Rated
Apr 21 2008
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3 reviews
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philosophy, religion, reality, worldviews
• stanford.edu
Truth
via the NYT / Stanley Fish, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Michael Glanzberg
Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth.
It would be impossible to survey all there is to say about truth in any coherent way. Instead, this essay will concentrate on the main themes in the study of truth in the contemporary philosophical literature. It will attempt to survey the key problems and theories of current interest, and show how they relate to one-another. A number of other entries investigate many of these topics in greater depth. Generally, discussion of the principal arguments is left to them. The goal of this essay is only to provide an overview of the current theories.
Truth
French Theory in America
Many theories about what truth is all about. But all those theories only present hypotheses about what it is and those hypotheses leave us as hungry as ever before for its true meaning.
We are able to say the truth about facts happening within our close environment but when we speak about "the truth" in its philosophical sense it relates to something a lot vaster that our environment. Truth relates to our understanding of the global reality in which we are such tiny particles. But we don't understand what is this "whole". We could even add that there is a structural impossibility for a particle to reason its way through the whole and even if such a feat was feasible it would still be a "view" from within or better a "view" seen through the lense of an inside observer.
The "truth" about reality, or to say this otherwise, about the "whole in which we are such tiny particles" is conceivable only from the viewpoint of an outside observer one who could relate this "whole in which we are such tiny particles" to its own environment. In other words if we could per any chance induce or deduce that this "whole in which we are such tiny particles" were a pink elephant how would we ever be able to know something about the family of this pink elephant?
What I mean to say is that there is a systemic impossibility for us particles to ever reach the truth about this "whole in which we are such tiny particles". What we can reach is an understanding of how we particles relate to the environment within the realm of what is observable to us (in our Island-Universe as per Villenkin). This kind of understanding has a functional value for us but it does in no way qualify as truth about reality.
We intuitively understand that our "functional understanding" does not account for the impact on our Island-Universe of all that lays outside of it. But we most often brush away that thought, for, life continues and we know no better.
In conclusion our grasp of reality is physically flawed by our impossibility to see further than the boundary of our Island-Universe and it is furthermore systemically flawed by our insider observation.
What is presented as truth, by philosophers, logicians, religious thinkers and others, is thus no more than a viewpoint about something that is unattainable. When the men of knowledge of the day share such a viewpoint among themselves it will then be shared further down in a simplified form with all the citizens in their societies. That's when the viewpoint becomes a worldview. The history of man witnessed 3 classes of worldviews: the animist, the religious and the modern. From all possible accounts we are presently witnessing the slowl transitioning from late modernity into early post-modernity. That means that the men of knowledge of our days are debating the contours of a new viewpoint. Once this debate settles a new worldview will eventually be shared globally by all. But patience this takes time...
via berrypicker's SU pages, in Pearls of wisdom Online.
