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.
The problem with teaching philosophy to children that young is that most children are born with, and to a great extent still possess at that age, an innate understanding of the difference between real life and make-believe. They are in no position to accept metphysics as anything but nonsense while that is the case.
9 th graders are no longer considered children Faust, however there are some deprived and late developing children who might fit that category.
Nonsense, the various modes of it, may be even at early age reflect Wittgenstein’s musings upon philosophy that makes sense. In terms of cognitive. and perceptive conflation. Child psychologists say actual depth preception occurs at the mirror stage. and this sense is somehow a-priori.
Ninth grade is high school. And they are still children. But there is another reason. To understand metaphysics (or any philosophy) you have to have a firm grasp of language. You have to know that “literally” means “literally” and that “like” means “like”. Or at least that it means something. There are highschoolers who could get to first base studying philsophy. Betteer that the time is spent learming about checking accounts and credit cards.
Just one man’s opinion.
Yes but his question was philosophical, and my point is, that the above reasoning points to the question, of why a priori synthetic jugememts possible, is acquired early on.
Our validation through later philosophical study, through self or inatotutional learning, has this unrecognized and debates element , a posteriori.
This leads to some people’s opinion that philosophers are born, not made.
I don’t really ‘know’
This is the path from epistemology to morality. So you suggest that epistemology is understandable to ninth graders? It was barely understood by Kant. Who was reputedly very smart. And had to be woekn from slumber by the anti-epistemologist. His religion forged by the fire of an atheist.
Simple for me. I’m just not sure about teenagers.
Back to topic, the confusion that the OP has is just this - that therer is an epistemology of truth. That comes from reading the Greats. Who were wrong.
Rather, we speak of true qualities, true relations and true properties -
“Truth” as a concept is not subservient to categorialism, but the root of it.
In other words:
The conception “truth”, which has the natural antipode “falsity”, is the first and foremost categorical distinction used to enable abstract thinking.
To align with what Faust said,
“Truth” is not a thing in a category, rather it is the category containing all statements which are true. This category is not part of itself, as the category has no syntactic structure, forms no statement.
“This category is not part of itself, as the category has no syntactic structure, forms no statement.”
This was always the great nuisance for Idealist philosophers who sought to demonstrate how the mother-category of descriptive statements, “truth”, amounts, by some internal machinations, to a comprehensive prescriptive statement. Aristotle and Kant sought to discern such machinations and failed, Nietzsche rather sought to devise a true statement that validates all true and all false statements. He succeeded.
Yes, somehow a pre-scriptive statement (a priori) no difference there.
By “true quality” we mean a quality which is correctly attributed somewhere. So “true” refers to the statement which says that “x” has quality “q”.