Questions tagged [truth]
Theories of truth deal with questions such as: what are truths? what makes them true? what is the relation between truths and the things that makes them true? Not to be confused with "what is the truth", which is a completely different matter.
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Why is truth considered a value in Western Philosphy?
In general I notice that a lot of Western philosophy emphasizes truth as a value.
For example, John Vervaeke argues truth as value using the following argument (to paraphrase):
"Would you want to ...
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How reliable is logic?
The reasons I think that logic is not enough to find the truth are:
I sometimes conclude that something is 100% true, and can be observed easily; as it is based on logic, and then people don't ...
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Is "This sentence is written in English" nonsense?
Wittgenstein and many others have said that our language gives the appearance of truth to some nonsense.
Do you think the very simple "This sentence is written in English." is such nonsense ...
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What should a person do?
Edit 1: As pointed out in the comments, the question implies the existence of a purpose and agency so I would like to re-phrase the question to match what I'm after:
What should a person do? (What is ...
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Is there such a thing as N-valued logic?
Is there such a thing as N-valued logic, N being above 5 since there exist 3-valued and 4-valued logic. I am asking, because after true, false and neither, the additional truth value basically don't ...
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Is this spreading a lie considered lying?
So if person A is fed false information by person B, and person A goes on to tell this information to person C in the best way possible in the exact way they heard it are they lying? Person A would be ...
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What is the difference between a Belief and Truth
I was interested in the definition of truth, i followed this post
What is the difference between Fact and Truth?
what I understood is that truth is anything I believe in or appears to be accurate ...
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Difference between Truth and Fact [duplicate]
I was interested in the difference between truth and fact. For me, truth is a belief that appears to be from a perspective. and a fact is an undeniable reality.
Is this way of thinking correct? How ...
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What is consciousness? Is it the ultimate reality of our universe? What implications do the various theories of consciousness have on human life?
Does a child has more consciousness associated with her or her adult form?
What about her foetus? If her foetus is not yet properly developed (it has just accumulated a bit more mass and complexity ...
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If the Continuum's cardinality could physically change because of a physical manifestation of forcing
Suppose that the Continuum has a specific cardinality assigned to it when it exists "in" a physical universe. (This, or a similar-sounding supposition, occurs frequently enough in the ...
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Can metaphysics ever find real truth?
I'm aware, on a conceptual level, of what metaphysics is, but have no actual knowledge of the subject. Despite that, I've recently been better acquainted with the study, and it seems like something I ...
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Is a decision made before the rationalization?
Well, I was listening to a podcast in Spanish and a great scientist was saying that there are studies that are seeing that decision making is not as rational as we think it is. He says that the moment ...
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Does Gödel’s findings boil down to part of classical mathematics (as opposed to computation) is flawed?
According to artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, only classical mathematics is affected by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem however not computation where calculations are performed in a step-...
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What do poststructuralists mean by "power legitimates itself"?
"The post-structuralists assert that in any culture power legitimates itself through its connection to the validating mechanism for truth claims."
How is it possible to use truth as an ...
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Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem: How can truth go deeper than proof?
My current understanding:
Math starts with a set of basic (purportedly self-evident) statements that are taken as a given without the need to prove them true, like e.g., a + b = b + a etc. Such ...
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Who first defined truth as "adæquatio rei et intellectus"?
António Manuel Martins claims (@44:41 of his lecture "Fonseca on Signs") that the origin of what is now called the correspondence theory of truth,
Veritas est adæquatio rei et intellectus.
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Truth vs Knowledge
I'm a little confused when philosophers speak of truth and knowledge. Is there any meaningful difference between truth and knowledge in epistemology? Or are they really the same thing, since false ...
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How can you know if your judgment is unbiased?
If one want to develop the skill that optimises the efficiency of the constant feedback loop that we engage in with ourselves (with intentions of self-development or a better understanding of the ...
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How Exactly Do You Define Truth?
I've been trying to learn about the multiple theories of truth and I've taken a look at the popular Stanford article. The first section has this to say about the neo-classical theories of truth:
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What is the reasoning behind vacuous truths? [duplicate]
Vacuous truths assert that an entire proposition is true even if the antecedent is false.
Take the following proposition..
"If I am a toilet paper roll then I am a flying guitar"
The ...
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Is there such a thing as completely objective truth?
Apologies if this question has been asked before, I looked at similar ones and couldn't find one that answered this exact question.
Is there such a thing as truth completely independent of conditions, ...
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Godel's incompleteness theorem when the cardinality of axioms is > ℵ_0?
So I was thinking of Godel's theorem (I am by no means an expert in this topic). Does Godel's only work when the cardinality of the number of axioms is the same as the cardinality of the number of ...
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Truth/actuality as an operator
Frege claimed that "it is true that" adds nothing to the actual meaning of an assertion, and following him along this line are prosentential theories of truth. However, I wonder if this is ...
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Do all true statements express the same proposition?
Do all true statements express the same proposition? I know that, for example, the statements "2=2" and "1+1>1" are distinct sequences of symbols. However, I want to know, do ...
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Can one be a nihilist?
From Wikipedia:
[Nihilism]... rejects general or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge [...]
Rejecting something means to me, claiming that something is not true ...
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Is there a word for the belief in truth? [closed]
I just wonder if there is a word for the belief in truth to look it up and learn more about it.
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McGee's argument on restriction of consistent instances of T-schema
Could someone help me understand what is McGee's argument on restriction of consistent instances of T-schema about please?
This is gonna be messy so please bear with me.
Halbach and Holsten's "...
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What does it mean for T-biconditionals to be derivable unrestrictedly?
I have been reading Leitgeb's What Theories of Truth Should be Like, and one of the desiderata for a theory of truth, he argues, is to have unrestricted derivable T-biconditionals. But I am having ...
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Levels of truth (is the liar paradox generated by equivocation?)
Strictly, Tarski's notion of truth levels, which is based on truth as a predicate (property), has it so that the liar sentence, "This sentence is false," by trying to attach a truth ...
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How does Yablo's paradox affect the theory of truth?
Question: What does Yablo's paradox tell us about what a theory of truth should look like?
I have been reading Leitgeb's What Theories of Truth Should be Like, and he discusses what a 'good' theory of ...
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What is the difference between truth and fact in mathematics and science?
I am particularly curious on how one can closely talk about truths and facts with the areas of knowledge mathematics and science.
I cannot seem to distinguish between these two terms with respect to ...
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The inquisition and Kantian morality
I read in Williams' book on truth that during the inquisition priests were eager to apply Kantian ethics under torture, and that this proved difficult because lies - and arguably secrets - were ...
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Who first used the phrase "Deflationary Theory of Truth"?
SEP's history of the deflationary theory of truth does not explain the origins of the term Deflationary, but does point to the first people who "explicitly defended it".
The deflationary ...
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Can truth exist even though nothing happens?
There’s magnet. If the magnet didn’t attract the other magnet and then disappeared, in this case can “the magnet attracts the other magnet” never be true?
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What is the virtue of having true belief?
What is the virtue of having a true belief: where can I read about it?
I have two specific questions, before reading about it (and I don't even know what we would call it, wisdom?)
Is that virtue ...
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Do exceptions and deviations from general rules and facts pose a fundamental problem?
Only because nobody has found a counterexample, it does not mean yet for a long time that a regularity must be fundamentally correct and generally valid.
Either because one does not know the true ...
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Would philosophy exist without semantics?
With so many threads on this forum seeming to me - from my point of view - as wars of words -can it be argued whether semantics are philosophy's oxygen? Would any philosophical debate actually take ...
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What are the categories of exact truth?
Most apparent facts are irremediably vague. For instance: "The chair in this room is red" may appear at first glance to be a statement that is either true or false. But in fact the meanings ...
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Diagonalization and Tarski's theorem of inexpressibility of truth
I've been reading Peter Smith's Intro to Godel's theorem but I cannot understand how diagonalization works in Tarski's theorem of inexpressibility of truth.
The mentioned Carnap's equivalence is of ...
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Philosophy of social motivations
There is a certain philosophy that social status seeking motivations stand in opposition to finding out the truth.
A social-status-motivated person will look first at status markers on arguments, ...
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I can’t get what Nietzsche exactly referring to by (the later is in no respect whatever an argument in favor of the former)?
TRUTH”!—“The truth of Christianity was attested by the virtuous lives of the Christians, their firmness in suffering, their unshakable belief and above all by the spread and increase of the faith in ...
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Modeling of persuasion [closed]
I'd like to set out a model of how the mind changes its beliefs based on persuasive evidence, and I'm interested to know what work has been done similar to this.
Borrowing some of the terminology of ...
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What do you call refusing to accept any proposition when there is any remote possibility it could be false?
What do you call the philosophical position of a person who radically denies any knowledge saying the contrary might be true.
Example:
Aspirin cures headaches.
Response: There are people on which ...
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Name for believing reality cannot be modeled?
What is the name for the belief that truth and reality cannot be modeled or represented logically, intellectually, nor linguistically and hence cannot actually be discussed?
Do any philosophers say ...
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How can materialists make claims?
I dont have all the modern philosophical terms down, but I cannot see how materialists/physicalists can make any claims. If there is nothing but physical universe, then there is no “truth”. Actually ...
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What's the purpose of truth that can be psychosocially manipulated? When are they "science-capable"?
What's the purpose of truth that can be psychosocially manipulated? When are they "science-capable"?
Such as things related to e.g.
deservingness
personal worth
fairness
Since it's not ...
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The meaning of the word theory
The normal, day-to-day meaning of the word 'theory' denotes the uncertainty regarding factuality. For instance, when we say that "it is just another theory" what we imply is that there can ...
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Correspondence theory of truth and analyticity
The correspondence theory of truth states that truth is essentially correspondence to a fact or state of affairs. How does this theory handle analytic truths - that is, 'true by definition' type ...
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Justification values
The concept of truth values is sometimes expressed in terms of "truth as an object vs. truth as a property." My in-a-slogan understanding of this alternative is "sentences being ...
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When can we have certainty in what we claim to know?
This is a question that my friends asked me a few times. I am confused, because I have been trying to answer this question myself, but I can't seem to come up with any valid answer. For example, what ...
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