(January 24, 2016 at 2:04 pm)robvalue Wrote: What practical use is it to say everything is "in some way" true? I agree things can be true in different ways. That's clear.
If you're allowed to project whatever you want into the statement in question, then it barely means anything anyway.
I would say the practical use of the understanding is to realise that the other person may (almost certainly will) have a perspective that's different to mine, therefore what he is saying is almost certainly not what I am hearing by default.
So it's a call to listen carefully, to try and step outside of myself into what the other person is saying, and hear it on their terms. It's a call to not project into it, in other words.
People who are not aware that truth is relative to a perspective have the tendency to get stuck in terrible arguments over the truth, when in fact there's no such thing.
I'm not saying here that all truths have equal value. Obviously a mentally unwell person may be saying strange things from an un-useful perspective. And it can be hard deciding whether a perspective is worth trying to understand or not. As a rule of thumb though, I think there are a bunch of mainstream perspectives that perhaps billions of people occupy - I'd say to anyone who wants to truly understand the world, can you actually occupy these perspectives and find the position from which they are true?
