How do you understand the words true and truth?

[LegionOnomaMoi]

For instance, the proposition " @LegionOnomaMoi gets his kicks from penning anonymous irate letters complaining about obscure problems in epistemology to the editors of small town Midwestern newspapers.") would be wholly true if and only if it were the case that Legion actually did get his kicks from doing precisely that.

I told you that in confidence! I can't believe you would publicize my confession like this! I suppose I should be grateful you told them that one and not what I told you about...well...you know...

 

[Sunstone]

"I was told that I would meet someone at the bridge. When I arrived, this turned out not to be true."

The proposition, "You will meet someone at the bridge", turned out not to refer to an actuality.

"You have your truth, and I have my truth."

It would strike me as nonsensical to say that two conflicting propositions could both be equally true. But I don't know enough to say whether that holds true on the quantum level.

"To lie is to say something which you know is not true. One can say something not true without lying if you believe it to be true."

Agreed.

"Major human conflicts are often due to one group believing that they have the truth."

I think leaders often sell conflicts to their followers by, in part, telling them that the beliefs and ideologies of an enemy are false. The leaders themselves might or might not believe that though.

"I can reasonably say that some of the things I believe are not true. If I knew which things though, I would not believe in them."

Wise.

"The purpose of the scientific method is to get our understanding closer to truth."

I think that's an intelligent layman's gloss of the purposes of the various scientific methods. There seem to be several purposes of the methods, and getting us closer to the truth might not be one of them, except in a sort of poetic way. Producing reliable theories and discovering reliable facts could be a more precise way of phrasing "getting us closer to the truth".

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

How do I understand the words "true" and "truth"? Good question. It has a lot to do with how my perceptual faculties link up with regions in my brain in which my concepts of these words is represented via networks of neural activity and connectivity. Incidentally, that's also how I understand the words "hello", "book", and phrases like "that ******* with the smart-aleck answer who thinks he's amusing."
More seriously, I don't subscribe to a particular theory of truth, even a personal one. I tend towards correspondence theories of truth, and I am absolutely against relativism (or at least the strong versions; I believe there exists objective truth even if we are sundered from it), but am hampered by issues like what a proposition is. Time also presents an issue for me as I do not agree with Aristotle here. I believe statements about the future do have truth values, but these do not entail fatalism. Thus a statement about what the average global temperature will be in 2080, for example, is necessarily true or false. Let's say it is true. Aristotle argued that this is tantamount to saying that therefore the average global temperature in 2080 is necessarily going to correspond to the statement about it made in the present, and therefore the future is fated to be in accordance with the truth value of the statement. He didn't like this fatalism, but his way out is not my own. I don't see the necessary truth (or falsity) of a statement made about a future state of affairs to entail a necessary state of affairs corresponding to the truth value of the statement, but rather that the realization of the future state of affairs licenses the necessity of the truth value of the statement made in the past.
Relativity, however, presents a further challenge. If reality is really 4-dimensional, and from different reference frames what will happen from our perspective has already happened (and we are 4-D "hunks of matter"), then any statement about the future has a truthmaker already in some form via some set of reference frames in which the state of affairs the statement concerns has already been realized.

 

[BSM1]

It is correct that people can understand no higher level of truth than they are willing to live.

All truth can be shown to be false simply by adding more light.

I learned many years ago that everyone has to find their own truth.

 

[bobhikes]

You probably argue with a sign post and take the wrong way home...


and so on... So while you may not accept them as synonyms, the truth is the rest of the English speaking world sees this as a fact.

Well this is a Philosophy debate thread and by the way how does you English Dictionary define synonym.

 

[Scuba Pete]

Well this is a Philosophy debate thread and by the way how does you English Dictionary define synonym.

It defines it rather well, thank you!

 

[crossfire]

Here's a meme that's been going around the internet that makes sense:

 

[allfoak]

I learned many years ago that everyone has to find their own truth.

Kind of a strange conclusion to come to actually.
Very few can see past the idea that if one thing is true that some other thing must be false.

 

[savagewind]

Kind of a strange conclusion to come to actually.
Very few can see past the idea that if one thing is true that some other thing must be false.

I call that perfect timing.

 

[BSM1]

Kind of a strange conclusion to come to actually.
Very few can see past the idea that if one thing is true that some other thing must be false.

I think I follow your thought. However, a person's truth may not lay on what's true.

 

[allfoak]

Everything must be true because it exists.
There is no other reason needed.
This includes the unseen as well.

The problem is that everything is a half truth, which makes some things look like they might be a lie when they are actually just an incomplete truth.