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What are some examples of Objective Truth?

thesoundofmotion

Bluelighter
Joined
May 1, 2007
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That is if you believe in Objective Truth.

I can say that 1+1=2 and that might be the case, but does that refer to reality?

I can say that the temperature is 40 degrees out, but does that refer to reality as well?

Are these just not systems created by us?

Does Objective Truth exist? On the contrary does Subjective Truth exist?

Do they both not exist and are actually just concepts? Could there be no objective and subjective truths?
 
Time is subjective. Actually I believe there is no time and it's just a concept made up by human mind. There's only 'one moment', in which things change.
Also I think that to conceptualize is to go further away from the 'true reality', than the opposite. My post is also filled with concepts, which aren't the reality, but just signposts trying to point at it.
 
I asked this question to someone the other day and they said Science proves Objective Truths.

How can I still be so sure of this though?

The person also told me to look at the ground and notice the difference between the colors of two concrete platforms. We both noticed they were indeed different colors so that is what he deemed objective.
 
the difficulty in finding objective truth is more to do with man's propensity toward self serving dishonesty than to an actual absence of it.
 
Some examples of objective truth:

The time is 7:00 PM in Chicago at the time of my writing this.
Paris is the capital of France.
JFK was assassinated in 1963.
A piece cannot be taken on the first move in a game of chess.
Sherlock Holmes lived on 221B Baker Street.
Snow is white.

Some of these truths may be true by convention, but they are not for that reason "subjective" rather than "objective". The truth about chess, for example, is most obviously true by convention, but it is perfectly objective. If you disagreed with it, you would be totally wrong, because you would not understand the convention. It is doubtful whether the truth about Sherlock Holmes "refers to reality", but its nonetheless objective.

In general, I think that concepts such as truth and objectivity make a good deal more sense when left uncapitalized.
 
to fully answer ur question i dont think there are any. it's all biased by our perceptions.
 
"snow is white" is so open to interpretation it's entirely subjective.

alasdair
 
Some examples of objective truth:

The time is 7:00 PM in Chicago at the time of my writing this.
Paris is the capital of France.
JFK was assassinated in 1963.
A piece cannot be taken on the first move in a game of chess.
Sherlock Holmes lived on 221B Baker Street.
Snow is white.

The time was only 7 PM because we defined it as such. There is nothing objective about that - merely conventional.
Saying that "a pitch in baseball that bounces on the way to home plate is a ball" is objective truth is ridiculous.
It is a rule in a game we made.
All of your examples are of this type, merely conventionalized systems that most or all people would agree on, because they are conventional. That doesn't make them objective.
Objective = conventional?
That is silly.

What if I make a sandwich with the mustard on the outside of the bread. I have broken convention, but have I destroyed objective reality? Of course not.

What if my friends and I play chess with different rules?
Are we breaking objective reality?

What if someone argues that France really has two capitals when it comes to fashion, and three when it comes to wine, and several when it comes to food?

What if someone uses the Chinese calendar to describe when JFK was killed?

You might want to say that I am using language "illegally", so that what I am talking about is not really "playing chess", or not the real capital of France.
But this is just appealing to conventional uses of words. Again, conventionality.
It also requires that I understand and accept your definitions of each word you used.
But I don't, and I am willing to bet that you would have a great deal of difficulty defining a good many without appealing to the notion of convention.

Your argument against this seems to be to state that, if I disagreed with X I would be totally wrong.

Weak argument, I would say. Different interpretations will arise, without anyone necessarily being "wrong". Someone must be elected or appointed to determine what counts as "right" and "wrong", but this does not bear any relevance to objective truth.

As you mentioned, Sherlock Holmes was fictional. He didn't live anywhere.
Also, in American English, we cannot say that he lived "on" such and such, unless he actually lived on top of the building.
Is the word "on" included in your so-called objective truth?
If so, it doesn't work for hundreds of millions of people.
If not, which words are included? Who decides?

Are only the ideas to which the words point included?
What if your conceptualization of the ideas differs from mine? Whose should we use?
What if I have a more fleshed-out conceptualization of Paris, since I have been there, but yours is more abstract?
What if someone thinks about "Paris" as representing the geographical entity one time, but the voting population another time, the fashion world another time? This is not some trick of semantics, but something people actually do all the time. For example, the following sentences are really very normal, but each selects a different entity to refer to with the name "Paris":
‘Paris is a beautiful city’ (location) vs.
‘Paris set a curfew’ (government) vs.
‘Paris elected the Green candidate as mayor’ (population)

I do not consider anything you wrote to be (or represent) objective truth.
I also do not believe in objective truth.
 
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I just farted. This is an objective truth. That it smells delightful, is a subjective truth.
 
^^^^
That question proves key. :)
...
I think that to engage this question thoroughly, we need to ask what objectivity and subjectivity are, how they interrelate, and what conditions give rise to their interrelation.

ebola
 
The time was only 7 PM because we defined it as such. There is nothing objective about that - merely conventional.
Saying that "a pitch in baseball that bounces on the way to home plate is a ball" is objective truth is ridiculous.
It is a rule in a game we made.
All of your examples are of this type, merely conventionalized systems that most or all people would agree on, because they are conventional. That doesn't make them objective.
Objective = conventional?
That is silly.

As I said in my original post, conventional is conventional, objective is objective, and subjective is subjective. The issue of whether something is true by convention is a separate issue from whether it is subjective or objective. If truth is a property of language (I think so), then all truth is conventional because all of language is conventional. It doesn't follow that no truth is objective, or that no distinction can be made between claims of fact and claims of opinion.

If two people agree on the convention and the convention is internally consistent, it can be used to settle matters of fact. For example, if you and I agree as to the rules of chess, then we should agree that a piece cannot be taken on the first move. If you dispute this, then either you do not agree as to the rules or you do not understand the rules. It is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact.

If you want to use the Chinese calendar to determine the date of the assassination of JFK, well and good. But remember that according to the convention of the Chinese calendar, there will still be a unique date and an objective way of arriving at it. People who claim to use the Chinese calendar but supply the wrong date are factually wrong.

Of course, it is only convention that tells us that Paris is the capital of France, but if someone told you that the capital of France was Berlin, I would hope that you would correct this person instead of telling them that they were welcome to their subjective opinion. It is far more likely that this person is ignorant of the objective facts of geography than that they are playing word games.
 
I think that intersubjectivity, entailing constant practical interaction between social organisms and their environment (and thus each other) conditions the emergence of both subjectivity and objectivity. Insofar as intersubjective practices coordinate individuals to undergo particular (ie, 'shared') experiences, intersubjectivity conditions how we form subjective impressions, socially conditioned concepts framing personal meanings. Insofar as intersubjective practice coordinates overt investigation of the world, it conditions objectivity, in framing what criteria constitute 'evidence', and in leading individuals to observe a common object in similar ways, to establish 'objective knowledge' (ie, universal across time, space, and individuals, and thus reproducible).

ebola
 
"snow is white" is so open to interpretation it's entirely subjective.

alasdair

=D

You're probably right that is the most subjective of the examples that I've given. Actually it's an allusion to a theory of truth called the disquotational theory. The theory holds that to say of a proposition that it is true is just to assert the proposition. The example usually given to illustrate this is:
"Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.
This is probably not the kind of answer that people are looking for when they ask questions like "what is truth", but it's one of the least confusing that are out there.
 
Insofar as intersubjective practice coordinates overt investigation of the world, it conditions objectivity, in framing what criteria constitute 'evidence', and in leading individuals to observe a common object in similar ways, to establish 'objective knowledge' (ie, universal across time, space, and individuals, and thus reproducible).

ebola

Sure, this sounds right to me. I would only argue that shared epistemic criteria are conditioned more by shared neural architecture than by any amount of intersubjective practice. People see the world and use language in similar ways primarily because their brains and sensory inputs are similar.
 
If two people agree on the convention and the convention is internally consistent, it can be used to settle matters of fact. For example, if you and I agree as to the rules of chess, then we should agree that a piece cannot be taken on the first move. If you dispute this, then either you do not agree as to the rules or you do not understand the rules. It is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact.

It is a matter of convention, not objective truth.

If you want to use the Chinese calendar to determine the date of the assassination of JFK, well and good. But remember that according to the convention of the Chinese calendar, there will still be a unique date and an objective way of arriving at it. People who claim to use the Chinese calendar but supply the wrong date are factually wrong.

Again, such a person would be wrong due to conventional standards, but this says nothing about objective truth.


All of your rebuttals failed, in my mind, because you merely restated that convention does not permit certain interpretations, which you then labeled as "fact" (and ostensibly were referring to objective truth with this label).


If truth is a property of language (I think so), then all truth is conventional because all of language is conventional. It doesn't follow that no truth is objective, or that no distinction can be made between claims of fact and claims of opinion.

I don't believe that language bears any relationship to truth.
More relevant, however, is that you used language to express what you termed objective truth.
Just where do the objective truths lie?
In the language? I have already argued that such an interpretation does not work.
In the ideas evoked by the language? I have already argued that such an interpretation does not work.
Somewhere else? I would love to know where.
 
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