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How would you define Truth?

Maybe, you can read The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus of Martin Heidegger. It's a very good introduction to the "more sophisticated" approach to the question what truth is. This is not an easy pop-philosophical book, but probably hard to read. Heidegger is the most influential western philosopher of the 20th century and probably among the five most important philosophers all time (which includes Plato, who the book is about).
 
I just looked out of the window - truth

I can hear a TV on downstairs - truth

Just ate an egg and bacon sandwich - truth

1 + 1 = 2 - Truth

A square's area can be worked out by multplying the lengths of 2 sides together - truth

Cat is spelled Cat in the english dictionary - truth

England is a country - truth
 
rickolasnice said:
I just looked out of the window - truth

I can hear a TV on downstairs - truth

Just ate an egg and bacon sandwich - truth

1 + 1 = 2 - Truth

A square's area can be worked out by multplying the lengths of 2 sides together - truth

Cat is spelled Cat in the english dictionary - truth

England is a country - truth
Click to expand...


Good try, but one might posit alternatives that render your 'truths' either undecided, or even false.

Can you be 100% certain that your TV is in fact downstairs? Perhaps someone has stolen it and replaced it with a tape recorder emitting a recording of a television?

Perhaps your sandwich was a piece of paper that due to a temporary delusional state, you mistook for food?

1+1=2, print it on a piece of paper, show it to a Mongolian teenager and ask if it is true, the probable reply would not be unequivable.

As for the square what if one side is marked out in inches, and the other in centimeters?

Cat=Cat, as a tautology it is most probably true, but you can't exclude the possibility of a dictionary that completely omits the word, rendering your argument false.

England is a country? Any truth value here is due to convention, so one might say you are showing the convention to be true, not the statement, one might argue that the proper appellation is nation state, or Kingdom.


In fact how can you be certain of any of these truths. Perhaps you have just entered a simulation whilst your body and brain lie in a universe completely at odds to our own. Perhaps you are but a brain in a jar, hooked up to a supercomputer that feeds you sensory information, all of which it knows to be untrue?:)
 
Psyduck said:
Maybe, you can read The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus of Martin Heidegger. It's a very good introduction to the "more sophisticated" approach to the question what truth is. This is not an easy pop-philosophical book, but probably hard to read. Heidegger is the most influential western philosopher of the 20th century and probably among the five most important philosophers all time (which includes Plato, who the book is about).
Click to expand...

whilst i completely agree that Heidegger's work is important, this predates Tarski's theorem (see perevious post) and its generally accepted in analytic philosophy (at the university where i studied it at least, which is a very very good one!) that only discussions of truth which take Tarski's theorem into account are valid.

that said, I don't wish to undermine your recommendation, it is nice to have someone contribute on the basis of the hard work of genuisus rather than their own perceptions. that might make me sound like a snob but i've studied a lot of philosophy and learned that in general most preconceptions are wrong so its better to look to respected authorities rather than come up with our own pop theories.....
 
^ well, if I recall correctly Tarski's approach was based on a correspondence theory of truth, and he did some recursive trick with meta/object-languages.

What Heidegger contends is that Tarski's preconditions (truth = correspondence) are historically secundary and that a more primordial conception of truth was forgotten. The essay on Plato discusses truth as aletheia versus truth as correspondence. Also, everyone should read Plato's cave allegory, that's why I suggested it -- one mustn't agree with Heidegger of course.
 
66

Perhaps Tarski's correspondence theory rein unhindered in analytic philosophy, but that does not precluse the value in coherentist theories of truth, axiomatic theories, deflationary theories etc.

Theories of truth seem to wax and wane within the Academic establishment, and as a philosopher I think one needs to be open to multifarious theories, and see the good (if any), and bad in each.

LOGOS
 
Truth as the means to solving a problem. This can relate to the correspondence of truth.

This website got me thinking about how truth is determined by an overarching goal.
http://www.thetruthsoflife.com/index2.html

For instance, 2+2=4 iff (if and only if) we follow the laws of integer values on the number line. The goal here is to follow those rules, thereby causing 2+2=4 within that paradigm.
 
ebola? said:
Provisionally:

Truth is NOT correspondence between description and phenomena. Rather, truths are conceptual tools which transform situations so as to expand the domain of human cooperative autonomy, also altering our views of situations so as to reveal the previously concealed, to establish 'intelligiblity'. I think that this even applies to our interaction with non-human nature.

ebola

ebola
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I could be wrong buttttt, Isn't there still a correspondence between humans (phenomenon) and the self? This seems like truth is just social symbolic cooperation; collective consciousness.
 
Pythagoras said:
66

Perhaps Tarski's correspondence theory rein unhindered in analytic philosophy, but that does not precluse the value in coherentist theories of truth, axiomatic theories, deflationary theories etc.

LOGOS
Click to expand...

i think you misundertsand- tarski's theorem does preclude axiomatic theories, becuase they would full under the category 'sufficiently strong formal systems'. and it showed that the correspondence theory of truth is incorrect!!!!! analytic philosophers gave up on correspondance theories after tarski's theorem.

so in plain english what he showed is that truith is neither correspondence between statements and facts about the world, nor can it be defined in terms of formal systems (the axiomatic approach).

analytic philosophers are open to everything but when relevant mathematical/physical facts come up which rule out certain theories, as tarskis theorem did, and quantum theory did, they do not ignore them, as someone implied they should.

as for it being a 'recursive trick with meta languages,' yes thats exactly what it is but that does not in any way undermine it. the majority of philosophers (who i've met and discussed this with) studying truth and language at present are logicians. so people may disagree with that approach but it is currently the most widely accepted approach and has been for a long time. i personally place more trust in people who have devoted their entire lives to studying this than people who attempt incoherent one line put downs of theorems they clearly haven't studied. had a proper attempt to describe whats wrong with the 'recursive trick/meta language' approach been made, i would be very glad to read it as this stuff is important to me on a personal level.

i will take a look at the heidegger stuff but i suspect, having looked up alethia, i will be able to point to quantum theory as evidence for that defintion being incorrect.... so my intial impression is he compares two theories of truth which have been thoroughly undermined by logic/physics.
 
@chinup

i personally place more trust in people who have devoted their entire lives to studying this than people who attempt incoherent one line put downs of theorems they clearly haven't studied
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if this comment was directed at me or psyduck. I don't believe my comments were in any way a 'put down', nor did I see it as incoherent. I was merely pointing out that philosophical trends wax and wane and that analytic philosophy is not the only approach to epistemology. You are right that Tarski's approach is not something I have studied in depth, being more in tune with and Ethics and Theology and philosophical historiography.

I do agree that discussing Philosophy formally (with reference to the work of philosophers) is rewarding, however on this board at least multifarious levels of acquittance with formal philosophy is the norm, and to my mind is more interesting as a dialectic exercise, rather than abrupt appeals to authority that might discourage those with no formal philosophical study to refer to..

I trust this clarifies my earlier post.

PAX
 
yeah it was directed as whoever mentioned tarski's theorem was some recursive trick using a meta language, and that its therefore somehow not relevant, or something, i couldn't work it out.

i do agree that abrupt appeals might not work. however i spent literally hours in the 'possibly a new understanding of reality' thread trying to explain in lay terms what the problems were in an attempt to have a genuine dialectic to absolutely no avail. so whilst i'd like to join in the discussions i'm no longer prepared to invest the time i put into that thread. i need to find some middle ground but i'm not there yet.

as it happens- my personal belief is that truth is a rather redundant concept. i have come to this after gaining a masters in logic because i thought truth was so important i needed to know it formally. in my line of work, which has a wide range of applications for the benefit of humanity, everything i do is plainly false. it is an approximation to something untrue, but it still has value.
 
the truth needs to be true to be truth

example of truth "firing full powered 12 gauge 750 grain slug from 20" barrel in your mouth aimed at middle of your brain will kill any human"

why its truth? becose it works
 
Simply_Live said:
^ Not always true. Trigger could get caught, gun could not be loaded, gun could be faulty, you might have left the safety on... Therefore, it couldn't kill any human.
Click to expand...

I sayd "firing",not pulling the trigger thats major difference.Firing is when gunpowder ignites,pulling a trigger is just action that should lead to former but becose guns dont work all the time its not 100%



that was probably bad idea,lets try again

If you directly hit chicken with 120 megaton nuclear bomb that manages to explode,your wife will not complain about it not being cooked enough =D

see? now this is what I call truth,becose it works in real world ( and probably in dmt mechano elf world too )
 
Pythagoras said:
Good try, but one might posit alternatives that render your 'truths' either undecided, or even false.

Can you be 100% certain that your TV is in fact downstairs? Perhaps someone has stolen it and replaced it with a tape recorder emitting a recording of a television?
Click to expand...

Yeah but nobody stole my TV and it was in fact on dowstairs.

Perhaps your sandwich was a piece of paper that due to a temporary delusional state, you mistook for food?
Click to expand...

Yeah but it wasn't.. it was a sandwich.

1+1=2, print it on a piece of paper, show it to a Mongolian teenager and ask if it is true, the probable reply would not be unequivable.
Click to expand...

Huh? Whatever you meant it doesn't change the fact that 1 + 1 = 2. You could ask a small child and get a different answer.. doesn't mean it's correct.

As for the square what if one side is marked out in inches, and the other in centimeters?
Click to expand...

OK. A if you multiply the width of a square in centimetres by the length of a square in centimetres, you will get the area, in centimetres, of that square.

Cat=Cat, as a tautology it is most probably true, but you can't exclude the possibility of a dictionary that completely omits the word, rendering your argument false.
Click to expand...

Just because a dictionary might not have Cat in it does not mean that Cat doesn't equal Cat.

England is a country? Any truth value here is due to convention, so one might say you are showing the convention to be true, not the statement, one might argue that the proper appellation is nation state, or Kingdom.
Click to expand...

OK so I showed the convention to be true? Still makes it true.


In fact how can you be certain of any of these truths. Perhaps you have just entered a simulation whilst your body and brain lie in a universe completely at odds to our own. Perhaps you are but a brain in a jar, hooked up to a supercomputer that feeds you sensory information, all of which it knows to be untrue?:)
Click to expand...

I just AM certain. :p :)
 
I am not very well versed in this subject as many of you are. However I would like to add my two cents. I feel the easiest way to come to a conclusion is to find the most simple examples.

Good
------- = Truth
Bad

Truth is the dividing line between opposites. It is the centered, unbiased, and whole understanding of anything. Which is why it is so hard to pin point truth, because we are not centered beings, therefore our beliefs are influenced by misconceptions.
 
rickolasnice said:
Yeah but nobody stole my TV and it was in fact on dowstairs.
Click to expand...

I stole it while you weren't looking, swapped it with a tape recorder, and eventually returned the TV before you noticed it was missing.

Prove me wrong! :)
 
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