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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How can anyone justify conspiracy theories / scientific skepticism
The number of conspiracy like theories is growing exponentially.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories
Here are the most famous.
How many of these have achieved any tangible success ...
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Question regarding ethics of the human to the dog relationship
I'm in the process of treating an elderly diabetic dog(diabetes in dogs is manifested very closely to the one in humans) and constantly hitting the wall of ethics(in my view) regarding human-dog ...
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Roko's Basilisk as Descartes' evil genius?
I'll try to pose a shortened version of Roko's Basilisk below and then ask about how it relates to Descartes' evil genius:
The idea is that down the line may it be decades or centuries from
now, ...
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What are the implications of spreading stories that are fake solely because they support a opinion?
I see quite often on many social mediums, the radio, news, as well as advertisements everywhere statements that are untrue or are misleading that support certain opinions. I think it is completely ...
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Supervaluationism and Theories of Truth
How does the supervaluationalist defend his/her theory of truth since the correspondence theory of truth seems to presuppose bivalence? It would seem then that the only truth is Super-Truth. And, the ...
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Why is Tarski's semantic theory of truth formally correct and materially adequate?
In "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics" (1944) Alfred Tarski asserts that a satisfactory definition of truth must be both formally correct and materially adequate. A ...
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Is there such a thing as a 'necessary truth'?
Wikipedia (note the redirect) defines 'necessary truth' as statements which "could not be untrue", and I assume that this is how the term is usually used. A search through the SEP shows that while ...
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Are mathematical statements necessary truths?
I apologize if a similar question has been asked here, but I haven't found it.
Are mathematical statements necessary truths?
By 'mathematical statements', I mean both mathematical axioms as well as ...
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The Truth-Falsehood Dichotomy and Logic
Some philosophers argue against truth bivalency, and say that not every statement must be true or false, but some statements can be untrue without being false, or truth-ambiguous, or both true and ...
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Could a scientific unification theory and scientific method itself be misleading?
I aspire to one day be a scientist (specifically an astrophysicist) and I have been reading up on many novels (like those of Asimov) which look into the development of humanity. I know that our ...
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Aren't rational thinkers falling a prey to a logical fallacy?
All rational thinkers would clearly know that in a series of arguments anything that appeals to faith would be considered a fallacy.
Yet the rational process itself (the belief that arguments based ...
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What are the philosophical implications of Tarski's truth definition?
I am a Math student currently taking my Master's Degree, and last semester I took an introductory course on Mathematical Logic. One of the subjects we covered there was Tarski's truth definition; and ...
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Why do many people derive comfort from the belief in an objective reality?
Many people derive comfort from the idea that there is an objective reality, and that there are objective truths, independent of our own individual subjective perceptions. Why should this be so? Why ...
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Were we born to believe? [closed]
This is a controversial question and not one that necessarily implies a Super Natural intervention, but I am curious about your opinion.
Many of you I would hope is aware of the fact that living our ...
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The Customer is not Always Right [closed]
This issue has always been a philosophic issue to me, sense I have worked at McDonalds for the last six years of my life. On minute one of my first day of training, I was told "the customer is always ...
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Truth is singular. Its "versions" are mistruths [closed]
In the beginning of the legendary movie called Cloud Atlas... Somni 541 is sitting in a room, and an "Archivist" comes in. The conversation starts...
Archivist:
On behalf of my Ministry and the ...
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What distinguishes logical necessity, logical consequence, logical truth, and tautology from one another?
The text I'm reading distinguishes logical necessity, logical consequence, logical truth, and tautology from one another; however it doesn't make their distinctions especially perspicuous.
As far as ...
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On the Nature of Truth [closed]
I'm fairly new to philosophical readings- that is, I've only parsed through various textbooks of antiquity. My questions, regarding the nature of truth, is as follows:
Is contemporary consensus ...
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Why do we celebrate made up stuff?
Time goes in one direction. It doesn't make sense for one to say "3 years go on this day...". Its not the same day. Change has occurred. We, this world, everything we know is in a different state (...
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Why do we tend towards discretizing things around and within us?
Why do we tend towards discretizing things around and within us? Do our senses (for space and time) fool us into this notion all the way into the need for discretizing abstractions themselves, e.g. An ...
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A non question pertaining to the the law of identity (axiom)
The Law of Identity states "That every thing is the same with itself and different from another." A is A and not ~A.
This seems to assume a perspective which facilitates this conclusion (hence an ...
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In what sense are proofs just arguments that convince us, not arguments that establish truth?
In mathematics and logic, it seems that once a proof of some theorem is discovered, then it is taken to be "absolute truth" within the axiomatic system from which it was derived. My question is: are ...
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What is taken as truth in philosophy?
First and foremost I should say that I am not educated in Philosophy; I study Mathematics.
Essentially, the job of a mathematician is to prove theorems by logical deduction from axioms, which are ...
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Is there a category for statements that are never true?
I studied logic and found no category for statements that are not impossible but never true (e.g. "The earth is flat.") to differ them from statements that could be true ("I'm wearing blue shoes.") or ...
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Perception and truth [closed]
This is an afterthought of a TEDx video I caught this week on moral philosophy and its links with truth: "Perception is truth." Consider the following situations: ...
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Do we have an understanding of the universe? [closed]
My question is if we as rational creatures have come to terms that the universe is huge, there are planets bigger than earth, and with the advance of string theory, have we as humans finally have a ...
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what is the practical use of Tarski's Convention T?
In software engineering one often starts with defining principles, standards and guidelines that programmers should stick to and apply in their products. There comes a moment when one has to evaluate ...
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Does Fodor present any argument for his use of computable methods in his view of the mind?
In defense of his Language of Thought Hypothesis (SEP article), Jerry Fodor argues that Thought is recursively compositional in just the same way that Language is. When we understand a sentence, we ...
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What is the difference between Fact and Truth?
I'm curious about the difference between Fact and Truth. I was searching on the internet if I could find it. But still I'm confused about the exact meaning.
I first read the forum discussion here
Fact ...
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What are the differences between Tarski's 1933 and 1956 truth definitions?
The paper "The Seven Virtues of Simple Type Theory" mentions that it uses the same trick (due to Tarski) to define the semantics that is also used by first-order logic. I interpreted this a reference ...
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What is the essential something that Heidegger suggests that philosophers can learn from poetry?
In this transcript of a conversation between Simon Critchley & Badiou on Badiou's book Being and Event, Badiou states:
And after that, I have also to understand why there is in modern times a ...
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The difference between soundness and completeness
Is anyone able to articulate the difference between the properties of soundness and completeness insofar as they relate to the validity of the truth tree/semantic tableau?
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What makes Humans different from a chemical computer?
Are we all robots? Is our DNA the 0's and 1's of computer code? Are we an advanced computer system, with instead of keyboard and mouse input... input from our senses. Our database being our brain ...
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What are the methods to evaluate a supernatural statement as carefully as possible? [closed]
I've found out that it is hard to evaluate the truth of a statement which has following 5 properties:
They concern events in the future.
They are so supernatural, to the point of being outside of the ...
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A simple paradox of True or False [duplicate]
In a piece of paper, it was written:
The statement written in the paper is false.
Is that statement actually true or false?
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How do correspondence theories handle statements like these?
I have a number of true statements. Each of these statements is a case where I have difficulty seeing how (assuming physicalism) the statement could correspond to a state of affairs. My question is: ...
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Was Karl Popper a "dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism"? If so, why, or how?
While reading the Wikipedia article on Karl Popper, I was surprised to find that one of the article's sources, in its lede paragraph, claims that Karl Popper was a "dedicated opponent of all forms of ...
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Is scientism a self defeating epistemology?
Some who have argued against the validity of scientism have argued that the view that only science can uncover truth is not a scientific discovery but rather a epistemology. Hence it has been claimed ...
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Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal?
There is broad agreement that knowledge is more than just true belief. What, though, must be added to true belief to get knowledge? According to traditional epistemology, two more ingredients are ...
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How does Logic define "true" and "false"?
"Truth", "Falsehood" are pretty axiomatic expressions, but even axioms need to be defined in common language terms.
What are the "official" definitions of these in Informal logic, Formal logic, ...
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How do quantifiers work in predicate logic?
Predicate logic is somewhat like propositional logic, except that where propositional logic only works on the level of whole sentences (e.g. A = "Socrates is mortal", B = "All ...
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How can we reason about "if P then Q" or "P only if Q" statements in propositional logic?
When you have a propositional sentence of the form P ⊃ Q — which we might read as "if P, then Q" — how can you tell when it is true, or false, based on the truth-values of P and ...
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What does "the case" mean?
Reading some philosophy articles, I keep coming across the phrases "it is the case that X" and "it is not the case that Y". I get the impression that this phrase has a somewhat different nuance than "...
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Are truth-claims inappropriate?
Strictly speaking, is it inappropriate to make a truth-claim?
I am seeking an answer from Philosophy (Epistemology), and feel free to use logic
I am speaking "theoretically", not "practically"
I am ...
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Why do we naturally regard the unfamiliar as ridiculous?
(Since there is no Psychology.SE, Ph.SE seemed like the best place to ask this question.)
I have noticed that when a person is presented with an unfamiliar idea, the default reaction is often to ...
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Can something be actually possible yet logically impossible?
By actual possibility I mean the possibility which is implied by ability or power.
By logical possibility I mean whether concepts of reality contradict each other or not.
I believe that knowledge ...
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Claims that we know (virtually) nothing - can they be refuted?
Here's an argument that I've heard a number of times from friends and on the Internet:
"The ratio of what we know about the universe to what we have yet to
discover is so small - it is therefore ...
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Is uttering a true statement and by that making it false considered lying?
Let's say my friend has a fly on her head, but she does not know it.
I say to her: "You don't know that you have a fly on your head".
Right before I uttered my statement - it was true, but right after ...
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Have there been any attempts to "redo" epistemology without the factivity of knowledge?
Mainstream analytic epistemology seems to take for granted that for S to know p, p must be true. I do not share this intuition. It seems that to be properly internalist about knowledge, one can't ...
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Is the concept of “knowledge” important for philosophy?
I learned the definition of “knowledge” of justified true belief. I wonder whether it is important in any branch of philosophy? If I think about information per se, this boils down to technical ...
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