Flying_Monkey
Recyclist
- Location
- Odawa
The problem is that we are often talking from different perspectives and using different ideas about truth:
To use the classical definitions of philosophy, there is:
Epistemology - how we know things
Ontology - what is
Aesthetics - what we like (taste / feeling)
Ethics - what is 'good'
Politics - how we enact our aesthetics and ethics beyond ourselves
The problem is that outside of ontology, there is nothing that is factually 'correct', and even ontology depends on arguments about epistemology...
This is why 'truth' in philosophy has different components - one way of thinking about this is in terms of veracity, validity and verifiability.
Veracity is good faith. It is that something is true if someone says it honestly believing it to be the case with no attempt to deceive.
Validity is internal. It is that something is true if it conforms to a consistent set of agreed propostions.
Verifiability is external. It is that something is true if it conforms to what we already know to be true about something else.
In practice, as Alfred North Whitehead said, all truths are half-truths - we work with them insofar as they appear to 'work.' It is when we try to insist that working propositions are absolutely truethat we end up with apparently irreconcilable positions...
Most statements here are in fact only true in terms of veracity and validity - basically they work if you accept the good faith and the worldview of the person stating them. This cannot make them absolutely true, however much they are stated. And what's worse, often such statements are not even valid in the terms that people set them out (inconsistent worldviews)...
To use the classical definitions of philosophy, there is:
Epistemology - how we know things
Ontology - what is
Aesthetics - what we like (taste / feeling)
Ethics - what is 'good'
Politics - how we enact our aesthetics and ethics beyond ourselves
The problem is that outside of ontology, there is nothing that is factually 'correct', and even ontology depends on arguments about epistemology...
This is why 'truth' in philosophy has different components - one way of thinking about this is in terms of veracity, validity and verifiability.
Veracity is good faith. It is that something is true if someone says it honestly believing it to be the case with no attempt to deceive.
Validity is internal. It is that something is true if it conforms to a consistent set of agreed propostions.
Verifiability is external. It is that something is true if it conforms to what we already know to be true about something else.
In practice, as Alfred North Whitehead said, all truths are half-truths - we work with them insofar as they appear to 'work.' It is when we try to insist that working propositions are absolutely truethat we end up with apparently irreconcilable positions...
Most statements here are in fact only true in terms of veracity and validity - basically they work if you accept the good faith and the worldview of the person stating them. This cannot make them absolutely true, however much they are stated. And what's worse, often such statements are not even valid in the terms that people set them out (inconsistent worldviews)...
