What is truth for…

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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What is truth for…

I was recently watching a documentary on Discovery Channel about a man who found an infant cheetah alone in the veldt. It was obvious that Cat, our cheetah, could not survive under such circumstances. John, our man, took cat home and attempted to raise her until she could fend for herself in the wild.

After a short period John recognized that he must release Cat into the wild when she had grown sufficiently to fend for her self. Of course, it stuck him that the cat must receive some training before she would be able to kill prey and thus have food and survive.

John set about to train Cat how to stalk and kill prey. He was able to combine the innate ability of Cat with various training techniques to train the Cat to stalk, capture, and kill a running animal, at least in a rudimentary way.

However, training Cat to recognize friend from foe and prey from dangerous animal in the animal kingdom was another matter. It was obvious that John had little ability to ‘educate’ Cat in the subtleties of survival. This was the task that Cat’s mother would have done.

It makes sense to me to conclude that John could not readily teach Cat the truths of her world. Without her mother’s guidance Cat had little chance to survive in her wild world even though she had grown the strength and size necessary to do so. [b]In Cat’s wild world truth is what is necessary for survival.

I would conclude that truth for any animal, including the human animal, is a matter of survivability. Evolution is a process for determining any creature’s ability to comprehend truth, i.e. survive in their particular world.[/b]

What is truth for humans? Cognitive science informs me that “truth depends on meaningfulness” and “truth is relative to understanding”. What is meaningful for humans? I would say that, just like Cat, survival is the ultimate meaning for humans just as for Cheetahs.

Cat is not a social animal to the extent that humans are. We can examine social animals such as wolves and apes and we can see that what the group decides is meaningful, i.e. true, determines truth for the individual as well as the group. Truth for humans becomes more complex because humans have created an artificial world of meaning that makes it more difficult to ascertain what is true and what will lead to the extinction of the species.

Isn’t scientific theory an example of truth for humans?

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson

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Maybe ‘Comfortable Existance’ is a higher priority than mere ‘Survival’. What are we willing to sacrifice for a more comfortable existance?

Or what motivations will we implement in coersion to our methodology?

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Will to power. It doesn’t matter if somthing is truth or not since often enough the goal is about conquest.

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Truth is not meaning, truth is a quality of an idea that describes how well the idea corresponds to reality.

Truth is important because holding alot of ideas, information or facts that do not correspond to reality leads one to make decisions based on a inaccurate picture of reality.

Before the flood of flames flies in my face allow me to qualify this in that I do not believe (In most cases) in binary truth values and believe most things are more true or less true. Epistemology is a tough cookie and no one has a completely accurate view of how things really are. It’s just that the close an idea corresponds to reality the better it is.

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truth is for politicians and priests…

-Imp

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Truth is also for people who like to shoot at things.

A tight shot group is truth.

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that depends on the calibur of the gun…

-Imp

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granted, but anything over 38+p is considered sufficient

I’m a .40 guy myself

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alas, 2 or 3 rounds from a 150mm cannon are hardly groupable…

-Imp

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Oh contraire monfraire. That is what you call “Fire for Effect”

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more like good old fashioned overkill…

-Imp

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Truth if for gauging how valid a concept is to reality. You can’t interact effectively if you don’t know the truth.

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We comprehend a statement as being true in a given situation when our comprehension of the statement fits our comprehension of the situation closely enough for our purposes.

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So you think it is perfectly reasonable to bend the truth to fit our goals?

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every communist/socialist/progressive/liberal democrat does.

-Imp

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The truth is I am prudishly shocked by graffitti in public places, loud talkers in movie audiences, and people having sex at the next table in a restaurant. I argue with myself that I should ignore such and my environment will gradualy become more chaotic as such scenes become more common. The truth is we live in communities where graffitti is either strictly dissallowed, frowned upon and regulated to a night-time activity, or welcomed as free expression. Whether these examples are divided into moral or ethical questions it is as you say, and to go one’s own way is to risk group ostracisation.

Sometimes I think there is an unwritten desire not to discuss these things because of the possibility of dissproving accepted modes of conduct and beginning a revolution that results in more shocking public displays.

That concern is certainly a valid one to the status quo.

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Objectivists want only “the facts mam”; they consider that there exists a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that defines the content of a category. Objectivists will tell you that the necessary and sufficient conditions for a statement to be a lie are: 1) the speaker believes the statement is false, 2) the speaker intends to deceive, and 3) the statement is false.

Reasoning requires the ability to conceptualize and the ability to infer. It appears to me that any creature that moves in space must have the neural structure necessary to conceptualize and infer in order to survive, i.e. such creatures have the capacity to reason. It is this capacity that is the source of the human capacity to reason.

Just as a fish fin does not resemble the human hand but is in fact the source of the human hand, so too is the reasoning ability of the creature I depict the source of human reason.

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. All neural creatures’ water creature and wo/man categorize.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

When individuals are polled about this matter of lying it is discovered that ordinary folks do not grade on such necessary and sufficient conditions. When surveyed most individuals grade on the curve. Item 1) is the most important and item 3) the least important. In other words, a person judges category, almost always by something different than necessary and sufficient conditions.

While the official category structure defines a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a statement to be a lie we citizens have a more complex and ambiguous means for such a judgment. Where objectivists do not allow for an internal structure of conditions the man and woman on the street does judge based upon other than necessary and sufficient conditions. Objectivist may define category as a conscious concept, in reality we use category in a much fuzzier manner.

The objectivist view says that to be part of the category ‘lie’ a statement must have certain necessary and sufficient conditions but we do not categorize in that fashion.

Concepts are those neural structures that allow us to reason about categories. Prototypes are the forms of concepts that allow us to reason. There are a number of different prototype forms: Typical-case, Ideal-case, Social stereotype, Salient exemplars, “in short, prototype-based reasoning constitutes a large portion of the actual reasoning that we do.”

“An embodied concept is a neural structure that is actually part of, the sensorimotor system of our brains. Much of conceptual inference is therefore, sensorimotor inference.”

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Personaly I think we are involved in rearanging the environment into something we would be happy to be recycled into.

If someone were happy to be recycled into a mouse in the Serengehti for one reason or another then I have nothing against that, they have their own reasons.

I think ‘ideas’ are important to the reformulation of society if reformulation is to happen. Some people are against ideas on the basis that ideas can threaten their existence or expectations; this is understandable. I don’t know if anyone intentionaly wishes to deceive in order to preserve a statusquo.

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Truth is a illusional or subjective created reality used to validate one’s illusions against other people’s illusions of being.

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Insert hysterical masses, somewhere into that. :slight_smile: