Talk:Truth/Archive 1

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From the current article:

"With such a variety to choose from at the very least you should be convinced that you don’t have to rest content with any sort of relativism that says that truth is just the same as belief. You can do a heck of a lot better than that. "

I'm not entirely sure, but the above strikes me as unneutral. I mean, does anyone have any solid proof that relativism isn't the case? Isn't proof against solipsism supposed to be unavailable? How do you really know the universe isn't just in your head?

Sigh. Because when you die, I'm still here. And vice versa. And if you don't accept that we must cease to discuss this and go directly to a duel. <-- clearly the Active Creation of Truth at work.

Why is the above point being pushed without the clear support of firm evidence? Why is the mere availability of other theories of truth accepted as such evidence?

(NOTE: This article talks mainly about reasoned truth and observed truth. For other forms of truth, see revealed truth, and intuitive truth.)

(Please let's not start articles called "reasoned truth" and "observed truth." Oy.)

No, let's not, because it's not necessary - reason and observation work in tandem. It is necessary to talk in short separate articles about revealed truth and intuitive truth

Deleted the above comment. Basically, I think what the author of the above comment is referring to is a colloquial and religious notion of "truth," according to which "truth" means "anything that anyone thinks is true." I do think that we should change the truth article so as to properly acknowledge this sense.

That is a pretty biased view of religion.

Except a few sorts of meta-comments for the benefit of editors, I think we should make all comments about the relationship between the given subject and other subjects within the page itself. There are lots of good conventions we've developed--having plenty of links and general discussion in the first paragraph of the article goes a long way. Having "see also" at the end of the article, while often less than entirely helpful, is also sometimes a good idea.

--Larry Sanger

frankly, after reading this article it certainly lacks objectivity and has only the barest references to the peoples 'shoulders upon whom we stand' to kludge a ref. of my own...--dgd

It's better organized now. Larry's original material was good but didn't have enough out-links, not surprising since it was early in Wikipedia history:

Well, it's just taken from some lectures I wrote out, and no one (including me) has put it into third person voice and removed the opinions (here and there). And definitely needs to include more references to philosophers who actually hold the views. (For purposes of the class I was lecturing to I didn't think it was necessary to do that--an encyclopedia article of course is different.) If you can correct the problems, that would be great, but otherwise it'll have to wait until I get around to it, and who knows when that will be. --Larry Sanger

I just completely removed five paragraphs that were recently added to the article, so let me explain why.

Aside from Rene DesCartes statement "I think, therefore I am" (or better still, "I can disbelieve everything except for the fact that I disbelieve"), people have not had great luck in finding absolute truth. Thus, most truth contains an element of relative quantifiability. This should not be surprising, however, as truth is something that only observers worry about having.
Descartes definitely saw imagination at the confluence of body and mind, and sw it as driving everything. He is being misrepresented as a dualist above. His real views are something between Semantic ("sin is not a thing") and Active Creation (see his view of dreams), it seems, not in any sense Deflationary or strictly Epistemic.

This is not NPOV and it is not particularly clear what the author is trying to say. In any case, the operative notion of "truth" in the above is not the simple bare concept that analytic philosophers are after in defining "truth," but rather "absolute truth"--and that is, basically, not the subject of this article, which is truth pure and simple. (I am skeptical that there needs to be an article called "absolute truth" except perhaps as a pointer to absolutism and relativism and a brief discussion of how people use the phrase "absolute truth"--the notion of absolute truth is usually discussed by philosophers and I suspect by religionists under different headings than this.)

Agreed.
This more common, relative kind of truth is an accepted norm as part of scientific method, which posits that all facts are merely theories of varying strength, and the stronger the theory, the more factual the fact. The "fact" that gravimetric hydrogen-helium fusion is a stable process, for example, is absolutely no guarantee that the sun will exist tomorrow -- indeed, all of the laws of physics may change entirely in the next instant.
That would not make the sun blow up, though. Only human belief would have blown up. See what's said about Euclid and his absolute view of geometry.

This assumes that there are in fact absolute and relative truths, which is highly biased--and again, people who actually theorize about this stuff don't put it in terms of truth. They put it in terms of justification, warrant, theory confirmation, and other terms depending on the context.

Agreed. To see science as a route to truth is plain scientism. And the article should say that, and say why.
Such truths, as dispiriting as it seems, take much on belief. For example, let's say that you were sure that you were thirty years old, and then the following day your memory, everyone else's, and your birth records and any other evidence as to your age became unavailable. A doctor could analyze your cells and say that you were somewhere between 28 and 33, and that fact would be the truest statement about your age. However, the truth that you are thirty would still exist to aliens with powerful telescopes thirty light-years away witnessing your birth, even if the aliens' existence (to us) is not an established fact. In this sense, truth does exist, but the problem is one of discovery. Or to put it another way, the fact that you can only be certain that you are between 28 and 33 does not alter the fact that you can only be one particular age. The truth is not gone; it is simply unknown.
The idea that truth exists independent of any observation is annoying but necessary to deal with. "If a tree falls in the forest" and all that jazz...

Here, "truth" is bandied about as if it meant "knowledge," which is, again, another use from ordinary language that is virtually always discarded by professional philosophers. (But nevertheless, the article should acknowledge it--my most recent update doesn't, by the way!)

It's better now, but, there are concepts of truth that cannot be dismissed as "mere knowledge" but also cannot be called correspondence, deflationary, semantic, or even wholly epistemic. All of these, and knowledge, are necessarily backward-looking, and employ fatalism or nihilism to claim that truth must be discovered, and cannot be created. All the views that challenge that idea, are not lumped together into Active Creation of Truth, but, that is where they are for now. They must be *somewhere*!
Concluding the above, what may be of greater importance is not whether things are true or not, but how you personally decide what is true (i.e., your objectivity), how you search for the truth, and how you let the truth affect you. This is ultimately what is morally interesting about observers. It is also logically provable that the truth cannot be searched for without observers entertaining

the untrue.

Whoever wrote this clearly has a philosophical enough of a bent that I predict he or she will enjoy reading neutral point of view.

This paragraph came from the beginning:

The search for absolute truth has been a theme of many important works, including the major religious texts. For example, one of the last things Christ did before His death was to tell Pilate "I seek the truth". Perhaps the definitive exposition of how truth is relative is George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984.

In place of this I've put a little longer discussion that explicitly acknowledges two different senses of "truth." --Larry Sanger

There are at least four senses that are labelled "types" now. If you agree that they exist, we can label them "senses". But really there should be a fith sense to deal with the "species scope" issue, that being the "bodily truth" that is validated by your physical senses and ends with your personal death.

The article as it stands is still far too Western, despite introduction of Gandhi's "truth-force", RSA "truth and reconciliation". Some discussion of the process of ijma among umma (later restricted to just ulema) in early Islam (especially kalam), and mention of Mao's mass line theory, would help explain the active creation view better, which is much more "Eastern".

Agreed. This is all lumped in under Active Creation now, which needs sub-theory distinctions. And most of these have the "bodily truth" issue to very different degrees which is another reason to distinguish them. Some of this is just theories of power and sociology of knowledge, though.

Continued censorship of such views shows clear bias on the part of its censors.

Probably racism. Gandhi and the other key figures of apartheid resistance, like Desmond Tutu, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, are all darker than a brown paper bag. We should watch carefully what that censor is doing.
If it's racism, then mention of Islamic or Chinese may also trigger them, unless the racism is specifically anti-black or something.
When it's done, the average colour of the philosophers mentioned should be at least a deep tan.  ;-) Confucius in particular must be mentioned, as he is very focused on honesty.

Missing:

Now both included
See above. Also Judea Pearl's algebra of doing needs its own article. He deals with this issue nicely. And do we have philosophy of history yet?
Thanks for digging this up. It seemed to confuse Consensus and Active Creation, though. I used some of it. I will use more of it on the next go. But I want the sections "prior to Pragmatism" reviewed by someone else first.

Concepts of truth, like trust or integrity, depend heavily on the point of view chosen. Religion has had the major influence, but there is increasing science brought to bear on these subjects, and causality.

Taking the view from propaganda analysis, truth can be defined as that explanation that we not only accept but act on reliably (to some standard of evidence for some period of time). Most people think of it as something that holds 'for a lifetime' or some equivalently long period, e.g. to the seventh generation.

Truth need not (some say cannot) be permanent - beings with this long-term perspective and the will to live by it are very rare in any society, and symbolic means of recording events are themselves distorted: Recent philosophy of mathematics focuses on the fact that even axiomatic proof is quite often corrected after the fact, and ultimately relies on human beings to and their inherent similarity (the cognitive science of mathematics) - nor need it apply to every type of living being, e.g. economics is a human construct. Choice of time and space limits (a spacetime frame) and point of view from which a given truth can be assessed, and the assessment then trusted by others, is absolutely pivotal to establishing any notion of truth - the branch of philosophy called epistemology deals with this directly.

The three paragraphs above are now integrated. The following hasn't been:

So, there can be "local truth" within that spacetime frame, and multiple point of view within that frame can be reconciled for that period of space and time. Many people describe love this way, and see it as closely allied to truth - both being an attribute of romance.

But, we rarely have the luxury only of acting on truth we accept so willingly - most concepts of truth are compromised by the need to agree with people that we do not wholly like or trust (that being another closely related concept along with its economic indicator called social capital). We do this to gain other advantages, e.g. not devoting our lives to the perfect framing of instructional capital for all beings for all ecologies for all time. So we accept in daily life a much looser notion of what truth is:

Truth is what we can agree on with those whose actions we must depend on.

Even this fairly permissive notion of truth can be twisted in various ways. The following are fundamental epistemology problems many people share which be very heavily by propaganda techniques:

The psychological manifestation is often as groupthink, a social instinct or preference to agree with those who are physically present but not representative of all those whose actions must ultimately be depended on make something 'real'. In any psychological or strictly social concept of truth, sincerity counts. That is, one can operate out of ignorance or make good faith mistakes and still be "telling the truth" from the point of view of an inquirer.

However, sincerity in error is no protection for ecologies or other living things that may be harmed by decisions made by any group of human beings even if they consider the interests of all other human beings. So no human social nor any human psychological notion of truth can actually be sufficient to ensure a biosphere survives. This would necessarily imply a tighter claim for truth:

Truth is what we can *rely* on for at least seven generations on this planet.

This is framed spatially and temporally, and agreement is not as important as reliability. Note that this necessarily implies some coordination of visions and perhaps also some coordination of perception of threats, across languages, and perhaps across species, to the degree that is possible (this latter requirement was first noted by Eugene Wigner in a 1960 paper). Greenpeace and advocates of Great Ape personhood take this broad view.

The above hasn't been integrated, as it's mostly about Active Creation and to some degree Pragmatism and other Epistemic views. The following *is* in there:

It is also necessarily the case that some beings have a narrower perspective. For instance the following cncept of tseems to have prevailed in various accounting scandals of 2001-2002 in the USA, e.g. Enron:

Truth is that agreed on a golf course and lasting until liquidity event

This suggests that concepts of truth might change over time. In addition to a very clear impacts on ideology and political economy, war might also alter truth, under this definition, by changing "who we must agree with" to include our former enemies.

But this isn't:

That in turn suggests that peace, the cessation of struggle, could only really be achieved by starting from the global perspective and thinking back to steps to take in the present moment. It would also suggest that trying to reach for a longer period than a century, or seven generations (if each is 15 years that's 105 years, a good human elder lifespan) would be to over-reach the point of view that any human being could ever achieve in real life - thus to make grievous errors. The Green Parties and the Iroquois Confederacy lay achieving this perspective out as a goal, often, and seem to use the term "elder" to mean only those that have this view.

Can someone please clarify the following:

For instance, a computer program typically calls on functions with side effects to test whether any given assertion is true. Even in LISP, a particularly strict language, four of the five basic atom types have such side effects, and thus its statements are not "formal".

In the first sentence, are is "side effects" meant to refer to setting of registers following a comparison, and/or the fact that something like a "branch if equal" instruction changes the program counter? In the second sentense, what is meant for a type to have side effects? Does this mean you can mutate the value bound to a variable? If this isn't made more clear, I'm not sure it's of any use. --Ryguasu 04:12, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I'm removing the italicized portion of the following:

This view is radical and anti-symbolic. Activity, rather than agreement, is what creates truth, which can only be seen and measured and agreed after the fact. While conceptual metaphor can play a role in the choice of action, it too is dependent on symbol ultimately (e.g. to say "love as war" is to assume something about the symbol "love" and something about the symbol "war", and is no more than suggestive of dangers, actions, goals - it isn't instruction).

It is altogether useless to say that a view is "anti-symbolic" without some kind of reference to what that might mean. Conceptual metaphor was apparently mentioned in response to the "anti-symbolic" claim. Although conceptual metaphor is interesting, it seems irrelevant once "anti-symbolic" has been removed. --Ryguasu 04:36, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It's back in temporarily as part of a revert to a version before some vandalism. The vandalism seemed apparently to stem in part from a lack of adequate introduction to "active creation", so the above has been restored. The quick answer to the issue: if symbols CAN state the truth well enough to act on decisively, as Western philosophy has always assumed since its roots in Platonism, then conceptual metaphor is a cultural choice, a "nice to have". If symbols CAN'T state the truth that well, as Eastern philosophy tends to say, then conceptual metaphors (back the body which is the root of them all) is "all you have". This is a rather pivotal question in "East versus West" too:
It's important to emphasize how different the "active creation" theory is from other theories. It is more an adaptation of Eastern philosophy from Taoism and Buddhism in particular, and some would say also Hinduism. In those, there is an acceptance that it is impossible to state truth in symbols. One approaches it instead through meditation, action, creation such as the famous Zen gardens, etc. One can't really say what is true for anyone else. There is no God's eye view to pretend to be looking from, as the religions do not say that man is in God's image. One looks backwards at the present from one's future enlightened state, in a sense, to unravel what must be true now... so symbols are useful only really for engineering, falsehoods, and experiments. A lot of which just break what they are trying to test, like torturing a witness to get more information. What you get is likely false. This can extend to opposing science as well, so it's important to say it's "radical". Anyway the "truth and reconciliation commissions" in many countries, the idea of "telling the truth" being essentially and only a matter of finding the right conceptual metaphor, need to be in there somehow.
Gandhi, who studied all these religions and was trained as a British Empire lawyer, was well aware of these issues, and chose "truth-force" as the name of his method of challenging power quite deliberately. It *must* be mentioned here. If one wants a purist Western statement then write truth (philosophy).