NEW PVAF SHARING... TRUTH ON MONDAY MORNING:....opposite of a Profound Truth may well be another Profound Truth...but not a False....
Posted by Vishva News Reporter on September 13, 2010

 



Truth, which is called a Divine Attribute, is the foundation of every virtue.

Truth, which is called a "Divine Attribute, is the foundation of every virtue."
- Phoenix Freemasonry (GardenOfTheWitch)


.....PVAF'S
MONDAY TRUTH SERIES
...
.....starts today....
TO FIND Truth OF
THE WORD "TRUTH"
IN
vEDik TIME ERA WE LIVE IN CALLED kli-yug....
 
.....THE MOST SIMPLE Truth OF TRUTH....
"The truth that makes men free is
for the most part the truth
which men prefer not to hear."

- Herbert Agar,  ((29 September 1897- 24 November 1980): An American journalist American journalist, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1934 for his book "The People's Choice", a critical look at the American presidency and President John Kennedy's favourite reference book in his library).

.....
WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN THE LAST 500 YEARS
AS PART OF ITS ENLIGHTENMENT PROCESS
STARTED CONNECTING

TIME AND TRUTH
AND
TRUTH WITH PHILOPHY AND NATURE

....as can be seen from the following famous paintings...
....what would be the need and purpose? ......
File:Nicolas Poussin 039.jpg
LEFT: Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy By François Lemoyne, 1737.
(Completed on the day before the artist’s suicide.)

RIGHT: Time rescues daughter Truth from Envy and Discord, Nicholas Poussin, 1641. Truth in feminine form is often portrayed in peril, humble, or pentitant---nude veritas---the naked truth is upheld by the fundamentals of nature, time. (Wikipedia)


LEFT: Truth Unveiled by Time By Gian Lorenzo Bernini:  (1645-52) (GardenOfTheWitch)
RIGHT: Truth, Philosophy and Nature:
by Bartholom?. Model of the Sculptural Group for the Monument to Jean-Jacques Rousseau  in Pantheon, Paris
(between 1907-1912, Paris, Mus?e d’Orsay) (ImageWebPage)

.....SCIENCE IS PROCLAIMED TO SHOW
THE TRUTH
ABOUT "EXISTENCE" PER SE....

.....But as Niels Bohr once said below
it is happening in layers:

....."The opposite of a fact is falsehood,
but the opposite of one profound truth
may very well be another profound truth"
......


 
......TODAY'S SEARCH FOR
"THE  PROFOUND TRUTH AFTER PROFOUND TRUTH"
IS  PROPOSED TO BE LED BY
THE SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHIC THINKIG
EXAMPLE OF 

NIELS BOHR
(Acclaimed as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century).

Niels Bohr's life-journey centered on
"The Truth of Science"
was to encourage the self and others

"To Take A Deeper Look and Develop
A Deeper Understanding Of
The Quantum, Metaphysical
and/or
 
Spiritual Realm
and
Provide Some Profound Insight
As To How You Can Create
A Life Of Harmony and Fulfillment For Yourself"....
.

Niels Bohr (7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) is known as one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century. Bohr's contribution toward helping the world understand the "unseen" in the atomic and sub-atomic levels of our existence which could be perceived as mystical aspects of creation has impacted our planet in a tremendous way. Bohr was a Danish physicist who has provided a profound and significant contribution to the world through his lifelong dedication to physics and using his genius to better understand quantum mechanics. His contributions in developing an understanding of atomic structure which is known as quantum physics, the scientific study of quantum mechanics, won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.

.....NEILS BOHR IS ACCLAIMED AS

"conceiver of the TRUTH "
in probabilistic new  quantum mechanics over
determinism of classical ATOMIC physics
AND 
 
the principle of complementarity:
 

which stipulates
"that items could be separately analyzed
as having several contradictory properties"
(such as light could be a wave or a stream of particles).
.....Bohr also found philosophical applications
for this daringly original principle....


....then following Neil Bohr's philosophical application
of "Complementarity"
and also believing in the Truth of what Niels Bohr's father said:
“One of the favorite maxims of my father was
the distinction between the two sorts of truths,
profound truths recognized by the fact that
the opposite is also a profound truth,
in contrast to trivialities where opposites
are obviously absurd”


can it be possible...in the 21st Century
TO  LIGHT THE MIND OF THE ENTIRE HUMANITY 
WITH THE TRUTH
THAT....

.....on the 9th anniversary of the start of Islam-Christianity-Judaism conflict of 2001 called  "9/11"
which has resulted in a trillion dollar and counting cost
plus unwanted and unasked for massive human death, suffering and regressive human evolution
brought about and led by a small group of Islam extremists
from middle and near east into the rest of the world nations.....


9/11 has resulted in a "un-philosophical"
"CONFRONTATION & CONTRADICTION"
in the Abrahamic Reglion's three traditions of 
ISALM-CHRISTIANITY-JUDAISM
all three with unifying characteristic that
each accept the tradition that God revealed himself to the
 
Patriarch Abraham....

.....This Confrontation and Contradiction... 

"CAN BE EXCHANGED
FOR
"NON-DESTRUCTION"
OF ENTIRE HUMANITY
with
"PEACEFUL AND PROSPEROUS CO-EXISTENCE
OF TWO DIFFERNET LIFESTYLES
OF THE SAME
FOUNDING FATHERS OF A SINGLE
Abrahamic religion
"....
 

File:ReligionSymbolAbr.PNG

.....This is possible ....
just as light could be a wave or a particle
in human life existing as suits life's
sustenance, progress, prosperity and re-creation
human and divine purposes .....

 
AND HOW THE ABOVE CAN BE DONE WITH ....
truth.JPG
AS SUGGESTED BY
Robert M. March...
 expressed the following in his book "Physics for Poets"
explaining physics to non-scientists...

(from: alditerate)
"A scientist...is supposed to be looking for the truth about nature.
But not all truths are equal. Some we call deep truths, and these are the ones that are also beautiful.
An idea must be more than right - it must also be pretty if it is to create much excitement in the world of science.
For the search for truth is not simply a matter of discovering facts.
You must also understand their significance and
then persuade others that your way of looking at them is valid.
It is always easier to persuade people to believe in something new when they find it beautiful,
especially if it runs counter to their established beliefs".


(The above thought process of current reality of our existence is contributed by
Champak Mistry of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
as part of learning, understanding and applying in daily living of vEDik Truth
about human existence in the infinite diversity of Creations by Creator...)

......ABOUT NEILS BOHR life-journey.....in continual search of
Truth of Nature and Natural Laws
That Creates, Sustains, Operates and Re-creates
For Welfare and Well-being Of Creations....


Niels Bohr, (7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) born of a Lutheran father and a Jewish mother in a lineage of academics and bankers, was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and probabilistic new  quantum mechanics (investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them), for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 and Franklin Medal (1929). Bohr mentored doctoral students and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century including Albert Einstein (see Bohr–Einstein debates)and Heisenberg (uncertainty principle). He worked on Manhattan Project, which developed the USA's atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (killing 240,000 in a few moments and obliterating the two cities in World War II started by Nazi Germany allied with Italy and Japan against the rest of the world killed 61 million peoples between 1937-45. One of Bohr's sons, Aage Bohr, also a physicist awarded Nobel prize in 1975.  Niels Bohr,&, in 1943 was arrested by Nazi police but escaped to London via Sweden. He was called the "Father Confessor" on Manhattan Project, worried about USA-USSR atomic arms race (TRUTH realized post WWII) in 1944 tried in vain with USA President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to partner with USSR to avoid creating atomic arms race. Again in 1950 addressed an "Open Letter"
to United Nations about then the modern development of science and technology and per se the USA-British atomic energy, which promised great improvement of human welfare but at the same time also a means of destruction the whole civilization in the hands of man....Continue knowing Today's Man by clicking here....
 
Please click on the next line to continue reading some famous quotes about TRUTH and also about the last 500 years of search for meaning and formulation of "Philosophy of Truth" in the western civilization.....including paintings of western thoughts of relations between Time and Truth


.......PLEASE KEEP ON SCROLLING FOR
VARIOUS VISUAL ART REPRESENTATION OF TRUTH
AND
SOME FAMOUS QUOTES ON TRUTH....


Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy
By François Lemoyne, 1737

Time unveiling Truth 1733, Jean-François Detroy (National Gallery)

 

.....AND NOW ABOUT TODAY'S TRUTH THEME

......CONTIUING TO LEARN MORE ABOUT

Truth OF THE TRUTH

.....please read the following meanings of TRUTH

in the minds of some famous humans to date....

(from whatIsTruuth)

 

(PVAF has compiled quick info on the author of each quote on its belief that

to TRUELY understand any quote... one must know and understand the life time experience of the author

from which the wisdom of the quote emanates...you will see this TRUTH when the quote talks to you....

 To read the life--journey overview of each author please click on the hyperlinked name...and also read more of quotes of each author to have further insight into diversity of understanding of human life about itself and rest of creation it co-exists with including fellow humans...)

 
......IN SOME HUMAN MINDS.....

"Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything,
making everything vulgar, and every truth false."

- Henri Frédéric Amiel (28 September 1821 – 11 May 1881), a Swiss philosopher, poet and critic.

"An epigram is a flashlight of a truth;
a witticism, truth laughing at itself."

- Minna Thomas Antrim (1861-1950) was an American writer who said the Truth about Experience:
"Experience is a great teacher, but she sends in terrific bills"


"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."
- Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888),
an English poet and cultural critic and
called a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.


"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."

 - Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (26 April 121 AD– 17 March 180 AD), last of the "Five Good Emperors"Roman Emperor from 161-60 AD and co-emperor with Lucius Versus from 161-69 AD, and a Stoic philosophers. His work titled "Meditations" is revered as a literary monument to a government of service and duty and Platonic ideal of a philosopher-king about what was best about Roman civilization.

"Not being known doesn't stop
the truth from being true."

- Richard David Bach (born 23 June 1936), claims to be a direct descendant of Johann Sebastian Bach, American famous author of the 1970s best-sellers "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" and others. His books espouse his philosophy that our apparent physical limits and mortality are merely appearance and in his writing relates metaphorically to flying which has been his hobby since age 16.

"There is no original truth,
only original error. "

- Gaston Bachelard (June 27, 1884, Bar-sur-Aube – October 16, 1962) was a French philosopher of poetics and science. In sceience philosopy he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break. He rose to some of the most prestigious positions in the French academy and influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida.

"Truth is a good dog;
but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error,
lest you get your brains kicked out."

Francis Bacon (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), 1st Viscount Saint Alban (1621), Knigt of Commonwealth (1603), an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist and author, Father of Empiricism pioneered scientific revolutionand through practice scientific method called the Baconian method in the investigations of all things natural and Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England, one of rare scientists in the world killed by their own experiments and died without heirs.

"Truth is so hard to tell,
it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
"
- Francis Bacon (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), See his first quote above for life info..

"Truth emerges more readily
from error than from confusion.
"
- Francis Bacon (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), See his first quote above for life info..

"Truth is the daughter of time,
not of authority."

- Francis Bacon (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), See his first quote above for life info..

"What is truth? said jesting Pilate;
and would not stay for an answer.
"
- Francis Bacon (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), See his first quote above for life info..

"You never find yourself
until you face the truth."

- Pearl Mae Bailey (March 29, 1918 – August 17, 1990) was an African American female actor and singer appearing in vaudeville Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman in 1946, won a Tony Award for the title role in the all-black production of Hello, Dolly! in 1968, won a Daytime Emmy award (1986) for a fairy godmother in the ABC Afterschool Special, "Cindy Eller: A Modern Fairy Tale", rendition of "Takes Two to Tango" hit top ten in 1952.

"Falsehood is cowardice,
the truth courage."

Hosea Ballou (April 30, 1771 – June 7, 1852) was an American Universalist clergyman and theological writer, acclaimed as the "father of American Universalism," along with John Murray, who founded the first Universalist church in America. he divested Universalism of every trace of Calvinism, and opposed legalism and trinitarian views as per his quote: "Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.", also preached those forms of Chistianity that emphasized God as wrathful in turn hardened the hearts of their believers.

"Man can certainly keep on lying...
but he cannot make truth falsehood.
He can certainly rebel...
but he can accomplish nothing
which abolishes the choice of God."

-Karl Barth (May 10, 1886–December 10, 1968, a Swiss Reformed theologian and one of the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century including acknowledgement by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas, embarked on a new theological path initially called dialectical theology, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth (e.g., God's relationship to humanity embodies both grace and judgment, and through his innovative doctrine of election based on "a theology of the Word" emphasized the sovereignty of God...and the fundamental TRUTH of all this theology expressed in his quotes: "The best theology would need no advocates: it would prove itself." "To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world."


"Truth is meant to save you first,
and the comfort comes afterward."

- Georges Bernanos (20 February 1888–5 July 1948), a French author of fiction, and a soldier in World War I, with Roman Catholic and monarchistleanings was a violent adversary to bourgeois thought and sel-exiled to Brazil, South America 1938-45 , from South where fulminated at his country's 'spiritual exhaustion'to what he identified as defeatism leading to France's defeat in 1940, disappointed in the Francoist cause which criticized Vichy regime in France during Nazi occupation and supported the nationalistFree French Forces led by the conservative Charles de Gaulle who became the post-war French President. His writings, mostly written between 1926-37are sharply critical of modern society and its inroads into personal liberty, both through government and through technical development.

"As scarce as truth is,
the supply has always been
in excess of the demand."

- Josh Billings, pen name of humorist born Henry Wheeler Shaw (20 April 1818 – 14 October 1885), a journalist and writer who wrote in an informal voice full of the slang of the day, with often eccentric phonetic spelling, dispensing wit and folksy common-sense wisdom, his books include Farmers' Allminax, Josh Billings' Sayings, Everybody's Friend, Choice Bits of American Wit and Josh Billings' Trump Kards, acclaimed as the second most famous humor writer and lecturer in the United States in the second half of the 19th century after Mark Twain, although unknown to later generations.

"When you want to fool the world,
tell the truth."

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), was a Prussian/German nationalist statesman dominant in world affairs, Minister-President, of Prussia 1862–90, he oversaw the unification of Germany becoming in 1867 Chancellor of the North German Confederation, designed the German Empire in 1871, becoming its first Chancellor and dominating its affairs until his dismissal in 1890. His diplomacy of Realpolitik and powerful rule gained him the nickname "The Iron Chancellor", became after his death hero of German nationalists who build hundreds of monuments glorifying the symbol of powerful personal leadership. Historians praised him as a statesman of moderation and balance who was primarily responsible for the unification of the German states into a nation-state. He used balance-of-power diplomacy to keep Europe peaceful in the 1870s and 1880s. He created a new nation with a progressive social policy, a result that went beyond his initial goals as a practitioner of power politics in Prussia. Bismarck, a devout Lutheran who was loyal to his king, promoted government through a strong, well-trained bureaucracy with a hereditary monarchy at the top. Bismarck recognized early in his political career that the opportunities for national unification would exist and worked successfully to provide a Prussian structure to the nation as a whole. On the other hand, his Reich of 1871 deliberately restricted democracy, and the anti-Catholic and anti-Socialist legislation that he introduced unsuccessfully in the 1870s and 1880s left a devastating legacy of distrust and fragmentation in German political culture.

"A truth that's told with bad intent
 beats all the lies you can invent."

William Blake (28 November 1757–12 August 1827, an Englishman, seminal figure in the history of 18th century's Romantic movement of Romantic Age  wrote prophetic poetry, acclaimed as the greatest visual artist Britain has ever produced" and printmaker who produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself"; but was largely unrecognised during his lifetime and considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work and characterised as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors" and named as one of the forerunners of modern anarchism. Hostile to the Church of England, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Notable works include Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, Milton a Poem



"Truth never penetrates
an unwilling mind."

- Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (J L Borges)  (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet, librarian, public lecturer and fluent in several languages was born in Buenos Aires and educated in Switzerland (1914-21). He published his poems and essays in aurrealist literary journals which supports the principles, ideals, or practice of producing fantastic or incongruous imagery in art or literature by means of unnatural juxtapositions and combinations.In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize, the Prix Formentor. His works, was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe, embraces the "chaos that rules the world and the character of unreality in all literature." His most famous books, "Ficciones" (1944) and "The Aleph" (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, fictional writers, religion and God which contributed to the genre of magical realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century. Borges's progressive blindness is attributed to have helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination as seen from Borges comment: "poets, like the blind, can see in the dark" and "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who knows themselves better than the blind?' - for every thought becomes a tool." The poems of his late period dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Luís de Camões, and Virgil. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."

Truth, though it has many disadvantages,
is at least changeless.
You can always find it where you left it
.
Phyllis Forbes Dennis (May 31, 1884 – August 22, 1963), a language and psychology teacher, British novelist and short story writer who wrote under her birth name, Phyllis Bottome, studied psychoanalysis under Alfred Adler while in Vienna and was married to a British diplomat (died July 1972) working for MI6 the British Spy Agency (covering Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia) and lived in Paris, Marseilles and  Germany, In 1924 she and her husband started a school in Kitzbühel, Austria to teach languages but was a community and an educational laboratory to determine how psychology and educational theory could cure the ills of nations. One of their  famous pupils was Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels. In 1935, her novel "Private Worlds" based on her knowledge of psychoanalysis was made into a film about reality in a psychiatric clinic. Her next film "Danger Signal" ran into trouble when Hays Code forbade from becoming a Hollywood film (The Hays Code was 1930's Hollywood Flm Production Code spelling out what was acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States). Her stay in Germany in 1930's which inspired her to write "The Mortal Storm" was a first film to mention Hitler's name and be set in Nazi Germany.. "Heart of Child" written by her was adapted to film. In addition to fiction she is also known as an Adlerian by writing a biography of Alfred Adler.


......AND IS THE ETERNAL CLICHE IN ALL BELIEF SYSTEMS.....

....IN THE END OF ALL
HUMAN LIFE PROCEEDINGS
ENDS IN THE TRIUMP OF TRUTH....

File:Aachen Allegory.jpg
The Triumph of Truth, 1598 by Hans von Aachen (1552 - 1615),
"Justice" has come to the aid of political power, symbolized by a lion, to protect naked "Truth" against "Perfidy," and "Ignorance" personified by a bearded man who is already unmasked and thwarted. Only when "Honesty" reigns--so this painting admonishes--can "Peace," "Prosperity," and "Fertility" flourish throughout the land. This is a spiritual allegory and an expression of Perennialist truth. which is defined as the notion of the universal recurrence of philosophical insight independent of epoch or culture, including universal truths on the nature of reality, humanity or consciousness (anthropological universals).

......AND NOW AFTER READING WHAT TRUTH
MEANS TO DIFFERENT HUMANS OF
LIFE KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM IN DIFFERENT LIFE TIMES....

.
....PLEASE KEEP READING BELOW TO GET AN OVERVIEW OF
 TRUTH FROM ANCIENT TO PRESENT TIMES
FROM PHILOSPHERS AND SCHOLARS...
...who were and are still searching for
the meaning and understanding of TRUTH....

 

Truth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From: Wikipedia: This page was last modified on 12 September 2010 at 19:50. For latest update please click on hyperlink.
Jump to: navigation, search
Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, François Lemoyne, 1737

Truth can have a variety of meanings, from the state of being the case, being in accord with a particular fact or reality, being in accord with the body of real things, events, actuality, or fidelity to an original or to a standard, truth "behind" everything, the ontological truth. In archaic usage it could be fidelity, constancy or sincerity in action, character, and utterance.[1]    Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars and philosophers.

 

There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth; what things are truthbearers capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that revealed and acquired knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective, relative, objective, or absolute. This article introduces the various perspectives and claims, both today and throughout history.

 

Contents

[hide]

 
[edit]
 Nomenclature, orthography and etymology

The English word truth is from Old English tríewþ, tréowþ, trýwþ, Middle English trewþe, cognate to Old High German triuwida, Old Norse tryggð. Like troth, it is a -th nominalisation of the adjective true (Old English tréowe).

 

The English word true is from Old English (West Saxon) (ge)tríewe, tréowe, cognate to Old Saxon (gi)trûui, Old High German (ga)triuwu (Modern German treu "faithful"), Old Norse tryggr, Gothic triggws,[2] all from a Proto-Germanic *trewwj- "having good faith". Old Norse trú, "faith, word of honour; religious faith, belief"[3] (archaic English troth "loyalty, honesty, good faith", compare Ásatrú).

 

Thus, 'truth' involves both the quality of "faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity",[4] and that of "agreement with fact or reality", in Anglo-Saxon expressed by soþ (Modern English sooth).

 

All Germanic languages besides English have introduced a terminological distinction between truth "fidelity" and truth "factuality". To express "factuality", North Germanic opted for nouns derived from sanna "to assert, affirm", while continental West Germanic (German and Dutch) opted for continuations of wâra "faith, trust, pact" (cognate to Slavic vera "(religious) faith", but influenced by Latin verus). Romance languages use terms following the Latin veritas, while the Greek aletheia and Slavic pravda have separate etymological origins.

 
[edit]

 The major theories of truth

 

The question of what is a proper basis for deciding how words, symbols, ideas and beliefs may properly be considered true, whether by a single person or an entire society, is dealt with by the five major substantive theories introduced below. Each theory presents perspectives that are widely shared by published scholars.[5][6]

 

There also have more recently arisen "deflationary" or "minimalist" theories of truth based on the idea that the application of a term like true to a statement does not assert anything significant about it, for instance, anything about its nature, but that the label truth is a tool of discourse used to express agreement, to emphasize claims, or to form certain types of generalizations.[5][7][8]

 
[edit]
 

Substantive theories
Truth, holding a mirror and a serpent (1896). Olin Levi Warner, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

 
[edit]
 Correspondence theory

Correspondence theories state that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs.[9] This type of theory posits a relationship between thoughts or statements on the one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a traditional model which goes back at least to some of the classical Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.[10] This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined in principle solely by how it relates to "things", by whether it accurately describes those "things".

 

 An example of correspondence theory is the statement by the Thirteenth Century philosopher/theologian Thomas Aquinas: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus ("Truth is the equation [or adequation] of things and intellect"), a statement which Aquinas attributed to the Ninth Century neoplatonist Isaac Israeli.[11][12] Aquinas also restated the theory as: “A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality” [13]

 

Correspondence theory practically operates on the assumption that truth is a matter of accurately copying what was much later called "objective reality" and then representing it in thoughts, words and other symbols.[14] Many modern theorists have stated that this ideal cannot be achieved independently of some analysis of additional factors.[5][15]

 

For example, language plays a role in that all languages have words that are not easily translatable into another. The German word Zeitgeist is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may "know" what it means, but any translation of the word fails to accurately capture its full meaning (this is a problem with many abstract words, especially those derived in agglutinative languages).

 

Thus, some words add an additional parameter to the construction of an accurate truth predicate. Among the philosophers who grappled with this problem is Alfred Tarski, whose semantic theory is summarized further below in this article.[16]

Proponents of several of the theories below have gone further to assert that there are yet other issues necessary to the analysis, such as interpersonal power struggles, community interactions, personal biases and other factors involved in deciding what is seen as truth.

   
Coherence theory

For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within a whole system. Very often, though, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system.[17]

 

A pervasive tenet of coherence theories is the idea that truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence with the whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single absolute system.

 

Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to characterize the essential and intrinsic properties of formal systems in logic and mathematics.[18] However, formal reasoners are content to contemplate axiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side, for example, the various alternative geometries. On the whole, coherence theories have been criticized as lacking justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially with respect to assertions about the natural world, empirical data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and society, especially when used without support from the other major theories of truth.[19]

 

Coherence theories distinguish the thought of rationalist philosophers, particularly of Spinoza, Leibniz, and G.W.F. Hegel, along with the British philosopher F.H. Bradley.[20] They have found a resurgence also among several proponents of logical positivism, notably Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel.

 

 
[edit]
 Constructivist theory

Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community. Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed," because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold). Rather, perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender are socially constructed.

 

Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made. Vico's epistemological orientation gathers the most diverse rays and unfolds in one axiom – verum ipsum factum – "truth itself is constructed". Hegel and Marx were among the other early proponents of the premise that truth is, or can be, socially constructed. Marx, like many critical theorists who followed, did not reject the existence of objective truth but rather distinguished between true knowledge and knowledge that has been distorted through power or ideology. For Marx scientific and true knowledge is 'in accordance with the dialectical understanding of history' and ideological knowledge 'an epiphenomenal expression of the relation of material forces in a given economic arrangement'.[21]

 
[edit]
 
Consensus theory

Consensus theory holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might come to be agreed upon, by some specified group. Such a group might include all human beings, or a subset thereof consisting of more than one person.

 

Among the current advocates of consensus theory as a useful accounting of the concept of "truth" is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas.[22] Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation.[23] Among the current strong critics of consensus theory is the philosopher Nicholas Rescher.[24]

 
[edit]
 Pragmatic theory

The three most influential forms of the pragmatic theory of truth were introduced around the turn of the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other proponents of pragmatic theory, they hold in common that truth is verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice.[25]

 

Peirce defines truth as follows: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth."[26]

 

This statement emphasizes Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as fallibilism and "reference to the future", are essential to a proper conception of truth. Although Peirce uses words like concordance and correspondence to describe one aspect of the pragmatic sign relation, he is also quite explicit in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence are no more than nominal definitions, which he accords a lower status than real definitions.

 

William James's version of pragmatic theory, while complex, is often summarized by his statement that "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving."[27] By this, James meant that truth is a quality the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to actual practice (thus, "pragmatic").

 

John Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is self-corrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed truths.[28]

 
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Minimalist (deflationary) theories

A number of philosophers reject the thesis that the concept or term truth refers to a real property of sentences or propositions. These philosophers are responding, in part, to the common use of truth predicates (e.g., that some particular thing "...is true") which was particularly prevalent in philosophical discourse on truth in the first half of the 20th century. From this point of view, to assert the proposition “2 + 2 = 4' is true” is logically equivalent to asserting the proposition “2 + 2 = 4”, and the phrase “is true” is completely dispensable in this and every other context. These positions are broadly described

  • as deflationary theories of truth, since they attempt to deflate the presumed importance of the words "true" or truth,
  • as disquotational theories, to draw attention to the disappearance of the quotation marks in cases like the above example, or
  • as minimalist theories of truth.[5][29]

 

Whichever term is used, deflationary theories can be said to hold in common that "[t]he predicate 'true' is an expressive convenience, not the name of a property requiring deep analysis."[5]

 

Once we have identified the truth predicate's formal features and utility, deflationists argue, we have said all there is to be said about truth. Among the theoretical concerns of these views is to explain away those special cases where it does appear that the concept of truth has peculiar and interesting properties. (See, e.g., Semantic paradoxes, and below.)

 

In addition to highlighting such formal aspects of the predicate "is true", some deflationists point out that the concept enables us to express things that might otherwise require infinitely long sentences. For example, one cannot express confidence in Michael's accuracy by asserting the endless sentence:

Michael says, 'snow is white' and snow is white, or he says 'roses are red' and roses are red or he says ... etc.

This assertion can also be succinctly expressed by saying: What Michael says is true.[30]

 
[edit]
 Performative theory of truth

Attributed to P. F. Strawson is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "'Snow is white' is true" is to perform the speech act of signaling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are more actions than communicative statements is not as odd as it may seem.

 

Consider, for example, that when the bride says "I do" at the appropriate time in a wedding, she is performing the act of taking this man to be her lawful wedded husband. She is not describing herself as taking this man, but actually doing so (perhaps the most thorough analysis of such "illocutionary acts" is J. L. Austin, "How to Do Things With Words"[31]).

 

Strawson holds that a similar analysis is applicable to all speech acts, not only to illocutionary ones: "To say a statement is true is not to make a statement about a statement, but rather to perform the act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement. When one says 'It's true that it's raining,' one asserts no more than 'It's raining.' The function of [the statement] 'It's true that...' is to agree with, accept, or endorse the statement that 'it's raining.'"[32]

 
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Redundancy and related theories

According to the redundancy theory of truth, asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to asserting the statement itself. For example, making the assertion that " 'Snow is white' is true" is equivalent to asserting "Snow is white".

 

Redundancy theorists infer from this premise that truth is a redundant concept; that is, it is merely a word that is traditionally used in conversation or writing, generally for emphasis, but not a word that actually equates to anything in reality.

 

This theory is commonly attributed to Frank P. Ramsey, who held that the use of words like fact and truth was nothing but a roundabout way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic muddle".[5][33][34]

 

A variant of redundancy theory is the disquotational theory which uses a modified form of Tarski's schema: To say that '"P" is true' is to say that P. Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims.

 

They argue that sentences like "That's true", when said in response to "It's raining", are prosentences, expressions that merely repeat the content of other expressions. In the same way that it means the same as my dog in the sentence My dog was hungry, so I fed it, That's true is supposed to mean the same as It's raining — if you say the latter and I then say the former.

 

These variations do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is not a property, but rather can be understood to say that, for instance, the assertion "P" may well involve a substantial truth, and the theorists in this case are minimalizing only the redundancy or prosentence involved in the statement such as "that's true."[5]

 

Deflationary principles do not apply to representations that are not analogous to sentences, and also do not apply to many other things that are commonly judged to be true or otherwise. Consider the analogy between the sentence "Snow is white" and the character named Snow White, both of which can be true in some sense. To a minimalist, saying "Snow is white is true" is the same as saying "Snow is white," but to say "Snow White is true" is not the same as saying "Snow White."

 
[edit]
 
Pluralist theories

Several of the major theories of truth hold that there is a particular property the having of which makes a belief or proposition true. Pluralist theories of truth assert that there may be more than one property that makes propositions true: ethical propositions might be true by virtue of coherence. Propositions about the physical world might be true by corresponding to the objects and properties they are about.

Some of the pragmatic theories, such as those by Charles Peirce and William James, included aspects of correspondence, coherence and constructivist theories.[26][27] Crispin Wright argued in his 1992 book Truth and Objectivity that any predicate which satisfied certain platitudes about truth qualified as a truth predicate. In some discourses, Wright argued, the role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of superassertibility.[35] Michael Lynch, in a 2009 book Truth as One and Many, argued that we should see truth as a functional property capable of being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or coherence.[36]

 
[edit]
 
Most believed theories

According to a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views which was carried out in November 2009 (taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students) 44.9% of respondents accept or lean towards correspondence theories, 20.7% accept or lean towards deflationary theories and 13.8% epistemic theories.[37]

 
[edit]
 
Formal theories

 
[edit]
 Truth in logic

Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell us if a proposition is true or not. However, logic does not deal with truth in the absolute sense, as for instance a metaphysician does. Logicians use formal languages to express the truths which they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under some interpretation or truth within some logical system.

 

A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement which is true in all possible worlds[38] or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to a fact (also called a synthetic claim or a contingency) which is only true in this world as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as “If p and q, then p.” is considered to be logical truth because it is true because of the meaning of the symbols and words in it and not because of any facts of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue.

 
[edit]
 
Truth in mathematics

There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are the model theory of truth and the proof theory of truth[citation needed].

Historically, with the nineteenth century development of Boolean algebra mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity" is also an arbitrary constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". In propositional logic, these symbols can be manipulated according to a set of axioms and rules of inference, often given in the form of truth tables.

 

In addition, from at least the time of Hilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century to the proof of Gödel's theorem and the development of the Church-Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics were generally assumed to be those statements which are provable in a formal axiomatic system.

 

The works of Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system.[39] Two examples of the latter can be found in Hilbert's problems. Work on Hilbert's 10th problem led in the late twentieth century to the construction of specific Diophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution,[40] or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions.

 

More fundamentally, Hilbert's first problem was on the continuum hypothesis.[41] Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standard axioms of set theory and a finite number of proof steps.[42] In the view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom.

 
[edit]
 
Semantic theory of truth

The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language:

'P' is true if and only if P

where 'P' is a reference to the sentence (the sentence's name), and P is just the sentence itself.

Logician and philosopher Alfred Tarski developed the theory for formal languages (such as formal logic). Here he restricted it in this way: no language could contain its own truth predicate, that is, the expression is true could only apply to sentences in some other language. The latter he called an object language, the language being talked about. (It may, in turn, have a truth predicate that can be applied to sentences in still another language.) The reason for his restriction was that languages that contain their own truth predicate will contain paradoxical sentences like the Liar: This sentence is not true.

 

See The Liar paradox.

 

As a result Tarski held that the semantic theory could not be applied to any natural language, such as English, because they contain their own truth predicates. Donald Davidson used it as the foundation of his truth-conditional semantics and linked it to radical interpretation in a form of coherentism.

 

Bertrand Russell is credited with noticing the existence of such paradoxes even in the best symbolic formalizations of mathematics in his day, in particular the paradox that came to be named after him, Russell's paradox. Russell and Whitehead attempted to solve these problems in Principia Mathematica by putting statements into a hierarchy of types, wherein a statement cannot refer to itself, but only to statements lower in the hierarchy. This in turn led to new orders of difficulty regarding the precise natures of types and the structures of conceptually possible type systems that have yet to be resolved to this day.

 
[edit]
 
Kripke's theory of truth

 

Saul Kripke contends that a natural language can in fact contain its own truth predicate without giving rise to contradiction. He showed how to construct one as follows:

  • Begin with a subset of sentences of a natural language that contains no occurrences of the expression "is true" (or "is false"). So The barn is big is included in the subset, but not " The barn is big is true", nor problematic sentences such as "This sentence is false".
  • Define truth just for the sentences in that subset.
  • Then extend the definition of truth to include sentences that predicate truth or falsity of one of the original subset of sentences. So "The barn is big is true" is now included, but not either "This sentence is false" nor "'The barn is big is true' is true".
  • Next, define truth for all sentences that predicate truth or falsity of a member of the second set. Imagine this process repeated infinitely, so that truth is defined for The barn is big; then for "The barn is big is true"; then for "'The barn is big is true' is true", and so on.

Notice that truth never gets defined for sentences like This sentence is false, since it was not in the original subset and does not predicate truth of any sentence in the original or any subsequent set. In Kripke's terms, these are "ungrounded." Since these sentences are never assigned either truth or falsehood even if the process is carried out infinitely, Kripke's theory implies that some sentences are neither true nor false. This contradicts the Principle of bivalence: every sentence must be either true or false. Since this principle is a key premise in deriving the Liar paradox, the paradox is dissolved.[43]

 
[edit]
 
Notable views

La Vérité ("Truth") by Jules Joseph Lefebvre

 
[edit]
 Ancient history

The ancient Greek origins of the words "true" and "truth" have some consistent definitions throughout great spans of history that were often associated with topics of logic, geometry, mathematics, deduction, induction, and natural philosophy.

Socrates', Plato's and Aristotle's ideas about truth are commonly seen as consistent with correspondence theory. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle stated: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”.[44]

 

 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy proceeds to say of Aristotle:

 

Aristotle sounds much more like a genuine correspondence theorist in the Categories (12b11, 14b14), where he talks of “underlying things” that make statements true and implies that these “things” (pragmata) are logically structured situations or facts (viz., his sitting, his not sitting). Most influential is his claim in De Interpretatione (16a3) that thoughts are “likenessess” (homoiosis) of things. Although he nowhere defines truth in terms of a thought's likeness to a thing or fact, it is clear that such a definition would fit well into his overall philosophy of mind.[44]

 

Very similar statements can also be found in Plato (Cratylus 385b2, Sophist 263b).[44]

 
[edit]
 
Medieval age

[edit]
 Avicenna

 

n early Islamic philosophy, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) defined truth in his Metaphysics of Healing, Book I, Chapter 8, as:

 

What corresponds in the mind to what is outside it.[45]

Avicenna elaborated on his definition of truth in his Metaphysics Book Eight, Chapter 6:

The truth of a thing is the property of the being of each thing which has been established in it.[46]

However, this definition is merely a translation of the Latin translation from the Middle Ages.[47]

 

A modern translation of the original Arabic text states:

Truth is also said of the veridical belief in the existence [of something].[48]

 
[edit]
 
Aquinas

 

Following Avicenna, and also Augustine and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas stated in his Disputed Questions on Truth:

 

A natural thing, being placed between two intellects, is called true insofar as it conforms to either. It is said to be true with respect to its conformity with the divine intellect insofar as it fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect... With respect to its conformity with a human intellect, a thing is said to be true insofar as it is such as to cause a true estimate about itself.[49]

Thus, for Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth in things (ontological truth).[50] Following this, he wrote an elegant re-statement of Aristotle's view in his Summa I.16.1:

 

Veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei.
(Truth is the conformity of the intellect to the things.)

Aquinas also said that real things participate in the act of being of the Creator God who is Subsistent Being, Intelligence, and Truth. Thus, these beings possess the light of intelligibility and are knowable. These things (beings; reality) are the foundation of the truth that is found in the human mind, when it acquires knowledge of things, first through the senses, then through the understanding and the judgement done by reason. For Aquinas, human intelligence ("intus", within and "legere", to read) has the capability to reach the essence and existence of things because it has a non-material, spiritual element, although some moral, educational, and other elements might interfere with its capability.

 
[edit]
 
Modern age

 
[edit]
 Kant

Immanuel Kant discussed the correspondence theory of truth[44] in the following manner, criticizing correspondence theory as circular reasoning.

 

Truth is said to consist in the agreement of knowledge with the object. According to this mere verbal definition, then, my knowledge, in order to be true, must agree with the object. Now, I can only compare the object with my knowledge by this means, namely, by taking knowledge of it. My knowledge, then, is to be verified by itself, which is far from being sufficient for truth.

 

For as the object is external to me, and the knowledge is in me, I can only judge whether my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object.

 

Such a circle in explanation was called by the ancients Diallelos. And the logicians were accused of this fallacy by the sceptics, who remarked that this account of truth was as if a man before a judicial tribunal should make a statement, and appeal in support of it to a witness whom no one knows, but who defends his own credibility by saying that the man who had called him as a witness is an honourable man.[51]

 

According to Kant, the definition of truth as correspondence is a "mere verbal definition", here making use of Aristotle's distinction between a nominal definition: a definition in name only, and a real definition: a definition that shows the true cause or essence of the term that is being defined. From Kant's account of the history, the definition of truth as correspondence was already in dispute from classical times, the "skeptics" criticizing the "logicians" for a form of circular reasoning, though the extent to which the "logicians" actually held such a theory is not evaluated.[51]

 
[edit]
 
Hegel

 

Hegel tried to distance his philosophy from psychology by presenting truth as being an external self–moving object instead of being related to inner, subjective thoughts. Hegel's truth is analogous to the mechanics of a material body in motion under the influence of its own inner force.

"Truth is its own self–movement within itself."[52] Teleological truth moves itself in the three–step form of dialectical triplicity toward the final goal of perfect, final, absolute truth. For Hegel, the progression of philosophical truth is a resolution of past oppositions into increasingly more accurate approximations to absolute truth. Chalybäus used the terms "thesis", "antithesis", and "synthesis" to describe Hegel's dialectical triplicity.

 

The "thesis" consists of an incomplete historical movement. To resolve the incompletion, an "antithesis" occurs which opposes the "thesis." In turn, the "synthesis" appears when the "thesis" and "antithesis" become reconciled and a higher level of truth is obtained.

 

This "synthesis" thereby becomes a "thesis," which will again necessitate an "antithesis," requiring a new "synthesis" until a final state is reached as the result of reason's historical movement. History is the Absolute Spirit moving toward a goal.

 

This historical progression will finally conclude itself when the Absolute Spirit understands its own infinite self at the very end of history. Absolute Spirit will then be the complete expression of an infinite God.

 
[edit]
 
Schopenhauer

 

For Schopenhauer,[53] a judgment is a combination or separation of two or more concepts. If a judgment is to be an expression of knowledge, it must have a sufficient reason or ground by which the judgment could be called true.

 

Truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself which is its sufficient reason (ground).

 

Judgments can have material, formal, transcendental, or metalogical truth. A judgment has material truth if its concepts are based on intuitive perceptions that are generated from sensations.

 

If a judgment has its reason (ground) in another judgment, its truth is called logical or formal. If a judgment, of, for example, pure mathematics or pure science, is based on the forms (space, time, causality) of intuitive, empirical knowledge, then the judgment has transcendental truth.

 
[edit]
 
Kierkegaard

 

When Søren Kierkegaard, as his character Johannes Climacus, wrote that "Truth is Subjectivity", he does not advocate for subjectivism in its extreme form (the theory that something is true simply because one believes it to be so), but rather that the objective approach to matters of personal truth cannot shed any light upon that which is most essential to a person's life.

Objective truths are concerned with the facts of a person's being, while subjective truths are concerned with a person's way of being. Kierkegaard agrees that objective truths for the study of subjects like mathematics, science, and history are relevant and necessary, but argues that objective truths do not shed any light on a person's inner relationship to existence. At best, these truths can only provide a severely narrowed perspective that has little to do with one's actual experience of life.[54]

 

While objective truths are final and static, subjective truths are continuing and dynamic. The truth of one's existence is a living, inward, and subjective experience that is always in the process of becoming.

 

The values, morals, and spiritual approaches a person adopts, while not denying the existence of objective truths of those beliefs, can only become truly known when they have been inwardly appropriated through subjective experience.

 

Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes all systematic philosophies which attempt to know life or the truth of existence via theories and objective knowledge about reality. As Kierkegaard claims, human truth is something that is continually occurring, and a human being cannot find truth separate from the subjective experience of one's own existing, defined by the values and fundamental essence that consist of one's way of life.[55]

 
[edit]
 
Nietzsche

 

Friedrich Nietzsche believed the search for truth or 'the will to truth' was a consequence of the will to power of philosophers. He thought that truth should be used as long as it promoted life and the will to power, and he thought untruth was better than truth if it had this life enhancement as a consequence.

 

As he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, "The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding..." (aphorism 4).

 

He proposed the will to power as a truth only because according to him it was the most life affirming and sincere perspective one could have.

 

Robert Wicks discusses Nietzsche's basic view of truth as follows:

 

Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") as a keystone in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call "truth" is only "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms."

 

His view at this time is that arbitrariness completely prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the very artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images; "truth" is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for merely practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistence.[56]

 
[edit]
 
Whitehead
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alfred North Whitehead

 

Alfred North Whitehead a British mathematician who became an American philosopher, said: "There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that play the devil".

 

The logical progression or connection of this line of thought is to conclude that truth can lie, since half-truths are deceptive and may lead to a false conclusion.

 
[edit]
 
Nishida

 

According to Kitaro Nishida, "knowledge of things in the world begins with the differentiation of unitary consciousness into knower and known and ends with self and things becoming one again.

 

Such unification takes form not only in knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs knowing, the willing that directs action, and the feeling or emotive reach that directs sensing."[57]

 
[edit]
 
Fromm

 

Erich Fromm finds that trying to discuss truth as "absolute truth" is sterile and that emphasis ought to be placed on "optimal truth". He considers truth as stemming from the survival imperative of grasping one's environment physically and intellectually, whereby young children instinctively seek truth so as to orient themselves in "a strange and powerful world".

 

The accuracy of their perceived approximation of the truth will therefore have direct consequences on their ability to deal with their environment. Fromm can be understood to define truth as a functional approximation of reality. His vision of optimal truth is described partly in "Man from Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics" (1947), from which excerpts are included below.

the dichotomy between 'absolute = perfect' and 'relative = imperfect' has been superseded in all fields of scientific thought, where "it is generally recognized that there is no absolute truth but nevertheless that there are objectively valid laws and principles".
In that respect, "a scientifically or rationally valid statement means that the power of reason is applied to all the available data of observation without any of them being suppressed or falsified for the sake of a desired result". The history of science is "a history of inadequate and incomplete statements, and every new insight makes possible the recognition of the inadequacies of previous propositions and offers a springboard for creating a more adequate formulation."
As a result "the history of thought is the history of an ever-increasing approximation to the truth. Scientific knowledge is not absolute but optimal; it contains the optimum of truth attainable in a given historical period." Fromm furthermore notes that "different cultures have emphasized various aspects of the truth" and that increasing interaction between cultures allows for these aspects to reconcile and integrate, increasing further the approximation to the truth.

 
[edit]
 Foucault

 

Truth, for Michel Foucault, is problematic when any attempt is made to see truth as an "objective" quality. He prefers not to use the term truth itself but "Regimes of Truth".

 

In his historical investigations he found truth to be something that was itself a part of, or embedded within, a given power structure. Thus Foucault's view shares much in common with the concepts of Nietzsche.

 

Truth for Foucault is also something that shifts through various episteme throughout history.[58]

 
[edit]
 
Baudrillard

 

Jean Baudrillard considered truth to be largely simulated, that is pretending to have something, as opposed to dissimulation, pretending to not have something. He took his cue from iconoclasts who he claims knew that images of God demonstrated the fact that God did not exist.[59] Baudrillard wrote in "Precession of the Simulacra":

 

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
—Ecclesiastes[60][61]

Some examples of simulacra that Baudrillard cited were: that prisons simulate the "truth" that society is free; scandals (e.g., Watergate) simulate that corruption is corrected; Disney simulates that the U.S. itself is an adult place.

 

One must remember that though such examples seem extreme, such extremity is an important part of Baudrillard's theory. For a less extreme example, consider how movies usually end with the bad being punished, humiliated, or otherwise failing, thus affirming for viewers the concept that the good end happily and the bad unhappily, a narrative which implies that the status quo and institutionalised power structures are largely legitimate.[59]

 
[edit]
 
Ratzinger

Philosopher and theologian Joseph Ratzinger, before his election as Benedict XVI, commented upon the relationship of truth with tolerance,[62] conscience,[63] freedom,[64] and religion.[62] For him, "beyond all particular questions, the real problem lies in the question of truth."[62]

 

Ratzinger refers to achievements of the natural sciences as evidence that human reason has the power to know reality and arrive at truth. He also argues that "the modern self-limitation of reason" rooted in Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which views itself incapable of knowing religion and the human sciences such as ethics, leads to dangerous pathologies of religion and pathologies of science.[62][65]

 

He thinks that this self-limitation, which "amputates" the mind's capacity to answer fundamental questions such as man's origin and purpose, dishonors reason and is contradictory to the modern acclamation of science, whose basis is the power of reason.[62][65]

 

In his book Truth and Tolerance, Ratzinger argued that truth and love are identical. And if well understood, according to him, this is "the surest guarantee of tolerance."[62]

 
[edit]
 See also

Book:Epistemology
Books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

 
[edit]
 Truth in logic

 
[edit]
 Theories of truth

 
[edit]
 Major theorists

 



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