k, i'll try again. what 'knowledge' does a child really have? if a child is told that if he's good santa will bring him presents on christmas he believes it to be true simply because of language. were it not possible for the parents to communicate through language his belief in the 'truth' that santa will bring him presents would not exist. when one LEARNS the 'truth' about god language was paramount to his learning.

i LEARNED early in life in the 'truth' that god exists and created the universe but as i aged i've questioned that 'truth' to the point that i now find the concept highly implausible. so MY particular truth is no longer the truth. truth is highly subjective. it's subject to each individual's unique way of thinking.

The statement was true & meaningless for the listener(farmer).

It was meaningless because despite of digging & touching the gold ore he cant find the gold.So the statement was meaningless for him.

Truth is subjective.It has to be subjective through propper description.Objective truth ( that it is gold ore & one can extract gold from it) is meaningless for all those who dont know this.

There exists plenty of such meaningless objective truths around us in the universe.

Those are TRUTHS & are MEANINGLESS for us unless anyone makes it subjective by invention.

I don't need to try again. I hit the nail right smack on the head perfectly.

Children usually do not have knowledge. Like jrbogie states, children typically believe whatever their parents tell them. In fact, if you ask a child why they believe something to be true they will often reply with something like, "Because Mommy said so!"

And that is all they need to believe something.

Like jrbogie, I too was taught a big fat lie in terms of religion. I too believed it simply because "Mommy and Daddy said it's true".

I later realized that those religious fables cannot be justified in terms of determining that they are a correct description with any actual state of affairs. In fact, upon close inspection of the doctrine I have personally concluded that it would be impossible for those fables to be a correct description of any actual state of affairs as they were actually written because it's crystal clear to me that they contain self-contradictions that, IMHO, would be impossible to justify as they were actually written in the fables.

This is why I have concluded that those stories are indeed fables. As far as I'm concerned that does represent the most likely correct state of affairs and therefore it also represents the most likely truth.

So what I once erroneously "believed" as a child simply because my parents and elders told me that it was true, I have since recognized to be highly improbable to the point where it's fair to say that I'm convinced that it's actually "false" (i.e. The biblical stories as they were actually written are far more likely to be an incorrect description of any state of affairs, than they are to be a correct description.

~~~~~

This is how mankind has been determining truth all along in the mathematics and the sciences.

Euclid's Elements is probably one of the first in-depth collection of papers that truly goes into a detailed method of how to determine whether a hypothesis (a description) actually is a correct description of a particular state of affairs.

Euclid's Elements laid out the very foundation for how we determined "Truth" in mathematics.

The scientific method is another example of how truth is determined in physics. And it's exactly the same method that I have described.

We create a hypothesis (a description of a state of affairs), then we go into the laboratory and do experiements to see if we can determine whether the hypothesis (our description) correctly matches the actual behavior of the physical world (the state of affairs that we are interested in describing).

If the hypothesis appears to be a correct description then we say that the hypothesis it TRUE. It represents TRUTH (i.e. it is a correct description of the state of affairs in question)

All this stuff is old hat Creative.

You're acting like as if we need to rediscover this or something.

I've been determining the truth value of hypothesis my entire life! Using both the methods of mathematics and the methods of the physical sciences.

I have an entire lifetime of experience at doing this. I personally feel that I've gotten pretty good at it.

What I have learned about TRUTH (determining whether a given hypothesis is a correct description of a state of affairs), is that in many cases the determination cannot be assured with 100% certainty.

Often times we simply can't even come up with a meaningful hypothesis that is a candidate for a correct description of a state of affairs. We certainly can't determine the TRUTH VALUE of a hypothesis if we can't even come up with a coherent hypothesis.

We also run into problems at the other end of the spectrum. Like in String Theory. In string theory the hypothesis is that there exists "strings" that are far too small to ever be physical detected. In other words, we have a description of a state of affairs that cannot be directly determined to be correct. So we do our best to try to find ways to see if we can determine indirectly that this is likely to be the case.

~~~~~~

As far as I can see Creative, I already fully understand what TRUTH is and what it takes for something to be considered to be true. I've been in the business of doing precisely that my entire life.

So this whole conversation is meaningless to me.

I've answered your question "What does it take for something to be true?"

That question has already been answered by Euclid, and countless other scientists and mathematicians over the ages.

For me it's not a question that I need to ask.

I already fully know and understand what it takes for something to be true.

So telling me to "Try Again" is nonsense.

If you haven't understood the answer, then you are the one who is still in search of the meaning of truth, not me. I've already explained it to you in a way that I feel even a child should be able to understand.

I'm truly done here now. I've answered your question in FULL.

All that's left now is for you to understand it.

I would suggest reading Euclid's Elements. That's a really good place to start if you're still unclear of what it takes to determine if something is true.

Do you believe in tabula rasa? Blank slates don't do anything.

They know what contentment/discontentment feels like. They can know the sound of their mother's/father's voice. They can know when they are in pain. They know when they are hungry. They can learn that crying causes them to be held. They can learn that fire hurts when touched. They know what they like/dislike the taste of. They know that other things exist. They know that things are happening around them.



He is told a falsehood. A belief in Santa if a false belief. That is not how the presents get under the tree. The claim does not correspond to reality. If there were no truth, the claim could not false.



It requires language to learn about Santa, because Santa is pure fiction. It does not take language to disprove the belief, and that is because true beliefs correspond to reality and false ones do not.

The existence of false belief does not disprove the existence of truth. It cements it in the understanding. If there were no such thing as truth, there could be no false beliefs.



What are you calling 'the truth'?



You're conflating here between belief and truth, by calling your personal belief "truth". Being told at an early age that the 'truth' is that God exists and created the universe in seven days is teaching a child to believe in a literal falsehood. Now, you have come to believe otherwise due to events in your life experience, due to the 'God' story that you were told not matching up to our knowledge about the universe, about the way things are/were. The only reason that you believe that truth is subjective is because you do not understand what truth does. You have equated it to belief, and many many people do.

It is perhaps the most common mistake in thought regarding truth.

Perhaps the most negative effect that the Church has had on mankind was it's usurpation of truth and morality. The Church equated truth and morality to God's will, to the 'Word', etc. In doing so it changed the narrative in such a way, that people have thrown out morality and truth along with the concept of God.

Truth is not attached to the concept of 'God' in such a way that it falls along with, unless that is, it is held to be contingent upon 'God' for it's value. Unless, one wrongfully equates truth and belief. Just because one calls their own personal belief their "truth", it does not make truth equal to belief.

False beliefs exist.

This is wrong. You're confusing resultless and meaningless. If it were meaningless to the farmer, he would not have known what he was searching for.



Humans engage in truth through presupposing 'loose' truth/reality correspondence within thought/belief formation. Thought/belief does not require proper description to be formed and held. It does require description to be discussed. You're confusing truth with discussion about truth.



There is no objective truth. I think that you're calling whatever states of affairs that exist in the unknown realm "objective truth". That is a mistake in thought. It confuses fact/reality and truth. The autonomous engagement of truth is what connects thought/belief to reality. Truth presupposition is necessary for thought/belief formation. Truth is a property of the universe and/or it's contents because it is a property of all thought/belief.

Truth precedes and is necessary to learn anything with common language.

One cannot learn that that is a tree without first believing that that is there(wherever there is).

If there is no objective truth, and no subjective truth, then either truth is an opinion or it does not exist.

I'll see if I can make this a little more plain, even though the first response was adequate. To one who wields a hammer looking to use it, everything begins to look like a nail. Your driving the wrong one.

Your claiming that what is necessary for a discussion about truth, is equally necessary for the existence of truth. It does not follow from the fact that discussion is contingent upon language, that the object of discussion is equally contigent upon it for it's existence. That is an invalid claim.

Truth/reality correspondence is embedded within our natural language because it is presupposed within our thought/belief, and the invention of natural language is a product of pre-existing thought/belief. In other words, our natural language is necessarily contingent upon the presupposition of truth/reality correspondence, not the other way around. Truth does not need a description of a state of affairs to exist or to be employed.

I would say that that is sufficient ground for needing to try again.



The qualifier "usually" does not make the original claim sufficient for setting out what is necessary for truth. If pre-linguistic children can possess knowledge, then your claim is false. You're attempting to restrict knowledge to that which is learned through natural language. Children have knowledge, true belief, and false belief prior to ever acquiring natural language. This is a well-known, and very well documented fact. One may be entitled to their own opinion, but one is not entitled to their own facts, and your claim is falsified by the facts in evidence.

What you've attempted to do here is to claim that the existence of truth is contingent upon language, and by virtue of that it is subject to language. That is wrong. With natural language it is the other way around my friend, and we already know this. Your own example proves the point. Learning anything through common language requires both trust and truth to be necessarily presupposed within the thought/belief of the student. One cannot learn the name of an object without first believing that the object is there. That is truth/reality correspondence being engaged prior to language acquisition. We engage 'loose' truth/reality correspondence long before we ever learn how to say that, long before we have built up the vocabulary in order to talk about it.

What this shows us is that truth is not subject to thought/belief for anything other than it's instantiation. What this shows us is that we do not invent truth. We employ it. Therefore, it cannot be a man-made concept, because all of our concepts require it to be in place prior to their invention. All man-made concepts are contingent upon the existence of truth. It is not a product of our language, because language necessarily presupposes it.

In layman's terms... the apple pie(language and it's constructs) cannot exist prior to it's necessary ingredients, which when combined, constitute being it. The presupposition of truth/reality correspondence within thought/belief being one of those necessary ingredients.



Irrelevant. So people hold and are taught to hold false beliefs. Offering up an example of believing a known falsehood does not make truth subjective, nor contingent upon language. It makes it necessary to distinguish between true and false belief.



This reflects the biggest mistake of mathematicians, and humans perversion of truth in general, especially concerning mathematics. Again it stems from the influence of the Church. Their mistaken use of natural language attempts to contain truth itself. It cannot be done. Truth is irreducible. They have called mathematical proofs "truth". They have called states of affairs "truth". Goedels theorems have proven the inadequacy of mathematics to see it's own flaws, and have proven that rather nicely.

Dogma.

Language, including mathematics, is a very useful creation of man. Truth is not a creation of thought, belief, and/or language. Rather those things are completely contingent upon truth/reality correspondence for their very meaning. Mathematics may precisely describe the way many things are, but it is not, in itself... correspondence. It is but one means of explaning it, of setting it out in an understandable fashion.



This reflects an old hat mistake and that is being repeated over and over. If the hypothesis predicts future behavior consistently, it is held as a true hypothesis. If it is described as "truth", if it is described as representing "truth" then that description is wrong.

Obtaining and preserving correspondence is what makes the hypothesis true.

That is how truth works in language.



I understand the answer in it's entirety. I'm disagreeing with it on the most basic of levels. The disagreement is based upon the weakness of the answer in it's descritive power. It cannot take certain facts into account and remain coherent. It is therefore false. There are some other things which are understood as well. I also understand the implicit underestimation that is going on here.

Truth/reality presupposition is what gives meaning to all human thought/belief. Thought/belief about the world and/or ourselves is what gives meaning to natural language. Therefore, truth/reality correspondence is what we use to give meaning to words. Words do not give meaning to truth. Consequently, I further understand that to be "in search of the meaning of truth" is a foolish game that has no end because it has no place to begin. Meaning begins at truth/reality presupposition. We need only to look at how truth is necessarily engaged within thought/belief, and how it is and has been put to use within our natural language construct, in order to become aware of how truth works. Knowing how truth works is to understand the difference between a discussion of truth and truth. It is to understand the difference between truth and belief. It is to understand the difference between a man-made language construct, and that which those things depend upon for their formation.





I don't believe in Santa Claus.

Truth/reality presupposition is a property of all thought/belief. It requires a thinking subject for it's employment. It connects thought/belief to reality. Thought/belief can be false. Therefore, truth exists and requires thought/belief for it's employment, but is not equal to thought/belief, nor does the presupposition of truth within thought/belief make it true.

We are both, objects in the world, and subjects taking an account of it. Truth is presupposed in that account.

Truth is therefore, neither objective nor subjective...

It is connective.

no, i believe nothing. i'm agnostic.



of course, they experience those things. we can only know what we experience ourselves. but none of that has a thing to do with truth. has to do with what is known.





parhaps a falsehood but a truth as far as the child is concerned. this particular truth is subject to what his parents told him, falsehood or not.





it requires language to learn about god as well. and of course you can no more prove that god exists or does not exist any more than you can prove that santa does or does not exist. disprove the belief in santa with or without language.



if truth actually existed humans would not need faith to believe. there'd be no reason to believe in god if god had been proved true. but that hasn't happened so the faithful must hold onto their faith to maintain the belief.





i used quotes to imply that there really is no universal truth.





i understand that's how you think but i don't agree. as i said, i don't BELIEVE anything. i don't recall BELIEVING that god created the universe in seven days. i recall learning that the 'truth' was that god created everything. that was my parent's 'truth, my pastor's 'truth' and until i began to do my own thinking it was my 'truth'. so if it was my truth then why is it not my truth today. the reason being, truth is subjective. subject to what we believe. as i believe nothing other than what i experience my truth lies in my experiences. your truth lies in your experiences. subject to our differing experiences. you must have faith to believe simply because you cannot experience what you believe is true.



i'll certainly agree that the church has done poorly with truth and morality. but i no longer even consider the concept of god and i'll stand my morals up against anybody who believes god exists to be true.



false beliefs indeed do exist. question is though, does true belief exists? if so, why the need for faith to believe what is true???

Ok fine.

Then give me an example.

Tell me of a truth that is not a description of a state of affairs.

Obviously your definition of "truth" is vastly different from mine, and from the entire mathematical and scientific communities of all of humanity.

So let's be clear on this point that YOU are the "lone one out here" with some outrageous claim that is far different from any ideas of truth in mainstream humanity.

You say:


So you are clearly taking a stance that all of humanity is wrong and you are right. That's a very special CLAIM that you are making.

You should not expect anyone to understand your totally new concepts and ideas until you have laid them out in their entirety. Have you published a paper on this that we can read?

~~~~

I was speaking to the issue of humanity and how things are done on Earth in general.

I have no idea how to speak to your personal ideas that might be totally different from those of the bulk of humanity. Especially seeing that you haven't even pointed me to a book or paper where you have introduced your new, and drastically independent, views.

Don't you think that you should publish your ideas in a philosophy journal first and see what professional philosophers have to say about your ideas. Why are you trying to sell this on a dating site, all the while acting like everyone else is an idiot for not understanding your totally new and radical ideas?

~~~~

Apparently you recognize that I'm right on track with the bulk of humanity. The mathematicians, scientists, and the status quo

That's all I claim to know at this point.

Along with personal experiences associated with using these methods.

~~~~~

So now that I understand that you are attempting to introduce a whole new concept of truth let's hear it.

Tell me of a truth that is not a description of a state of affairs.

Let's see if we can understand your personal definition of truth that is so radically different from the idea of truth used by mathematicians and scientists.


~~~~

By the way, I'm familiar with Godel Incompleteness Theorems concerning mathematics and the natural numbers. I actually have mathematical solutions that render Godel's Incompleteness Theorems inapplicable to mathematical formalism. However that's a whole other story. It really comes down to self-referenced situations. And the reason mathematics is self-referenced is because it is indeed an axiomatic system. It doesn't actually need to be an axiomatic system. That's just the form that the current formalism has taken. My solution is to change the foundation of mathematical formalism so that it is no longer axiomatic. This renders Godel's Incompleteness Theorem inapplicable. Not wrong, but simply no longer applicable to mathematical formalism.

However, like I say, that's a whole other story.

In the meantime, if you will, please give us an example of a truth that is not a description of a state of affairs.

Perhaps we can begin to gain some sort of insight into what you personally mean when you speak of "truth".

I'll try my best to understand your new concept. A definition would be enlightening as well.

I wasn't previously aware that you were introducing a whole new concept for the meaning of "truth". Perhaps we should lable this concept of "truth" differently and call it "star truth" like so with an asterisk before it *truth. This will differentiate this new concept of *truth from the standard idea of truth that humanity in general has been using for centuries.

I have been addressing humanity's notion of truth all along.

So it' no wonder we've been unable to communicate.

I didn't realize that you were attempting to introduce a whole new concept of *truth.

So can we start with an example of a *truth that is not a description of a state of affairs.

Your behavior shows otherwise. Belief is not restricted to religious belief. That is but a very small aspect of it. Although the religious tend to let their religious belief overflow into their everyday lives affecting other beliefs that are not based upon religion.



Knowledge cannot be false. Therefore, if it has something to do with knowledge, it has something to do with truth.



So, he's wrong? It is not truth. It is a belief.

Truth is presupposed in thought/belief. If the child believes it, then he believes that it is true. That does not make belief "truth", it makes it a very poor description of the relationship between the two. Belief necessarily presupposes it's own truth/reality correspondence. Conflating belief and truth by calling beliefs "truth" begins one upon a misunderstanding of truth.



We cannot prove nor disprove the existence of an entity that does not appear. There can be no correspondence of thought, belief, and/or language to that which never appears.

This says nothing of truth.



That is not how it works.

Faith is having no doubt regarding the truthfulness of a source. To doubt, is to doubt the truth of. Faith is unquestioned trust regarding the truthfulness of any given source - be that a book, a person, or one's own thought/belief about the world. Faith requires truth, for it is what faith is built upon.



Perhaps, but there are common denominators that all humans, all thought, and all belief share.



Your engagement in this discussion shows otherwise. Have you ever lost an item, and went looking for it? Why do you not step out in front of a moving vehicle?



A positive claim cannot be both true and false simultaneously. To call belief "truth" is to show a lack of understanding how truth works in belief. To deny holding belief about the way things are is to deny thinking about the way things are.



The Church's usurpation and mistreatment of truth is no cause to throw out truth along with the concept of God. That is to still believe that truth is attached to God.



Of course true belief exists. I hold a true belief that Barack Obama is the current president of the United States. I hold a plausible belief that he is a moderate republican in disguise, afterall he was trained at Harvard.

No faith is necessary to believe what is known to be true, it takes unshakable faith to believe in that which conflicts with current knowledge.

Yep, we are both the observer and the observed.

Noting the incoherence...

I'd rather first show why this question is still hammering the wrong nail. By asking another to tell "of a truth that is not a description of fact" we wrongfully presuppose that truth is description of fact. An accurate description of a state of affairs is called true. The description is true, IFF, it corresponds. So the question sets out the matter in the wrong way. It repeats historical mistakes which began with the Church, and continue with dogmatic science enthusiasts. It objectifies truth and equates it to a description. A true description is not "a truth". It is a desciption which corresponds to fact/reality. A true description obtains and preserves truth.

Truth cannot be rightfully equated to a true description of a state of affairs, for it is what makes them true(or not).



I do not define truth, I look at how it works. It is a whole different approach.



That's interesting, because much of academic philosophy disagrees.

--

Now, regarding how truth does not need a description of a state of affairs in order to be employed in thought/belief, in order to exist. Re-read my last response to you. It is chock full of adequate justification for that claim.

More and more truth begins to look like a "true opinion" or "true belief" than anything else.

Bah.

When you connect it with thought/belief it become subjective. Without an observer, it is meaningless.

No.

What makes people say that a description of a state of affairs is "truth" is nothing other than their very own subjective evaluation that the description correctly describes the state of affairs in question.

That precisely what they mean when they claim that a particular statement (description of a state of affairs) is true, or not.

That's all that truth is Micheal.

Truth is a subjective human assessment of a description of a state of affairs.

You need to have both of these things in place before you can even speak of assigning a truth value to the system. And that's all that truth amounts to. It's the subjective act of assigning a truth value to a particular statement or description of a state of affairs.

When we have enough people who are in agreement concerning their individual subjective conclusions that a particular description is "correct" then we begin to accept the idea that this is probably an 'objective truth'. In other words, we are saying that we conclude that the description of the state of affairs will be "correct" for everyone who encounters this particular specific state of affairs.

So ultimately all truth values that we have ever assigned to descriptions are indeed all subjective acts of individual humans. Even if done by many individual humans collectively. It's still ultimately just a collection of subjective conclusions in agreement with one another.



I'm sorry Creative, but for someone who is constantly complaining about the importance of semantics you are without excuse to not have a definition for your term.

That's is totally inexcusable based on your stance that semantics is so all-important. Yet now you claim that you can't define your term?

You have told me in the past, "If you can't define your idea then you must not have one"

Well touché . Who is without definition now?



I politely asked for an example.

I politely asked for a definition.

You have refused both.

I can only conclude that you have neither.

I've got my definition of "Truth" down pat. I fully understand what truth means, what it is, and how to go about determining it. I also understand its limitations and domain of applicability. I also understand how it ultimately often depends upon unproven premises and or axioms that are often accepted on faith before the truth value is even assessed. As I have shown via examples in mathematics.

You even renounce the standard methods used to determined truth in mathematics and science!

Hey, like I say, at least I'm not alone. You're rejecting most of humanity's methods of determining truth.

And apparently you're blaming it on the Church.

Well, if there are flaws in human thinking I'd probably be the first to agree with you that the Church is highly suspect as the culprit for having induced such terrible thinking into the psyche of mankind.

At least we can agree on that one.

k. what is it that you think i believe?





agreed, but since the only knowledge we can possess is that which we experience and we each have our own unique experiences we each form our own truths subject to those experiences. truth is subjective.





but to the child he is not wrong. it's what he believes to be true.



can only repeat myself and i don't do that. we see truth and belief differently.




correct. so god cannot be seen to be true. not necessarily false but not true either. simply unknown and unknowable.







it's precisely how it works for me.



but the child's faith in his belief that santa exists does not make santa true. so if i child can have faith that his belief is true how can faith and truth possibly be intermingled? you belive that the existence of god is a true concept right? and the child believes that the existence of santa is a true concept. and yet i see that both concepts are unimaginable. not impossible, simply highly implausible. neither you nor the child can prove your truth or disprove the other's truth since neither of you have actually experienced what you believe to be true. truth is subjective.





not so, unless you were able to answer my earlier question asking you to point out something i believe that i have not experienced myself.





ah, like these easy ones. because my experience tells me that people who step out in front of a moving vehicle get hurt reeeeeeaaaaal bad. my dog, on the othe hand has not shared my experience seeing or reading about the consequences of not watching where you step or if she does she has no recollection of it and she won't hesitate to run out into a busy street.





i've never claimed anything that i haven't experienced to be true or false much less both simultaniously.





i'd never even consider god and truth being the least bit related so throwing one concept out without the other or both together is a simple matter to me. indeed i see no reason to think that either exist. again, we must experience it to know it.





as do i, though i wouldn't call it a belief. i've experienced barry as the potus. no reason to have faith in a belief that he is potus. something knowable. something that can be experienced.



agreed. faith is only required to believe something is true that cannot be known from experience. like god and santa. unlike barry as potus. no reason to have faith to believe barry exists. faith will come in handy if he's to be re-elected though, me thinks. lol. but again, unknowable.

Abra,

Re-read the longer post which was written earlier today. It exhausts everything you've asked for. It also shows very clearly, in no uncertain terms, exactly why truth cannot be defined. It explains exactly it is a fruitless endeavor with no beginning and no end. I've already explained why that is the case.

If you will not engage what I've already given, and instead keep asking questions that have already been answered while continuing to put forth things like this, I'll ignore every post you write. Now is your chance, if you want to discuss this, then discuss what I've already written.



Is this supposed to be a response to what I wrote? Calling a subjective evaluation regarding a description that corresponds to fact/reality "truth" is to completely confuse a true description with that which makes it so. Correspondence to fact/reality is what makes true claims true, not our evaluation of the claim, not our methods for determining that correspondence.

Your thinking is fatally flawed.



You're now confusing people's subjective definitions of truth with truth, itself. Our determining and setting criterion for assent to belief is not equal to truth. Calling a true belief, or a seemingly accurate description of a state of affairs "truth" is to confuse true belief, and descriptions believed to be true with that which makes them so. I see no point in continuing a conversation with someone who cannot make and keep the meaningful distinction which understanding depends upon.