When we speak of something as being true, we usually refer to beliefs or claims to knowledge, expressed in the form of a proposition.
What is true? Propositional beliefs and knowledge. Why not other kinds of knowledge? Because it makes no sense to say that my knowledge of swimming, or of my mother, or of Turkish, is true. (This doesn't mean that I can't make true statements from my knowledge about these. I can, but then we are back to propositional knowledge. But propositions about swimming, my mother and Turkish are not the only things that constitute my knowledge of them.)
When is a belief true? When the belief has been found to correspond to reality? But we often do not have direct access to reality, except through the biological filter of our brain and the cognitive filters of our mind. So how do we judge something as being true? (Cognition is the process of acquiring or constructing knowledge.)
Several conditions need to be fulfilled:
a) There should be no reason to believe that it is not true, i.e., there is no evidence that is contrary to or inconsistent with the belief.
b) The evidence available is incontrovertible, and either implies the belief or is consistent with it. (But how can we describe something as “incontrovertible” without relying on some notion of truth and evidence?)
c) The belief has no consequence that is (found to be) false.
d) The belief can be acted upon to produce results that are expected.
[Note: (a) and (b) do not rule out the possibility of evidence appearing later which casts doubt on the belief.]
Therefore there is no certain knowledge (except logically certain or solipsistic knowledge). All knowledge is tainted with error, or with the possibility of error.
Conditions (a) and (b) together give us a rough grip/grasp on reality. The grip is enhanced by the belief satisfying the conventional tests of truth (correspondence, coherence, consensus and pragmatic) spoken of in philosophy textbooks.
The better the grip on reality that the belief gives, the truer it is.
When we say that a belief or a proposition is true, we do not mean that it has truth. Truth is a quality that resides in reality, which is never completely knowable. For a belief to be true, it needs to partake of the truth, just as the visible world around us partakes of sunlight during the day. This partaking of the truth occurs to a greater or lesser extent – our grasp of truth is almost always partial or incomplete.
Truth is like the light of the sun. We see things only when light falls on it. Similarly, we regard a belief as true only when we see the light of truth reflected in it.
Reality is given, and exists independently of our individual minds or wills. (This excludes many things we hold as “real”, such as values.) But our beliefs are constructed by our minds. Truth is a quality of reality, but our beliefs partly share this quality. Truth is absolute, it is our grasp of it that is partial, relative, imperfect, contextual, incomplete, and that constitutes what we regard as knowledge. The fact that knowledge is not absolute does not mean that we can’t be certain (or certain enough) about it in many practical situations.
The people who "knew" that the earth was flat didn't know the truth (which is that the earth is round - if that is indeed what it is).
I believe that truth is a defining characteristic of reality, but reality is not directly accessible to us. (Then how do I know that truth is a defining characteristic of it?) All our knowledge is corrupted by margins of error, in many cases so small that it makes no difference to us, but in other cases quite large, and therefore subject to frequent correction and revision.
Often we embrace error because we are somehow deceived into believing it is truth. But as long as the error serves us well, we see no reason to change it. Following Karl Popper, I believe that all knowledge develops through a process of successive encounters with error, searching and puzzling over error and its eventual correction AND modification of perspective when the errors become persistent. But we would never know the truth if we chanced upon it, because to do so, one would have to be sure that we had eliminated all error, and that is something about which we can never be completely sure (although we can be sure enough in many cases).
But does this always work in this straightforward, progressive way? Look at politics, morality, institutions…Do we not often cling to our beliefs despite plentiful evidence that we are wrong? What is the process by which we shield ourselves from attacks upon our most cherished beliefs? Self-deception, bias and protective dogmatism are two constituents of this shield, but there are others.
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Our intellectual energies are spent on cleaning a very dirty pair of spectacles – those through which we see the world - but this job is never done, because new dirt keeps accumulating (from where?).
Perhaps we need to get some hearing aids as well (since our spectacles are dirty) as well as clean our ears from time to time. We seem to be deaf to the moral basis of our understanding. We are like a deaf person trying to get around a dark room only with a pair of very dirty spectacles. He doesn’t know where the light switch is, and may not even know whether there is one!
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