A question about Truth

[bennyboy]

Experiences are intrinsically true-- as experiences. It is attributions about the source of those experiences which is in question.

That made no sense at all. Experiences aren't the bearers of truth, propositions in language are.

I think this represents a shallow understanding of what language is. Language is the organized presentation of symbols for communication. But it is not the words that are subject to a truth value-- it is the symbols themselves.

So where does the symbolic representation of fact begin? I'd argue it begins right with the awareness of the relationship between subject (self) and object (others). This is surely the first layer of interpretation of raw sense data. In other words, "cogito ergo sum" is the first truth that any person can be aware of, and it is not dependent on communication with others.

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A plane is a flat two-dimensional surface.
The flatness of the desk is a feature of the border of the space defined by the particles that compose the desk. "Flatness" might not ever be absolute, but it still objectively true that some thigns are flatter than others.

What's a "thing," and what's its relationship to the myriad particles of which it is composed? It is true for us that things exist, but is their nature more than an arbitrary division and categorization of the properties of color, form, etc. of which our ideas are composed?

If a truth proposition represents a consistency between symbols, and if we are now all aware of two levels of reality-- the mundane perception of things, and the knowledge of particles-- then the truth is paradoxical: things are real as we perceive them, and they are not real as we perceive them. You cannot find "flat" anywhere in the universe. You can only find particles that are aligned in space, and refer to this relationship as "flatness." To me, that's a symbolic relationship. But since this is how we actually experience the universe, flatness is only untrue when we try to make it coexist with ideas about particles.