Honorable Journey (eBook)

In Search of Truth

Bob Alba (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-1911-3 (ISBN)

Infos

An Honorable Journey is about a fresh vision about wisdom, truth, and God from a spiritual perspective

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An Honorable Journey, a search for truth is a book about the human need to confirm God's existence and know God's genuine nature and understand the rules that govern how to believe in anything. The book covers Religion, Spirituality, Philosophy, Science, and Metaphysics. The chapter walks the reader through the logical steps that it takes to identify what is "e;true and false"e;. It proposes, based on a logical path, a completely alternative way of looking at the age-old problem of the existence and nature of God. This a scholarly yet simple way of considering a new worldview.

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Truth

A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.

—William Blake

Truth is not arbitrary and is always supported by rigorous and reliable evidence. Truth must match facts and reality. Further, it must have fidelity to a standard acceptable by all persons of good faith and scrupulous judgment. Over time, the concept of truth has become a subject of discourse among traditional, legal, philosophical, scientific, and religious/spiritual stakeholders, and theories, about what makes up truth have been established by accepted modes of judgment. This scholarly discourse gives credence and an intellectual foundation to what is it that we can rely upon.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the German philosopher, held that the original meaning of truth, according to the ancient Greeks, was an essence of “un-concealment.” The original concept of truth was called Alethia. Eventually, this became known as veritas by the Greeks.

The stakeholders have continued to debate how to identify truth from falsehood. Humans use language to communicate, so the meaning of what we say using the words we speak or write or, in some cases, communication is expressed through symbols (as in mathematics), so it must be included in an analysis of the augments concerning truth. These boundaries are called the “criterion of truth.” This further leads to the question of the role that faith-based and empirical knowledge play. These roles will further be examined in this chapter. Deciding how words, beliefs, and symbols can be considered “true” is the focus of the five substantive theories we will now examine. These theories are rooted in the widely accepted and shared view of published scholars. We must recognize the categories that will be studied further. The first category to examine is the substantive theories. They are not universally accepted. The second category includes the deflationary theories which have been developed more recently. We will consider the deflationary theory as well in this chapter.

Let us look at the definition of substantive theory as laid down by Avinash Dixit in Lawlessness and Economics (2004, 22):

“The aim of a substantive theory should be to construct a collection of models that is sufficiently small but memorable enough to use and still cover an optimally large portion of the spectrum of facts.”

The substantive theories thus represent a collection of truth that covers the widest range of related theories and facts.

The first of the theories is the correspondence theory. The simplest way to understand this theory is to understand that it is proposed to be true and corresponds to the facts. This was the position that was taken by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The principle behind this idea is that something true or false is always related to a “suchness.” This suchness holds the fidelity of the thing that is being taken as true or false. The philosopher/theologian, Thomas Aquinas, stated the idea as follows: “A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to external reality.” There are some problems with this theory because some languages do not provide a clear translation regarding the essential nature of “truth.” Alfred Tarski’s semantic theory deals with this issue, and we will discuss it later in the book.

The next theory, coherence, states that it is essential that the element of a truth. “A coherence theory of truth states that the truth of any (true) proposition consists in its coherence with some specified set of propositions.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1996)

Elements of the argument for truth must mutually reinforce each other. If, for example, a person asserts that she/he was an eyewitness to an event but was found to be at a distant location at the time they claim to have witnessed the event, there is a lack of coherence. Therefore, being a witness to the event is not supported by coherence. The facts do not support the assertion. Nonetheless, other scholars on the subject reject coherence theory as, in general, lacking justification in its application to other areas of truth. The counterview revolves around specific areas of inquiry concerning the natural world. Empirical data, in general, asserts practical matters of psychology and society with the support of other major theories of truth.

The next theory, constructivist theory, was championed by such philosophical luminaries as Spinoza, Leibniz, G.W.F. Hegel, and F.H. Bradley. Constructivist theory is more accurately labeled social constructivism because it asserts that truth is reflected by struggles within the community, it is culture-specific. It views the perception of truth as dependent on many elements such as human perception and social experience. Truth, therefore, is viewed as a construction of the perceived realities of the individual or community, regarding specific situations. In it, there is a strong tie to physical and biological realities like race, gender, etc.

G. Vico, a philosopher, stated, “that history and culture were man-made.” Thus, this theory has an epistemological view concerning truth. In this theory, truth is said to be profoundly influenced by human culture and its components, as noted above, such as race and gender.

Consensus theory, in its simplest form, holds that whatever is agreed upon is the truth. In some iteration of this theory, the truth must be agreed upon by some group. A proponent of this theory was J. Habermas (Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world, but it was countered by Karl Marx, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), [2] who is more closely aligned with conflict theory in relation to society and its motivations. It is noted that in the Islamic Koran, Muhammad stated that “My community can never agree upon an error.” This can be loosely compared to the Catholic belief that the Pope can never err in matters of faith and morals. The American jury system seems to rely on this principle as well; however, we know the jury system can be flawed and there have been results of some defendants being judged guilty and then later being exonerated when circumstance showed that they were, in fact, innocent.

The pragmatic theory is somewhat faceted and there are three schools of thought on the subject. It was introduced in the twentieth century by C.S. Pierce, W. James, and J. Dewey. They did not completely agree on the details, but generally believed that truth could only be verified by putting the results of “agreed truth” into practice. The crux of Peirce’s pragmatism is that for any statement to be meaningful, it must have practical bearings. Peirce saw the pragmatic account of meaning as a method for clearing up metaphysics and aiding scientific inquiry.. (Peirce 1931–58).

William James, on the other hand, held that the theory was more complex. He felt that truth was a quality. Its value could only be confirmed by its effectiveness when the concept is applied to practice. In other words, if something is purported to be true, and when the underlying issue is tested and found to be accurate, only then we can say that the issue is actually true. John Dewey’s subtle variation was that an inquiry into some element of truth could be judged true, only if “openly submitted” to the test by a community of appropriate and knowledgeable judges and if it passed the test. It is clear that pragmatic theory is nuanced and somewhat shadowy in construction, but all views correspond to the practical results of something said to be true. The famous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman somewhat fatalistically said of the pragmatic theory that “we could never know with certainty if something were true. We could only know with certainty if it were false.”

Minimalist (deflationary) theory (not a substantiated theory) is a relatively new theory, a second bite of the apple if you will. In short, it says that just because something is old, does not necessarily mean that it is correct. This theory relies on the use of predicates (as in the truth of the matter is predicated in 2 + 2 = 4). Pundits claim that predicates are not normally used in common language. So, in ordinary language we may say that “snow is white” but, in fact, there might be dirty snow which is not white but gray or brown. This renders the statement a kind of paradox until we investigate the matter more thoroughly. It is said by deflationary theorists that the word “true” is just semantic convenience. Personally, I find this line of reasoning tedious, but that is just me.

There are a few other theories in the category of truth, but I am going to move on into areas less esoteric and a little more commonly understood. Formal theories are as follows:

Logical Truth

Logic is concerned with the rigid patterns or steps in reason that help distinguish if an assertion is true or false. I will provide a concrete example of this when we discuss Meno later. A logical truth is determined by the analysis of facts agreed upon by the participant(s) of the argument. The constituent elements of the argument are taken to be empirical and undisputed by consensus of the one(s) analyzing the proposition. So, let us say that the argument...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.9.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Esoterik / Spiritualität
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-1911-7 / 1098319117
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-1911-3 / 9781098319113