What is truth?

[raw_thought]

Spheres is using the very common conception of "truth" as equivalent to reality and/or actuality, depending upon one's metaphysics wrt to direct/indirect perception. Both lack the ability to make sense of what sorts of things can be true/false and what makes them so.

"reality" is different then "truth". One can make an untruthful statement about reality.

You know that's ridiculous right?

Reality is in fact the truth!

Does one's untruthful statement about reality change reality? Of course not, because reality is the truth!

Are you serious???? This is philosophy 101 stuff. The fact that one can make an untruthful statement about reality shows that reality and truth are two different concepts.

[raw_thought]

Are you talking about an ineffable truth? One that is not a statement???
Or are you saying that it is impossible to make an untruthful statement about reality???

[raw_thought]

Note that ALL the theories of truth are attempts to define what is the relationship between a belief, statement, proposition and realty. If truth and reality are two words for the same thing they would not have written anything below.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/
What about Wittgenstein's truth tables??? They would make no sense if truth= reality.
http://philosophy.tamu.edu/~hkocurek/Re ... Tables.pdf

[Hobbes' Choice]

creative,

Is 'Fire burns.' a truthful statement?

Not always.

[raw_thought]

"Does one's untruthful statement about reality change reality? Of course not, because reality is the truth!"
Spheresofbalance
No, * but that the fact that you admit that there are " untruthful" statements about reality shows that somewhere deep down you know that there is a difference between truth and reality. So you are saying that you can point at something ( without making a statement ) and simply say "truth" and that makes sense??? Suppose you point at a rock and say "truth" ( actually pointing is making a statement , this not that) . OK so the rock is truth???
* Actually that is an argument that shows that truth does not equal reality. If an untruthful statement could change reality ( like that new age Abraham Hicks nonsense) it would mean that our beliefs and reality are the same thing.

[raw_thought]

We say "1+1=2 is the truth."
We say "2+5=23 is not the truth."
In other words we determine if the equations match up to reality.

[creativesoul]

creative,

Is 'Fire burns.' a truthful statement?

Sure.

[henry quirk]

raw,

"The fact that one can make an untruthful statement about reality shows that reality and truth are two different concepts."

I think mebbe SoB is bein' (intentionally) misinterpreted. As I said up-thread, truth (what is true) corresponds directly, cleanly, with what is real (reality). A 'truthful statement' is simply a description of what is true (real) as in 'fire burns'.

Seems to me that's all SoB is sayin'.

So, no, reality (what is real) is not different from truth (what is real).

And: that one can make an untruthful statement about reality just means that one can lie about what is real, can lie in one's description of things as they are.

#

Hobbes,

Can you give me an example when 'fire burns' is not a truthful statement?

#

raw,

"Note that ALL the theories of truth are attempts to define what is the relationship between a belief, statement, proposition and realty. If truth and reality are two words for the same thing they would not have written anything below."

Nitpickers and fart weighers, writin' endlessly, and in defiance, of what is obvious to any normal six year old, that's an evidence, to you, that SoB is wrong?


"What about Wittgenstein's truth tables??? They would make no sense if truth= reality."

Here's a thought: the tables are nonsensical.

[SpheresOfBalance]

"reality" is different then "truth". One can make an untruthful statement about reality.

You know that's ridiculous right?

Reality is in fact the truth!

Does one's untruthful statement about reality change reality? Of course not, because reality is the truth!

Are you serious???? This is philosophy 101 stuff. The fact that one can make an untruthful statement about reality shows that reality and truth are two different concepts.

No it does not, Your logic is flawed. It's 'reality' that humans can lie! It's 'reality' that humans can be wrong! And finally it's 'reality' that RT can attend a philosophy class and either misconstrue what it was that the professor meant, couldn't sense his jest, or couldn't see that the professor was wrong in his understanding.

Instead it's 'reality' that there are humans, it's 'reality' that they can know, it's 'reality' that they can only believe they know, when in truth they don't. Thus It's 'reality' that humans are still young and growing so as to know 'reality,' that they are in truth not all knowing, that what humans may say must be taken with a grain of salt. So it's also true that humans can be arrogant and foolish enough to believe that their view on 'reality' necessarily defines it. But in truth it doesn't necessarily!!

Read the red below and weep, sorry but your 'belief' is definitely twisted!

reality [ree-al-i-tee]
noun, plural realities for 3, 5–7.
1. the state or quality of being real.
2. resemblance to what is real.
3. a real thing or fact.
4. real things, facts, or events taken as a whole; state of affairs:
the reality of the business world; vacationing to escape reality.
5. Philosophy.
...something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.
...something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.
6. something that is real.
7. something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent.
adjective
8. noting or pertaining to a TV program or film that portrays nonactors interacting or competing with each other in real but contrived situations, allegedly without a script:
a popular reality show; reality TV.
Idioms
9. in reality, in fact or truth; actually:
brave in appearance, but in reality a coward.

Humans are not necessarily the knowers of 'reality,' but the 'reality' is that they can twist their ideas and concepts around such that they can get lost within them. And this is what I often see in this forum. Those with stunted philosophical growth, lost within the mishmash of human concepts, that they can't fathom! Their logic is so obviously flawed, often oblivious that they are speaking falsehoods, erecting strawmen where ever they tread!

You sir, have proven to be illogical over and over again! Though you still matter, and I still care for your life, as sometimes one can use a bit of levity! And as I always say, if I can provide someone some laughter, for whatever reason, I have done a good deed for that day, as endorphins are good for you. You sir, have done a good deed, rejoice!

[Terrapin Station]

No it does not, Your logic is flawed. It's 'reality' that humans can lie! It's 'reality' that humans can be wrong! And finally it's 'reality' that RT can attend a philosophy class and either misconstrue what it was that the professor meant, couldn't sense his jest, or couldn't see that the professor was wrong in his understanding.

You can feel it's misconceived, but the standard view in philosophy is that truth and facts are different. Truth is a property of propositions.

[henry quirk]

HA!

https://instituteforobjectiviststudies. ... hilosophy/

[Terrapin Station]

HA!

https://instituteforobjectiviststudies. ... hilosophy/

I don't know if I've ever seen someone say "accept this because it's the received view" ("received view" is the normal term for it, but not everyone knows what that refers to).

Rather, when people tell someone that something is the received view, as I did above, it's merely to educate someone about what the received view actually is. This usually occurs when it's clear that someone isn't familiar with what the received view is, and you want to help them so that they don't come across as uneducated about the field in their future discourse.

Re the questions they ask:

What is the criterion for something’s being 'the standard view in philosophy'?

The criterion is that either (a) it's the consensus held by a vast majority, and/or (b) it's a pedogogical standard, taught in the vast majority of relevant courses. (a) and (b) can both be the case, but sometimes (b) is the case for pragmatic reasons. For example, when you're first teaching students about the standard characterization of propositional knowledge, you just teach "justified true belief" and ignore the Gettier problems, because that's a far more advanced topic than you're going to tackle in an Epistemology 101 type course.

The distinction between facts and truth, and the idea that truth is a property of propositions, is going to be taught in every single intro-to-mid-level epistemology course by an analytic-oriented philosophy department.

The way one knows the above, by the way, is via familiarity with the field, familiarity with a wide swath of the literature in the field, including books used as textbooks, familiarity with philosophers, what philosophy departments set as their curriculae, etc. You gain that by being involved with that world, first as a student, especially if you've gone on to postgraduate work, and then as a teacher, as someone who interacts with philosophers at conferences/congresses, etc.

More fundamentally, however, you might ask why p‘s being an instance of “the standard view in philosophy” has anything to do with its truth.

As I explained above, it simply has to do with the truth of it being the received/standard view. Not knowing such a 101-level standard view immediately telegraphs to the person you're talking to that you have no formal education in philosophy. They know right off the bat that at best one is self-taught via the Internet, probably via message boards, Wikipedia pages, etc.

Standard views in philosophy” are temporally indexed: they change over time.

Sure, that's the case for many views. However, for others, such as the jtb formulation of propositional knowledge, they've been the received view since Plato.

So unless the person has a synoptic grasp of the whole history of philosophy,

Which anyone with a formal education in philosophy will have. Philosophy isn't like the sciences. You don't just learn the current status quo. You study the history of the discipline. There might be one or two schools that don't require a historical approach as a significant part of the curriculum, but they'd be extremely unusual.

One of the big reasons for this is that too much in philosophy is basically incomprehensible if you're not familiar with the field's history, if you're not familiar with the major works in the field going back to Plato. One can see the entire history of philosophy as akin to a massive, 2500+ year long message board thread--people are commenting on stuff that was said earlier in the thread, and posts thousands of pages into the thread can be unintelligible without knowing at least the landmark earlier posts. Philosophers generally write for other philosophers, which results in a dearth of explanatory contextual material--it's expected that you're already familiar with the background necessary if you're reading peer-reviewed journals, books published by academic presses, etc.

S believes that p at t, where “S” stands for “the set of people affirming the standard view” and t is some time . . .

When someone says that such and such is the received view, they mean at present. Otherwise they'd say that such and such was the received view.

[Hobbes' Choice]

We say "1+1=2 is the truth."
We say "2+5=23 is not the truth."
In other words we determine if the equations match up to reality.

Maths is analytic, and so the argument is circular.

[SpheresOfBalance]

"reality" is different then "truth". One can make an untruthful statement about reality.

You know that's ridiculous right?

Reality is in fact the truth!

Does one's untruthful statement about reality change reality? Of course not, because reality is the truth!

So, Spheres...

If reality is the truth, then how is it possible for one to make truthful statements?
Huh? You've lost me as I see no contradiction.

I mean, a truthful statement is most certainly not full of reality,
Full? I would say that if all the contents of a statement are in fact indicative of the actuality, the truth of any matter, then they are both real in and of themselves and really represent reality.

but yet there are such things as truthful statements.
Of course!
Though it seems that you were contradictory, I mean that your first and second clause in this last sentence were at odds.

[SpheresOfBalance]

Are you talking about an ineffable truth? One that is not a statement???
Or are you saying that it is impossible to make an untruthful statement about reality???

It's absolutely true that the reality is that one can make a false statement about anything, including reality.
The reality is that a statement doesn't have to be true. Though if one was stated, the reality would be that it was true, that a statement was made. Reality allows for humans to make both true and false statements. Falsehoods can be uttered about anything in the universe, including the universe (reiteration for the sake of clarity). But for something to be true, it has to agree with reality.