Is there anything about which we have the truth instead of mere justification for thinking our belief about some matter is true? Or is truth just something we say we have when we think there is sufficient justification for a belief?
I think “truth” is another word some people (ab)use to dram about “absoluteness” out of relative things.
When we evaluate something as “true” or “false”, the result is relative to the evaluation method/criteria and thus not absolute.
In other words, there is no such thing as absolute truth that is independent and free of any limitation/condition.
All positive property, notion, concept, idea, evaluation, justification, etc are relative.
And believing is the act of deluding oneself into taking something relative as if it’s absolute/limitless/unconditional.
I ask this question because of an opinion I’ve come to hold as of late. That is, the opinion that we can’t know or even find out whether some particular belief we have is knowledge. Basically, to find out whether some belief of yours meets the basic criteria (jtb) to be called knowledge, then you must sort of think back about your own thoughts and create a checklist. You can check off belief, because you can think back and see that you do believe, and you can check off justification, because let’s say you’re a philosophy major and you know what evidence warrants what conclusion, but can you check off truth?
I don’t think you can, because any attempt you may make to get the truth about some issue will only yield you more justification. For example, let’s say you wanted to get the truth about the tree outside your window. You see that it’s a tree. You go over to it and you touch it, smell it, bite it, taste it, cut it and burn it. All these things confirm that it’s a tree, but this confirmation is only more reason to think that your belief is justified; not that it’s true. You may leap to the conclusion that it’s probably true that it’s a tree based on the evidence, but this leap is a belief in of itself, and not “the truth”.
So, actually I misspoke in my OP. Question is not whether we can have the truth about any one belief we have, but whether we can find out that we have the truth about a belief. We can unknowingly have the truth about some belief, in that when we guess and it turns out right.
What is truth contingent on (if anything) and how are we conceiving the truth? That is kinda important for this discussion.
I would think truth is contingent on belief, loosely speaking. To say that something is true means saying something about the relationship between what’s really going on and the thoughts/beliefs/mental states of a being intending to recreate in mind what’s really going on. So, basically, I don’t think truth is a function of just what’s the case, but of the relationship between the case and our representation of the case. Hence, to have truth means having a belief which represents reality well. My question then is can we ever find out that any of our beliefs are true? I don’t see how. Here’s why, and I’m being a bit redundant here. Suppose you wanted to find out whether your belief that that’s a tree outside you is true. You look at it, you touch it, smell it, taste it, burn it, and run a bunch of other tests. But what is it that these tests do for your quest to find out whether the belief [That is a tree] is true, if anything? They justify it, that’s for sure, but do you find out via these efforts that your belief is true? Are there any methods that allow you to find out whether your beliefs are true?
I suspect I’m making a crucial mistake somewhere in this whole train of thought, but I can’t see where.
I’ve been mulling this over, as I am wont to do when I read a post that seems like it ought make sense . . . but it doesn’t, at least to me. Some crucial breakdown where I can’t get into the head of the writer because they are operating in a sufficiently different manner than I do so communication gets muddled.
I think the confusion deals with reifying “truth” and then abstracting it from “justification”. This is actually a major problem I have with the jtb theory since it seems to treat these elements are somehow seperable. Beliefs can stand on their own, that I get. Because beliefs can be true, false, or neither true nor false. But something is only as true as it is justified. Whether or not we have knowledge of that justification and to what extent we want to follow that justification is another matter entirely. If truth is out there in some noumenal/absolute sense, it makes sense that the degree of justification needs to also match that level, at least ultimately. But if the truth is merely a reflection of what works, I’m unsure it needs to be so. This invites another problem, since it abstracts (or at least can) “how” from the justification. When I turn on the light in my house, the light goes on. If it doesn’t, I check the filament in the light and if that is broken, I replace it. If that doesn’t work, I check the fuse box and if that doesn’t work, I’ll eventually call an electrician. The reliability of this method, this functionality, ultimatelty justifies electrical engineering and, by extension, the physics that electrical engineering is based off of.
But I can happily be an ignoramus about that, the “how” and justify it as true through its functionality. I don’t have a problem with that. If, on the other hand, how needs to be included in the conception there is a major problem (one that is often exploited by post-modernists) since empiricism is a limited field so if the questions of “how” and “why” are asked enough the answer invariably becomes “I don’t know” which, if a complete system is demanded for truth, would invalidate the entire truth structure of the system. But that sort of thinking doesn’t work, so I’m honestly not too worried about it.
Those who have no conception of truth can’t complain when, or that, they are lied to.
theories of justification or truth-tracking will always be insufficient to account for “truth” in any demonstrable way. the only way to build a truth-theory which demonstrates true beliefs is to construct a coherence theory of truth, which builds a system of consistent and non-contradictory beliefs(premises/conclusions). most of these will be based on perceptual experience via sensation, some on logic/math. of course it will bear no demonstrable relation to any kind of “Truth” (capital T) but then again, objectivity being impossible (with regard to the impossibility of nonsubjectivity) , all theories of Truth are just lies (and all attempts to demonstrate (justify) a belief’s truthfulness with regard to anything other than the belief’s subjectivity is impossible).
the best we can do it construct a theory of truth based on coherence-platforms, which at least allows us to conclude that such beliefs within that set are true by relation to each other and to the system itself via logical necessity. noncoherence theories of truth are just theories of Truth in disguise, as they smuggle in impossible notions of nonsubjectivity. that is why noncoherence theories of truth/true belief will never suffice to achieve anything other than confusion, doubt and error.
These two concepts ‘truth’ and ‘justification’ are in fact different. Where justification deals (usually) with the ways a person comes to believe, truth deals with the belief’s relation to reality. A person can be justified even though their belief is false.
They are, and must be. There’s also good reason to think so.
I have been thinking over this part of our post, and I can’t say I understand what you mean. Truth does not, in principle, require justification, and justification does not require truth. A person who guesses and it turns out that he was right had a true belief but no justification. And for the converse, imagine a detective who is investigating a murder, but the main suspect is framed by a professional. All clues lead to this person having done it, and so you would say that the investigator is justified in believing that the guy who is framed did it, but his belief would not be true.
If you’re saying that one is justified only if their belief is true, then you’ve made the conditions for justification too stringent. If you’re saying that one has a true belief only if their belief is sufficiently justified, then I think this still is wrong as the detective case is supposed to show.
You’ve lost me again. Are you saying in the italicized part that you think if we’re assuming truth is noumenal that if one has sufficient justification (i.e., reason) for his belief, then his belief is true? Is this a condition for truth? Why does one need justification for his belief to be true? Let’s say I buy a lottery ticket, and the day the numbers are drawn passes, and for no reason I start believing that I’ve won. As it turns out, this really is the case. My numbers were picked, but obviously I didn’t have justification for my belief that I won, yet I had the truth.
But truth cannot in an epistemology class be said to be what works. The argument, I assume, is that truth works, meaning if you have the truth, then it will works. From this, you affirm the consequent, and conclude with the antecedent. This is faulty arguing. I mean, it is reasonable to assume that whatever works is true in a day to day life, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that whatever works must be true.
Last book I read on epistemology didn’t look kindly upon coherency theories. I don’t remember exactly what the arguments were, although I do remember thinking they were good. This was some time ago, so I’ll need to freshen up on this stuff if we’re going to have this conversation. Can you give me a definition of a coherency theory of truth, because all the ones I have in my mind right now seem to be about justification.
Pragmatism/instrumentalism seem to get along fine defining the truth as “that which works.” This goes into the levels of justification that I was talking about. We justify our beliefs by how well they work or via some proxy we trust. The degree of truth contained in something is therefore contingent upon how well it works, though “absolute truth” (if such a thing exists) cannot ever be said to be reached using this method. I’m fine with that. Truth is constructed by the observer, ultimately. It isn’t faulty arguing, it is a tautological premise. The degree to which something approaches the truth is defined as being its usefulness.
As for you purchasing the lottery ticket, you can’t think of probabilities like that as being the truth since your actions bear no significant relation to the outcome. Or rather, you can think of them as being somewhere on the function of ‘truth’ but such an approach is very distant from the asymptotic point on the graph where the “absolute truth” is being approached.