Do you believe whatever is real is true? Or do you believe that some things are true but not real? If there is a distinction between real and true, then how do you determine the difference?
I believe something is real if it causes matter to move or it is matter. Something can be true if it does not cause matter to move such as 2+2=4 or it is true that all aunts are sisters.
Real and true are two different adjectives. Statements can be true, whereas a house can’t - however real it is. True statements can be about real or unreal (e.g. fictional) subjects. And one can make untrue statements about real things.
“True” is transitive.
When someone says “true”, my reflex is to ask “true to what?”
In such circumstances as someone claiming something happened, the truth of this statement is determined by whether the declaration is true to possible experiences of the now past event (the “reality”).
Truth is ABOUT reality (or unreality if the experiences are determined to be “unreal” - that they didn’t really happen).
In such statements as 2+2=4, this is true to the assumptions declared such that it comes to appear as a logically consistent and definite expression.
This is not directly about the reality of existence, but indirectly about (concepts derived from) the reality of existence. These concepts aren’t “real” in the sense that they are exactly true to reality (concrete), but in that they are generally true to reality (abstract).
True ‘things’ refer to other things. They portray or describe or assert something about something else (or themselves, though that can get tricky). STatements being the core example of something that can be true, and they are true as far as they fit what they refer to.
A rock does not refer to something else - unless, say, certain shaped rocks were used to show which trail to chose and then the placement of that rock could be true or false.
A dog generallly does not refer to other things. But a pointer, for example, could Point at a rock, when it should be pointing at the dead body of a bird and so its pointing is false.
But regardless of what the dog is pointing at, it is real. If it is a real dog, and not just my hypothetical one.
Objects are real. Even abstract objects can be real–like government, holidays, interviews, etc. I guess actions can be real too (running is real, for example, it happens). So can properties. So can states.
But statements are true (or false). So are beliefs. You can also talk about true stories. True love? Well, that’s getting into a different meaning of “true”.
Truth is, I think both the real and the true come from the same source. We experience the real with our eyes (or any of our senses). We experience the truth with our thoughts and beliefs. They both come from the mental. The mind has a funny way of projecting itself as a reality in one form or another. Sometimes, this manifests as real objects (sensory perception) and other times as truth (belief and knowledge). This seems to be the way the mind works regardless of the character of the qualia from which it is projected. You can have all sorts of real and true (and this, and that) things in a perceived reality.
“Real” and “true” don’t seem sufficient in covering the broad array of manifestations of perceived reality. The closest I have come to finding a term that suffices is “seeming independence”–but even here, I ask: independence from what? From the mind? Then what about the mind’s perceptions or awareness of itself? From the self? Then what about experiencing the self? I find the best approach to be a Wittgensteinian one: just accept a whole family of words and pick and choose from them as you see fit.
I’m going to try to answer coherently (which can often be difficult.) What does the mind perceive that’s “true.” Probably not very much. The individual mind synthesizes what it doesn’t understand with what it does understand. All the sensory perceptions, then, become a ‘blending’ of what we understand of what we’ve seen, smelt, felt tactically, heard, and/or tasted and what we don’t understand. This leads to simile and metaphor in language. It also makes the job of synthesizing more difficult if a person is, say, color-blind or hard of hearing.
If one starts by knowing and accepting that, then it should be realized that everyone is individual and alone in their perceptions. What you experience is unlike what anyone else experiences. What you say and/or write depends on your individual perceptions–but you have to use language in an attempt to transmit what you think. Language generalizes–it must, or there would be no communication.
But just as there is a transmitter, there’s also a receiver–and the receiver has her/his own perceptions. That means even the most clear expression of thought from the transmitter is somewhat garbled by the receiver, who has to blend what s/he understands of the words used with what s/he doesn’t understand when s/he reads or hears the words of the transmitter.
So, yes, there’s a great deal of difference between what’s ‘real’ and what’s ‘true.’