Today's soundtrack is Deerhoof: Deerhoof vs. Evil.
In an unexpected yet welcome change of pace, the Randomizer gave me some reprieve from the onslaught of math; tonight, I get to continue reading Coles Philosophy Questions and Answers. I'm now on chapter 2, "Theories of Truth."
There are many ways that different philosophers perceive truth, listed as "correspondence, coherence, pragmatism, the semantic theory, and the adequation theory" (6).
The correspondence theory says that truth is the alignment of ideas and reality; the coherence theory says that truth is a statement that can be integrated into a statement that is both orderly and consistent, without contradiction; the pragmatic theory says that the truth of an idea or concept can be tested by how practical or workable it is; the semantic theory says that truth is only identifiable in the context of a sentence within a statement - whether the sentence agrees with the statement as a whole; the existentialism theory says that truth is freedom; and Aristotle's adequation theory says that "truth is an adequate relationship between concept and object" (6).
Philosophers also differ when categorizing truth as absolute and objective or subjective and personal; nihilists believe there is no truth, and agnostics say that we can't know the true nature of truth.
Expanding on the concept of "true and false" as simply describing the accuracy of a statement, the performative theory of truth says that there are two ways of interacting with truth: making a statement that something is true is predicative (making an assertion); agreeing with someone else's statement of truth is performative (making an active statement). (I'm unclear on this section. Further reading will be required).
In the relationship between truth, knowledge, and belief, there are four major schools of thought: logical truth looks for agreement between ideas and the facts of reality, ontological truth looks for agreement between ideas and the truth from God's perspective, formal truth looks for consistence in reasoning and logic, and ethical truth looks for agreement between a person's beliefs and statements and actions.
The difference between the criteria of truth and the theories of truth are that the critera of truth are used to verify the truth of a statement, and the theories of truth are used to define what kind of truth has been verified (or not).
The book states that we can never be absolutely true of any statement or fact; there is nothing in the universe of which we are absolutely certain (except, apparently, that we are absolutely certain that we can never be absolutely certain of anything...a bit of a paradox here, yes?). So when people claim to speak the truth, what they speak is actually just a very high probability of truth. The only exception is formal logic and mathematics.
Relativists believe all truth is relative; absolutists believe that absolute truth exists.
