Efficient-Squash5055 t1_j4l592r wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in Philosophy has never been the detached pursuit of truth. It’s always been deeply invested in its own cultural perspective. by IAI_Admin
Well to be fair, I didn’t argue that humans can’t find truth. We seem to find plenty of it in discrete contexts of physical environments; where measured validations confirm with confidence a representative of truth was found. This is even contextual on the prior basis of developed “truth” though, as one thing builds upon another.
There are times where some new revelation happens (such as light is not infinite) and models of what we owned as “truth” have to be rebuilt. And that will hold until another revelation comes.
I think this notion of “truth” is much like Happiness in the Bill of Rights. “A pursuit of happiness” - “A pursuit of Truth”. The pursuit is ever present, the realization of it… a “maybe-ish”.
But then to move into philosophy, where all notions are abstract, metaphorical, and hypothesis that is incapable of scientific validation… the notion of Truth becomes far more wiggly. Truth may even be an inappropriate word to define outcomes. Perhaps “workable models” is better.
Of course the domain of beliefs (everything we believe as explicit “trues” about reality is largely as subjective as objective. (E.g. Capitalism is good or bad, theology is right or wrong, etc.)
There is not really any absolute truth in this domain, it’s more a truth of “believing is seeing”. And the seeing becomes evidence again for believing.
I do think it’s very safe to acknowledge we can and do develop very reliable models of “true’s” (a “true” being an outcome which can be verified externally) though that is a different notion than truth is. To me anyway.
Perhaps I would go so far as to say we can (in some cases) access as much of a genuine truthful view as is possible within our contextual frame. To be honest though, one would have to be omniscient to have complete absolute truth; as any absence of any truth is an incomplete truth, so not “the” truth.
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