From the current article:
"With such a variety to choose from at the very least you should be convinced that you don’t have to rest content with any sort of relativism that says that truth is just the same as belief. You can do a heck of a lot better than that. "
I'm not entirely sure, but the above strikes me as unneutral. I mean, does anyone have any solid proof that relativism isn't the case? Isn't proof against solipsism supposed to be unavailable? How do you really know the universe isn't just in your head? Why is the above point being pushed without the clear support of firm evidence? Why is the mere availability of other theories of truth accepted as such evidence?
- (NOTE: This article talks mainly about reasoned truth and observed truth. For other forms of truth, see revealed truth, and intuitive truth.)
(Please let's not start articles called "reasoned truth" and "observed truth." Oy.)
Deleted the above comment. Basically, I think what the author of the above comment is referring to is a colloquial and religious notion of "truth," according to which "truth" means "anything that anyone thinks is true." I do think that we should change the truth article so as to properly acknowledge this sense.
Except a few sorts of meta-comments for the benefit of editors, I think we should make all comments about the relationship between the given subject and other subjects within the page itself. There are lots of good conventions we've developed--having plenty of links and general discussion in the first paragraph of the article goes a long way. Having "see also" at the end of the article, while often less than entirely helpful, is also sometimes a good idea.
frankly, after reading this article it certainly lacks objectivity and has only the barest references to the peoples 'shoulders upon whom we stand' to kludge a ref. of my own...--dgd
Well, it's just taken from some lectures I wrote out, and no one (including me) has put it into third person voice and removed the opinions (here and there). And definitely needs to include more references to philosophers who actually hold the views. (For purposes of the class I was lecturing to I didn't think it was necessary to do that--an encyclopedia article of course is different.) If you can correct the problems, that would be great, but otherwise it'll have to wait until I get around to it, and who knows when that will be. --Larry Sanger
I just completely removed five paragraphs that were recently added to the article, so let me explain why.
- Aside from Rene DesCartes statement "I think, therefore I am" (or better still, "I can disbelieve everything except for the fact that I disbelieve"), people have not had great luck in finding absolute truth. Thus, most truth contains an element of relative quantifiability. This should not be surprising, however, as truth is something that only observers worry about having.
This is not NPOV and it is not particularly clear what the author is trying to say. In any case, the operative notion of "truth" in the above is not the simple bare concept that analytic philosophers are after in defining "truth," but rather "absolute truth"--and that is, basically, not the subject of this article, which is truth pure and simple. (I am skeptical that there needs to be an article called "absolute truth" except perhaps as a pointer to absolutism and relativism and a brief discussion of how people use the phrase "absolute truth"--the notion of absolute truth is usually discussed by philosophers and I suspect by religionists under different headings than this.)
- This more common, relative kind of truth is an accepted norm as part of scientific method, which posits that all facts are merely theories of varying strength, and the stronger the theory, the more factual the fact. The "fact" that gravimetric hydrogen-helium fusion is a stable process, for example, is absolutely no guarantee that the sun will exist tomorrow -- indeed, all of the laws of physics may change entirely in the next instant.
This assumes that there are in fact absolute and relative truths, which is highly biased--and again, people who actually theorize about this stuff don't put it in terms of truth. They put it in terms of justification, warrant, theory confirmation, and other terms depending on the context.
- Such truths, as dispiriting as it seems, take much on belief. For example, let's say that you were sure that you were thirty years old, and then the following day your memory, everyone else's, and your birth records and any other evidence as to your age became unavailable. A doctor could analyze your cells and say that you were somewhere between 28 and 33, and that fact would be the truest statement about your age. However, the truth that you are thirty would still exist to aliens with powerful telescopes thirty light-years away witnessing your birth, even if the aliens' existence (to us) is not an established fact. In this sense, truth does exist, but the problem is one of discovery. Or to put it another way, the fact that you can only be certain that you are between 28 and 33 does not alter the fact that you can only be one particular age. The truth is not gone; it is simply unknown.
Here, "truth" is bandied about as if it meant "knowledge," which is, again, another use from ordinary language that is virtually always discarded by professional philosophers. (But nevertheless, the article should acknowledge it--my most recent update doesn't, by the way!)
- Concluding the above, what may be of greater importance is not whether things are true or not, but how you personally decide what is true (i.e., your objectivity), how you search for the truth, and how you let the truth affect you. This is ultimately what is morally interesting about observers. It is also logically provable that the truth cannot be searched for without observers entertaining
the untrue.
Whoever wrote this clearly has a philosophical enough of a bent that I predict he or she will enjoy reading neutral point of view.
This paragraph came from the beginning:
- The search for absolute truth has been a theme of many important works, including the major religious texts. For example, one of the last things Christ did before His death was to tell Pilate "I seek the truth". Perhaps the definitive exposition of how truth is relative is George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984.
In place of this I've put a little longer discussion that explicitly acknowledges two different senses of "truth." --Larry Sanger
142.177.103.16 is back editing this: the usual interests: nuclear MAD, foundation ontology etc, clearly show that this is You Know Who again. Reverted. -- The Anome 17:24 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)