RankStranger Posted November 16, 2012 Share Posted November 16, 2012 Yep, absolute truth MAY well exist. Problem is that things in our minds that we "know" are essentially models of reality- approximations that we can store within our biolological jelly-brains. IMO our beliefs and knowledge are necessarily only approximations of 'truth' (or 'reality', whatever you want to call it). Therefore I'm pretty sure that its impossible for us to KNOW an absolute truth. And I don't put much stock in the argument that claiming that there is no absolute truth somehow IS a statement of absolute truth... and is therefore invalid. IMO thats nothing more than semantics- a trick of language. And while my ability to articulate an idea damn well IS constrained by language... my ability to FORM an idea isn't necessarily subject to those constraints. And the veracity of a given idea is NOT AT ALL dependent on its conformity to the arbitrary structure of our language. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator Joshpantera Posted November 17, 2012 Moderator Share Posted November 17, 2012 ^ I know it sounds strange, but I got it from following an argument on a philosophy site: You should always give the source/link when you quote something. By DMCA rules, you have to appropriately attribute the author his/hers deserved credit, or it's plagiarism (actually, it's theft). We've actually been in trouble on this website for not doing it properly in the past, so... please link the source. And on a side note, the author fails to bridge the "knowledge of absolute truth" to "existence of absolute truth" in the beginning of the article. It's kind of jumbled up, both concepts, not sure which one he's arguing for or against. Sorry, I added the link to the post. And I posted the postmodernism quote and then added the idealism quote under it, but in the argument Geoff Haselhurst is making he presents the idealism quote first and then the postmodernism. That's probably why it reads backwards. He's arguing that physical reality can be known by deductive measures using the wave structure of all particles revealed by quantum physics. If you deduce that space exists and it's wave motion creates the particle effect causing matter, you can then advance forward trying to solve some of the past problems in philosophy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted November 17, 2012 Share Posted November 17, 2012 Sorry, I added the link to the post. And I posted the postmodernism quote and then added the idealism quote under it, but in the argument Geoff Haselhurst is making he presents the idealism quote first and then the postmodernism. That's probably why it reads backwards. He's arguing that physical reality can be known by deductive measures using the wave structure of all particles revealed by quantum physics. If you deduce that space exists and it's wave motion creates the particle effect causing matter, you can then advance forward trying to solve some of the past problems in philosophy. "Can be known", does that mean that we don't know right now? "If you deduce" means that we have to make certain assumptions. If absolute truth exists, and if we can know what is absolute truth, we can't assume that we actually do know the absolute truth. How do we know that a truth is absolute? And how do we know that we know it? The problem here is that there is a huge overlap into psychology and how the mind works. Do a mind really "know" absolutes or does it just make strong assumptions? I'm not arguing against that absolute truths (facts of reality, ontology) do exist, but I doubt that we always know (epistemology) what those truths are. We have some fractions of truth, but most of the time, we disregard and eliminate parts that belong to the whole picture. Put it this way, we say we know Earth is revolving around the Sun, and we accept that as a truth. I think from what I've read and learn and observed that it's probably most likely true. Of course, there's the small chance that I'm deceived some way. However, this was true even before I was born and even before I knew it was true, but this is the ontological aspect of "truth", while me knowing it to be truth is the epistemological aspect of it. To me it seems like Haselhurst is mixing both aspect simultaneous or making an equivocation of those two. But they're not the same. Something being true is not the same as we knowing it to be true, and that goes for absolutes as much as anything. We live our daily lives as if things are true and not false. Our experience constantly confirm that we are mostly right, but not always. We make mistakes. We have notions that we hold very hard and dear that later proves to be completely wrong. So we can have a conviction or "knowledge" of something to be absolutely true while it is not. Like being a fundamentalist in Christian and believing the world is only 6,000 years old and be totally convinced. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator Joshpantera Posted November 17, 2012 Moderator Share Posted November 17, 2012 And I don't put much stock in the argument that claiming that there is no absolute truth somehow IS a statement of absolute truth... That's what I'm looking at here. If we make the assertion that "the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth", then we disqualify the statement as a true statement. Or if we cut it short and just say 'there is no absolute truth' then at the minimum we cancel the possibility of our statement as true, by our own assertion. Plus there are clear absolute truths such as the natural laws and so on. So obviously the mind can conceive of absolute truths. In edition, we can doubt the existence of just about everything except for the fact we are aware and experiencing. That's an absolute truth, dispite the problem of fully understanding the thing in itself. We're experiencing something that appears to us as space and matter and has fixed laws that can be observed. There's absolute truth in all of that. So there's several ways of questioning the postmodern claim that there is no absolute truth, none of which are flattering to theism or give it a leg up in any way. So I don't see this a beneficial to theism. My concern with this inquiry is simply that I was raised on the absolute truth of church claims, learned that they were not absolutely true or even remotely close, then had to wonder if there's even such a thing as any absolute truth at all and found postmodernism, then learned of the arguments against postmodernism that seem to strip it bare. So my take on all of this so far is that postmodernism is a type of knee jerk reaction to faulty theistic truth claims which over shoots the mark by trying to over compensate for faulty theistic truth claims and in return shoot back the claim that "there is no absolute truth." That interests me as a truth seeker because it seems to suggest that we ought to throw our hands in the air and just give up on truth seeking as worthless. I don't mean to sound too rough on postmodernism but this has been part of the truth seeking process. Claiming that there is no absolute truth is in and of itself untrue for a variety of reasons. So there's still a need to press on... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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