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Oct 6, 2003, 01:36 pm
| #1 (permalink) (top) |
| Hot Lava Location: Spokane, WA Posts: 782 | There is no such thing as truth, and for that matter lies. Each statement has a different proportion of each, but can never be completely true, or completely false. Some examples: I'm Human Many would consider this a true statement without question. Further analyzation proves different, because the term human is based upon the senses, which aren't always accurate. The five senses can decieve you. People die No one has ever died in the history of mankind, and the universe for that matter. They might have ceased to function, but a dead object cannot die further. Humans are never alive for that matter either. The answer is that you are just a product of one single cell, which wasn't born. Humans are machines. I'll end it with a quote from a wonderful book Hitchhikers Guid To The Galaxy. All that they found on the asteroid was an old man who claimed that nothing was true, but was later found out to be lying. |
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Oct 6, 2003, 09:02 pm
| #3 (permalink) (top) |
| Hot Lava Location: Spokane, WA Posts: 782 | 1. The quality or being true; as: (a) Conformity to fact or reality; exact accordance with that which is, or has been; or shall be. (b) Conformity to rule; exactness; close correspondence with an example, mood, object of imitation, or the like. 2. That which is true or certain concerning any matter or subject, or generally on all subjects; real state of things; fact; verity; reality 3. A true thing; a verified fact; a true statement or proposition; an established principle, fixed law, or the like; as, the great truths of morals. That's from dictionary.com Note Geoff how I'm not getting pissed off with you when you asked me the definition of a word. |
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Oct 6, 2003, 09:26 pm
| #4 (permalink) (top) |
| Igneous Magma Location: New Zealand Posts: 309 | Which definition are you taking? As with most dictionary definitions, they're vague and inclusive. They attempt to cover everything (or close to it) with the definition. This is right and proper for a dictionary, but not very useful for analysis. There is a slant towards a correspondence theory, but it's general enough to include other truth theories fairly easily. Let's look at two examples of true statements to clarify the difference. a. 1+1=2 b. Gravity is an attraction between two objects that varies according the the inverse square of the distance between them. In a. we have something that is 'true' according to a coherent set of rules (mathematics). In b. we have something that is 'true' according observation. These are quite different criteria for truth. Things get even more complex when one looks into philosophy. There are about five major streams of truth theories (correspondence, coherence, semantic, pragmatic and deflationary -- different people give different labels, so this list may not be a perfect match). Each of these has a different take on what is true. I usually work with correspondence and coherence theories -- correspondence looks for a match between the claim and reality; coherence looks for consistancy with the claim and existing things that are known to be true. The examples you gave struck me as being semantic -- if you change the definition or meaning of a word (eg 'to die'), you can change the 'truth' of the statement. And, yes, I do appreciate your response. |
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Oct 6, 2003, 10:01 pm
| #5 (permalink) (top) |
| Avatar of Tiamut Location: Dallas, Texas (Irving) Posts: 848 | Actually 1+1=2 is hardly a concrete fact. Counting numbers do not naturally exist in nature. If you add a rock to a rock you do not get two rocks, you merely have the potential to have two rocks, because the statement fails to qualify that nothing happens to the original rocks so as to change their numerical count, such as breaking one or fusing them together. If you count people the rules change again, because breaking a person in half does not increase the count, it lowers it because then you have a corpse...which changes the rules again. What creates the greatest difficulty is how many times you must cross the line between abstract and real. Therefore I would consider 'b' the more solid definition because it can be more accurately applied... |
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Oct 6, 2003, 11:40 pm
| #7 (permalink) (top) |
| Avatar of Tiamut Location: Dallas, Texas (Irving) Posts: 848 | ...which is a completely abstract concept, and no two people define abstract concepts in exactly the same manner... You just cannot let anything pass that has my name on it, can you? You are a bigger egoist than me, and I belong to an egoist philosophy while you claim not to. How irrationally delicious. |
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Oct 7, 2003, 12:50 am
| #19 (permalink) (top) |
| Avatar of Tiamut Location: Dallas, Texas (Irving) Posts: 848 | Okay, here is one for you. 1+1 right? 1/3+1/3+1/3=1 right? 0.33333(repeating)=1/3 right? Therefore: 0.33333(repeating)+0.33333(repeating)+0.33333(repeating)=1 right? Wrong! It is 0.99999(repeating) So much for those rules... |
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Oct 7, 2003, 12:53 am
| #20 (permalink) (top) | |
| Igneous Magma Location: New Zealand Posts: 309 | Quote:
I might agree that there is no such thing as a perfect correspondence of truth to objective reality -- but this is not the same as saying there is no truth. I strongly suggest you take a look through this page | |
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