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 having true beliefs important? (More detail)
I forgot to keep track of my earlier asking of this question. Rather than make similar replies to many comments, I'll elaborate here. I'll use the example of panpsychism: it holds that natural laws ...
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Why is having true beliefs so important?
Of course, when you need to describe reality or make predictions about it, it's important that the beliefs correspond to reality, but say a religion makes an unfalsifiable and unverifiable claim. Does ...
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Is to be able to describe something to be able to judge that it's true or not?
Unicorns don't exist, but I can still describe unicorns as "unicorns have four legs".
Does the statement "unicorns have four legs" have no truth-value or is it always false, ...
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There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Are these words of Shakespeare,inspired by Marcus Aurelius, true?
This question is not about ethics. It is about our perceptions of positive and negative value. I take the original meaning of the great emperor to be that we have control only of our own thinking, and ...
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Proof verification of god existence theorem
NB:
My question was closed on math stack exchange. They advised me to post it here, but due to the lack of LaTeX formatting, I had to upload it as images. Apologies for that.
I am a first year student ...
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Can semantics work independently apart from philosophy?
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
It implies grammar can work independently apart from semantics.
So I was thinking: "Can semantics work independently apart from philosophy."...
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According to Meinong's theory, is it false that all circles are not square?
According to Meinong's theory, "square circles are circles" is a true statement.
Does it mean that "circles include square circles" is true, so is it false that all circles are not ...
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Why don't people say a square is round?
If a round square exists as a concept, does it mean it exists? So, a square is round because it exists as a concept. But why do some people think "sqaure is round" is a false statement ...
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Vacuous truth: can something exist and not exist at the same time?
Any square isn't round, so I use "round square".
A round sqaure exists
A round sqaure doesn't exist.
Are they both (vacuously) true because any square isn't round?
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What is the nature of ultimate reality? How rise of AI is challenging the old notions?
From centuries debate is going on nature of ultimate reality. With "conscious" and "material" being two extremes and views with different composition of two lying between the ...
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Can a definition be true/false?
Can a definition be false or, for that matter, true?
Dog (noun): A tamed lupus canis.
Unicorn (noun): A horse with a horn growing out of its forehead; may be of any color, but are usually pink or ...
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Model vs Theory: Meanings reversed in Alfred Tarski vs Julian Jaynes?
In my reading of Alfred Tarski's model theory, a theory is a formal system whose sentences are without inherent meaning, but which becomes meaningful (e.g. having truth values) only after a model ...
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Do you gain further truth from syllogisms
If you have a valid syllogism thats conclusion is true, have you gained any further truth?
I'll explain my reasoning.
The syllogism:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man
Conclusion: Socrates is a ...
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The Truth Paradox [closed]
This is a paradox thought up by me, and I do not know if anything similar exists. Please do not accuse me of copying others.
Assume that I am a schoolchild. One day, we have an assembly. Our principal ...
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Confused On The Definition Of A Proposition
One definition I encountered was something that is either true or false.
(for example, I ate vegetables yesterday is a proposition).
Another definition I encountered is the meaning of a sentence
(for ...
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Is there a difference between believing something and behaving as if it were true?
To clarify, I mean without deception. In other words, if something seems plausible to me, and I decide to act on it as though it were true while recognizing that I could be mistaken, do I believe it?
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What is the fallacy called where "Nothing a liar said can be true?"
What is the fallacy called where "Nothing a liar said can be true" (i.e., "false in most things, false in everything")?
For example, consider that 99% of something someone said is ...
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Can life have meaning when all your happiness is from a clear illusion?
When all your happiness is from a clear illusion, is your life meaningless? I am not talking about intentionally living a lie, because I don't mean lying to yourself about it, but feeling as if it ...
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Is philosophical truth always necessary truth?
p147 of Section "Two Kinds of Truth" in Big Questions by Solomon says:
Perhaps the statement "the Forms are most real" is defensible through pure
thinking and without regard for ...
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The deception clause in lying
What if I am asked a question, and respond with an untruth I know is untrue, and I don't really care if I am believed, but definitely don't want to be found out (I don't want anyone to know Ive ...
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When is ok to tell a lie?
When is ok to tell a lie? Clearly, there may well be some cases, such as hiding Anne Frank.
May we sometimes lie about our infidelity, if e.g. we think it could lead to a jealous murder? What about ...
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How can we commute the alethic negation in the liar sentence?
Normally, "It is not true that F," equals, "It is true not that F," or even, "It is true that not F." I can't figure out how to carry this out with the way the truth ...
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Is seeking truth always preferred?
I’ll start off with moral values as an example. I think it is pretty obvious that moral values are socially constructed and don’t have any sort of ontological basis to them. Nature is full of examples ...
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Do alethic nihilists think that all deception and secrecy has the same moral value that "lying" would to non-nihilists?
Do alethic nihilists think that all deception and secrecy has the same moral value that "lying" would to non-nihilists?
This seems strange if taken to extremes. So what separates a virtuous/...
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I think I finally understand alethic nihilism
So the definition of truth is that p is true if and only if p.
However, since the Liar Paradox states that p is true if and only if p is false, this is a contradiction.
So the words truth and falsity ...
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Quantum probability theory and the idea of a "truth-value sphere"
A while ago I asked a question about using imaginary numbers as truth-values for a peculiar concept known as "the square root of negation"; I just found out that apparently this concept is ...
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How Does Alethic Nihlism Address The "Changing Of Subject" Objection?
I recently read this article in my pursuit to understand wtf alethic nihlism is trying to say:
https://philarchive.org/archive/ASASIT
One of the objections to alethic nihlism is that alethic nihlism ...
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Trivialism vs Alethic Nihlism
What are the similiarities and differences between the two theories (as well as arguments for and counterarguments against).
From what I know, trivialism states that everything is true (and I believe ...
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What's so special about Tarski's T-Schema?
It seems fairly obvious. Even a five year old could probably come up with it. Its obvious that if something is the case, it is true (literally synonyms).
So, am I missing something? Is there a gulf ...
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Alethic Nihlism
I read this article:
https://aeon.co/essays/on-the-advantages-of-believing-that-nothing-is-true
I just don't understand how someone can believe something is the case but is not true. It's like saying ...
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How important is a lack of secrecy in judgments of wrong doing?
How important is a lack of secrecy in judgments of wrong doing? Obviously, no-one should be found guilty of a crime and punished for it, without being informed and making their case. What about e.g. '...
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How is Truth Different From Reality?
Is the whole question like "what is truth" just about finding definitions to things we know but can't put into words to explain (things that are currently ineffable). For example, everyone ...
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What is Alethic Nihilism?
I recently came across this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/15chen5/comment/jtwnkkw/
I think it has something to do with denying the truth predicate without denying the ...
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Is quasi-realism the inverse of quasi-fictionalism (or: would the concept of quasi-fictionalism make as much sense as that of quasi-realism)?
For reasons of partial linguistic symmetry, say "quasi-factualism" for "quasi-realism." Now, suppose that there is an initial truth-value multiset [T, T] and a truth-value set {T, ...
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Truth-value multisets with only one type of element
Suppose we had a multiset of truth-values [T, T], and that was it. Letting those be indexed as T1 and T2, suppose a twofold fragmenting of a related set of propositions (maybe not a set of all-...
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Does the question, "Does S correspond to a fact?" meaningfully exist even if "corresponds to a fact" is not the same as "is true"?
Or, then, do all questions involving the substitute for "is true" in some or another truth theory, exist as meaningful questions? So that any of the following is admissible on its own terms (...
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Questions Regarding Tarski's Semantical Formalization of the Colloquial Usage of Truth
My question is in regard to a problem (albeit a simple one) that I ran into reading Tarski's paper "Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages".
On page 159 Tarski states:
(5) for all p, ‘p' ...
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How do proponents of the correspondence theory of the truth respond to hypothetical counter-factuals?
The vast majority of philosophers today subscribe to the correspondence theory of the truth, that the truth is correspondence to the reality. Two other theories of the truth are the coherence theory ...
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What reasons philosophers give to justify the claim that the Liar is paradoxical?
Most philosophers seem to see the Liar as paradoxical. Typically, they would say:
(L) -- If the Liar is true, then it is false; if it is false, then it is true.
According to what I have read, (L) ...
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Certainty, or at least near-certainty, in philosophy
I love thinking about and discussing philosophy; I consider it an extremely important discipline.
But: In mathematics, many results have been discovered that are virtually certain to be true, ...
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Peirce cuts (mirrored) + demi-negation = demisets?
[Note: I found one essay, about Aristotle, that used the word "demiset," although at a glance it seemed like they might've been substituting this terminology for a counterpart to the subset/...
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Book request: A nosology of untruths
I recall reading several philosophical articles which deal with various types of untruths: lies, misrepresentations, contradictions, omissions, confabulations, delusions, hallucinations, apparitions, ...
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Would the imaginary unit be the truth-value of sentences formed using √𝐧𝐨𝐭?
Section 4.3 of "Sentence Connectives in Formal Logic" discusses a concept of demi-negation or what is (for the sake of the text) resolved to a concept of "the square root of negation&...
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Is this a problem with verisimilitude talk, many-valued-logic talk, or something/nothing else?
A perhaps naive characterization of verisimilitude is "closeness to truth," the proximity coming from the similarity. At least, the SEP article uses, "The number of planets is 9," ...
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Are there conjunctive facts and disjunctive facts?
Facts are supposed to be the grounds for truths. However, consider a conjunctive statement like "Paris is in France and New York City is in the USA". What fact grounds that? Is there such a ...
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What is the difference between understanding and interpretation?
What is the difference in the cognitive processes of understanding and interpreting an utterance (especially written discourse like a legal statute)?
What does a judge do when they interpret law; is ...
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Are there any stoic suggestions around dealing with unneeded hard truths and happy unknowing minds?
Say I really liked sausage, one day decided to learn how it was made, and came out disgusted though not morally opposed.
Later, someone is telling me they really like sausage. They are happy liking ...
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Basic truths as self-justified or parajustified
Some foundationalists maintain that basic truths are self-justifying, which means they are allowing, in some exceptional cases at least, a form of circular reasoning; petitio principii or begging the ...
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"Truth" as a description of our cognition versus "truth" as a description of reality
In reading about the feud of foundationalism, infinitism and coherentism, there seems to be some arguments based on how cognition/reasoning works. However, an argument of the form (vaguely put by me) ...
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How does one experientially know if his analysis on any subject is correct?
I will limit this question to matters in which there does seem to be a correct answer, and will leave matters that are subjective in its nature such as morality aside. In matters that involve getting ...
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