Today's soundtrack is Chelsea Wolfe: Hiss Spun.
This afternoon, I'm reading chapter four of Philosophy Questions and Answers, "Criteria of Truth."
According to the book, "[c]riteria of truth are standards, rules, or tests by which to judge the truth or validity of facts and values" (p. 14). There are several major criteria of truth, some of which are umbrellas of smaller ones: subjective criteria include "feeling, intuition, revelation, and instinct" (p. 14); unanimous opinion (consensus gentium), the word of experts (authority), an agreement between the statement and the whole (correspondence), whether a theory works in practice (pragmatism) when put to the test through "reason, consistency, and coherence" (p. 16).
Though all philosophers seek truth, not all philosophers feel that the truth is always what should be given. Sometimes it is better to mislead people for their own good - for example, if a father gives his sick child medicine disguised as food. Some philosophers, such as Hegel, believed that no isolated statement could be determined to be true without its context. Some philosophers, such as Aristotle, believe that one can tell the truth without being truthful; conversely, some said that "an infrequent lie did not make a man a liar" (p. 16).
Most philosophers say that truth is discovered, but some say that people can create truths by achieving goals. My understanding of this is that if I said yesterday "I wrote a blog post about the criteria of truth while listening to Chelsea Wolfe," that would be a lie; however, I did it today, and created a truth that had not previously existed. The philosopher William James says that "'truth happens to an idea'" (p. 16), which ties in with the example I just gave. An example given in the book is that "many years ago we had no aircraft, but a man with an idea made it into a truth" (p. 16).
