There is absolute truth but interpretation and implementation are wholly dependent on context. For instance, Thou shalt love...Originally Posted by hypatia_
There is absolute truth but interpretation and implementation are wholly dependent on context. For instance, Thou shalt love...
"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"
I don't understand the point of a 'Serious Discussions' sub-forum when people post one to two sentence responses that they come up with in less time it takes to itch a mosquito bite. No offense to anyone in particular..
My hide hides the heart inside
I suppose a natural scientist would say there are absolute truths, and work hard to prove them with experiments that can be repeated. Definitions are very precisely defined so that everyone understands the same thing. Even so, I read a New Scientist article that said the average lifetime of a scientific fact was about forty years. Then even the most prized scientific theories are often discovered to be incomplete, although still useful. Social scientists have the problem of trying to work out what is going on in people's minds. A social scientist may say that there is no objective truth, just perception. For example, the thermometer may say it is 17°C in the office, an absolute truth more or less. I may perceive the room as warm enough, but a colleague may think it is too cold; so the office is cold would be a relative truth. Natural scientists and social scientists seem not to get on eye-to-eye very often. Social scientists think natural scientists are naive. Natural scientists think social science isn't science. Natural scientists are baffled when they hear of social scientists discussing their ontological stance, the lens they use to view the world, for example positivist, interpretivist, critical realist, post-modernist or some mix. I do think natural scientists (and engineers) have to be careful though, especially where their field touches on human behaviour. For example, some researchers of human evolution have tended to emphasize the man-the-mighty-hunter and the violent struggle aspects of human evolution. I once read a newspaper account of another paleo-anthropologist who cried with happiness when he discovered evidence that suggested early humans were scavengers not necessarily killers, and of a female researcher who became annoyed with the male-centric view of human evolution and so developed her own feminist theory. Psychology seems to be another field in which the supposed neutrality of science can be contaminated by the perceptions of the researcher.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
truth is an idea and everything else is just a possibility.
if one to prove anything to anybody else he or she is not trying to tell the truth but merely trying to prove a point.
the rest can either believe or disbelieve then interject accordingly.
to tell the truth is just saying that we have lied when we have just simply either forgotten or misunderstood something.
Last edited by cacian; 06-05-2013 at 10:15 AM.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
i think absolute truth can only be considered absolute if the context doesn't matter. therefore there are very few absolute truths.
“the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought....
I can't imagine anything that is context independent. Can you? Even the language of thought involves manifold contexts.
Maybe context changes, although the underlying absolute truth is forever unchangeable.
Surely the natural sciences suffer the same defect. Newton's laws of motion did not encompass Einstein's because the perceptions of Isaac Newton were limited by his experience and perceptions of the world.
"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"
If context changes but the absolute truth is unchangeable regardless, that means it is independent of context.
“the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought....
A = A.
Mathematical truths are independent of context, because they are independent of facts. They are true or false based strictly on the logic of the system.
Although absolute truth is independent of context, our understanding of it is not.
Surely mathematical truths depend on the fundamental assumptions underlying mathematics and, hence, on context.
"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"
Of course there are fundamental assumptions, but the truths are "absolute" given those assumptions, and since mathematics is purely abstract (it need have no connection to the physical world) the truths it expresses can be "absolute" (I think, I don't actually know anything about math, except from trying to read Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems, which I couldn't understand.) How can A not equal A? It's inconceivable!
It seems to me that there can be absolute truths in artificially constructed systems (as opposed to the physical world) and math is one of those.
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