Can one know "the truth"?

Zelig said:
So is the number of true statements.

1. This is a statement.
2. Statement 1 is a statement.
3. Statement 2 is a statement.
etc.
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Not the set of base true statements that you need to build all the other true statements, though. The spanning set of true statements should be finite.

And since we're going for a list that's meant to be practical rather than the opposite, we can agree not to include obvious truths in it.. right? "Every sentence is a statement" vs listing every single possibility. So it should be finite. Technically infinite if you want to try to make it useless on purpose.
 
warpus said:
Not the set of base true statements that you need to build all the other true statements, though. The spanning set of true statements should be finite.

And since we're going for a list that's meant to be practical rather than the opposite, we can agree not to include obvious truths in it.. right? "Every sentence is a statement" vs listing every single possibility. So it should be finite. Technically infinite if you want to try to make it useless on purpose.
Click to expand...

If the spanning set of true statements in finite you can create a finite spanning set of false statements.

If you're going with the colour of the sky, you don't need to list every colour it isn't as a false statement, "the sky is a colour other than blue" vs listing every single possibility.
 
warpus said:
Surely the number of false statements in existence is an infinite set. That alone sort of settles it for me.
Click to expand...

I would say that human imagination is limitless, but the ability of humans to reach that is limited. For one thing once a statement is considered false, it rarely is remembered as in absurd reduction. If one is reluctant to hold anything as truth, why in common sense would we want to keep track of what is false? Once again I may be misrepresenting your statement, but if your patience would allow me. It would seem that as long as we have an accepted truth; (I did not really think you would want to start over with new truths) It would seem to me that the only reason one would have to say that truth cannot be known, is just a way to discredit truth that already exist.

I see that later you arrived at the point that truth bears an unreasonable burden.

I do not hold that there is an unlimited amount of truth out there either. In fact the less we claim as true, it is true, the less of a burden there is to bear.

It seems to me that humans are looking for a singular truth that they can hang their hat on and claim as their own, but I may be wrong. They may just want to sift through all the false statements that keep them busy allowing them to forge their own path through existence.

@ Zelig

That is not an infinite set of truths. That is a repetition of the same truth.
 
timtofly said:
I would say that human imagination is limitless, but the ability of humans to reach that is limited. For one thing once a statement is considered false, it rarely is remembered as in absurd reduction. If one is reluctant to hold anything as truth, why in common sense would we want to keep track of what is false? Once again I may be misrepresenting your statement, but if your patience would allow me. It would seem that as long as we have an accepted truth; (I did not really think you would want to start over with new truths) It would seem to me that the only reason one would have to say that truth cannot be known, is just a way to discredit truth that already exist.

I see that later you arrived at the point that truth bears an unreasonable burden.

I do not hold that there is an unlimited amount of truth out there either. In fact the less we claim as true, it is true, the less of a burden there is to bear.

It seems to me that humans are looking for a singular truth that they can hang their hat on and claim as their own, but I may be wrong. They may just want to sift through all the false statements that keep them busy allowing them to forge their own path through existence.

@ Zelig

That is not an infinite set of truths. That is a repetition of the same truth.
Click to expand...

It is one thing to not hold falsehoods in memory. Quite another that they do not exist as part of your entire world of thought.
My own conclusion in this matter is that the latter is most probably not true. Which is quite impressive, actually. Maybe all possible variations do indeed have to already exist in some form, so that even one specific object can rise out of the infinity of variations it will never be and never was.
 
Kyriakos said:
I don't agree with this view, cause it is a particular reading of my (most excellently refined, obviously :) ) OP: true, you know what lunch you had, and you were close to the actual lunch. This does not have much to do with you being able to know what lunch you had if you were unable to surround yourself with any number of false statements, beliefs or views. The quote by Kafka seems to me to very prominently refer to the "truth" being something (as mentioned by myself later in the first page of the thread) in the realm of the mind, so to refer to basic external phenomena and knowing they are true is not against that premise (which is exactly why i myself mentioned pi, due to it being a mental calculation).

Idealism, afterall, is not about someone claiming you cannot know what you ate last night. You clearly can (unless you were eaten by something? don't know). It refers to the view that any sort of knowledge we have is based on a system which is seperated from anything external to it; ie our mental world. Kafka's quote seems to refer to a sort of limit in the attempt to know truth, formed due to us needing the non-truth to even focus on a concept of truth. :)
Click to expand...

I had originally written some discussion about the interrelationship between lunch and truth and how few people choose to examine the platonic ideal of truth on an empty stomach. My internet browser, however, decided it wasn't worth keep. Please take it on faith that it was witty, amusing, and truthful.

There seem to be two issues here.

The first question is "how do we know that what we observe is true?" Isn't truth just a creation of the mind and not outside it? Truthfulness if the veracity of facts so the question goes to whether or not we can trust our observations to be true. Generally speaking, we can trust those observations because most of our observations are repeatable and can be confirmed with other people. You look up, the sky is blue. You look up tomorrow, the sky is still blue. Your neighbor, in polite conversation, mentions the blueness of the sky. Based on this evidence you confirm the veracity of your observations. That the sky is blue is true.

The second is the applicability of truth to ideologies, which is nil. Truth, as mentioned, concerns itself with facts. Ideologies, however, do not. An ideology is a model, a map, an abstract. No ideology is universally true because there will always be things that fall off the map. Ideologies instead provide a guide to understand what occurred and what will occur in the future. Ideologies aren't factual.
 
BvBPL said:
I had originally written some discussion about the interrelationship between lunch and truth and how few people choose to examine the platonic ideal of truth on an empty stomach. My internet browser, however, decided it wasn't worth keep. Please take it on faith that it was witty, amusing, and truthful.

There seem to be two issues here.

The first question is "how do we know that what we observe is true?" Isn't truth just a creation of the mind and not outside it? Truthfulness if the veracity of facts so the question goes to whether or not we can trust our observations to be true. Generally speaking, we can trust those observations because most of our observations are repeatable and can be confirmed with other people. You look up, the sky is blue. You look up tomorrow, the sky is still blue. Your neighbor, in polite conversation, mentions the blueness of the sky. Based on this evidence you confirm the veracity of your observations. That the sky is blue is true.

The second is the applicability of truth to ideologies, which is nil. Truth, as mentioned, concerns itself with facts. Ideologies, however, do not. An ideology is a model, a map, an abstract. No ideology is universally true because there will always be things that fall off the map. Ideologies instead provide a guide to understand what occurred and what will occur in the future. Ideologies aren't factual.
Click to expand...

While truth may be indeed only a mental phenomenon, there is also the question on whether any part of the system formed to seek truth will remain decicevely human in its mentality and character. For example it is true that you will agree that a cube i show you is a cube, and so will others who merely know what a cube means. It is not evident though that a sentient Alien will see the cube in a similar way. And a third issue there is whether his own version of a regular hexahedron (ie a cube), whatever it looks like to him and his species, will have the same qualities that we too would see in it if it was examined from a similar angle.

The first seems evidently true, the second most probably untrue (ie the Alien will not see the forms as you do), and the third might be either, but i suspect it is also untrue. While the cube has set qualities for us, it may not even be a notion in an Alien sentience, due to critical differences in the Alien mentality. It may then be either a theoretical concept, or a concept which can never exist anyway in that mentality.

But the properties of a cube are still true for us, cause our science is born by humans, and humans are the meter of it anyway, as Protagoras said in the fifth century BC.
 
Under what circumstances would a space alien see a die, or other regular solid, as something other than a die? Are they mistaking it for a crème brulee? The assertion that a space alien would not see a die as a die doesn't make sense as an assumption with additional proofs.

I mean, if I have a die an inch on its side and I cut out an inch long piece of string, each edge of the die will be the same length as the piece of string. It will be a regular solid. The space alien will be able to confirm this by taking my piece of string and comparing it with the edges of the die.
 
BvBPL said:
Under what circumstances would a space alien see a die, or other regular solid, as something other than a die? Are they mistaking it for a crème brulee? The assertion that a space alien would not see a die as a die doesn't make sense as an assumption with additional proofs.

I mean, if I have a die an inch on its side and I cut out an inch long piece of string, each edge of the die will be the same length as the piece of string. It will be a regular solid. The space alien will be able to confirm this by taking my piece of string and comparing it with the edges of the die.
Click to expand...

Yes, as long as the space Alien actually views stuff:

a) in 3 dimensions

b) as finite and infinite (a line you draw on a map is taken as finite, but theoretically it consists of infinite parts)

and

c) The Alien has quite similar optic mechanisms as you do (apart from the afforementioned 3d view).

I think it is very possible that if sentient Aliens exist, they won't all have all of the above in common with us. They might, but it is a gamble anyway. :)
 
I am not sure that any of that is a barrier to communicating the properties of a regular solid or that a party lacking those prerequisites would be unable to understand the properties of a regular solid.

Polyphemus and Ulysses could be standing in a field, looking at a pair of sheep about a football field away. Ulysses can tell from his initial position that the ram is closer than the ewe, but Polyphemus can't because he doesn't have stereo vision. However, both can take a length of rope and measure out the distance to the ram and to the ewe so that they both know how distant each animal is from their initial observation point. That's plane geometry. It doesn't strike as particularly difficult to extend that to solid geometry.

Vision isn't even a prerequisite as demonstrated by the fact that blind people are taught and do understand geometry. Aural and tactile forms of communication could be used to describe the thing to aliens that do not use vision.

If you say the alien is so vastly, well, alien that it doesn't perceive things at all in three dimension then I guess you might be right. However the existence of a non-three-dimensional alien that would be able to communicate with us seems strikingly unlikely to me. I don't know of anything that suggests the possibility of extra-dimensional aliens.
 
BvBPL said:
I am not sure that any of that is a barrier to communicating the properties of a regular solid or that a party lacking those prerequisites would be unable to understand the properties of a regular solid.

Polyphemus and Ulysses could be standing in a field, looking at a pair of sheep about a football field away. Ulysses can tell from his initial position that the ram is closer than the ewe, but Polyphemus can't because he doesn't have stereo vision. However, both can take a length of rope and measure out the distance to the ram and to the ewe so that they both know how distant each animal is from their initial observation point. That's plane geometry. It doesn't strike as particularly difficult to extend that to solid geometry.

Vision isn't even a prerequisite as demonstrated by the fact that blind people are taught and do understand geometry. Aural and tactile forms of communication could be used to describe the thing to aliens that do not use vision.

If you say the alien is so vastly, well, alien that it doesn't perceive things at all in three dimension then I guess you might be right. However the existence of a non-three-dimensional alien that would be able to communicate with us seems strikingly unlikely to me. I don't know of anything that suggests the possibility of extra-dimensional aliens.
Click to expand...

They could also be experiencing or imagining things in less dimensions. I suppose (although this is a lot more theoretical) they might even have different barriers between the dimensions they realise).

If you had an alien who sees stuff in 2 dimensions, for him a sphere would be a theoretical concept. While you would see readily the sphere in its total form, the Alien would only see it in 2d, so if the sphere was moving he would be seeing circles, expanding till you get to the half-sphere, then diminishing as you got to the end, and then just dissappearing. The object would be the same for both, but only you would see it in its 3d form.

Likewise if an alien senses in more dimensions he would obviously have a different science by default. That his science would be similar to some steps to our own is debatable, but not having to be so in all (or maybe even most) cases. And the differences can be of other kinds too, as alluded before (different relation of dimensions, different sense or lack of sence, and so on).

Of course it is possible that aliens do not even exist, or that if they exist and are sentient they would be pretty close to us in those respects. Maybe. :)
 
But an inability to perceive another dimension doesn't mean there's an intellectual inability to understand it. It seems to be me that the existence of third dimension would not be any more difficult to communicate to a two dimensional alien than the existence of a fourth dimension is to us. Just because someone doesn't perceive something doesn't mean they can't understand it.
 
BvBPL said:
But an inability to perceive another dimension doesn't mean there's an intellectual inability to understand it. It seems to be me that the existence of third dimension would not be any more difficult to communicate to a two dimensional alien than the existence of a fourth dimension is to us. Just because someone doesn't perceive something doesn't mean they can't understand it.
Click to expand...

I agree with you, but think of what it takes for humans to theorize an object in four dimensions, next to what it takes for humans to imagine an object in three dimensions (or less). The first is a concept, the other ones are based on the senses and are empirically observable. Having an empirical way to check theories is a massive help in any study.

So while an Alien who only senses two dimensions can form an idea of what a sphere is, he would never actually be able to just use the sphere as an easy basis to form other stuff, including stuff of even more dimensions. It would be like asking one to present a 5-dimensional sphere and then use it as the basis of constructing a building.
 
An "easy basis" is too low a bar for truth. I don't have an easy basis to explain the molecular behavior of water, but that doesn't mean I can't explain the truth of, say, ionic bonds.
 
BvBPL said:
An "easy basis" is too low a bar for truth. I don't have an easy basis to explain the molecular behavior of water, but that doesn't mean I can't explain the truth of, say, ionic bonds.
Click to expand...

To seek a general link: Is it not similar to having a much more limited horizon to another person, and keep trying to observe equally far-away objects? Surely after some point the first observer will revert to pure theory, and later on (if it comes to that) a conjecture resting on a pure theory which was not conclusively backed with math he had as his own basis (unless he had formed math entirely dependent on his theory, which in turn would determine what would follow from it in every future step until it was cancelled).

While i do not doubt it is always possible for both entities to keep going on in the "somewhat similar" study, they would differ dramatically after they exceed their own stable basis, cause math may be a mental construction but it is also formed by our 3d eyesight and our human mental world. If we could not account for changes in degrees of matter or any other such change, would we really have numbers as the basis of our arithmetic? Would we even care for such a concept? And if we did not, just how much of the rest of math would evidently have to be there?
 
Kyriakos said:
To seek a general link: Is it not similar to having a much more limited horizon to another person, and keep trying to observe equally far-away objects? Surely after some point the first observer will revert to pure theory....
Click to expand...

Well, sure, but a theory isn't the search for truth. If Polyphemus walks out to learn that his ram is closer than his ewe, repeats the same thing on several occasions, and develops a theory that his ram will always be closer to him than his ewe, that's not a truth. That's a predictive model for future behavior. What's true is the distance from his point of observation at the end of the football field to the locations of the ram and the ewe. That distance is knowable and true. His theory that his ram will always be closer than his ewe is just a prediction.

The differences in perception between Polyphemus and Ulysses don't change the actual, factual, true distance between Polyphemus and his sheep. Polyphemus's less sophisticated eyesight makes it appear that the sheep are the same distance away, but that lack of sophistication doesn't mean the true distance doesn't exist for Polyphemus. It simply means Polyphemus may have to use an instrument to supplement his senses in order to determine which sheep is closer.

The fact that Polyphemus's innate senses are incapable of telling him which sheep is closer from his vantage point doesn't mean the true distance of each sheep is unknowable, it simply means that he cannot rely just upon his visual acuity to determine the distance to the two animals.

Now I could imagine an alien being of such stature that it seems the flat surface of the Earth as a curved system. Or even one that is able to detect the curvature of the universe itself. At little distances, like the football field between Polyphemus and his sheep, that alien wouldn't have a substantially different result for the distance between the point of observation and the sheep being observed, but at great distances the curvature of the plain on the plane plainly becomes an issue. That alien's geometric systems would likely look different than our own because that alien is always dealing with curved surfaces. However, assuming we could communicate with such a creature it would be relatively easy to determine what degree of curvature the alien perceives and to adjust our geometric systems accordingly to enable communication. We might say that Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years from the sun using a strictly Euclidian distance measurement scheme and this alien might say Alpha Centauri is, in fact, 4.38 light years away after accounting for the curvature of the universe that is not immediately visible to us. That difference doesn't mean that there isn't a true distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri because there remains a finite and knowable length of rope that can be strung from Earth to Alpha Centauri to figure out the distance.

(Note that I have no idea whether or not 4.37 lys takes into account the curvature of the universe or if it is a strictly Euclidian measurement, but I suspect that if there is a difference it would be significantly less than one hundredth of a light year. I've just provided this as an example)
 
BvBPL said:
Well, sure, but a theory isn't the search for truth. If Polyphemus walks out to learn that his ram is closer than his ewe, repeats the same thing on several occasions, and develops a theory that his ram will always be closer to him than his ewe, that's not a truth. That's a predictive model for future behavior. What's true is the distance from his point of observation at the end of the football field to the locations of the ram and the ewe. That distance is knowable and true. His theory that his ram will always be closer than his ewe is just a prediction.

The differences in perception between Polyphemus and Ulysses don't change the actual, factual, true distance between Polyphemus and his sheep. Polyphemus's less sophisticated eyesight makes it appear that the sheep are the same distance away, but that lack of sophistication doesn't mean the true distance doesn't exist for Polyphemus. It simply means Polyphemus may have to use an instrument to supplement his senses in order to determine which sheep is closer.

The fact that Polyphemus's innate senses are incapable of telling him which sheep is closer from his vantage point doesn't mean the true distance of each sheep is unknowable, it simply means that he cannot rely just upon his visual acuity to determine the distance to the two animals.

Now I could imagine an alien being of such stature that it seems the flat surface of the Earth as a curved system. Or even one that is able to detect the curvature of the universe itself. At little distances, like the football field between Polyphemus and his sheep, that alien wouldn't have a substantially different result for the distance between the point of observation and the sheep being observed, but at great distances the curvature of the plain on the plane plainly becomes an issue. That alien's geometric systems would likely look different than our own because that alien is always dealing with curved surfaces. However, assuming we could communicate with such a creature it would be relatively easy to determine what degree of curvature the alien perceives and to adjust our geometric systems accordingly to enable communication. We might say that Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years from the sun using a strictly Euclidian distance measurement scheme and this alien might say Alpha Centauri is, in fact, 4.38 light years away after accounting for the curvature of the universe that is not immediately visible to us. That difference doesn't mean that there isn't a true distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri because there remains a finite and knowable length of rope that can be strung from Earth to Alpha Centauri to figure out the distance.

(Note that I have no idea whether or not 4.37 lys takes into account the curvature of the universe or if it is a strictly Euclidian measurement, but I suspect that if there is a difference it would be significantly less than one hundredth of a light year. I've just provided this as an example)
Click to expand...

:)

But in your example you are still accounting for entities that have the same (in number as well as theoretical inter-relation to each other) dimensions as sensed by them in a basic and immediate way. True, an Alien may see a curve where we see a line and still be seeing stuff in 3d (but have a different optic/brain outcome). But this is not in the same ballpark as the other changes which may occur. In your example it is (metaphorically) a pupil altering the result of another pupil's test by a known factor, in a more or less simple way. In another example you could have the first pupil seeing a straight line, and the second seeing *in the same object* a chaotically arranged system of interwoven lines and shapes. The latter would not be immediately translatable to the first's point of view. Maybe it would not really be there as a translation given that in such a case you would be very unlikely to even notice (or prove) that both entities were examining and accounting for *the same* object.
 
I thought this thread was supposed to be about epistemology from the title. Now I'm confused.
 
^

The question on what truth is inevitably lies very near the question of what knowledge is, and what it can aspire to be. Another question is one presented by Aristotle, about what "being" means (as in that something "is" something).
That question was also examined by a prominent nazi philosopher in the 1930s Germany 1 ;)

Although i have a translation of the two volumes of that work (Being and Time), i never managed to read it all, cause (much like Camus claims) it is indeed written in a very boring way :/
 
IMO the only absolute truth is the experience of the moment. Everything else can potentially be true or false one way or the other. In effect true and false become theories with which we try to predict and control the world. For instance looking at a tree and thinking "this is a tree and this is the truth" comes down to us predicting a given object to behave according to our theory of tree behavior. So we will predict it to not stand up, come over to us and ask for some change for a phone call.
So I'd say that beyond the one absolute truth there is only success or failure in predicting/controlling stuff whereas outstanding success is labeled truth.
 
Terxpahseyton said:
IMO the only absolute truth is the experience of the moment. Everything else can potentially be true or false one way or the other. In effect true and false become theories with which we try to predict and control the world. For instance looking at a tree and thinking "this is a tree and this is the truth" comes down to us predicting a given object to behave according to our theory of tree behavior. So we will predict it to not stand up, come over to us and ask for some change for a phone call.
So I'd say that beyond the one absolute truth there is only success or failure in predicting/controlling stuff whereas outstanding success is labeled truth.
Click to expand...

There is a nice relevant quote by De Maupassant in a short story, where he asks what would happen if suddently the flowers in the garden started humming a song. Horror would be the most common result of such a collapse of the sense that the external world is ordered mostly in a way that we are familiar with in practical matters.

Another question, though, is whether if such a collapse takes place (which can happen without any actual physical law appearing to be broken, cause i doubt they can be broken in this respect) the horror one can feel at the time is in effect the result of the mental constructions he based on the view the world around him is not some unknown abyss.

Which is another theme in the better De Maupassant stories :)

Besides, the link between the erosion or destruction of the main views on has on something, and feeling dread, is one studied in a number of texts. Even the archaic notion of "divine dread" rests on that correlation.
 
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