Absolute truth?

@Cyracuz,

My simple response is no.

@cicerone imposter,

Mine too. Which makes it kind of strange, mildly spoken, to say that philosophy deals with absolute certainty...

@Cyracuz,

Philosophy has different aspects depending upon many variables of human experience that includes culture, time of life, political system, environment, genes, and religion. It's impossible to tie down all of them into one, true, concept that applies to all.

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@cicerone imposter,

“Philosophy and religion - what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?”
- William Golding, Rights of Passage (1980)

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Sure there is an absolute truth, it is just you that don't want it to be. Which means that depending on you philosophy is dead.

You should urgently begin to think about why and how the statement, "There is no absolute truth" is self-contradictory, by asserting itself an absolute truth. This fact is like a traffic sign written, "Hey, you are wrong!"

How did you get your driver's licenses?

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@guigus,

In case you did not read my deconstruction of the simplistic "self-contradicton" argument, I re-state it here.

Quote:

The evidential support for the statement that "there are no absolute truths" is pragmatic in the sense that "truth" is "what works" and is always open to revision. That implies that "truth" has an aspect of temporality whereas "absolute truth" does not. So transcendentally "Absolute truth" is beyond the realm of any temporal agent seeking effective axioms, and it is from that transcendental level that "logicality" is being evoked. In the Wittgensteinian sense, the word "truth" has different meanings at the transcendental and pragmatic levels.

The fundamental error by formalists is to assume that the word "truth" has a fixed meaning.

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@fresco,

So in resume...it is true now that you did wrote what you did, but on your own assumption, in a thousand years it might be not true...hmmmm, that is odd...

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@guigus,

guigus, Absolute truth is based on personal belief; it's not universal.

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@fresco,

...it may even be the case that the word truth might have more then one meaning although I only know one that is true, but the fact remains that with one or more meanings there must exist a state of affairs in each and every one of them...even language needs a fixed point...just as meanings are things to...

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@Fil Albuquerque,

...it is true, that if you think that there is no truth then you think it...
...it is true, that I disagree with you on that and you know it...
....it is also true, that you or I one day may change our minds on that regard...

Truth is precisely on about "things working", and "meanings working" and why they work...
... even if we can have more then one perspective on how something relates with us, each perspective is valid on its own right, it concerns a state of affairs justified by its own manifestation if nothing else...the problem to me is not to know if things are or are not true, but to know where they are to be true...in what context do they make sense...that is the true problem !

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I found it particularly amusing when Rorty resumed, "truth is absolute and that´s precisely why nothing can be said about it"...well he just did...

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@Fil Albuquerque,

A good example of that thesis is when humans believed the earth was flat. That was their truth.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Quote:

I found it particularly amusing when Rorty resumed, "truth is absolute and that´s precisely why nothing can be said about it"...well he just did...

If you were watching in the interest of learning and understanding you would have pondered the meaning of that instead of disregarding it because of a curious grammatical twist.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

As a non-native speaker you may have missed the distinction Rorty made between "truth" and "Truth" (capital T). You also don't seem to follow my point that nesting=transcendence. Talking about "truth" immediately changes the meaning of that "truth" from the "truth" of the transcendent discourse. The two levels are as different as the game of football is to general game theory.

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Fresco, I recognize the reality of Truth (the absolute non-temporal kind), but I don't think I've ever seen it (cognitively speaking), or ever will. Its reflection in Reality I have seen; indeed, it is my very existence. But there is no way, I think, that I or anyone can talk about it. As with the Tao, it remains fundamental and as such mysterious. It seems that philosophy cannot deal with this transcendental Reality which is why there are so many competing philosophical schools on every "issue." In everyday life this is no problem for here we are all pragmatists for whom temporal truths are manageable on-going problems.

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@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

guigus, Absolute truth is based on personal belief; it's not universal.

Sorry, this is relative truth. Absolute truth is the other kind.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

In case you did not read my deconstruction of the simplistic "self-contradicton" argument, I re-state it here.

Quote:
The evidential support for the statement that "there are no absolute truths" is pragmatic in the sense that "truth" is "what works" and is always open to revision. That implies that "truth" has an aspect of temporality whereas "absolute truth" does not. So transcendentally "Absolute truth" is beyond the realm of any temporal agent seeking effective axioms, and it is from that transcendental level that "logicality" is being evoked. In the Wittgensteinian sense, the word "truth" has different meanings at the transcendental and pragmatic levels.

The fundamental error by formalists is to assume that the word "truth" has a fixed meaning.

Your assertion that "all truth is 'what works' and is always open to revision" asserts again an absolute truth, so you are again contradicting yourself. And you contradict yourself yet again when, despite holding that there are two different kinds of truth (absolute and relative) you try to reduce both to the relative kind. All your argumentation boils down to asserting that "There is no absolute truth," which is why it only presents more developed forms of the same basic self-contradiction.

Try thinking about what you say when you are saying it, instead of leaving this work to others.

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@guigus,

No, relativism always ends up contradicting itself, and therefore it cannot be universal.

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@guigus,

north wrote:

reasoning logic wrote:

I am in no denial of the suns impact on me but what does that have to do with how others define absolute?

the suns impact is on ALL of us

others then have to define absolute truth based on on this fact

Quote:

In science, there is no such thing as absolute certainty---only a high level of confidence---there is no absolute certainty even of the existence of the Sun.

We are talking here about philosophical, hence absolute certainty---something fundamentally alien to science, which makes your scientific references useless.

Hmm.. your reponse is ridiculous really

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@guigus,

Guigus, am I wrong in understanding that for you any and all propositions are absolute? Can I make a truth proposition with the understanding that it may be right for a period of time and under certain circumstances--but not forever and under all circumstances? In addition, all axioms (statements that we consider necessarily true) may seem true because we cannot imagine them not to be, but that may reflect no more than our neurocultural condition--they may be what we might call "species-specific truths".

1 Reply

Absolute truth?

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