This is another way to say what I am saying. Some credit Protagoras with this kind of saying.
I have tried instead to build the theory entirely on belief.
We “live in” our belief. Our strong belief is “just how the world is” — tacitly from our POV.
What does progress and improvement mean if the notion of truth is rejected? When what was regarded as true is modified or replaced what is its value if it is no closer to what is the case?
It is true that mammals need oxygen. The Milky Way galaxy is one of many galaxies. The Earth is more than a hundred years old. And so on.
The problem I see is that if we honestly believe that there is more to reality than just belief, and “true” is based in honesty, then we must allow reality to extend beyond belief, to allow for truth. Then trying to make “how the world is” consistent with “belief”, becomes an exercise in dishonesty.
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So we can tell whether p is true/false with evidence.
Some (dis)beliefs are unjustified doesn’t imply anything to the contrary.
Perhaps we understand or approach the sign “belief” differently.
I’m anti-dualist. I don’t accept the typical assumption that perceptions are “inside stuff.” Nor, for me, are beliefs “inside thought stuff.”
We use signs sometimes in a “picturing” mode that I describe in terms of “surrogate perception.” Sometimes we verbalize beliefs in this mode.
But belief is primarily — as I see it — our expectant conduct.
I rush up the staircase without hesitation. I “expect” the stairs to fulfill their function without even verbally expressing this belief.
The stairs are dimly there as “trustworthy.” The world is “there” for me largely in terms of what I “count on” like this. I flip on the light switch as I enter the room. This expectant fluid flipping, which is utterly sub-verbal, is belief in its dominant visceral mode.
I could say that I trust that the stairs are “true.” I find this kind of expression beautiful even. I even prefer it in purely aesthetic terms. The problem, for me anyway, is that most philosophers take an “objective reality truth-maker” for granted. And I reject that postulation as vacuous.
I reject the notion that an absolute and perfect truth is known (unclear if eventually knowable, but unknown at present), and posit that there are useful substitutes therefor that persist for a time until disproven or modified.
The examples you’ve provided are our current “truths,” but they’ve not always been known or experienced as truths. It wasn’t until the late 1700s that we “discovered” oxygen and learned of its necessity for many life forms. Throughout human history, there have been a myriad of explanations for the cosmos and we still have so much to learn about outer space that the concepts we have now will likely be outdated in 100 years. Even the concept of time has been the subject of debate within physics. What we perceive as time may be a product of our biological disposition rather than an objective physical reality.
I think accepting these ideas as the bases for decision making and discourse is important and necessary because it’s the best we have. However, that doesn’t mean we are inerrant in all of our presently held beliefs about existence and thus thinking of these as objective truths presumes infallibility of current knowledge. We historically have been wrong whenever we’ve considered ourselves to have the final answer on any number of issues.
I don’t have much use for nouns which try to contain a person by the content of his thought. I don’t believe in atheists, for example. There are just people willing to say, “God doesn’t exist.” or “I don’t believe in God.” or “I hate God.” Whatever.
In fact, the most prolonged violent debates I’ve ever witnessed have been over this very issue. Go into a forum and start a thread titled, “What is an atheist?” You will be opening a vomitous can of worms. And these are secular sorts, tearing at one another over the correct definition of an atheist.
I am a skeptic and not-a-skeptic, who acquires the thing you probably call knowledge quite proficiently. But I rarely call it knowledge. I usually call it my best guess.
But of course I claim to know things all the time. Language constrains me. I have to use the words as they exist. I just mean something different by it than many others. Some seem to think that when they know something, that thing parallels ultimate reality. I tend to think I’m just reciting my best guess yet about the matter.
I’m not a prophet of God. Not so far as I know.
I admire anyone who engages the battle, especially in public.
At debate, it means answering all questions as honestly and thoroughly as possible… at least until one grows weary and judges the other guy to be insincere. Even then I will pop in and answer a question if it seems challenging to my thought.
I sometimes say that the only way to do philosophy well is to love the chase even more than one’s own ego.
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But the point I was making is that sometimes things aren’t as expected, and are therefore not trustworthy. Doesn’t that indicate to you that there is more to reality than belief? There seems to be a large part of reality which “belief” is incapable of capturing
I wouldn’t say that’s “most philosophers”. I think that just represents a few naive philosophers.
That’s cool. I don’t think about God much unless someone uses the word. I seek to discern what they mean by it, what part of their experience they’re evoking, and what ulterior motives they might have for bringing it up. In other words, God is a matter of psychology to me, not so much about skepticism or atheism or what have you.
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche).
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This is why time is the central concept in Heidegger, for instance.
Reality never arrives. A thing is only ever partially here. The thing is before me usually as a mere means that I act on or with and don’t even see. It is when expectation is violated that the thing becomes explicit. Peirce understands inquiry as the (re-)settlement of belief. Belief is smooth, confident flow.
We can see the quest for “Eternal Truth” as a kind of escapist fantasy. It’s not that simple. We want beliefs that remain effective. But talk of “eternal truth” is precisely a denial of existence in a complex and dangerous world. Or I suggest that life is structured by hope and fear. Life is “toward something” and “on the way.” The future is primary. “Eternal truth” implicitly “negates” the future as dark future by making it “present.” In computer science, this involves assuming that the Turing machine “actually” halts or not. The situation “here and now” is already binary. The “?” that represents a genuine future is swept aside. Brouwer and others resisted this exclusion of time from math.
I like to read Socrates ( or use him as a symbol ) for a key idea in Gadamer. In my words, symbolic Socrates says “all vision is blindness.” To see the object in a specific way is to be blind to much of it. The world shows up for me in terms of my personality. Subjectivity is bias. The world is world-for-biased-subject. The trivial version is that I see what’s in front of my eyes, which are not where your eyes are. But this gets much richer as we consider how personal history determines the reading of this or that sign.
But the world is not therefore in the subject.
If we are honest with ourselves, we believe that we share with world with others. We believe they can hear us speak and mostly understand us, at least on practical matters. So the world is shared, but the “side” it shows to Bob is not the “side” it shows to Larry. And the world is ongoing, and so are Bob and Larry. Each are surprised in their own ways. Each update their belief, their visceral comportment toward this or that situation, this or that sign.
I guess it depends if you mean famous academics or online forum philosophers. I don’t meet many people who want to let go of “objective reality.”
I don’t think this is proper phrasing, “reality never arrives”. The future might never arrive, perhaps even “the thing” might never arrive, but then this is reality, and reality is here right now. So it doesn’t make sense to say that reality never arrives, unless you are denying the reality of reality, but that in itself doesn’t make sense.
Even if Bob sees a different side of the world from what Larry sees, that implies a world (a reality) which the two are seeing different sides of. So we really do not have the premise here to proceed toward “reality is belief” unless we assume some sort of “belief” which is independent from Bob, Larry, and all others.
I think we can either let go of “objective reality” because the way most people understand it leaves it as unintelligible, or we can redefine it in a way that makes sense. The latter, I believe is necessary, because something has to occupy that place.
But aren’t these truths in line with what you say about progress and improvement?
While I agree that we still have so much to learn, it does not follow that in 100 years it will no longer be true that mammals need oxygen, that the Milky Way is one of many galaxies, or that the Earth is more than a hundred years old.
I agree, but not being inerrant in all our beliefs does not mean that we must be wrong about all of them.
The notion of objective truths has no clear, unambiguous, agreed upon meaning, and leads to endless, hopeless confusion. We observe, we measure, we gather evidence, we propose theories, we establish laws. We cannot eliminate ourselves from our investigations, but it does not follow that there are no facts or that a statement of fact is thereby subjective.
Put differently, by rejecting the idea of objectivity we are rejecting the idea of subjectivity.
Yes, there is ample evidence to support this fact, but we should not regard this as the final answer to the question of truth. Any number of issues does not mean every issue. We also have ample evidence that mammals need oxygen, that there are other galaxies, that the Earth is more than 100 years old. Is there any evidence to support the claim that we might be wrong about these things beyond the fact that we have been wrong about other things in the past?
It is figurative language. Reality is here and now, of course. But how is it here ? Objects are here in terms of what you might do with them. As you read this sentence, it keeps arriving.
It seems so to me. I don’t mind someone claiming mathematical truth or proof.
Down deep, I do not think such a thing exists as forest green. There are only humans trying to nail down their world with words.
I have no good idea what the academics mean by “justified” in their formula, and I doubt they do, either. I mean, I suspect there are many millions of words written about the subject and possible gun battles fought over the matter. Much clever but furious insult, at the very least.
Two philosophers, eighteen opinions… as they say.
Sure. But every person I know can demonstrate the correctness of his believed things.
I guess I’m a little lost. If I see a lion behind a tree, and I bring a philosopher there to look for himself, it seems like I have offered some justification.
Sure. They want a belief to be both justified and true, in order to say they know it.
I’m saying that’s an ordinary thing. Even a blind child can do it. Ask the child if his knowledge is justified and true. He can say Yes. Many might disagree, but the observer—the blind child—knows otherwise. Maybe the child is a seer. Seers know stuff that ordinary people don’t.
Well, you just make your decision. If you’re in the African savannah and you see a lion, you tend to accept what you see. If you’re in Kansas and you see a lion, you might look again, wondering if it’s a big dog or a pile of boxes.
Then you make your best guess.
If you are a smart ape, you make that best guess from high in a tree.
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If I say it is true and you say it is false… what is it?
It sounds like we share our approach to that. A person making claims about God is telling us more about the person than anything else.
I should read that guy some time. He sounds like he looked into things.
Yes. The same is true of militant atheists. People like that have multiple loose screws.
Oh, yeah. We can march for God or march against God. I tend not to trust marchers myself, but I enjoy watching and tossing assorted tacks into the road.
Some say we all do. I find it hard to counterargue with much conviction.
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The evidence will tell us. For example if I say there’s a penny in my pocket and you say there isn’t, we can find out by checking my pocket.