bananas in a fruit ball" refers to more than just your "subjective sensory perception"?
in 1999, I watched a movie called "The Matrix". Please see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093 Have you seen it? If you have not, I highly recommend that you do. Ever since then, I have been wondering if the things I see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are really there or if they are a simulation. I can see the two bananas in my fruit bowl. I can touch them. I can peel them and eat them and experience their sweet taste. All of these are subjective experiences. How do I know that I am not in the Matrix?
By "subjective" I mean internal to minds. By "objective" I mean external to minds. How can we really know what is and what is not external to my mind? Solipsism can't be proven or disproven. The simulation hypothesis can't be proven or disproven.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Well, for starters, you don't have any reasonable grounds to doubt that you are "not in The Matrix" ...
Whatever makes "my mind" mine (e.g. embodiment) cannot be internal to "my mind".
Speculative suppositions are not matters of "proof" like (e.g.) mathematical theorems; rather they are matters of reasonableness. For instance, do you believe it is reasonable to doubt that there are 'other minds, the external world'? Apparently, Seeker, as this discussion demonstrates, you do not.
How do you know this? Are you an expert or non-superficially familiar with universal quantum computation¹ (D. Deutsch)? Cite a fundamental physical law that is inconsistent with prohibits "the simulation hypothesis"; if fundamental physical laws do not prohibit it, propose some reasonable grounds to doubt that this universe is 'a simulation within a simulation within a simulation, etc' (N. Bostrom ... R. Penrose², S. Lloyd, S. Wolfram³, G. Mandelbroit ...) Again, it's a hypothesis about model of (aspects of) the physical world that is either experimentally testable (i.e. scientific) or it is not (i.e. pseudo-scientific or metaphysical) and therefore, in either case, is not a matter of "proof".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Turing_machine [1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology [2]
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-the-ruliad/ [3]