Objective Truth

Great Debates
1

It’s late, I have the LD 50 of caffeine in me, and I’m thinking about objective truth. Specifically, is there such a thing?

I have little or no knowledge of Philosophy, except for what I picked up in Classics (Stoicism, Cynicism, etc.), so I’m certain someone else has said the same thing more thoroughly and eloquently. Here it is, anyway.

Truth, as we know it, as we must know anything, is just a product of our perception. Our perceptions are as limited as we are (maybe they’re identical to everyone else’s, maybe not… point is our perception is too limited to know) and they are inherently flawed and variable. Therefore, nothing we perceive can be certain. Therefore truth, as a product of perception, can never be certain. ERGO, no such thing as objective truth.

Am I rehashing some other philosopher? Or just spouting gibberish? Both?

2

That sounds like a form of epistemology (the study of the limits and validity of knowledge). Descartes had a lot to say on objective reality.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy might be a good starting point.

3

Does Necessary Truth count as Objective Truth? IIRC, Necessary Truth is where it is impossible for a claim to be false. (e.g. Happy people are not sad. A square has four sides.)

4

Whilst I’m all for debating the goodies again and again, you might be interested to know that we only just finished this particular one - it’s still on page 2 of GD here.

It even made “threadspotting”.

pan

5

I did read that thread. However, I was unsatisfied (more likely due to a lack of understanding than an absence of the actual argument I was looking for). I felt this was sufficiently different to start a separate thread, and just wanted to look for glaring holes in my logic. My apologies if I was out of line.

6

There are two kinds of truth:

  1. truth by definition, which has to do with logic and mathematics and abstraction and whatnot. We know that two plus two makes four. This is so in all other universes, in all conceivable physical states. That’s because “four” is just an abstract concept one of whose meanings is “the sum of two and two”. If we tried to conceive of a four that wasn’t the sum of two and two, we would end up with a non-four or we would make the concept of four meaningless. Same goes for >3-sided triangles, squared circles, and whatnot.

  2. other kinds of truth, “a reassuring notion which, in practice, is difficult to identify. The determination to establish truth usually means that violence must be done to others.” - Saul, The Doubter’s Companion This kind of truth has to be subjective and falsifiable, because we are not God and we do not have access to an objective perspective. (“Objective perspective” is an oxymoron.)

7

It is not possible to firmly establish an epistemology by which objective truth cn be known.

This is not precisely the same as saying that there is no objective truth.

8

Fair enough Trucido - like I said, nothing wrong with rehashing the good ones.

I’m still a little punch-drunk from “Is it possible to know anything directly?” though, so probably won’t participate much in this thread.

A summary (of my understanding) from the Other Thread:

(warning: lack of rigour and sweeping statements follow. This is, after all, a summary of a 4 page thread. If you want to know more, you’ll have to read that thread.)

To ascertain “objective truth” requires us to know what we mean by truth. This means that we need a way to evaluate truth - this is known as an epistimology.

There are many ways of evaluating truth (epistimologies) - some more useful than others. Religion is one, science another. Still another is “English sentences ending in vowels are true”.

Epistimologies, being set-based, are constrained by set theory. One result therefore is that they cannot be both complete and consistant. That is, they cannot explain everything and lead to no contradictions. This means that if you strive for a totally consistant epistimology (eg science) you will end up with paradox. If you strive to remove all paradox, you will end up with something inconsistant. Science deals with this by accepting that some things are unknowable. Religion relies on God to get it out of trouble.

Another result from set theory is that you cannot logically reference the set from within itself. This means that there is no “fundamental” episimology that comprehensively establishes the validity of other epistimologies without itself being questioned. In other words the moment one tries to ascertain a hierarchy of episitmologies, one is using an epistimology to do it, which isn’t allowed.

This in itself means that one cannot decide that anything is absolute, or objective, truth - whilst something may be true in one epistimolgy, it need not be in another and we have no way of unarguably determining which is the better epistimology.

There - I hope that was digestible.

pan

9

Certainly we can say that objective truth exists. We merely define it and toss it in our epistemology as a validation rule for gathered data: [blank] is objective truth.

If you are wondering whether my objective truth is the same as your objective truth, then that again would depend on what exactly you meant by objective, and how you view the universe as existing independent of you.

If one of our initial assumptions/postulations is that a universe exists whose behavior is consistent with itself then surely objective truth exists. Now it is just a matter of finding out what it is. And again we return to the epistemology.

The think we can never demonstrate as valid is the epistemology and any of the assumptions the epistemology makes; the rest is certainly true.

10

There is no way for me to say that my perception is identical to any other persons. The only way for a human to know truth would be to perceive it. In perception, the truth is made subjective, where as an objective truth would be perceived identically by all.

If we define a truth as objective, won’t that definition be subjective?

I worded the OP poorly. Perhaps it should have been this: can humans ever know a truly objective truth? I’m thinking no, because it loses its objective nature when it is made to fit human thought processes.

11

<dlb kicks a rock>

Of course, did I dream kicking the rock?

Samuel Johnson fans may now throw said rock at me…

12

Can Humans Ever Know a Truly Objective Truth?
Sure. Why wouldn’t we be able to? If by truly objective you mean completely accurate and independant of personal judgement, why wouldn’t we be able to? If you mean, can we ever know a truth so true that it can’t be doubted; well, no, I don’t think so. But why would that make truths less true if they are all that way? Everything is true; everything is permissible. Nothing is true; everything is permissible. Which of those please you better? How are they any different?

Once you accept that there is a reality independent of your perception you accept that there are objective truths; if you choose to base your knowledge in such a way as to verify truths based on a consistent criteria, you know objective truths.

If we all subjectively define something to be objectively true, haven’t we just discovered an objective truth? (I’m not saying that we have or we haven’t one way or the other, just wondering what you think)

13

I’m frankly too dim to post a response to this, but I think it’s a wonderful topic you’ve started here, Trucido…

Now if I only felt that my opinion here would mean something… :slight_smile:

14

I just want to point out something about truth by definition. It is only true as long as one excepts the postulates the logic is built on. ie 2+2=4 only if we except that x=x. If we don’t except that x=x then 2+2 does not have to equal 4. Of course this leads into a realm of math that I have no understanding of but I thought that it was a valid point. It was thoughts like these that led Renee Descates to the conclusion that the only thing one can “know” is that they exist. “I think therefore I am”

15

aynrandlover:

Because we might not posit the existence of objective truth. In fact, we might posit its non-existence. Conversely:

I may be of the opinion that there is a reality apart from my perception, and that there are therefore objective truths, but that I can never know these truths.

More fundamentally, I may think that there is a reality independent of my perception, but that there are no objective truths. Does “objective” not imply “verifiable”? Is there anything that I can verify with absolute certainty? Is there anything that would not be different to someone else, in some regard?

Even more fundamentally, I see no reason to accept that there is a reality independent of our perception (I would tend to agree with, say, Berkeley in this regard).

Please clarify. It seems as if you are arguing that if you define “objective truth” as “that which we know by the means through which we know it,” then you know objective truths. This, of course, seems completely subjective.

I don’t think so. We all just happen to be in agreement. That may change.

Even better: if this objective truth refers to something “material,” we might all be wrong (e.g. suppose, for the sake of argument, that we all thought the earth was flat. Or suppose that everyone thinks that the earth is round, but that the earth is actually flat, and we just think it’s round). Of course, this objection assumes that there is objective fallacy (and therefore objective truth). So then if we accept objective truths, we accept that we might be objectivly wrong about them. As there is no way to objectively determine whether or not we are right (for even when we are wrong we think that we are right), we could then never know these truths, only guess (rightly or wrongly).

JasonDean:

Just for the record, Descartes began with the assumption that we can doubt everything, even our own existence. He then decided that we can “know” that we exist (we can’t, I don’t think), that we can “know” that there exists an undeceiving God (we can’t), and that we can therefore “know” that the world around us is largely as it seems. I disagree with Descartes. . .

16

Actually, I think that you’ll find Descartes was having a little joke with “cogito ergo sum”. It’s the classic beg-the-question tautology. And I’m sure that Rene was smart enough to know that.

pan

17

Well, Varlos, you are putting meaning into objective as if it really meant something outside the scope of human thought (which funny, since that’s what we think it means).

You may choose to posit that the world is other than we think it is, and how would we find out? Why, we would test it. If the “answers” we get from testing agree with our truths, than what is the difference?

Once you’ve declared a means to find out if something is true, it serves the means and yourself litle purpose to ignore its conclusion unless you find some cause to do so.

Nothing is absolute, eh? :stuck_out_tongue:

Except for the truth that you don’t know truths.

18

Close. I’m putting meaning into objective as if it meant something outside of human perception, not thought. Of course it’s a construct of our thought, but when people make a case for the existence of objective truth, I assume that they mean that which is true regardless of human perception (or lack thereof).

Who is “we”? Ayn Rand loving Objectivists? [Insert smiliey face.]

Hey, I wasn’t stating what I believed, merely putting forth some objections to a few of your statements.

How? I have declared no means by which we might find out if the “world” is as it appears, if we are as we appear, or if we co-exist in a realm with objective truths instead of only subjective perception. (Hint: this is because I don’t think that one exists.)

To try to put some structure into this:

  • I don’t think that there are objective truths, but this may just be problem of definition. We should work on one.
  • If there are objective truths (things that are true independent of our perception, let’s say), I don’t think we can “know” them. Since we may be wrong, and can never be certain of our knowledge, we’re rght back to a completely subjective existence (from our end, at least).

kabbes:

Then you have more faith in him than I. If he knew that it was completely tautological, I’m not sure that he cared.