That is the huge can of worms... needlessly so. Let's avoid it and talk about things that make sense. Universal mind is another topic altogether worthy of it's own thread. I'll not entertain it here.

Yep, as I said, its a huge can of worms.

Referring to your last paragraph - If truth is central in the way you claim, then truth must be experienced and interpreted through individual perception - is that so?

Hey Di.

I don't think that this vein of thought can lead anywhere useful and/or coherent. I think that that line of thinking shifts the problem one step back and ends in an infinite regress, just like phenomenology does. Individual perception is interpretation. So, more to the point, we arrive at must truth be experienced and interpreted?

I would tentatively answer in the affirmative, however, it may be better to parse out what is meant by "interpreted".

Isaac Newton found a 'truth' not because of inductive reasoning but becasue he 'perceived' phenomena and attempted to present the cause of that phenomena in the form of facts upon which a baseline of truth could be established.

Newton's truth ended up having a limited sphere in which it held true. The reason this occurred is not that truth does not exist, but that we have limited access to truth due to our perception of it.

You suggested that


I have suggested (as presented above) that our knowledge of truth is limited due to our need (as physical beings) to perceive truth.

That was the reason I wrote:
Referring to your last paragraph - If truth is central in the way you claim, then truth must be experienced and interpreted through individual perception - is that so?

Your response:


led me back to the original OP.




I content that the only truths we can relate to are subjective, because we are physical beings who must rely on our physical senses for the truths we perceive.

If the question were more aptly stated such as:
“does truth exist beyond subjective perception” I would err on the side of YES but the way asked your question does not leave room for skepticism rather it is a question of right and wrong and that doesn’t seem like something ‘you’ would get caught up in.

Perhaps I am still not seeing your view correctly. I hope I have presented my view well enough for you to find the err in my thinking and present it to me.

Thanks – I know can count on you to reach back and catch me up.

You're right Di. We are treating truth differently.



What is it that you're referring to when you say "the only truths"?

I figured as much.

What I am referring to when I say "the only truths" are the truths that you say are:



If it got in our minds and we believe it to be true, then what we accept as truth must have been perceived through our senses and conclusions drawn from our perception is subjective; at least initially.

With some research, and persuasion our subjective reality may provide a window to a greater truth, like Newton's persuasion which was ultimately 'subjectively' reviewed and corrected by Einstein before it too was accepted as a larger truth.

What other truths that we have not perceived, and run through our subjective mind mill, can we be conscious of? In other words what truths are YOU talking about?

Ok. I'll attempt to set out the differences in our treatment of the 'concpet' of truth. I scarequoted truth, because I hold the position that truth is not man-made, all concepts are, therefore, truth cannot be a concept. I can offer an argumet for that position if need be.What you're calling "truths" I am calling thought, belief, and/or knowledge. Truth, on my view, is connective in that it is what connects those to reality through it's necessary presupposition which basically amounts to the autonomous employment of 'loose' truth/reality correspondence in all thought/belief formation.

Regarding your treatment/use of truth, as shown above in the last paragraph... If we replace the term it with "truth" we will lose intelligibility/coherence. However, we could replace it with any of the three above suggestions and retain it.



I'm talking syntactics, not semantics. I'm analyzing our use of the term, because if truth is central it is fundamentally so. If truth is not man-made, then attempting to analyze it is futile exercise. This is why truth gets little resistance in epistemology. Only a nutcase would argue that knowledge can be false. That we can know a falsehood. Keep in mind that our knowing that X is false is not our knowing a falsehood. Subsequently, because of the always looming possibility of infinite regress within any given justification(words, words, words, and more words), there are some things which must hold strong - on their own.

We can know that truth is necessarily presupposed in belief. That belief is a necessary component of knowledge, and that arriving at a complex conclusion in thought presupposes truth in pre-existing belief somewhere along the line.

Hopefully this helps to clarify the differences between our treatments/use of the term.

I'll get to directly addressing your assertions as soon as we iron out the differences in our employment.



I promise.

For two reasons. One is boring, the other assumes that the physical reality around us exists and we can observe it.

In this latter case, we can't have assurance we got it right, because:

- our measuring instruments are not infinitely accurate (there is always a margin of error)

- our interpretations of the measured reality is done by our minds, which is necessarily fininite in complexity, so what we observe always has the chance to have a greater complexity than our minds can encompass

- by observing something in the phyical world, we always have the chance that important details are smaller than our measuring instrument's resolutional accuracy

- and also we run the chance of taking something to be simple but it is very complex, except we can't ascertain that, since it is impossible for any system to FULLY comprehend an even more complex system than itself. A case of not seeing the forest for the trees.


Potentially, and because of the inherent problems with the way we comprehend and first observe anything, the entire set of human knowledge may be a "can't see the forest", and we are not aware of it. Why are we not aware of it? Because it is impossible for us to be aware of it. In other words, you can't know what it is that you don't know.

Therefore I say with absoulute certainty and assurrance, that we can never be assured that we got it right.

Truth being a perspective of a person from their life experience means it is subjective.

Facts are absolute for everyone.

Good post wux.

That is a good synposis of the problem at hand.

Do you believe that omniscience is necessary for any knowledge at all?

If, and only if truth is equal to personal perspective/point of view. That is the treatment of truth which I reject. My rejection is based upon the following consieration... if truth equaled perspective, then all perspective would be true. That is clearly not the case. Therefore, truth cannot equate to perspective.



I hold that a fact is an objective state of affairs. "Absolute" is a little too strong for my taste.

Thanks for the compliment.



It is sufficient, but not necessary.

I think we already covered that. If truth is knowable by chance, which it is, then your question is answered by its corollary (that not only an omniscient knower can guess right, but almost anyone.)

You're more than welcome.

--

Perhaps the question could have been better posed...

Need we know everything about X in order to know anything about X?

Good perspective creative!

Thank you. I'm working on it.

This is curious. Is truth knowable? I mean, what does that mean? What would it take for truth to be knowable?

This hits a philosophical vein.

I don't think talking about truth makes any sense in terms of whether or not it's knowable.

Because I am basically proponent of justified true belief as knowledge...

To talk about truth in terms of it being knowable is redundant. It is to ask if truth requires justified true belief. On my view, correspondence to/with objective fact/reality is how truth is obtained by a statement/thought/belief, thereby rendering it a true claim.