Thief
Rogue Theologian
your minor 't's would be assumptions
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
How Do We Know Something is True?
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
your minor 't's would be assumptions
jonathan180iq
Well-Known Member
Good observation...And?
If you read the post again, you'll see that there's no qualms about that. The vast majority of our lives are based on little T's.
jonathan180iq
Well-Known Member
Pretty much the dictionary definition:
facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
knowledge - Google Search
Good question. While the authors don't go as far as to offer a dictionary type definition, they reference how they're defining it throughout the article. Excerpts from the first article:
The second article expresses ideas of the definition by utilizing exerpts HP Blavatsky's "What is Truth?" :
And from 12 Things Theosophy Teaches :
And while I'm referencing HP Blavatsky's "What is Truth?", here is a link to that:
What Is Truth? by H. P. Blavatsky
NOTE: These quotes are in direct response to @Sunstone 's query. I have no intention of debating any of the above excerpts out of context with one that has not read the article(s). Advance notice: if you throw out that bait, I won't bite.
PureX
Veteran Member
The truth is what is. Which is something we cannot cognate, directly. We can only experience limited aspects of it with our bodies, and then imagine it in our minds from that limited experience.
PureX
Veteran Member
The fact that you asked, shows you that it is.
What do you mean by indefeasible? The dictionary says, "Not able to be lost, annulled, or overturned." Knowledge is lost and overturned all the time, although annulling it is a bit silly.
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
If you think you know, that's fine by me!
The relative state is true. The fluid and subjective states are true. Truth is not definable in terms of anything that is true, else it's just a circular definition.
Indefeasible in the sense of being annulled or overturned. As it happens, justified true beliefs can be annulled or overturned by Gettier cases.
Yes, perhaps accuracy is not precisely the same thing as truth, but it is certainly very close to it -- if one assumes the Correspondence Theory (CT). Other theories might not give the same result. But with the CT, we could say, "Truth is the accuracy with which a proposition corresponds to reality", "A true proposition accurately corresponds to reality", etc.
A slightly imperfect analogy would be the correspondence of a map to its terrain. The map is analogous to a proposition. The terrain is analogous to a reality or -- perhaps more precisely -- a state of affairs. Just as one can say that the truth of a proposition lies in its correspondence to a state of affairs, one can say that the accuracy of a map lies in its correspondence to a terrain.
It seems to me you are saying that a false belief can be considered knowledge. e.g. Even though my belief there is snow on the ground is false, I can be considered to know whether or not there is snow on the ground. If that's what you think, then of course that's your prerogative. Yet, I myself would not say a false belief was knowledge.
I would agree with you that truth changes in the sense that propositions once thought to be true are sometimes later found to be false, etc. I think it's a bit of a leap to interpret the statement you referred to as "assuming there is some wholly objective test of what is true". After all, they could be assuming, say, reliable inter-subjective verification, and they would get the same results as they did.
The Gettier cases seem quite logical to me, but then not everyone agrees on what's logical.
Thanks for an interesting discussion so far.
Arguably.
Not a bad analogy.
What if there's no one around to see whether there's snow on the ground or not? What if everyone in the room thinks there's snow on the ground but there isn't? What if everyone knows there's a leprechaun lives in the hollow, and that you can't see it? Who's this Uber-Arbiter who knows about snow and leprechauns?
And even for the Uber-Arbiter, once it was true that the earth was flat. That the sun went round it. That atoms were, as their name says, indivisible. That phlogiston explained fire. That light was a wave in the lumeniferous aether. That the earth's crust was fixed. And it stayed true until it no longer was.
An erroneous belief about reality is still as much knowledge about reality to its owner as an accurate one. I don't see any way that knowledge can be purified with anything like sufficient precision to make it only right or wrong. It's a spectrum from black through all the shades to white, and if someone moves the lamp of best opinion, all the shades change.
But if you don't do that, I can't see how your view of knowledge could work. Either it's black or white, right or wrong, knowledge or not-knowledge; or, as it seems to me, a spectrum of shades of grey. And if genuinely believed, knowledge.
That's to say, knowledge may be right or wrong. Knowledge is not the same thing as fact.
Last edited:
The subjective "your truth" or "my truth" is euphemism for belief. You are talking about belief.
BSM1
What? Me worry?
???
BSM1
What? Me worry?
Then all truth has to simply be belief until it becomes fact.
It has been offered ITT that assumption can be equivalent to relative truth. Based on these, does that equate belief with assumption?
Objective truth requires that you accept a couple of axioms before you can take it further. Firstly, that a world exists independent of one's perception of it. Secondly, that other people also exist and can observe the objective world in a roughly similar manner to oneself. That might sound like a lot of waffling for little gain but I feel it's important when discussing objective truth to accept a couple of basic axioms lest we turn out to be a brain in a jar
I'm fascinated with your thoughts here, Erebus! I don't have any proper objections to them, but I'm quite curious about how you would address certain related issues.
To illustrate, let's take the proposition, "There is a cat in my house." Purely for the sake of convenience, let's momentarily adopt the Correspondence Theory of Truth and say that "The proposition, 'There's a cat in my house', is true if it corresponds to a state of affairs such that there is indeed a cat in my house."
Now, I can say I have subjectively verified there is indeed a cat in my house if I see the cat. In this case, verification is performed through empirical observation. However, as you point out elsewhere subjective verification is not always reliable. For instance, it's possible I could be drunk and hallucinating when I see a cat in my house.
Let's suppose, however, that you visit me and also see the cat. Now we have inter-subjectively verified the cat, and arguably our inter-subjective verification for a variety of reasons is more reliable than my subjective verification alone.
Suppose further we bring in other people, all of whom verify there is a cat in my house. At some point, couldn't we say that our inter-subjective verifications were so reproductable that we had arrived at a point where we could safely assert, "It can be inter-subjectively verified with a high degree of reliability that there is a cat in Sunstone's house"? And wouldn't that mean -- again, assuming the Correspondence Theory -- that the proposition, "There is a cat in Sunstone's house", reliably corresponded to the state of affairs of there indeed being a cat in Sunstone's house, and was therefor a true proposition?
Please note, however, that at no point in this exercise have we needed to assert the existence of an "objective reality". That is, we have arrived at a reliably inter-subjectively verified state of affairs without needing to indulge ourselves in any metaphysical speculations about that state of affairs being "objectively real". We can even make truth claims about that state of affairs with a high degree of confidence that our claims will correspond to that state of affairs.
All of which brings us to the issue that I am most curious to hear your opinion on. Given the above, can you see any reason that we need to postulate the existence of an "objective reality" before we can arrive at reliable truths, assuming "truth" is defined according to the Correspondence Theory? I would love to hear your thoughts on that!
Curious George
Veteran Member
That I asked does not entail truth to your proposition.
Curious George
Veteran Member
Well that's not very fun or in the spirit of discovering truth.If you think you know, that's fine by me!
Your previous statement is self contradictory.