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How Do We Know Something Is True?

Started by Truthseeker, February 28, 2012, 11:57:53 AM

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Truthseeker

My inclination relative to this topic commences with the understanding that through various phases of my development I donned an absolute certain mindset about some issues. Experience, however, has all but completely stamped out that mentality. The only portion that still exists is that I am certain that I cannot be certain about anything.

I, in my finite mind, could not possibly KNOW the truth. I often wonder what life would be like if I could obtain absolute truth in its purest form. Seems to me it is not life's intention for truth to be within our grasp. The mystery is what keeps us searching. The search is what is so thrilling. Following is what I consider to be one of the most incisive declarations regarding truth:

Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security – religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs.
Krishnamurti  

Your thoughts?
Suffering is the breaking of the shell that encloses one's understanding.  Khalil Gibran

Tank

"Truth is what is left when you stop believing in something." ~ Some smart person whose name I can't remember.
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

Truthseeker

Quote from: Tank on February 28, 2012, 01:00:10 PM
"Truth is what is left when you stop believing in something." ~ Some smart person whose name I can't remember.

Jesus man.  That really resonates with me.  Top shelf quote Tank. 
Suffering is the breaking of the shell that encloses one's understanding.  Khalil Gibran

Siz

Quote from: Tank on February 28, 2012, 01:00:10 PM
"Truth is what is left when you stop believing in something." ~ Some smart person whose name I can't remember.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Phillip K Dick

When one sleeps on the floor one need not worry about falling out of bed - Anton LaVey

The universe is a cold, uncaring void. The key to happiness isn't a search for meaning, it's to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually you'll be dead!

Truthseeker

Quote from: Scissorlegs on February 28, 2012, 01:54:26 PM
Quote from: Tank on February 28, 2012, 01:00:10 PM
"Truth is what is left when you stop believing in something." ~ Some smart person whose name I can't remember.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Phillip K Dick

Yes, yes.  More, more quotes like this.  To much is not enough! 
Suffering is the breaking of the shell that encloses one's understanding.  Khalil Gibran

Too Few Lions

I really don't like the idea of 'absolute truth', the people I've generally heard talk about it are religious nuts who like to capitalise the word as 'Truth' when they refer to their bizarre beliefs. I don't think there's anything wrong with relative truths or approximate models that can be altered as we learn more over time. Maybe there's some absolute truth in mathematics, but I'm no mathematician. I think the whole idea that there is an 'absolute truth' derives from ancient philosophy, religion and mysticism, for me it's also getting awfully close to the idea of 'God'

I'm not even sure what 'absolute truth in its purest form' could actually be, the sum of all information of all the universe(s)? If so, it's way beyond what our brains have evolved to or need to process. I don't really think I need to know quite that much, or how much it would really benefit me if I did. I'm happy with simple relative truths that can be defined as something like 'that which can be verifiably shown to correspond to reality.'

oh, and that Phillip K. Dick quote is brilliant, not bad from a man who used to eat dog food!

Tank

Quote from: Scissorlegs on February 28, 2012, 01:54:26 PM
Quote from: Tank on February 28, 2012, 01:00:10 PM
"Truth is what is left when you stop believing in something." ~ Some smart person whose name I can't remember.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Phillip K Dick
That's the one!
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

Davin

Quote from: Too Few Lions on February 28, 2012, 02:25:43 PMI really don't like the idea of 'absolute truth', the people I've generally heard talk about it are religious nuts who like to capitalise the word as 'Truth' when they refer to their bizarre beliefs.[...] I'm happy with simple relative truths that can be defined as something like 'that which can be verifiably shown to correspond to reality.'
I agree with this, this is how I accept things as true. I also recommend that people should only accept things at true when they both understand the concept and the evidential support, because I see no use in someone accepting something they don't understand.

Quote from: Too Few Lionsoh, and that Phillip K. Dick quote is brilliant, not bad from a man who used to eat dog food!
One of my favourite quotes.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Stevil

the "Truth" is propoganda dressing. Used by people and organisations that know they need to tie in their stories to this word somehow because otherwise it isn't obvious.


When science make discoveries and models, they don't have to dress it up. Have you ever heard E= MC2 being referred to as the truth?

If it comes with dressing and it is not a salad then there is bound to be something fishy.

xSilverPhinx

Truth, such a tricky word.

On that issue I tend to side with the solipists a bit - we can't really know for certain that anything is true, only that we experience things, and even so, we can't know for certain that we're experiencing what we think we're experiencing. ???

Pure and absolute Truth may be a bit beyond our abilities to ever comprehend.
I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


penfold

Quote from: Truthseeker on February 28, 2012, 11:57:53 AM
I, in my finite mind, could not possibly KNOW the truth.

I suppose it depends upon what you mean by truth.

First there are what are known as analytic truths, for example "2+2 = 4", "The morning star is the planet Venus", "a triangle has three angles". In general these kinds of statement are taken to be true by definition. (Though some thinkers, most noticeably Quine, argue that even these are not certainly true).

More problematic are synthetic truths, that is truths that are not true by definition, things that may or may not be true. For example: "The acceleration of an object is proportional to its mass and the force applied", "the moon orbits the earth", "God exists" (in fact Kant argues compellingly in Critique of Pure Reason that all truths relating to the existence of things must be synthetic).

With regard to synthetic truths there are broadly three camps, the realists, the anti-realists and the skeptics.

The skeptics argue that synthetic truths are unobtainable as we can never discount the possibility of errors. The film the Matrix provides a nice example of this; all the truths accepted by Neo about the world turn out to be a false construction. Reality was something very different. The skeptic points out that we can never prove we are not completely mistaken about the world (we could really be living in something like the Matrix - brains in vats).

A realist, in general, believes that certain propositions correspond to the world. So if a realist says "the moon orbits the earth", they are making a claim about the actual shape of the universe. Importantly they are making a claim about the universe independent of human existence. They would argue that even if all intelligent life were to cease tomorrow it would still be that case that "the moon orbits the earth."

The anti-realist, on the other hand, would argue that truth is really pragmatic. So for the anti-realist the statement "the acceleration of an object is proportional to its mass and the force applied" may or may not correspond to the shape of the universe; what is important is that this proposition has huge utility for humans. For an anti-realist "the moon orbits the earth" is only true in so far as this information is useful; if all intelligent life ceased then "the moon orbits the earth" would no longer have any claim to truth.

It seems to me that there are problems with all these approaches. The skeptic abolishes truth entirely, this is both unhelpful (it has the unpleasant effect of reducing all truth to mere opinion) and to my mind relies upon a bad dictionary definition of truth as requiring absolute certainty. Realists need to explain how we can know that the universe corresponds to our descriptions of it and so far no compelling account has been offered. Anti-realists, however, are hardly an improvement as truth becomes dependent upon human whim; by their theory Aristotle's idea that worms are made by squeezing mud was true up until the Enlightenment.

peace

Crocoduck

Isaac Asimov wrote a great essay about the The Relativity of Wrong. I think it speaks very well to the idea of absolute truth.

C0nc0rdance made a very good Youtube video about it.
The Relativity of Wrong

The full essay can be found here.
The Relativity of Wrong
By Isaac Asimov



As we all know, the miracle of fishes and loaves is only scientifically explainable through the medium of casseroles
Dobermonster
However some of the jumped up jackasses do need a damn good kicking. Not that they will respond to the kicking but just to show they can be kicked
Some dude in a Tank

pytheas

#12
Crocoduck wrote:
Isaac Asimov wrote a great essay about the The Relativity of Wrong. I think it speaks very well to the idea of absolute truth.
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"The Greeks introduced the notion of latitude and longitude, for instance, and made reasonable maps of the Mediterranean basin even without taking sphericity into account, and we still use latitude and longitude today. "


Asimov knew about the original pytheas
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fuzzy grey areas juxtaposed occasionally, superimposed circumstancially

need and emotion and anxiety dictate our concentration magnitude and our perception resolution

every noteworthy quote from evading belief, to knowing you know nothing, is nonredundant, nessecary and irreplacable
truth is an indicator, a flag of security of stepping on the firmer ground available to human experience


"Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."
"Freedom is the greatest fruit of self-sufficiency"
"Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little."
by EPICURUS 4th century BCE

DeterminedJuliet

"Truth" on paper and "truth" in how we actually live are two different things. I like a pragmatic approach to truth, personally.
"We've thought of life by analogy with a journey, with pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end, and the THING was to get to that end; success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead. But, we missed the point the whole way along; It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played.

Anne D.

I try not to get too attached to any "what is so," since I am constantly having what I thought were fixed bases for the things I "believe" yanked out from under my feet.

That might just be a consequence of working for a government agency, though.  ;D  "What is so" changes on a daily basis.