I’ve been considering this for five years now, and was interested in hearing some new insights. My only request is that you consider “truth” and not “the” truth. They’re different things when you think about it.
Either this is boring people or I need to be more specific…
Descartes once asked whether something was hot because it was not cold, or hot because it was hot. Is something true because it is not a lie, or is it true because it is true? If it is true because it is not a lie, how can it really be true, and wouldn’t the contingent nature of that assessment render the assessment itself tenuous? On the other hand, if something is true because it is true, how can we be certain of it. I hope this question isn’t too much of a pain. What is truth? Can truth exist without perception?
Truth is always subjective, at least from my point of view 
- G. Raven
Well, we can never prove something to be true or not. We can only fail to disprove it. Thusly, “truth” as we can perceive it is simply a matter of “remaining undisputed by evidence”.
I’m not sure what the answer to your question is. But I do offer the following:
The truth is that I’m a female. Various biological and chemical tests can prove that I’m a female. I’m not a female because I don’t have a penis. I’m a female because I have paired X chromosomes.
Anywho, here’s one of my favorite quotes about truth:
Welllllll.
Are we defining truth to be the opposite of falsity? The we have a pretty yin-yang problem on our hands.
If we define truth like SPOOFE did, which I think is pretty good, then falsity follows in terms of it instead of merely being a two-step tautology.
I’ve been spending too much time in the epistemology thread.
Truth is knowledge which conforms to reality, but how well do you kno reality? how much of your info is second hand?
i’d be willing to tell someone i KNOW the sun is 93,000,000 miles away but i’ve never measured it. don’t know what instruments to use to do it. but all the sources i’ve encountered say 93 million, not 92 million or 94 million. if pressed i’d have to admit i just VERY STRONGLY SUSPECT because of totally consistent 2nd hand information.
something like the existence of God rates a lower level of certainty. so for a lot of stuff there is only probability not truth.
Ah, but JuanitaTech, scientific truth has been debunked countless times before. What you KNOW is truth and what IS truth aren’t always the same.
Maybe there will be a scientific breakthrough, and you’ll find out that the truth is that you are really, TRUTHFULLY a man.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” – Philip K. Dick
Now if Truth is what isn’t false, what is false?
And is not not true True, or very false?
Actually, we could say there are two types of truth and two corresponding types of false as negations of truth.
- Things that are both plausibly deniable but undenied, AND derived as true from some logical system. In the strictest sense, every formal system of proof.
- Things that are plausibly deniable but not denied. In the strictest sense, applied (1) truth. Scientific truth.
- Things which are plausibly true but shown in all existing cases to thus far be false as well as derived as false from some logical system.
- This is left as an excersize for the student.
This is just my opinion on the matter, however, for those who find such things as strict dichotomies distasteful. To simplify, we might say
Things are either true and provable to be so, true and not provable to be so, false and provable (to be false), or false but not provable to be so.
Comments? Questions?
I am not really prepared to back these comments up or attempt to explain why I think this, but interested parties may apply within. 
I’d like to thank everyone who has posted so far…hopefully there will be more. Tell your friends and neighbors.
My mind doesn’t start to work properly until late in the evening, but there is something I’d like to address about Juanita’s post. Let me digest my dinner and I’ll be back.
I dunno, but I gotta go wash my hands.–Pontius Pilate
I’d like to take the discussion a bit further and begin exploring the notion of truth being derived from empiricism. Is empirical evidence enough to determine the truth of something? If it is, why?
[Homer Simpson]
“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Nevermind.”
[/Homer Simpson]
I think the idea of true/false dualism is similar to that sentence… we define truth as being the absence of falsity, and falsity being the absence of truth, and we just keep going 'round and 'round and 'round…
Ultimately, we can only come up with a definition that applies to us, as people, since a Universal Truth, if it exists, cannot be entirely comprehended by us, as we do not understand the entirety of the universe.
If you’re talking about a simple matter of trivia knowledge, such as “Where was the battle of Bunker Hill fought?”, the best “truth” we have is merely the last piece of evidence that wasn’t shown to be false (BOBH was fought on Breed’s Hill), but there may come a point in the future when new knowledge proves otherwise (Hey! Bunker Hill was fought on Mount Everest!).
If you wish to discuss such less-than-concrete notions as “What is the mind?” or “Is there a God?”… well… if you find a truth to those questions, you’re a better man than I am. And if you find a truth to those questions AND “paired X chromosomes”, then you’re a better woman than I am.
[quote]
truth \Truth, n.; pl. Truths. [OE. treuthe, trouthe, treowpe, AS. tre['o]w?. See True; cf. Troth, Betroth.] 1. The quality or being true; as: (a) Conformity to fact or reality; exact accordance with that which is, or has been; or shall be.[/truth]
truth is and must have always been the same truth, the truth can not change, for example we can say that internet communication is made through the TCP/IP protocol, that is an has always been true, but it probably wont be the truth forever.
we could assume that homo sapiens will always have two hands, therefore it is truth for if homo sapiens would someday develop 4 hands it will be called something else.
being true is being the same, always.
bj0rn - boring
First, we have to distinguish between two issues:
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How do we know whether something is true or false? (epistemological question); and
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What is truth? (definitional question).
I assume that you are after an answer to the second question.
Many people debate whether truth is objective or subjective. If something is true, is it objectively true (true for everyone) or subjectively true (true for me but maybe not for you)? This is a stupid question not really addressed by philosophers. Of course, truth has to be objective. The concept of Subjective truth, (besides being a useless concept — if truth is subjective, then it does not differ from mere opinion, and then there is no such thing as truth), is paradoxical, since the proposition “There is no objective truth” has to be objectively true for the subjectivist about truth to be right about truth. But if the proposition “There is no objective truth” is objectively true, then there is at least one objective truth, so the proposition "there is no objective truth has to be false.
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST…
In answer to the second question (the definitional question), the interesting debate is whether truth is inflationary or deflationary.
An example of inflationary truth is the correspondence theory of truth. The Correspondence theory is that truth is a relation between mental representations or ideas and reality. So a proposition (or perhaps sentence) is true if it corresponds to the facts, or the world, or states-of-affirs, etc. Truth is a substantive property that linguistic tokens (propositions or sentences) have or do not have.
The deflationary notion of truth (there are many differnt versions of deflationary truth) says that truth is not a substantive property of linguistic tokens. Saying that a proposition is true is no different than simply asserting the proposition. The question “what is truth?” has no answer because it seeks a definition of truth as if it were a substantive proporty such as “being red”, which clearly can be defined. But truth is not a substantive property.
I have really not provided a good definition of deflationary truth, but I would recommend a book by Philosopher Paul Horwich called “Truth”. He gives a great exposition of one version of deflationary theory of truth (Horwich calls his theory “Minimalism”).