Thursday, January 19, 2012
The Philosophy Toolkit
Under the category of "Logical Terms" reads this definition, "Truth: the correspondence of a statement with the way the world is. Philosophers disagree with this definition (see above), but it is a good place to start." (7) I didn't understand why there would be any disagreement at all, this claim seemed to be indisputable. On further inspection of this claim, I wondered if the disagreement arose from the idea that this is a mostly metaphysical claim, and may or may not apply to epistemology or axiology. When you're talking about "the way the world is", you are making a primarily metaphysical claim. It may be true that the correspondence of a statement with reality is metaphysical truth, but perhaps there needs to be a greater criteria for the definition of "truth" in order to also incorporate epistemological and axiological truth. As far as what this definition might be, I'm afraid I don't have a clue. Does anyone else have any ideas?
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Here's a quote from a 20th century idealist (E. von Glasersfeld) where he questions the very sense of truth as correspondence:
ReplyDelete"[T]he unanswerable question whether, or to what extent, any picture our senses "convey" might correspond to the "objective" reality is still today the crux of all theory of knowledge. Sextus used, among other things, an apple as an example. To our senses it appears smooth, scented, sweet, and yellow -- but it is far from self-evident that the real apple possesses these properties, just as it is not at all obvious that it does not possess other properties as well, properties that are simply not perceived by our senses. The question is unanswerable, because no matter what we do, we can check our perceptions only by means of other perceptions, but never with the apple as it might be before we perceive it."