Suppose you examine an apple and determine that it’s red, sweet, smooth and crunchy. You might claim this is what the apple is. Put another way, you’ve made truth claims about the apple and seemingly made statements about real properties of the apple. But immediate problems arise.
Epistemologists (people who study truth, belief and knowledge) use the following concepts as the framework for their study of truth.
The main idea behind this view is that a belief is true if it “coheres” or is consistent with other things a person believes. For example, a fact a person believes, say “grass is green” is true if that belief is consistent with other things the person believes like the definition of green and whether grass exists and the like.
So we have some theories but it seems we’re no closer to answering our question. Which theory is true? Kant surely was on to something when he claimed that we have to start with our beliefs if for no other reason than that it seems impossible to deny.
Philosophers are supposed to love wisdom and wisdom is more oriented towards the practical than the theoretical. This article has been largely about a theoretical view of truth so how do we apply it? Most people don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about what truth is but tend to get by in the world without that understanding.
Unfortunately for this so-called correspondence theory of truth, the mind does not perceive reality as it is, but only as it can, filtering, distorting, and interpreting it.
In modern times, it has been argued that truth is constructed by social and cultural processes, to say nothing of individual desires and dispositions. Michel Foucault famously spoke, not of truth or truths, but of ‘regimes of truth.’.
For William James, the truth is ‘only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.’ . If something works, it may well be true; if it doesn’t, it most probably isn’t.
In Plato’s Cratylus, on the philosophy of language, Socrates says that aletheia (Greek, ‘truth’) is a compression of the phrase ‘a wandering that is divine.’.
Truth is a property not so much of thoughts and ideas but more properly of beliefs and assertions. But to believe or assert something is not enough to make it true, or else the claim that ‘to believe something makes it true’ would be just as true as the claim that ‘to believe something does not make it true.’.
For some thinkers, something can only be true or false if it is open to verification, at least in theory if not also in practice. The truth of something lies at the end of our inquiry into that thing. But as our inquiry can have no end, the truth of something can never be more than our best opinion of that thing.
According to the pragmatic theory of truth, truth leads to successful action; therefore, successful action is an indicator of truth. Clearly, we could not have sent a rocket to the moon if our science had been wide off the mark.
STEER CLEAR. DECEPTIVE PRACTICES. Will not permit you to view or unlock any documents until you have submitted 10 docs for 1 unlock. I submitted 14, 6 were denied and 9 were approved. It still kept asking me to submit 10.
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