Bill Snedden

I don't disagree, but as I said it's really a different question for a different topic.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

[ December 23, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

Thomas Ash

No, I didn't mean to say I was lying at all. Like I said in the fragment you've quoted, and like I've meaning sayin in all my posts, I'm taking the phrase "abolute truth" to mean "an objective reality which claims can be right or wrong about." I think this is all any of the advocates of objective reality (Bill Snedden, etc.) in this thread are advocating, and you darn postmodern, relativistic atheists ( ) are assuming by saying we believe in the existence of 'absolute truth' we're meaning something more than this, like claiming we have absolute certainty about what that truth is. But we're not. If you mean something else by 'absolute truth' above and beyond what we're saying, could you spell it out? Thanks.
And, besides, if you don't believe in an objective reality against which statements are right or wrong, how can you say theists are wrong in claiming God 'exists'? Isn't that just 'subjective' and 'equally valid from their perspective'?
Also, how can you say that I'm objectively wrong in saying objective/absolute truth exists if you don't believe in absolute truth in the first place? This isn't just a tricky question - I'd appreciate your answer.

Well, specifically the assumption that atheists are amoral, a la Joe Lieberman.

John Page

Thanks for the clarification. Your definition of absolute truth above seems to me like just the plain ole truth. By adding absolute, I'm assuming you mean "by any measure or standard". To the best of my knowledge, truth exists only in our minds and is arrived at through a) a tautology or two or more self-satisfying statements are strung together or b) when something is proven to be in accordance with external reality - it then becomes a fact.

First off, I believe in a reality external to the mind. To the extent we are able to view this objectively you have attained a subjective view of an external reality. What exactly you mean by an objective reality is beyond me.
Second, I am entitled to my own beliefs and I think the best explanation regarding theism is that it is a religious philosophy invented by mankind. Absent factual evidence and a coherent explanation of this god thingy atheism seems totally appropriate.
Third, it seems we are all fallible and I agree that ones perspective is critical in arriving at a "truthful" or accurate conclusion about reality. However, I'm still looking for a coherent explanation about the god thingy.

I did not state it was an absolute truth!! I just don't think a claim of "absolute truth" is a meaningful claim.

To repeat somewhat from an earlier post. Truth is arrived at by comparing two entities and declaring an assumption that they are identical. (As you may have seen in my discourse with Bill, making an assumption of identicalness voilates the Law of Identity and this nonsense is perpetuated by the systems of notation found in logic). Ironically, therefore, in a cognitive sense, each truth is the result of a lie or deception by our cognitive powers.

Truth is a function of the entities being compared. Each of the entities is unique. Absolute truth would require a priori that entities do not change over time... I hope you will see that the perception of a "constant" entity is due to our mental faculties telling us things like "the compute screen hasn't changed" or "The constitution hasn't changed".

Finally on this point, you are testing me by stating I claim an absolute truth that absolute truth does not exist. This is a logic bomb in the same form as the Liar Paradox. My claims remain coherent, truth is not absolute but manufactured by the human mind and such as truths may be agreed between minds so we can intersubjectively agree. Your claims, on the other hand, seem to require an absolute truth and proof which has not yet been produced.

Cheers, John

Hugo Holbling

Here is an interesting link discussing (amongst other things) Rorty's views on Truth. I wonder, John, if you've studied Rorty and - if so - what you make of his work?

Says Rorty in his essay The Contingency Of Language :

Thomas Ash

I do mean just plain ole truth. I agree with your saying that I'm claiming truths are true "by any measure or standard", but remember that's just a claim about the nature of the truth 'behind the scenes', and has nothing to do with my ability to have knowledge of that truth. Truth does only come from a) and b) above - b) obviously leaves room for mistakes, and even truth derived from a) could be mistaken, as you can never have 100% confidence in your logical faculties. 'I exist' does seem to me to be an undeniable truth (for me! - not you ) though, but whether it is or not is really beside the point in a dicussion of whether objective, or, what's the same, absolute, truth exists 'behind the scenes.'
If you think I'm just talking about "plain ole truth" and "absolute truth" involves claiming something more, could you lay out precisely what it does involve claiming? I think the people who've been arguing for absolute truth in this thread have been pretty clear that we don't claim 100% knowledge.
By objective reality I do just mean external reality, which you've said you accept. Isn't that the dictionary definition of 'objective', "external to the mind." Ha - foisted on you own petard (- whatever a petard is .)
I don't see that that's true. All I'm saying is that when I make the claim "there is a squirrel on the tree outside my window" (there is actually ), there is actually a squirrel on the tree outside by window in external reality. And if I wasn't here, and no one was looking, there would still be that squirrel on the tree outside my window! ( ) I'm not claiming that what I have in my mind is anything other than a subjective perception, which doesn't 'capture' the nature of the squirrel or 'hold' absolute truth within my mind. Is this what you're saying I'm claiming? If not, what is?
But there must be something against which to judge these intersubjective claims. Like you said, you think that there is an external reality, which is just what I think (and all I mean by absolute truth), so that's what we can both say the truth or untruth of these claims ultimately rests on, even if we can never 100% know whether they're in accordance with objective reality or not.
Cheers, Thomas

Darth Dane

Mybe if the ten commandments would work perfectly if Everyone followed the rules!


Also this little story a friend told me:


A little story (it is not mine):

Moses Came down with the 10 commandments, and the people rejoiced.
The next day they woke up and saw the tablets, and were stunned. Someone during the night, had inscribed after each commandment: For Love
They realized that if you could not do anything for Love what then....

They came up with two new commandments:

1)You may
2)You don't have to.



I thought this was very interesting.

Just food for thought.





DD - The Love Spliff

John Page

No, I haven't studied Rorty.
I looked at the link you provided and it seemed there was a general notion that truth was dependent upon language or a product of it. I disagree. Truth is manufactured by the mind as part of the mind/brain process. We can observe something and conclude whether it accords with reality (or rather, our internal sense data from reality) and judge that notion true or false without using language. The meaning of the word truth comes from reality and our ability to measure the correspondence between reality and our ideas about it. Does Rorty have anything to say on the phenomenology of truth or define it rigidly?

From your quote of Rorty The Contingency Of Language :

Quote:

Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

First, I think truth is contained within minds (and this is more a definition than a statement) but minds need not be human. I do not believe truth is contained in sentences.

Second, all is contained within reality so I'm not sure of the basis for saying "The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." Well, where are these descriptions that is not a part of reality?

In summary, if one accepts the Law of Identity, the truth itself is a pragmatic thing - an assumption that one thing is identical to another. One dog may be much like another but they are not identical, they cannot correspond perfectly. However, this "coherence" occurs separately from language unlike the coherence theory of truth in the link you provided?

Any comments?

Cheers, John

John Page

Thomas:

I too can imagine things that do not exist outside of my mind! (Hint: such things are all subjective)
Terrific scenery, totally imaginary. Sounds like an EOG debate.
Shot yourself right in the foot with that last sentence, haven't you!
I think you mean hoisted. I mean external reality, not objective reality.
Yay!
Yes, external reality and other intersubjective claims.
... or whether we've actually agreed on that.
Cheers. John

Thomas Ash

I don't think so. So far as I can tell, no one advocating what we call 'absolute truth' (which I'm beginning to think is totally different from what you mean by the term - see my penultimate paragraph, before I accuse you of being hoisted ) was saying that we 100% knew the truth, or that our personal knowledge was absolute.
I agree that external reality is an intersubjective claim, and this is how we come to believe it is true. But believing it's true involves thinking that an external reality exists beyond our perceptions. Again, this doesn't involve making any claims about our ability to know it - that would be an epistemological claim. But it does involve making an ontological claim that there is an external reality beyond our perceptions, whatever way our thoughts and perceptions relate to this.
Also, could you answer this question I posted:
Ha - Hoisted!
Thomas

Hugo Holbling

I'm not inclined to add anything, then, other than encouraging you to take a look; but since you ask, i'll try to answer your points as i imagine Rorty would.

Unfortunately i don't have my library with me over the holiday. IIRC, Rorty argues that truth is a property of statements; but statements are part of language, which is a contingent human construction. Ergo, truth is not "out there".

Perhaps you could provide an example of such a methodology, together with a meta-narrative that is not contingent upon language?

Only for the correspondence theory of truth. Rorty is deeply critical of this; indeed, he's a anti-representationalist or antiessentialist generally.

No. The difficult aspect of Rorty's work to appreciate is that as an antifoundationalist he insists there is no non-contingent vocabulary which may be used to redescribe or evaluate all others; argument presupposes foundationalism, so he is aiming at a pragmatic version of truth - an agreement to agree as to which statements are useful at a particular time and place, as opposed to which are True in some mythical ahistorical fashion. (I refer you to Kuhn, Quine, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Putnam or Davidson for the antifoundationalist trend in epistemology that Rorty is work in and from.)

Perhaps within the mind, as you said yourself? Here he is claiming - much as Wittgenstein did - that true and false, like good and bad, are not intrinsic properties of the world: the world is out there, but our contingent descriptions of it are added to it using contingent vocabularies. Here is Wittgenstein using his "big book" argument in similar fashion.

Is this a question? Rorty claims that there is no One over-arching vocabulary (Grand Narrative, if you like...) that may redescribe all propositions made in other vocabularies and evaluate the truth thereof; without it, such coherence as you discuss may or may not occur, but we can say nothing about it.

Please read Rorty for yourself - i'd be very interested in your opinion! Most of his critics have apparently not taken this step and as a result the objections to his work are largely amateurish caricatures.