notMichaelJackson

My junior year history teacher gave my class a test. The next day he said there was evidence a student had stolen all of the answers before the test and had cheated. In order to punish this one student, he was going to give the entire class an "F" for the test.

Of course, we all started complaining, and tried to reason with our teacher. After we were done complaining him said he made the entire story up. He said he did it to demonstrate "McCarthyism."

But before he told us he was lying I knew the story could not be true because there was an inconsistency to it. He had sent a girl who had been absent the day before out into the hall to take the test. Why would he give her the test if she was just going to be given an "F" for it? Other students in the class found inconsistencies with his story, as well. This was two years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy. But I do remember that others found errors in his story, and the story ended up being false.

A science book that is not consistant with itself is not worth reading. If chapter three states that lions have 56 bones, but on chapter six says they have 76 bones, which can you trust? The sources becomes invalid.

Religion is another area where inconstancies point to the invalidness of concepts. Would a perfect God support something one minute, and latter make it a sin? I think not.

Never have I experienced a truth that was inconsistant. Can a truth contain an inconsitancy?

sodium

I think the reason a truth cannot be inconsistent has to do with the way we decide what is true, and what is consistent. When we find evidence that suggests a previously accepted proposition might be false, then we say we have uncovered an inconsistency. An inconsistency is something that makes us decide that something isn't true. So, it isn't surprising that truth cannot be inconsistent, because this is inevitable, based on how we use the terms.

Or in other words, saying that truth is never inconsistent is more a statement about us than about reality.

Tom Sawyer

None of us can ever say that something is definitively "true". All that we can say is that it is true based on the evidence we presently have. That means that any statement about the thing's truth is based on how true the evidence that supports it is. The truth of the evidence is based upon the evidence that leads us to believe that it is true; and so on and so on.

The evidence that the world was flat and the sun revolved around it used to be absolutely conclusive. You could see that it was flat and you could see that the sun rose and set on either side of it. Then we got better methods of looking and found out that our previous evidence was flawed which led us to an erronious conclusion - not because our logic was bad, but because that logic was based upon faulty premises.

With the example of your teacher, she was saying something that the evidence available was not consistent with. That meant that there was good reason to question what was being said to her. If the student who had not taken the test had been asked to stay in her seat while the teacher talked about the test, it would have added more validity to what she was saying. In the science book example, it may have just been that the author hit a five instead of a seven when writing about the lion's bones and the editor didn't catch it. A small error like that isn't enough to invalidate the entire work. If a book makes large errors that are easily disproved using available evidence - like the universe was created in six days a few thousand years ago when easily obtainable evidence contradicts this - then you would be correct to question everything said by that book since it contains such a glaringly obvious error.

We can't know anything about the truth except based on the evidence that we have. We then make assumptions based upon that evidence to come to conclusions that hopefully are somewhere close to the actual "truth". That's as good as we can get. When the evidence that our conclusions was based upon change, we then have to reevaluate those conclusions and decide whether the new evidence is superior to the old evidence and if so, draw new conclusions. That's as close as we will ever get to "truth".

leyline

Can a truth be inconsistent? Inconsistent with what?

In the case of reductio ad absurdum, a truth is revealed through inconsistency that follows from a false premise. But what ‘follows’ depends upon the criterion for testing the truth that we agree upon. What is absurd by one method may not be by another. Eg a logical contradiction as compared to positing a pink elephant with blue ears munching my grass. Both are absurd, but that elephant might not be a logical contradiction within a truthful argument.

A truth that is inconsistent?

All perceptions and experiences, including space and the self, are contained in the brain, ……. but on the other hand our brains are contained in space.

Before we knew about brains and perception we naively believed that what we saw was outer reality. This includes the space that we perceive. Like the room you are in.

After science told us that perceptions are not the things in themselves, and that all perceptions are contained in the brain, then we have the following inconsistency :- that space contains the brain, that perceives ‘space’, which is not the thing in itself.

Despite science creating an ‘outer’ real space from the subjective experience that it then denies is reality, one would be hard pressed to say that science has not revealed many truths about space and perception based upon this contradiction. The assumption that perceptions such as colour and sound occur within the brain is very useful.

yguy

Is this statement definitively true?

food

Consider this situation.
You wear a blue shirt to school on monday. You wear a yellow one on tuesday. It is 100% true that you wore a different shirt on each of the two days. Are you being inconsistent?

Depending on how you define and/or apply consistency: either 1) you are not being inconsistent or 2) you are being inconsistent, but it doesn't matter because consistency means nothing in and of itself.

Either there is no inconsistency; or there is, in which case it is apparent that consistency is only important when considering some must-be-consistent concept.

*hopes that was coherent*

Tom Sawyer

The statement itself may or may not be definitively true. Until I know every single possible variable that could affect it, I cannot say whether or not it is definitively true - I can only make an educated guess based upon the available information I have at the time. Whether it actually is true or not is a fact that exists independent of our knowledge of it and we can only make a guess at that fact based on the limited information that we know. The more we know, the more likely our guess is to be accurate, but there is never a 100% guarantee.

yguy

How you can possibly lack the information that the statement is internally contradictory is a mystery to me.

It may exist independently of YOUR knowledge, but it doesn't exist independently of mine. The statement is obviously false.

callmejay

What about the wave-particle duality of light?

Wyrdsmyth

Yes, inconsistencies point to flaws and errors.

But one must be careful here; the flaws and errors can be in one's own understanding.