RE: Necessary Truths Exist
December 10, 2013 at 1:47 am
(This post was last modified: December 10, 2013 at 2:09 am by MindForgedManacle.)
(December 7, 2013 at 6:10 am)Rational AKD Wrote: really? lets see... truth is a body of facts and facts are true pieces of information. both words are interchangeable and use the other in their respective definitions. perhaps you're simply confused.
Truth is not a body of facts, not even on truth as correspondence. Just what theory of truth are you mangling here?
Quote:yes, I know truth refers to propositions and real refers to existence. but what you seem to forget are propositions are most often representatives of reality. "this rock exists" is a proposition that represents a fact similar to how a word represents its definition. we can clearly tell the difference between a word and a definition, but we equate the word to its definition so deeply, it is literally impossible to bring up the word without its definition. same applies to truth. we equate truth to reality so deeply it is impossible to bring up one without the other. truth represents a reality to where if it is not real, it is not true either. so if I say "there is life on other planets" this statement is not true unless there is life on other planets, and even if we don't have any evidence of it for a hundred years it doesn't affect the truth value of the statement.
You revealed your own flaw several times. "Representatives of reality", in other words, correspondence. You are seriously confused about language if you don't see how this screws up what you're saying. Words refer to certain concepts, words are not the things themselves.
Truth is a correspondence between a proposition and a fact, not the fact itself. All truth would disappear if there were no minds, but not all facts would. Truth is dependent on fact, because truth is dependent on the existence of minds. Truth is the attempt to accurately encapsulate facts, but it is not the facts themselves. Heck, in the part I bolded you agreed with me, thereby giving up inadvertently.
Quote:funny, that wasn't in the definitions. though I do accept your explanation, but propositions can still deal with reality.
Yes it was:
Your Dictionary quote Wrote:2 a (1) : the state of being the case : fact (2) : the body of real things, events, and facts
Propositions deal in accurately reflecting reality, they are not the reality they refer to (self-evidently).
Quote:reality cannot be true because in order to say something is true you need more than a subject. you need an about, what, why, where, etc. but tell me, does reality have an about or do we simply make that up? if we make it up, then nothing we say or observe about reality can be real. you might as well claim you live in your head since everything about reality only exists in your mind.
And the underlined bit basically accepts exactly what I've been saying but that you've repeatedly denied. Truth is to propositions corresponding to reality, fact is that to which is corresponded.
Clearly experience of reality is real (we already agreed that is incorrigible did we not?). Whether or not there is something 'behind' those experiences I take to be unanswerable, a la Kant. Reality itself has no about, it just is. Only minds make abouts.
Quote:what does the word current mean? what does it refer to because every dictionary I look at says it refers to the present. is that true or false? if it is true, then the reference changes over time not the truth of the statement. if you read a book that had the statement "Ronald Reagan is the current president of the US" and saw it was dated 1985, would you claim the author wrong? of course not because you know what he was referencing. the statement is only wrong if you remove its reference and context, which also removes its meaning forcing you to impose your own reference and context.
You seemed to have missed the point. Say for example you don't know when the sentence was written and have no way of finding out. If it says that Regan is the president, it is false. Why? Because the fact that statement refers to is no longer the case. In other words, facts change and thereby the truth of propositions do too.
Wikipedia has some good stuff as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact#Fact_in_philosophy
Wikipedia Article on fact Wrote:Facts may be understood as that which makes a true sentence true. Facts may also be understood as those things to which a true sentence refers. The statement "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system" is about the fact Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system.
The underlined bits in particular are exactly what I've been saying.
