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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Language confusion; necessary/nomological/true in all worlds
I got confused by the way different people use language in the context of physicalism.
In particular, Kripke seems to equate "necessary truths" with something that is true in all possible worlds. Is ...
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How is Wittgenstein’s “notorious paragraph” about the Gödel's Theorem not obviously correct?
Timm Lampert quotes from Wittgenstein's "notorious paragraph" (§8 of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Appendix 3) in http://wab.uib.no/agora/tools/alws/collection-6-issue-1-article-...
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Circularity between truth and meaning?
These two common claims are equally appealing:
(1) the meaning of a ( declarative) sentence consists in its truth conditions
(2) the truth of a sentence depends on its meaning
But are we moving ...
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What are the identity conditions for " a truth" [closed]
Here I'm not talking about "truth" in general ( as when one says " truth is correspondence between thought and reality") but about truth considered as a particular truth, as when one says " this ...
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Are there recent coherence theory of truth for mathematical truths?
Are there any recent works (papers, books, etc) in philosophy of mathematics where it is given an account of mathematical truth in terms of a coherence theory of mathematical truth?
I am interested ...
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Has any consensualists written on Wittgenstein?
"This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a
rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the
rule" - Wittgenstein
This paradox is purported to call ...
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What is the division of philosophical doctrines with respect to absoluteness/relativity of truth?
Right now I am listening to a talk on youtube which starts with the declaration "of course we all know truth is a relative notion".
There are certainly some directions in philosophy which ...
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Should truth entail possible truth?
It is a well-accepted axiom of modal logic that truth implies possible truth.
Is there any philosophical argument against this conclusion? In other words, should truth entail possible truth?
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What's the role of certainty in discussions about philosophical positions?
Karl Popper was one of the twentieth century’s preeminent philosophers of science. He was an avowed realist who was dedicated to the correspondence theory of truth. In his seventh decade of life, ...
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Is fallibilism a better option than absolute certainty?
Fallibilism is the epistemological thesis that no belief (theory, view, thesis, and so on) can ever be rationally supported or justified in a conclusive way. Always, there remains a possible doubt as ...
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What is the connection between objective uncertainty and truth as subjectivity in Kierkegaard?
I just want to understand clearly what is the possible connection between the objective uncertainty and the truth as subjectivity of Soren Kierkegaard. Since we cannot find much in his books his ...
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How can we be certain that we cannot be certain?
I read a lot about people saying that it is impossible to be certain about anything with 100% certainty, but that means that this rule in and of itself must be true 100%.
I mean the rule that "we ...
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Frege: Truth as an expression of assertoric force
I am writing an essay on Frege's redundancy theory of truth. As far as I have read, his theory is that the word 'true' does not add anything to the thought of a sentence in which it appears, however, ...
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Did any philosopher make the claim that mathematics can be as illusory as visual information?
The Greeks postulated that the world we observe may be just an illusion and Kant based some of his philosophy on that very idea. From that idea, came the idea that mathematical truths are more certain ...
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What are some philosophical arguments that explain why mathematics allow us to reach a greater truth than empirical evidences?
Is it really the case? Was there a proof of sort that shows mathematical facts are more certain than empirical facts? What are the arguments for and against that claim?
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Is there any philosophy that associates the absolute truth with monism?
I never know what people mean by absolute truth, it sounds like they're referring to a truth above all truths, but there are many truths.
So I was wondering if there were a lot of philosophy that ...
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Why should I trust experts - and what's the place of experts in a democracy?
If we trust experts, do we then elevate them as determiners of the truth? When we trust our surgeon to do a good job in surgery because he is an expert, do I forfeit my right to criticize experts on ...
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Did Nietzsche violate Christian morality in his life? Was he urging anyone to do so? [closed]
Did Nietzsche violate Christian morality in his life, in his behaviour? Was he urging anyone to do so? He seems to have had a long standing grudge against it.
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Is there any way to gain "truth"/accuracy in social truth? How?
Is there any way to gain "truth"/accuracy in social truth? How?
What seems to make it difficult is that I don't know if social truth has any generally accepted epistemologies, truth deduction ...
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Under what definitions of truth and knowledge (especially Bayesian) are 'definitely knowing' and 'certain' different
Under what definitions of truth and knowledge are 'definitely knowing' and 'certain' different? Apologies if too much of a semantic question, but I think we should agree that we can have a sense of ...
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On Truth and Lying
If A, consciously, reports false data to B, and B (or anyone else) has no way to verify, then no one can make the statement, "A lied". So, there exists no such person with respect to whom A lied.
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Does Reality change when theory change?
I was going to include a caveat to prove a premise: to show that truth has become more subjective and then proceeding from older to newer theories of truth, I would cite a survey showing how ...
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What does Tarski mean when he says that truth is a property of sentences?
A fundamental statement of Tarski's Theory of Truth is that truth is a property of sentences. What does this statement mean?
What kind of Truth is it referring to?
What is the formal definition of '...
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How is the truth multiple things?
For the philosopher, the Truth must be a surprisingly intractable concept. Truth has been called subjective, relative and plural. Also intriguingly: Truth is relative and plural. Now I realize this is ...
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Anything that is wrong involves some kind of imbalance (true or false?)
I had a friend who claimed this to be true:
Anything that is wrong involves some kind of imbalance
Examples where it works:
Overweight. Imbalance in the amount of calories eaten and calories ...
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Truth in Science vs. Truth in Math
Two scientists independently try to solve a problem to predict a certain phenomenon. The two scientists come up with different answers, but both of their solutions seem logical to each other. How do ...
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How to disprove "I'm entitled to my opinion"
Background
There is an article in The Conversation that attempts to disprove the notion that people are "entitled to their opinions." That is, people have a right to believe whatever they ...
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Can a fact be ambiguous? [closed]
I have read online and personally believe that every statement has some degree of ambiguity to it. With this in mind, I was wondering how any propositions can be true. For example, I have heard some ...
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References discussing self-evident truths?
I am interested in philosophical or logic-based texts that discuss the nature of self-evident truths, which seem related to Alvin Plantinga's discussion of so-called properly basic beliefs. I am more ...
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Arendt on Factual Truth in "Truth and Politics"
I'm reading Hannah Arendt's "Truth and Politics" (1967). I thought I was getting it, but then I read two statements that to me, seem to be in conflict with one another:
"Factual truth, on the ...
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Do good explanations have to be true?
Is it so that whenever one gives an explanation to a question starting from 'why' or 'how' the explanation that we receive in return always is true in nature?
From one perspective, an explanation is ...
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Where do thoughts come from?
When the next thought comes, try to catch its source.
Is there an entity "you" there? Or does the thought come from silence/nothingness? Is this "you" is just a thought that comes from this silence/...
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Authors on Truth over Illusion to achieve happiness
It is accepted that white lies and creating fantasies is sometimes needed to deal with psychological pain specially with children. Sometimes reality is hard to deal with therefore people tend to ...
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What's a Good Introduction/Summary to Probabilistic Logic?
I hadn't even heard of Probabilistic Logic before today. My world view was already leaning in this direction as I never really put much stock in either the law of the excluded middle or the principal ...
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Dynamic concept of "truth"
I've recently read a book in which a certain sentence sparked a question in my mind:
"the Platonic philosophy is a search for truth, the certain truth.
Such truth... is necessarily static" (...
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Why is belief necessary for justified true belief?
In justified true belief it is said that for a person to know a fact it must be true, she must believe in it and she must be justified in believing it.
My question is: Is belief necessary? Why is the ...
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Is Tarski's schema T trivial?
Tarski's schema T asserts that:
(T) x is true if and only if p
where x is the name of any sentence of the language in question and p is the expression which forms the translation of this sentence ...
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Is it possible to know the truth value of a statement without knowing any information about that statement?
Is it possible to know the truth value of a statement without knowing any information about that statement?
If no, then to me that would imply that truth values are not absolute and depend on how we ...
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Authors that wrote on how to look for the truth efficiently?
The human mind is perhaps not efficient when it comes to looking for the truth, specially when you are emotionally attached to an idea about any subject such us close relatives, God, your government, "...
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Is it possible to define argument validity as a formula?
Let A, B and C be propositions. Define ARG(A, B, C) as the following argument:
A.
B.
Therefore, C.
My goal is to create a formula whose truth value is equivalent to "ARG(A, B, C) is ...
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Is "all truth is relative" an absolute truth?
All truths are relative, and this is the only absolute principle.
wrote August Comte.
Anyway a radical relativism poses a serious problem: if every truth is always relative, is the latter an ...
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Can my attitude kill you?
Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish... -Nietzsche
Would it be morally reprehensible to tell a truth to someone if I know or ...
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Is there a single definition of truth?
Is there a single definition of truth in philosophy?
Seeing multiple definitions has inclined me to believe that there is no proper definition of philosophy that everyone can agree on.
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Interpretation of Nietzsche's "We have art in order not to die of the truth."
Can someone please shed some light on the following quote given by German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:-
We have art in order not to die of the truth (The Will to Power §822).
As far as I can ...
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The relationship between truth and consistency
It is often claimed that a scientific theory can be proven false, but can never be proven true.
In abstract terms, for a particular experiment, let T represent a theoretical prediction, and let E ...
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Verum or T in dynamic epistemic logic models
I've been reading a paper on dynamic epistemic logic where they use T in a way that I'm not really familar with. The paper is here by Wesley Holliday, page 16: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dae6/...
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Can a relativist also be an absolutist about truth?
If your starting point is relativism (the view that there is no truth 'out there' because truth is subject to the individual) then you could deny the law of non contradiction. With this law out of ...
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Strawson criticism of Austin theory of truth
I'm quoting a snippet of Strawson paper on truth.
[Austin] says that, when we declare a statement to be true, the relation between the statement and the world which our declaration "asserts to ...
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Is it possible to know something without any assumptions?
I know a similar question already exists on this site, but please bear with me.
Descartes's famous Dubito ergo Cogito ergo sum preassumes the existence of an "I".
Since there is an assumption ...
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From evolution: Why do we need truth, meaning of life and all that stuff?
On pure evolutionary vision, we are a specie coming after the monkey. It follows we have many monkey-manners, even those related to the way we learn.
From evolution it follows also the idea that ...
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