Is truth subjective or objective?

Same ole rationalization!


You can define a camel's ass to be a rose if you choose, JL, but it ain't gonna smell nearly as sweet.

REALITY IS WHAT IS.

THE TRUTH IS THAT REALITY IS WHAT IS.

The truth is not subjective...it is objective.

I've made no mistake.

Yitwail, welcome to A2K. It seems from you great post that you'll be a great addition to our little snake-pit.
Great point. If an event is predictable has it not in a sense already occured--whether or not as an empirical phenomenon.
I'm just trying to push the boundaries of our subject matter beyond its common sense framework. What does seeing an event mean in terms of its ontological status? Ultimately, is the collision just a collision? Does it only exist at the level that makes sense to humans? Or is that sense only one of an infinite, or indefinite, range of possibilities?
It would be foolhardy for me to deny the value of common sense meanings, such as "the collision" or any other event within our universe of human discourse; it is both practical and psychologically necessary to assume such events as adequately, if not absolutely, real for our purposes. Neverthess, regarding "ultimate" philosophical inquiry, they and everything else must be seen as relative to our condition--including geometical and all other "a priori" axioms.

By the way, Yitwail, don't let Frank (or me) get to you; he (and I) mean well.

Yitwail, I would suggest that some "truths" (i.e., correct statements about reality) are more practical, yet no more true, than some others. Consider, for example, the purely "basic science" theories in astronomy that cannot have any practical value, at least not today. And I suspect many "truths" in theoretical physics, mathematics and philosophy have only intrinsic value, none of the extrinsically valuable applications in medicine or engineering. That doesn't make the latter more true.

i shall try my best, and thank you for the compliment. i won't mind an occasional ribbing, but i may retaliate in kind. i rather like differences of opinions, so i welcome counterexamples to my examples, the dialectical method if you will.

Great!!!

Frank

Do you mean: "a stone is a stone and the truth is that a stone is a stone"?

But I still have a doubt: what is a stone? (behind being a stone of course)

Without any fancy clothes, Val...what I am saying is that WHAT IS....IS.

That is the reality.

The TRUTH....(the truth about reality and the truth)....IS THAT THE REALITY IS WHAT IS.

JL is insistent upon making a distinction between REALITY and TRUTH such that he can assert that TRUTH is subjective. I'm not sure why JL wants to do that.

By now, I suspect JL realizes that the subjective thing that we sometimes mistakenly refer to as "the truth"....is nothing more than our considerations about the truth.

"Our considerations about the truth" ARE SUBJECTIVE.

The TRUTH is not.

Frank, you've almost got it. Just change one word. "The truth" refers to the validity of our successful considerations about reality.

I think this difference in opinions came about because of the different meanings that we attach to the word "truth".

definition:
"conformity to reality or actuality"
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn

Truth then, is absolute, but how near we are to the truth is subjective.



A stone is a stone. We use the word stone for a pattern that we see to be a stone. The events occuring within the stone is not known when we say a stone is a stone, but this truth statement is uncovering the truth of what a stone is and not what occurs within it and what energy, etc is affecting it.

Frank and Ray

Let me try to explain my position about this. I am not using those "fancy clothes" you mentioned, Frank. But you must excuse some imprecisions due to my poor english.

When I say "a stone is this, or that ..." I am not talking about anything real, I mean, anything with a physical reality. There is not "a stone". There are stones,this stone here, that stone over there. But when I give a definition of "stone" there is no physical object that has any correspondence with my definition. Truth being, in this case, adequacy of my definition within a system of specific language - the definitions can change if you use the language of physics, geology, chemistry ...

What have we real? For instance, the stone I have in my hand. I know that there is something - that I learned to name "stone" - because I feel it with the touch, the view. But what I have in my hand is this: something that can be heavy or not, something that can be rough or not. And what I see is this: something black, or white, or green.
A child in his first months of life, doesn't know anything about a stone except that it is "something heavy, green, rough".
This is what our perceptions give us. Nothing more.

But I say: this is a stone. In that moment, what I am saying is: this thing I have in my hand is a stone because it has some characteristics of the concept of stone that I have learned. I go, from the real object, the thing, to the abstract concept in order to give a meaning to the thing I have in my hand.
That means that I learned what is the definition for a stone - even if I never found a stone in my all life. The definition of a stone is only a concept, within a specific system of language. As I said, "a stone" does not exist in the physical world.
This kind of reasoning, that started with Plato, is in fact very near to those metaphysics you claim to reject, Ray. But without it, there would be no science.
Science doesn't deal with real things. It would be impossible, since then we should have a science for each thing; and that is the exact opposite of the concept of science since Plato.

Apparently you simply cannot acknowledge the obvious on this issue, JL. There is a difference between "the truth" and our "considerations of the truth."



"Our considerations about the truth" are subjective; "the truth" is objective.

Val...I appreciate your perspective and I suspect we are reasonably in agreement of the issue.

JL makes lots of sense on lots of different issues...and offers reasonable arguements in favor of his (I'm not sure if it is him or her) take on various things. But on this issue (as with one more on which we disagree) he is dead wrong and being bull-headed about acknowledging.

Frank, I am a bearded woman, like you. And I don't mean to offend you, but we look alike in some respects.
Val, interesting observation: "Science doesn't deal with real things. It would be impossible, since then we should have a science for each thing; and that is the exact opposite of the concept of science since Plato." Yes, science deals with abstract CLASSES of "things." Or should I say the relationships between variables, aspects of classes of things."
Frank and I will never come to agreement on this particular issue; it's just too much fun to disagree on it.

Val, I think, I think, I understand what you are saying now.

A person's definition of a stone might be attached to something different than another person's definition of a stone. Thus in that sense, the word stone has different meanings to two people who attached the word to different things.

?

I think it's critical to realize that we live in a symbolic world, of our species' and culture's making. Language and its grammar defines so much of what we "see" and "think". Going beyond language--which IS possible--is what is part of what is meant in the East by liberation (or enlightenment). That does not mean, of course, that we can live without language, but we must be its master; it must be no more than our tool (a grand tool, however: it is both instrumental in the most mundane ways and an artistic medium, as in poetry and literature).

another aspect of that nonverbal approach to living, is the primitive nature of inarticulate animals, that exist communicatively entirely on the basis of instincts, body language, and sensory clues, in their interactions.

Language it seems to me allows a broader articulation of intellectual intent, and a greater depth of understanding.

[and, as any good salesman can tell you, allows for a much more complete obfuscation of reality!]

Indeed, BoGoWo. There is little INTELLECTUAL power without language. But "spiritual" well-being must transcend language.

surely 'truth' is the point where the subjective, and the objective merge.

[the truth is a point; see it?]

The "TRUTH" is what is true. It is...what IS.

There is absoutely nothing subjective about it.

It doesn't matter what you think about it; your considerations about it don't matter. It is what IS.

If only "is" were simple Frank !

http://spanish.allinfo-about.com/grammar/verbs/vb-serestar.html