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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A material-constitution model of truth
On one end, let there be the correspondence model of truth, that S is true if and only if S corresponds to the appropriate fact.
On the other, let there be the identity model, that S is true if it IS ...
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What is the axiological basis of the preference of truth to falsity?
Axiologically speaking, why is truth the preferred logical value by humans? In general, why do we prefer true statements to false ones? What about the value of true makes a statement "right,"...
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Is it possible to define Truth?
I hope this is the right place to ask a question like this. I'm a student, I haven't studied philosophy and I'm not familiar with all of the famous philosophers, so this question probably already have ...
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How to define truth, in the context of scientific theories
It seems that scientific theories are not infallible, since it is conceivable that they will be proven wrong (or at least partially wrong), and be replaced by better theories.
Thus, they are not ...
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Are figures of speech true and false?
I'm thinking about Gilbert Ryle, who I believe analyses category mistakes as figures of speech. An example like
the teeth of crows are pearly white
seems neither true nor false. But what about
this ...
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Copernicus vs Kepler vs truth [closed]
I have always felt uneasy about the step from the Ptolemy to the Copernicus system describes as objective truth.
I note that Thomas Aquinas had the same feeling:
“…Reason is employed in another way, ...
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Is there something between objective truth and opinions?
Is there something between objective truth and opinions? Sometimes, there's no objective truth to a question, but is there a way to assess how valid an opinion is and is there a class of opinions that'...
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Truth condition in JTB
I have been told that knowledge is usually analyzed as being justified true belief (although this conception has been criticized - namely after Gettier published his famous article - it seems to be ...
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How do we know certain things to be "obvious", in general?
Sometimes while discussing things, we might come across statements which are pretty obvious to us. And, in English, sometimes we use statements such as -- "It's pretty obvious". But without ...
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Any concrete, real life example of Peirce's Law? [closed]
What would be a real life, concrete example of Peirce's Law?
((p → q) → p) → p
There is a Wikipedia article on it, if you are unfamiliar with it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce's_law
There ...
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Can a true sentence be a lie?
My question is simple - can a true statement be a lie - that is, can the pragmatics of use of a true sentence (context, intension, effects, etc) make a true statement into a lie? Intuitively it seems ...
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Quote check: Hannah Arendt on ideology and capability to reason
I am searching the source and exact words for a quote from Hannah Arendt that I only vaguely remember:
Das Ziel totalitärer Systeme ist es nicht, die Menschen von der eigenen Ideology zu überzeugen. ...
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Can we say that "I Think Therefore I Am" was never about "I", or thinking, or "I" doing the thinking?
Strictly speaking, "Cogito ergo sum" simply means:
"The existence of your own mind can never be in doubt."
Item 1) also describes our true knowledge in its entirety.
Or we can ...
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Actual and potential truth for neo-verificationists
Neo-verificationists such as Martin-Löf and Prawitz make a distinction between actual and potential truth of a proposition, roughly defined as follows:
... that a proposition A is actually true means ...
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Truth value for objects that are not included in definitions
Consider the statement "This triangle has radius 3" and the statement "This cat is a chihuahua". Both radius and chihuahua are terms defined for different kind of objects than the objects we are ...
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If-then statement and time between antecedent and consequent
Suppose the following statement. "If I kick the ball then the ball will hit the wall." Can this sentence have a truth value? I mean the time that I kick the ball, it hasn't reached the wall so the ...
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Are opinions considered statements?
‘Aristotle was great’. Is this a statement?
I consider a statement to be something either true or false (but not both).
For an individual, this may be considered a statement (because either you ...
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Is political correctness a result of a more rational society?
Yes, I am aware of the insanity in the question. However, that is precisely why I am asking. The insanity stems from the popular idea, especially amongst academics or the type of people you might find ...
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How do we call a tendency of people to call things facts without further justification?
People usually talk as if it was some absolute truth what they are saying. What philosophy has taught me is that we cannot be sure of anything. For everything there exists some counterargument. If a ...
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Is this conditional donation morally permissible?
About a week ago, at the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic in Bulgaria, a Bulgarian entrepreneur (Ivaylo Penchev, founder of Walltopia), offered a conditional donation of medical ventilators to a state-...
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Do Mathematics "exist" in some sort of "Reality" that is different from our Physical Reality
I will explain why I am asking this question. Let's say, there are mathematical truths and truths about our physical reality. But, there is no way we can establish the truth of any statement about our ...
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"Dinosaurs did exist once". Is it knowledge or is it only justified belief?
On Wikipedia, knowledge is defined as justified true
belief:
The concept of justified true belief states that in order to know that a given proposition is true, one must not only believe the ...
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Why do I accept some inconsequential claims as "obviously true" without evidence? E.g. "Most people don't like to be hit on the head with a hammer."
There are certain claims that I accept as obviously true without (much) evidence. For example:
Most people don't like to be hit on the head with a hammer.
Donald Trump ate dinner some time last week....
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Do philosophers think beliefs are bearers of truth-value?
In the literature about what sorts of things have a truth-value, the idea that acts of belief bear truth-value seems present, yet uncommon. On the other hand, objects of belief like propositions or ...
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Citation regarding a quote having to do with "truth" and what "an animal needs to believe"
I'm trying to run down a quote from (I think) Hegel which I read several years ago and have not been able to find since.
The gist of it is this...
"What an animal, for the sake of its own survival,...
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Excluded middle versus bivalence [duplicate]
In logic, the law of excluded middle (or the principle of excluded middle) states that for any proposition, either that proposition is true or its negation is true.
This principle should not be ...
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When is it meaningful to say that an undecided conjecture is true or false?
I see that other questions have already been asked about mathematical truth but here I want to ask clarifications on a particular perspective.
One can think the answer to the question could be "when ...
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Is it possible to determine if one's perceptions and logic are valid?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I live in a world divided into tribes with strongly-differing views. My tribe says that many of our opponent's values are immoral and much of their leadership ...
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Plato's method for reaching the truth?
I wonder about Plato and, in particular, about his method of reaching the truth. One can suppose that the method is based on the practice of his dualistic philosophy, which would aim to free the soul ...
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Truth values of sentences
Frege proposed that the meaning of a sentence is its truth value in "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (close to "On Sense and Meaning"). This is not correct because some (many) English sentences do not have ...
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Do we have a right to know some things?
Do we have a right to know some things?
Obviously you don't have a moral right to know what I had for breakfast today -- though you might be able to find out [it was pizza]. And we have a right to ...
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The truth of statements which do not capture everything about the object [closed]
Logically it could be true to say: "All human beings are mortal (and therefore Peter is mortal because Peter is a human being)."
But the above statement could be false in a sense, because mortality ...
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Did any philosopher promote a “pure” pragmatic conception of truth?
William James often associated truth with usefulness (utility), but overall his conception of truth was not pure in this regard. It shares some elements of the correspondence and coherence theory. For ...
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Is there consensus on the framework of truth one should use when talking about moral statements?
My understanding is that for a moral realist, moral statements are propositions that have a true/false property that can guide reasoning. However, most articles I have read do not talk about what ...
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Did medieval philosophers believe that Truth is causally active?
From the modern standpoint, truth is about propositions or beliefs. Getting true beliefs is not something that just comes to us by itself; evidence has to be gathered by us, we have to reason, ...
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The future in the deflationary theory of truth
How does the deflationary theory of truth, which defines true and false in the following straightforward way
The proposition that p is true iff p.
The proposition that p is false iff p is not true.
...
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Is it ethical to research potentially harmful topics? [closed]
Some truths are very unpleasant. Some fields may even be unpleasant to research, because the researcher may wind up discovering something very disconcerting about the world.
Should we investigate ...
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Does every truth have to be provable based on evidence?
I know the answer is "no" in general due to Gödel's Theory of Incompleteness, but I mean this question in a more real-world sense (i.e. scientific sense). In other words, I am talking about empirical ...
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Ramifications of a world of unrestrained truth [duplicate]
Are there any papers/books/studies on the ramifications of a theoretical world of unrestrained truth, meaning no secrets? A part of the motivation for this question is the fictional show, Code Geass, ...
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Is it possible to prove that a particular statement cannot be disproved without creating a contradiction?
In the following link (http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Metaphysics_ExistenceExists.html) the authors are basically arguing that there are statements that we cannot deny without contradicting ...
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A Paradox for Anti-Realism?
Semantic Anti-Realists hold that a claim has a (constructive) proof if the claim is true. I wonder whether this position runs into a version of Yablo's supposedly non-circular version of the liar ...
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What does it mean for a statement if we cannot disprove it?
In the following link (http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Metaphysics_ExistenceExists.html) the authors are basically arguing that there exists some truth that we cannot disprove by any other ...
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How do we call a statement that is unthinkable for any person to not be the case? [duplicate]
The example of such an unthinkable or unimaginable thing for a person could be non-existence, therefore argument against existence seems to be so absurd. Aren't we calling such things axioms or ...
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Do we have a name for the following axiom?: We can never know for sure whether we know everything that exists
Let's assume that our words and sentences are able to describe the truth. It is clear that whatever we know - even if we have knowledge about an entire universe and every position and momentum of its ...
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Noam Chomsky vs 9/11 Truth movement. Is Noam's Logic legit?
When Noam Chomsky was asked about what he thought about the collapse of building 7 at the University of Florida in 2013, he replied that only a minuscule part of the scientific community backed up the ...
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Ref request: Reality objective or subjective
This is a request for a reference on (within) philosophy.stackexchange.com.
It follows from discussions around this question.
I am asking after having tried my luck at websearch.
What I am searching ...
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Is every sentence we write or utter either true or false? [closed]
Please read the complete description before putting any answer / comment, Thank you.
I've been just thinking through this question which I can frame it like this:
Can I write or utter any sentence ...
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Is mathematics truth? As in the sense of that which is manifest or possible in reality?
In mathematics there are imaginary numbers which cannot be represented directly in reality (the physical world). For example, you can't have i apples where
i = √-1 (square root of -1)
Can we ...
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Scientific truth vs. mathematical truth
It is said that in the real world nothing can be proven to be absolutely true because there is always a way for a statement to be disproved by a counterargument. For example, a person "A" could say ...
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Is it true in some sense that the only "truth" people are capable of knowing is the "truth" that they assume to be true?
What are some viewpoints on the following assertion in philosophy and logic?
Anything people argue to be true is only their assertion based on some axioms or premises which they assume to be true (...
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