What is truth?

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One of the things which is of particular concern about the correspondence theory of truth is that in its standard version—

A statement is true if there is some fact or facts to which the statement corresponds

—there is an implication that another step, verification, must be taken. In order for the statement to be judged as corresponding to the facts one must look and see if indeed it does. But then this begins to look less like a theory of truth and more like a criterion for truth. A method, in other words, for testing whether or not truth has occurred.

Judgements of value are statements which a theory of truth needs to consider. If I bake a cake and tell my neighbour it is better than the cake I baked last week, must I be telling the truth? If my neighbour tastes the cake and disagrees with me, which of us is right? It is after all the same cake.

At an art competition a Judge states that a particular painting is the best in the show. How does truth/falsehood apply in such a case? Does the indicated painting become the fact which corresponds to the judge’s statement? If so, precisely when did it become that fact, or was it always so, and the rest of the attendees could not see it? In many or even most art competitions there will be someone present for whom a quite different painting is the best. It’s a matter of taste.

Is Truth, then, relative to circumstances, or to one’s point-of-view?

Apologies for having two bites at this in succession. I just had a couple more thoughts about the issues.

Malperdy.
 
Malperdy said:
Let’s assume that the following sentence represents the correspondence theory of truth, or is a criterion for correspondence-truth:

‘A statement is true if it says that that which is not, is not, and that which is, is.’

Now consider the following statements:

A: There are no unicorns.

B: A unicorn is a horse-like animal with a single horn.

Apply the criterion and statement A is ‘true’.

But, what about statement B? Is it also true? It does not seem to ‘correspond’ with anything ‘which is’. Yet, we do not say that statement B is meaningless. We do not even say “I believe that unicorns have only one horn”. But, we might be inclined to say: “By definition, unicorns have only one horn”, because that is how we use the term in our language. And, by saying so we would believe that we said the truth. But, how we use a word in any language is by convention. (I mean that we might have all agreed to use some other word.)

Does the ‘is’ of correspondence theory indicate or stand for What Exists, and the ‘is not’ for What Does Not Exist? Consider numbers. Numbers don’t exist, in the way that material things exist, yet they are very real. We use them all the time. We even decide if our calculations are true or false. But what do numbers correspond to? Mathematicians even make use of imaginary numbers, which is a set of strange but apparently useful numbers like the square root of minus 1. But, what do such imaginary numbers correspond to?
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So much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The statement “A unicorn is a horse-like animal with a single horn.” means “this is what the term ‘Unicorn’ means”. The statement “there are no unicorns” means “the class ‘unicorns’ does not have any real members.” Or in other words, “unicorns have, as far as we know, only potential existence, since they are not contradictions in terms–there are no actual unicorns (that we know of)”.

Basic metaphysics.

“Is” when used as “a unicorn is etc” is the “intransitive predicating copula, third person singular present tense.” It can also be used for the existential expletive in some languages–expressions about being and nonbeing. Some languages distinguish them–in Korean, for instance, “copula is” is ida, while “existential is” is ittda; in Japanese, the copula is desu, while the existential expletive is aru.

But while the same word is used in many languages, it has two different uses, which is to say, they are accidentally equivocal.

Again, metaphysics.

Numbers do, in fact, exist, by the way–or they wouldn’t be real. They’re not physical, but that just means they don’t have dimensions. The truth of a mathematical statement is determined by its correspondence to the realities of numbers–there’s nothing more nor less to it than that.
 
In philosophy, as I understand, there are three kinds of truth
(1) ontological : the truth of things in themselves, i.e.: what is real is true
(2) logical: conformity of mind to reality (i.e: the Correspondance Theory referred to above), i.e.: things are as you think they are.
(3) moral : conformity of speech to mind (i.e.: what is communicated refects your beliefs). The opposite is lying.

And yes, God IS Truth. Consider (1). Whatever is real has existence. Now God not merely has existence, He is Existence, Absolute Being, Infinite Being, etc. Therefore, since God is Existence, in a way, He is truly Truth itself.
 
Truth_Is_Great said:
In philosophy, as I understand, there are three kinds of truth
(1) ontological : the truth of things in themselves, i.e.: what is real is true
(2) logical: conformity of mind to reality (i.e: the Correspondance Theory referred to above), i.e.: things are as you think they are.
(3) moral : conformity of speech to mind (i.e.: what is communicated refects your beliefs). The opposite is lying.

And yes, God IS Truth. Consider (1). Whatever is real has existence. Now God not merely has existence, He is Existence, Absolute Being, Infinite Being, etc. Therefore, since God is Existence, in a way, He is truly Truth itself.
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Hmm, forgot about the other two kinds of truth, thanks for the reminder.

And the last bit, incidentally, is why one of the names of God in Judaism is Emet, “Truth”–which is a function of YHWH, “I AM”.
 
Well yes, what is truth has some interesting definitions. Strange for if one asked the same three questions of a simple person they may tell you that truth is in the honesty of their words and ways, goodness in their works and in the things around them and the measure of beauty is in all that can be experienced and known.

But that is just a simple explanation. A wise person has the capacity to analyses and nitpick to pieces anything presented much like a group of chooks penned over a patch of ground rich and green with growth then eventually remove all that made it lush, save for worms and the manure that needs to be scratched through for any further morsel to consume.

Michael.
 
If only I could see

What a baby sees that makes him laugh

What a cormorant sees high above the ocean

Why Jesus is in the Eucharist always new every day

What God sees in you and me when we come home

Then I will be in truth and truth in me.
 
Thank you jbuttrey for your post, that is what I am trying to get at. When I look at the Bible my faith tells me that it is the greatest book ever written and true. A weather pattern is also true if it follows the path described for it even if it does not plot each rain drop. The temperature and the location of the storm front and the path it will take is all important. The Bible is our weather map and is absolutely true. I am hard on correspondence theory because after wasting a year and a half on scientific forums I found out all the truth about our reality is doctored to the last pixel and corrected not to reality but so that the picture fits the mathematics.

When reading Exodus it is a labor dispute more or less and the nation splits, the rulers stay and the workers leave. On their travel the spiritual strength of their group belief parts the sea, provides clean drinking water and food from the sky. Then some time a chap around Jerusalem performs healing and gets on well with the establishment … we don’t hear much about him but his name was Simon the Healer.

The thing these have in common is that in all the time of Exodus there was no sickness. Around the time of Simon the healer the temples were very much into teaching and healing and cleanliness … for a price, a lot like hospitals are now in our times. It appears that every few thousand years there is a great time of spiritual over the physical and that potentially the signs of the stars are more than comets.

The problem is that people being human and more concerned with petty human ways and listening to the devil within may not and probably would not tell the truth … even if it meant living in ignorance of the consequences is far worse than doing exactly as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ instructed us to do.

Love the Lord Thy God The Father Almighty with all your heart and do unto others as you would be done by.

Now the bombshell. During the second world war the nuclear bomb was first tested. A bomb does two things :- Explodes (goes bang) and gets hot (thermal). The halo effect was a worry if the bomb got too hot before the bang spread the explosion out further than the chance of igniting the atmosphere. Too small no problem, too big a bang no problem … too hot and not spreading fast enough and the world burns … the halo effect.

During the cold war rumours that a freighter in the ocean was loaded with nuclear fuel in such a way that the heat would produce the thermal heat in one spot to set nuclear fire to the oceans.

Now we are less than two months away from a machine designed to produce fireballs many millions of times hotter than the sun so that scientists can ‘see’ what it must have been like around the time of the big bang.

I am normally a reasonable person but I am all for getting a branding iron and explaining in simple terms and actions to the said group of intellectuals what hot really means … and that is the truth.
 
Truth is the conformity of the mind to that which is outside of the mind, to objective reality.

God is at the very center, origin, the very essence of existence itself. He is the most real thing, the ultimate reality. That is why he is often described as being The truth, although the title of “truth” can apply to different things in different situations.
 
sometimes people are so highly educated that common sense seems to have been thrown out with the bath water.

to my limited mind truth stands by its own accord. what was true yesterday is true today and shall continue unto the future, forever. it is irrifutable and needs no justification other than its existence.
 
Hmmm. I thought this discussion had suffered a quiet death weeks ago.

😃

Sorry i have not been around for what i’ve started. If there are any philosophers who are interested, i’m looking for all the help i can get at this discussion:

A Tale of Two Eucharists

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=223770

It’s an open invitation to anyone interested. There is really no need to read the whole thing. If you jump right to the end, you’ll probably get the gist of the discussion. We haven’t really reached any definite conclusions, yet.
 
Well there are many diffrent ways we can look at this question. One, if we look at it in the theological sense there is a simple “Circle of Truth” that goes as follows:
God is seen as absolute truth, and in God we base our morality, and in that morality comes relativism and in relativism we see reality which is God, whom is absolute truth.
Second, we can take apart bits of this circle and look at truth from a situaltional perspective. That truth is based on what we see in our own eyes as moral.
Lastly though there is a third stand point, that there is no personal thought on something and it is completely it’s own person/idea/action. This, in actuality, would be “truth” but seeing as we all have emotions and thoughts and are human we can never truly be this “third person.”
So Truth is based on what you beleive, but if you don’t believe what I have written and what I see as true, then you’ve just told me I am false and not right.
~Fuji
 
Truth_Is_Great said:
In philosophy, as I understand, there are three kinds of truth
(1) ontological : the truth of things in themselves, i.e.: what is real is true
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But, the terms Real and True may not have the same meanings; and if they don’t then they are not equivalent to each other. In order to declare that what is True is equivalent to what is Real we first need to define Real.
(2) logical: conformity of mind to reality (i.e: the Correspondance Theory referred to above), i.e.: things are as you think they are.
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But, things are not necessarily as one thinks they are. One is sometimes mistaken. That is why our desire (hopefully) to assert the Truth requires us to seek it out, to take the time to carefully consider issues we have had little experience of in order to avoid error. How do we know with certainty when what is in our mind conforms to what is really the case? That is the question.
(3) moral : conformity of speech to mind (i.e.: what is communicated refects your beliefs). The opposite is lying.
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But, in all sincerity one may assert a belief which turns out to have no basis in reality. And one may hold firmly to such a belief even when shown evidence to the contrary. This is not necessarily lying. It seems we need to distinguish false beliefs from true ones. How is this to be done?

It is when we assert something about a state of affairs that our assertion can be judged to be true or not, according to certain criteria. These criteria are not the same for all types of assertions. Those claims to truth made by scientific statements, for example, differ in their criteria from those claims to truth made by the statements of religion, mathematical systems, morality, fiction, poetry, the courts of law, or history, to give a few examples.
 
Malperdy,
Those claims to truth made by scientific statements, for example, differ in their criteria from those claims to truth made by the statements of religion, mathematical systems, morality, fiction, poetry, the courts of law, or history, to give a few examples.
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Thanks for the reminder of the continuous confusion of life 🙂
 
Caldera said:
Thanks for the reminder of the continuous confusion of life 🙂
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The problem is that the idea of Truth looks simple but is in fact subtle and complex. It looks simple because we immediately know what ‘Truth’ means and we have no problem using the term 100s of times in our daily life. We teach our children to tell the truth and not to lie. And both we and they come to understand the difference between the two as far as our everyday dealings with ordinary matters are concerned. So far, so good. It is when we seek to apply ‘Truth’, or ‘is true/is false’ in a range of special situations that we may need special explanations of how the term ‘Truth’ works.

As we know, witnesses in a case before the law courts each swear to tell the truth, and only the truth, and may in fact do so. Yet apparently conflicting evidence may be given, and this without any belief that the witnesses are doing other than telling the truth. Of course, they may not be interpreting what they witnessed in precisely the same way, and so give ‘truthful’ accounts which differ in factual content.

The saying: *God is Truth *is a special use of ‘truth’. It names an attribute the faithful give to God, and says God will not lead us to error. But this is not the way we use ‘truth’ in everyday life, unless of course we offer it as a prayer. It is an expression of an absolute value.

The saying: *Truth is Reality *is a special use of ‘truth’, perhaps like an assertion from metaphysics (or poetry!). It is also an attempt to express an absolute value. Depending on what we understand by ‘Reality’ it may or may not be useful in everyday discourse.

I do not seek to muddy the waters by claiming that Truth functions differently within different types of discourse (science, law, logic, poetry, religion, history, etc.). That is simply the way things are. After all, a primary thrust of atheism claims that the assertions of religion must be false, because they cannot be proven to be true. What are the criteria which will satisfy the atheist here? In very many cases the criteria demanded are taken from the discourse of science; the demanding of scientific-type evidence. But the atheist must first demonstrate that those criteria are appropriate in the case of religious discourse. To my mind a major failure of atheistic argument is that they do not see that Truth in religious discourse and Truth in scientific discourse are not one and the same.
 
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