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 What is truth?

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PostSubject: What is truth?   What is truth? Icon_minitimeThu Oct 11, 2012 6:30 pm

The idea of truth is all too often lost in modern philosophy. Let us offer here some useful definitions of truth, and explore these definitions.


Truth is the assumption, given form through language as a coherent object of thought's mediation, which allows thought to remain continually open along whatever paths it runs or intends, or pretends, to run. Truth is the open category that must underlie all other categories whether they be more open or closed, and is the most violently radical act, an act which must be resisted with an equal ferocity by any individual, institution, ideology or socioeconomic or military system that seeks power to declare and determine absolutely its own ends. Power in this sense governs subjects of the world whose impetus is to construct self-enclosing barriers by which to positively and consistently regulate its interactions with the world; this power therefore is a trade-off, the sacrifice of a relationship to truth and to the possibility to engage in or bear witness to "truth-procedures", to employ Badiou's useful term, in order to gain a stable platform from which a limited number of more consistent, which means consistently useful, truths may be uttered. The world is shrunk to a manageable size, truth is "frozen" at this manageable level.

What then is philosophy but the attempt to "un-freeze" this "manageability"? To resume, or declare from a beginning, a relationship to truth itself? Truth is therefore a category which can never totally be abandoned, but which can be more or less sought for or attained. To think is to think with respect to truth, to think within truth, and to know truth, or perhaps to be "known by" truth. Philosophy therefore is nothing without a relationship to truth, without an effort to designate and declare this truth and this relationship to it. By this definition, all that fails to take account of truth and this relationship to it constitutes sophistry, the antithesis of philosophy.
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PostSubject: Re: What is truth?   What is truth? Icon_minitimeTue Oct 16, 2012 12:41 pm

Vaeros, I think your post was deleted because you didn't seem to have read the OP. It may also have had to do with the fact that your definition was, to put it mildly, hard to work with - you pretty much said that philosophy is the business of lying. I can see how this was perceived as distracting from the intent of this thread, but I may be wrong.

_____________
In response to the OP: For truth to be made explicit, there must be a framework, a context for statements to signify. Science is the most reliable framework for explicit truths - because it restricts the substance that can be designated to equalized quantities of mass. Clearly philosophy can not operate within this framework, this procedure is of use but only within a larger framework, wherein the subjective human is included, which means also the use man has for science, essentially, the view of science as a moral perspective. This idea was formulated brilliantly by without-music, in the ILP thread The Ontological Tyranny.

The other 'end' of this spectrum is the total abandonment of logical method, the idea that "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!" and the satisfaction with that, the idea that, as a consequence of the truth of this statement, everything that one asserts with ones being is true.

Another approach yet is "all that matters is the quantum of power that one is, the rest is cowardice" - in other words, the only valid truth is in power, same as "might is right".

But to me an even less reducible truth appears as the idea that all existence is self-valuing, that these truth-generating self-valuings condition any kind of situational truth such as physical law. The reality of self-valuing is a transcendental truth, something that underlies all instances of procedural truths and conflicts between these.

A difficult question is the one of defining my true values, because it implies an exhaustive certainty pertaining to my self-valuing core. I am not sure that the self-valuing can be exhaustively explicated.

Finally, what is suggested to me by the OP is truth as the absence of bias. But even to move toward an absence of bias is a result of a bias - a bias against bias - the absence of bias is death non-existence, for a self-valuing is a bias. And this is reflected in the etymology:

Quote :
O.E. triewð (W.Saxon), treowð (Mercian) "faithfulness, quality of being true," from triewe, treowe "faithful" (see true). Meaning "accuracy, correctness" is from 1560s. Unlike lie (v.), there is no primary verb in English or most other IE languages for "speak the truth." Noun sense of "something that is true" is first recorded mid-14c.
One can only be faithful to something.
So, the question of truth is the question of perspective.
The quest for objective truth ends for me at the observation that all subjects may command a fundamentally different truthfulness, and that objectivity is merely the consensus of these commands. Truth then is a matter of power - something is made to be true, made to be valid, made to apply, by force.

As force accumulates, so does the potential for truth. Truth may be best defined as 'that which is impossible to negate', i.e. necessity.
Truth-procedures are subjectively designed channels for necessity.

In this way truth is indeed a 'way' and a 'life'.



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PostSubject: Re: What is truth?   What is truth? Icon_minitimeTue Oct 16, 2012 12:59 pm

Fixed Cross wrote:

Quote :
O.E. triewð (W.Saxon), treowð (Mercian) "faithfulness, quality of being true," from triewe, treowe "faithful" (see true). Meaning "accuracy, correctness" is from 1560s. Unlike lie (v.), there is no primary verb in English or most other IE languages for "speak the truth." Noun sense of "something that is true" is first recorded mid-14c.
One can only be faithful to something.
To whit:

Capable wrote:
The ontic subject or the "subject itself" simply means any particular "epistemic" structure whereby data, as stimulation of that structure, is translated by the particular logic of the structure itself, which is to say interpreted, into information; the structure takes account of that quality of the data which it is able to relate to itself, which is to say makes this data meaningful[.]


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PostSubject: Re: What is truth?   What is truth? Icon_minitimeFri Nov 02, 2012 12:17 pm

Perhaps truth can be defined as the percentile limit of the sum of evidences each of which are given a non 100% accuracy themselves. this limit approaching but not ever reaching 100% itself...
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PostSubject: Re: What is truth?   What is truth? Icon_minitimeThu Nov 08, 2012 6:11 am

Capable wrote:
Truth is the open category that must underlie all other categories whether they be more open or closed, and is the most violently radical act, an act which must be resisted with an equal ferocity by any individual, institution, ideology or socioeconomic or military system that seeks power to declare and determine absolutely its own ends. Power in this sense governs subjects of the world whose impetus is to construct self-enclosing barriers by which to positively and consistently regulate its interactions with the world; this power therefore is a trade-off, the sacrifice of a relationship to truth and to the possibility to engage in or bear witness to "truth-procedures", to employ Badiou's useful term, in order to gain a stable platform from which a limited number of more consistent, which means consistently useful, truths may be uttered. The world is shrunk to a manageable size, truth is "frozen" at this manageable level.

I don't consider this to represent a sacrifice of the relationship to truth, personally. It's inherently necessary for a person to construct a structure that regulates the manner in which it interacts with the world, in accordance with their needs and motivations. Having a conception of truth necessarily relies on these "self-enclosing barriers" as you worded it. There couldn't be a conception of truth without cognitive processes, supported by biological processes. To any degree that their existence would suggest a barrier or sacrifice to knowing truth, we'd have to recognize that, to begin with, we have a limited capacity of knowing truth. From there it's a matter of the way in which we're orientated towards conceiving and recognizing truth. I think that, keeping in consideration the nature of our own processes, the nature of our own existence, we can find that our capacity of knowing truth isn't really limited by these processes, but rather facilitated by them.
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