Fuck you, Ludwig.
Truth has been badly abused by philosophers. I will tell you the truth about truth, but it’s not likely to be helpful in studying philosophy.
One of Nietszche’s points, above, is that truth is one of those nouns… there are some adjectives that we insist on giving a noun form. This works well enough in common parlance for the word “true” and it’s noun form. But philosophers have really fucked this up. The first thing to know is that “true” applies only to statements (in the general sense in which we are discussing this) and that its noun form is, in philosophyat, a reification.
This is one factor in the birth of philosophical metaphysics. Metaphysics is a violent rape of language.
When I consider what truth is,
it is basically a way of saying yes to what you are.
We experience our experiences, and call those experiences truth.
As we experience the self, we feel it.
The feeling feels like truth.
Instinct is different than knowledge,
but some animals have some serious instinct capacities.
Behavior and choice is the act of saying yes to instinct.
Alligator mothers take their hatchlings to the river in their mouth.
They don’t chew/eat their babies.
This isn’t because their parents trained them,
or god told them this or that.
Instinct is a way of guiding the being in its life.
Instinct is close to knowledge, reason, and truth.
Truth is only a reification if you don’t have the stones to hold it as a description of what is true.
Of course there is truth.
Anything else is nihilism.
Nietzsche said it, when addressing Kant. Cannit be really known? No. And a certain type celebrates this.
That’s why we have wisdom. If truth could be known, we wouldn’t have wisdom. Sophia, saber. ¿Saber qué? Haha!
Nietzsche thought similar to you, but with a crucial difference. Whereas you see the rapists and go: the woman is ruined, Nietzsche said, if truth is a woman, have all philosophers so far not been really awkward and embarrasing? It speaks not of truth, but of philosophers. Also not of philosophy.
Truth applies only to statements? Well I guess in the sense that food applies only to teeth. Your putting the pussy up on a pedestal. The pussy here being semantics, or language if you don’t want to be all pedanditc.
Often the roots of words have jokes on those who “reify” the words. Language just means toungueage. Latin just says lengua, toungue. You are talking about toungue like it’s all reified and shit, joke’s on you. Or philosophy having love in it, and being touted by all these loveless bastards. Good joke, really.
Greeks were mastrs at this. Not the joke part, the words part.
You know how we know there’s truth?
Because there’s lies. This is where zoot gets it backwards. He says if blang is bleng and bleng is skurt, then skurt is blang and so “is” is not constitutively true. But because we know that blang is not bleng and skurt not blang, since we know it is a lie, we know there is truth, that is is in some meaningful sense. That something actually is. Because we know the other to be a lie, really beyond a shadow of a doubt. That is a retarded statement, bleng is blang.
Maybe on acid bleng is blang. But if bleng can be blang, that only furhter proves the point.
I guess that’s the main point here. People love doubting truth, but who have you ever seen doubt lie?
There are no truths, so we create our own truths but when you create your truth so do other people create their own truths also which becomes a problem overtime concerning legitimate consensus and because of such there is a competition of whose truths gets to be the ultimate truth. The dominant ones establish dominant social orders and out of that what is dominant prevailing truth . So as the dominant one you eliminate those people by civil debate, cultural absorption, religious conversion, war, political persecution, slavery, intimidation, or even murder and then establish your own created truth as the ultimate truth which then amongst your followers overtime becomes objective.
After several generations it just becomes objective established fact.
I thank each of you for your response. Have read them all–except could only get through about 1/3 of 3rd post…time constraints.
But the question remains unanswered: is truth from the philosophical perspective a quality, property, relation or something else? Or is truth a thing in its own category? Thanks.
Truth is what power makes it to be for truth requires enforcement along with equally enforced perception and the elimination or restraining of all skeptical mental doubts of it by others.
I understand that the notion of the absolute is abhorrent to many within philosophy and without. Further comments on the presentation below are welcome.
The graphic above represents absolute values A through E. These are arranged in bundles of existents on the left labeled 1-4. An observer occupies arrow on the right, and observes the bundle changes through a timeline. Can start from either top or bottom.
I maintain that all the observer is able to perceive is the mutability of existents as they undergo change through time. In the fluid world of change, the absolute elements don’t stay put long enough to be observed. But if mutability consists in the rearrangement of absolute components into ever-evolving configurations, it is mutability itself that is illusory, right?
The question is flawed. It’s a value placed on a statement, or in other words, a claim. Statements are either true or false. Statements are the only things that are either true or false. To determine which they are, you need a theory of truth, and there are several to choose from. Your observations about the statement are applied to the theory. Or, youy must make a seperate judgment about the observations of others.
There is no direct answer to your question because it contains way too many assumptions for there to be an answer.
This is difficult. You may never understand this, but you can try. Hint: there is no “philosophical perspective.” There are many, most of them useless.
I think somehow, instinct can relate.
Without instinct, we would not find the opposite gender appealing.
Without instinct, food would not be desirable.
When we affirm / say yes to our instincts,
that is part of the expression of “my truth”.
Without instinct, nothing is important.
I was hoping you would like my posts, Fausto.
Yay for holism.
this sounds like something parmenides might say.
but let me give you some inside info on this infatuation a lot of philosophers have with the concept of ‘change’. to be perfectly clear, we don’t know enough about the universe to talk about ‘change’ on such a grand philosophical scale. locally we observe it all the time, but in order to say it’s a fundamental characteristic of all that exists, we’d have to be able to prove that no past or present ‘state’ of the universe has ever existed more than once… and we sure as shit can’t do that.
when we think about shit like this it’s difficult to avoid a brain freeze. we can, however, make sense out of one simple line of reasoning: if energy is finite - meaning no new energy can be introduced into the system from outside the system (even in talking about ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ systems, we’re already fucked) - and time is infinite, not only at some point will there be a repetition of some prior arrangement, but that repeat will happen an infinite number of times. see? brain freeze.
think of a box of marbles. shake the box up. now stop. observe the position of the marbles. now shake it up again. stop. observe the position of the marbles. do this over and over ad infinitem. because there are only a limited number of marbles, there’s only so many relative positions all the individual marbles can ever be in. now substitute those marbles for sub-atomic particles, and the box for the universe. bada bing, bada boom. that’s the whole story. this is why democritus was called the laughing philosopher.
but was he laughing because he found this absurd and expected existence to possess a little more mystique… or because all the other philosophers were making such a tremendous noise over something so simple? probably a little of both.
Truth can be all, a quality, property, relation, and something else.
To Philosophy, Truth is Unknown as a premise. Philosophy is not like Science or Religion. In Science, Truth is in the process, in the Middle. In Religion, Truth is in the premise, in the Beginning. In Philosophy, Truth is in the conclusion, in the End. Philosophy starts with what is Unknown, and works toward knowing it. Philosophers don’t start with “knowing Truth”, but try to end with knowing Truth.
Religious types, the opposite, start with “God” and “Truth”. They believe they are Righteous (Truthful) from the start.
I always like your posts, Danno.
Let’s just look at this for a second. Just one second. Try to remember the last time you sat on a rock, a stone. You were sitting on a stone. That is true, you don’t need theories to know that is true or blablabla, pretty simple, you know it is true. You were sitting on a rock. Does the truth of this apply only to my having said it? Before I said it, was there no truth value to you having sat on a rock? The fact of it, rather than the sentence?
See what I mean? It puts you in a ridiculous position.
Thanks to all for the input. I only post occasionally and other than getting philosophy from the internet (SEP & other philosophy sites and whatever papers I can find without signing up for some membership) operate in a vacuum. It’s good to hear the opinions of those who actually know philosophy from time to time. Have to say Uwrongx1000’s answer comes closest to what I’m looking for…never looked at truth that way (beginning, middle, end depending on goal of the organization studying it). Makes sense. Of the options property, relation, etc. discussion has more or less confirmed my suspicion that truth doesn’t fit neatly into a tidy category.
Hi
A last shot here. I do not think one has to go to philosophy even, to find truth.
Although it would be useful to start teaching philosophy in junior high, we have to apply our individual takes on what truth is, because lets face it, the decisions we make in our teen age years that need truth to be considered, will pre-empt in most cases the university years, if we ever get there.
We must pick and choose the truthful ways of perceiving our reality at that time, and try to project that toward the ends we see as appropriate for ourselves.
Some if it comes from parent’s teaching, some from our friends and neighbors, our early work environment, some from basic intuitive gut level feelings.
Lastly , we suddenly realize the need for change, irrespective what the truth is, of acting more in behalf of others then ourselves, that is the most profound rebelation ever. and it is really not a contingency at all, it dictates categorical necessity. When it is not considered in this way, the other, for whom usually, one feels and owes compelling responsibility , may be hurt, and by that token it becomes a debt, a sin of omission which comes back and hurts the owner of the debt.