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A privative is the absence of something, and as such doesn't exist. So cold is a privative, as it is merely the absence of heat.
This question is inspired by this answer about a single noun for an honest person.
It seems to me that the truth is merely the absence of all lies, and as such can be considered a privative.
Is this the case?
It seems to me that truth is merely the absence of all lies, and as such can be considered a privative. Is this the case?
An absence of lies may be sufficient for truth, but does not necessarily mean that a rational assessment of "non-lying" statements will be true. The question is a bit like comparing horses and buggies.
Truth is a condition of propositions (statements, sentences, etc.) which is satisfied when utterance corresponds to (matches, fits...) what is the case. The absence of truth can be falsehood, or the absence of truth can be a statement which is not rationally assessed a truth value, such as an opinion or an order.
A lie is an intentionally false or intentionally misleading statement. The conditions of satisfaction requisite for a lie to be identified are different (intentionalistic, agentive). Now if someone intentionally misleads with true statements, the absence of the lie is not truth.
Imagine you work in an office with no windows. The weather forecast called for possible rain and you are wondering if you should bring your umbrella with you when you go to lunch. A coworker who has a corner office with windows happens by your office door and you ask them to tell you what the weather is like outside. Unbeknownst to you your coworker suffers a delusional mental disorder such that when in fact the sun is shining, they think it is raining. Furthermore, your coworker decides to play a trick on you and tell you that the weather is other than it appears to them. When they return to your office and tell you the truth that it is sunny, did they lie?
No, it's not. You can take a body of information, eliminate all lies and be left with nothing, rather than truth.
You seem to be engaging in an obscure usage of privative, further. I've only encountered it being used in reference to prefixes like in- and un-.
Heidegger famously argued for precisely this. He points out that the Greek word for truth, ἀλήθεια (Aletheia), grammatically relies upon the use of a privative; it literally means unconcealedness (with the privative use of "un-".)
Interesting question :) but lies and concealment have to be lying about and concealing something, no? Once all the lying and concealing has being eradicated, there is still the object of the lying and concealing, viz. the truth.
For example, it is true that "Greek word for truth is ἀλήθεια". Is that truth defined merely by the absence of anyone lying about it or concealing it?
It seems that if truth is simply the absence of lying, kindness will be simply the absence of cruelty, love the absence of hatred, etc., and these are patently false. Just because something has an opposite doesn't necessitate its existence being defined by that opposition.
There is a big jump from "is the absence of something" to "doesn't exist." I think most of the responses here, taken from the English stackexchange, were more focused on the language of it than the logic of it. For example, @chaos,
You can take a body of information, eliminate all lies and be left with nothing, rather than truth.
That is precisely what the question is asking. It is just restating it another way. Taking out all the lies, however, in the context or pure logic results in a tautology—something necessarily "true" by virtue or form.
I guess the philosophic answer depends largely on your definition of "truth". I lean towards the idea that lies are the twisting of truth, and not the other way around. A distinction I make with an analogy. Truth is like pure water. Lies are everything else in the same bottle trying to blend in.
The definition of privative given by the NOAD is the following:
The definition defines as privative something that is normally present, and that has been removed or lost. Given this definition, you cannot say that truth is a privative, or that would imply that the falsity is normally present.
Truth, according to some modern philosophers (such as Karl Popper), would indicate no more or less than the absence of error or inaccuracy of a statement as compared to the real world. Following a popular essay by Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong, it follows that one may even speak of an idea A being more true than another idea B, without meaning to indicate that B is totally erroneous or false; just that A has less error or is a more accurate representation of the state of affairs than B.
Have an upvote for a great question!
Like heat, a lie is applied by an agent external to the object itself.
In the case of the lie, though, the object cannot take on the lie -- can't acquire the quality reported in/by the lie -- in the same way that it acquires heat. IOW, heat is one of the characteristics of the object at an instant, whereas the lie by definition is not.
So the lie might not be a precise analog of heat.
But because the instantaneous truth is in its nature immutable, could it be that truth overshadows or subsumes the "privative?"
Sorry to go on thinking out loud; it's a very good question.
According to scholastic ontology, truth is not a privative. In fact, truth is founded on being. It's said of something while tha something is.It's a transcendental, i.e., a property/feature of beings as such. (It's a bit difficult for me to write in English on this subject. It would be easier in a romance language...)
St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes two senses.
The ontological truth: the adequation of the thing to God's Understanding.
The logical truth: the adequation of human intelect to the thing's being.
The Scientific definition of heat is the change of internal energy. Something doesn't possess heat. However, when you bring two objects into thermal contact energy spontaneously moves from the object with more thermal energy to the object with less thermal energy. The rate of transfer of this energy is what we dub 'heat'.
This explains why a wooden floor and a marble floor at the same temperature feel as though they contain differing amounts of "heat". They do not! What is different is that the marble floor whisks away thermal energy from your body faster than the wood. This is due to its internal structure.
So, it depends on whether we are viewing things from the floors point of view or our foots point of view. From the floor it seems as though heat flow is positive, from the foot it seems as though heat flow is negative. This is actually the case.
What a layman considers 'cold' is a negative heat flow. However, as heat is defined as the rate of change of internal energy and internal energy can range between zero and infinity (well technically not, but close enough...) then the change needs to be defined on the same scale.
For example - you don't say that speeding up and slowing down in your car are two different things. They are the same thing -- the change of speed, which may be positive, negative or zero. Same with heat.
Anyway, on to the PHILOSOPHY. If one concedes that there exists an infinite set of attributes then it should be quite clear that you cannot define something by the lack of one particular attribute. Of course, you may do so for a finite set. Example if you have {A,B,C}, B=~{A,C}. The negation of infinite is just finite; it is not some specific finite thing.
Hope that helps!
