Quote Originally Posted by tessa View Post
All insights and opinions sought.

Asked in all seriousness. Well, as serious as I can be...

What is truth?

Are there any absolutes encypted within the concept of truth?

When faced with cognitive dissonance, can truth be at all?

And even outside the realm of such existential crises, is truth to be found?

Again I ask-

What is truth?


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I'd say it's down to definition, and all are equally valid, depending on what you need it for. It's easy to get them confused.

Scientific truth is just one of them and is basically just about following the rules of the scientific method. It's just a convention to make life a little easier to cope with.... or at all.

This truth is quite different from my favourite definition which is Kant's, which basically states that the truth of something is how the thing in itself is to itself. Which doesn't really say much or help us in the least. But I think it's the most honest one.

The interesting thing is of course, how can we figure this truth out. Kant himself thought truth is just a social agreement, which I don't agree with, because I don't think human perception is infinitely malleable. I do think human interpretation of the world is to a large extent hard-wired. Kant can be excused for living in a time before physical studies of the brain was even possible.

I think there is a truth but I don't think it's knowable. At best we can make an agreement on how we chose to interpret the world, which tries to minimize variance. Heidegger's phenomenology project was just this. Saussure did studies in linguistics and how we symbolize the world, making us realise that there is more layers than just our senses and our brain.... there's also how we formulate those thoughts into language. The capacity of the language puts a limit on how much truth can be conveyed. The bits sticking out of the form gets by necessity cut off/out.

Basically, Tessa. To answer your question we'd have to mention the entire history of philosophy, because at it's core, this is the one main question they've all been trying to answer. I think having read philosophy makes it much easier not to run into traps of simplification. There's a famous Adam Smith quote on economy which is equally true for philosophic theory of truth, and I'll paraphrase it.

Those who say their only following their own heart and chose to think for themselves, are invariably following an obsolete theory of truth.

We are all following one of these theories of truth that these dusty old dead men once formulated. It doesn't hurt to know which one it is. Because if you do, it's easy to find criticism against it. There are plenty of problems with all formulations of truth and how we know it, (known as the school of epistemology).