The issue I see with calling these objective truth is, I am sure this is true to you, and I am sure you think this is true in general, but what if I don't know what these symbols mean? What if these arrows, chevrons and parentheses do not evoke anything in me beyond shapes drawn on a screen? Then these statements wouldn't be true to me, they would be drawings, and while I could say it is true to me that I see these drawings, I couldn't say these drawings refer to some independent truth. — leo
This problem, of course, is due to the conflation of truth and meaning. The 'official' semantics of our shared language is too coarse and inflexible to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of every person's bespoke use and interpretation of their national language. One can imagine a futuristic society in which each person's private dialect of their national language is publicly translatable into every other person's private dialect. If in addition the causes of every person's utterances were also understood, then every utterance in the language could be publicly interpreted as being necessarily correct. — sime
Don't forget to answer: "You'd say that you're more certain that the experiences stem from a world that doesn't exist aside from our minds?" — Terrapin Station
I don't have a third-person perspective to know for sure, but then the very idea of a third-person perspective stems from a mind. My view is everything is mind-dependent in some way. Your view is that there are mind-independent things. In my view you can't use the mind-dependent concept of mind-independent things to prove that there are mind-independent things.
What you see as objective facts, I see as ideas that some minds try to impose on others based on mind-dependent criteria. — leo
Your own definition makes the same distinction I am making. A belief is a feeling and feelings tend to be projected onto things that have no feelings, which is how subjectivity crops up. A belief is a feeling of being certain, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is true. You can feel certain, but that doesn't necessarily mean that what your feeling is about is true. As your definition states, it is what those feelings are about - meaning some state of affairs independent of your beliefs and feelings - that are true. Your feelings are just another state-of-affairs which I can have beliefs about, but your feelings exist in a such a way independent of any of my feelings or beliefs about them. How your feelings are are true, but what they are about is a different story entirely.What is the difference between truth and belief? Cambridge dictionary defines belief as "the feeling of being certain that something exists or is true". You're implicitly saying that there is a true way to differentiate between truth and belief. — leo
We are all stating beliefs. The real shape of the Earth, independent of our statements about it's shape, is the truth - objective. Some of our terms are meant to be approximations, like the terms we use to describe the Earth's shape. "Accuracy" is a term that I like to use when it comes to the relationship between our claims and the truth. Our claims are more or less accurate when it comes to describing how things actually are (the truth). So some of these terms may be more accurate, but not necessarily entirely accurate, than others when describing the shape of the Earth.You're saying it is true that the Earth is a sphere, but many people say it is true that the Earth is an ellipsoid, and many other people say that it is true the Earth is neither a sphere nor an ellipsoid but something that approximates these shapes, and many other people say it is true that the Earth is flat. Who is right? Who is stating a truth and who is stating a belief? — leo
Asking how truth is objective is incoherent because truth and objectivity are the same thing. If truth/objective is independent of our beliefs then it doesn't matter whether you disagree or not. It doesn't even matter if you are aware of it or not. Truth is independent of your awareness.If I disagree with you, how is your truth objective? — leo
Your beliefs are such that they exist independent of what I think or believe about them. — Harry Hindu
It is incoherent to use Solipsist in the plural sense. If solipsism is the case, then there can only be one solipsist. If solipsism is the case, then beliefs become incoherent as there would be no aboutness to beliefs. The idea of solipsism makes the concept of "mind" incoherent.Solipsists do not agree with that, so how are my beliefs objective? — leo
Then we would always be talking past each other - never talking about the same thing.If there is no objective truth, then why do so many people on this forum feel the need to quote other philosophers as if those other philosophers hold some truth about others than just the philosopher being quoted? — Harry Hindu
Because they agree with these philosophers, they share the same point of view about something, or they believe they do. This is my view, my personal truth. If you disagree with me, then you have a different truth, and we're not sharing the same truth, so it isn't objective. — leo
You seem to implicitly assume an objective reality that can be somehow accessed, referring to 'causes' as something objective that everyone would agree on, to personal dialects as being objectively translatable into one another. How could we agree on causes of what we experience if we don't agree on what we experience? How could we agree on an objective translation if in the first place we don't have access to what other people experience?
We use language as a rough way to try to see what others experience, if we had direct access to what others experience then your idea would be practical, but we don't, and that's the problem. Seeing the problem as a mere limitation of our current language is masking the deeper issue, it isn't a limit of our language, it is a limit of our ability to know what others experience. Words do not convey what others experience, they convey what we believe they experience, from our first-person point of view, making our language more precise wouldn't change that.
If there are experiences some people have that other people don't, why would the people who don't have these experiences agree that these experiences exist? For all they know those who claim having such experiences could be lying, or they could interpret these experiences falsely in terms of other experiences they've had. And that's not a limitation of our current language, that's a fundamental limitation of us not being omniscient. It seems to me that if we have different experiences, then we can't find something that everyone agrees on, or maybe everyone could agree on something temporarily but later on some would realize that they didn't have the same thing in mind when they were agreeing.
Maybe you will come to agree with me on this, but if you don't then that would only serve to support the idea that truth is personal. Until we find an example of truth that everyone agrees on, the concept of truth that applies to everyone is merely an idea that some people have. — leo
If it is presented to us, it is as we understand it; if we are not present, questions about anything are irrational. And foolish. Which is what I think you were trying to show. — Mww
The reason I agree that there is no objective truth is because of a "technical" issue re truth in analytic philosophy that I described above. (Truth is a property of propositions in analytic phil, propositions are the meanings of statements, and then my view stems from what I think the ontology of meaning is and how I think that the "link" between propositions and other things work--namely, that it's a judgment that a mind has to make.)
I do, however, think that there are objective facts. Most folks on the board seem to use "truth" so that it amounts to the same thing as "fact" (even though a couple different senses of "fact" tend to be conflated here, too). So that leads to some confusion. — Terrapin Station
as Terrapin Station seems to be doing, ignores half the problem. — Echarmion
If a proposition is true when it matches a fact - and the fact is objective - then why in your view would that truth not be objective? — AJJ
Or if a proposition is neither true nor false until someone judges it, which one is it when two people judge differently, and why? — AJJ
The matching would have to be objective. That is, it would have to be a property of extramental things.
How are we supposed to arrive at extramental matching? — Terrapin Station
True to the people who judge it to match. False to people who judge otherwise. (Simplifying so there are no other options.) — Terrapin Station
Because something can match another thing regardless of anyone thinking it does. — AJJ
But we can even challenge or doubt that "Objective Reality exists", so "objective truth exists" is not an objective truth, it is a personal truth. — leo
It seems to me that the concept is used by people who want to impose their personal truth on others, as if they had a transcendent access to a supposed objective reality beyond perception. — leo
we'd be better off simply talking about personal truth, and not pretend that our personal truths somehow apply to everyone and everything. — leo
How would that work? We'd need to be able to describe/detail the process. — Terrapin Station
Right, so we're talking about what matching, text marks that look like this: "The dog is on the rug"? Those sounds, or what?The dog is on the rug. If the dog is on the rug, then that proposition matches a fact. If it isn’t, it doesn’t. I’m not seeing where I come in to that matching process. — AJJ
I don’t think meaning is extramental. — AJJ
So once a meaning is created, which is an event in someone's head, then the way that we can extramentally see if a fact matches the proposition is . . . what? — Terrapin Station
The match is independent of our mental recognition of it. — AJJ
I find that option no less plausible than believing the experiences we have in common stem from a world that exists independently of us. I am sure that I have experiences, I am confident that others have some experiences in common with me, I am less certain that these experiences stem from a world independent of us (as in a world that doesn't depend on minds).
I have evidence of mind (my own), I don't have evidence of something that doesn't depend on mind. — leo
The issue I see with calling these objective truth is, I am sure this is true to you, and I am sure you think this is true in general, but what if I don't know what these symbols mean? — leo
What if these arrows, chevrons and parentheses do not evoke anything in me beyond shapes drawn on a screen? Then these statements wouldn't be true to me, they would be drawings, and while I could say it is true to me that I see these drawings, I couldn't say these drawings refer to some independent truth. — leo
and I too could create my own system in which I assign truth to such or such proposition, but that doesn't mean that the truth of these propositions would extend beyond the system they were formulated in. — leo
Because the way I see it, such a system was created out of perceptions and thoughts, and it doesn't apply to people who have perceptions/thoughts incompatible with it — leo
It seems inevitable to me that truth is personal, that we can't find a truth that applies to everyone — leo
What if some great catastrophe occurred in Africa very recently and I am not yet aware of it and it turns out all lions are dead? — leo
Or what if I consider that it is meaningless to talk about what goes on in a place "at this moment" if I am not in that place? — leo
People could very well disagree with that proposition in a reasonable way according to them — leo
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