Objective Truth

Mind Over Matter

WHICH revealed truth? WHICH god? Oh the non-sense created in the religiously corrupted mind.

Grumpy

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While both the subjective and objective divisions of experience are apparently the result of a conscious system -- that is, both "inner" and "outer" manifestations disappear when a prizefighter receives a knockout blow -- the objective part is nevertheless publicly shared with other humans (those not suffering from certain clinical conditions). So any reliable descriptions and truth value assigned to propositions derived from the objective side should be independent of personal will or desires -- i.e., they can't all be branded subjective. They also aren't absolute, because of the a posteriori circumstance (their being grounded in public and personal experience). Absolute = immutable; unrevisable; non-contingent; free of dependency upon relations and special conditions.

Principles deemed as either necessary or as globally applicable, or are prerequisites for methods and formal enterprises (like grammar, mathematics, "naturalism", cosmology, morality, etc.) could be considered either before experience or free of it (a priori). But it may be difficult to demonstrate they are not derived or inferred from empirical territory in any way whatsoever, as well as thereby being immune to any possible revision. Also, any standards, measurement units, or axioms of a system can be nominally declared "absolutes" within that invented system, so as to prevent muddling-up or corrupting the system.

Immanuel Kant . . . "For whence could experience derive its certainty [like a chair being perceived, identified, and kicked in a room?], if all the rules, according to which it proceeds, were always themselves empirical, and therefore contingent? Such rules could hardly be regarded as first principles." --Critique of Pure Reason, p45, Norman Kemp Smith translation

 

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If this statement is correct then it's attempting to refer to an absolute truth in it's meaning because it's saying there isn't an absolute truth which makes it self-contradictory.

 

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Big Chiller

The point I was trying to make(badly, it seems)is that what we call Absolute Truth isn't Absolute(ever)and often isn't true at all.

Grumpy

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I thought YHWH said that to Moses...

 

What I say is not a truth.

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The point that I was trying to make is any statements made about absolute truths disproving them are self-contradictory make of that what you will.

 

If you could disprove absolute truth, then the disproof would be an absolute truth. Therefore you didn't really disprove absolute truth, but rather demonstrated an absolute truth.

Often there is a subjective layer of truth, on top of an objective layer of truth, sort of the way we you work with layers in photoshop. If we flatten the image we get a composite which is both objective and subjective, at the same time, with the final result dependant on how we philosophically blend the two layers. In photoshop we can lighten, darken, difference, etc. A politician for one side may start with a partial truth layer, add another subjective layer based on bias, and then use lighten for blending. The composite looks true to the base but not the opposition. They may use darken to blend the layers.

This can be done even without blending. For example, one hundred years ago we knew of atoms. Now we have quarks with quarks making up the atoms (according to theory).

Say I had a rock one hundred years ago. We all can see it exists via our sensory systems. This is an objective layer. The next layer is the theory of what we actually think exists in our hand. The atomic explanation was objective in its day, but not totally true one hundred years later, due to quarks, therefore this layers was somewhat subjective. One hundred years ago, the composite appeared very objective with or without blending.

Among other layers, is the layer connected to the eye of the observer. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. We can define beauty via culture for a collective layer and call this objective. The individual may also have his own personal layer which might be defined as subjective, since the consensus assumes it is the only objective layer in town.

It is not clear the number of layers there are, but in physics even the observer can have an impact on phenomena, at the quantum level, for another blending layer that can tweak the layer below it, before this is then blended.

Thinking in terms of layers and blending allows for those subtle tweaks in truth that different people see.

 

Yes.

 

This is a truism.

But from it, it does not automatically follow that the Catholic Church is the truest and highest representative of God on earth.

Nor does it automatically follow that a man claiming to have a revelation of God must be believed for such.
Your saying that you know the absolute truth does not obligate us to believe you that you do. (There are, for starters, a few thousand Protestant churches who maintain to have the absolute truth revealed to them, and each of them claims to be the one and only right one, and that the CC is wrong.)


IOW, there is a crucial epistemological step here that you have not elaborated on:

How can a person know that something that someone claims to be the revealed truth, in fact is the revealed truth?

 

??
I don't see how what you say ties in with what MOM said.



(That said, from a theistic perspective, it is absurd to suggest a notion like "Without God man can only know subjective truths" - because from a theistic perspective, there is nothing without God - no man, no truth, no understanding, nothing. I assume that by "without God" MoM means something rather specific, such as 'without the teachings of the Catholic Church'.)

 

The question is, rather, how to get MOM to actually participate in a thread he started.

 

I don't think so, in fact I'm mystified by what you could mean.

Grumpy

 

Without a god there are still objective truths. How does that not tie in with what he said?

 

Like I said -

That said, from a theistic perspective, it is absurd to suggest a notion like "Without God man can only know subjective truths" - because from a theistic perspective, there is nothing without God - no man, no truth, no understanding, nothing. I assume that by "without God" MoM means something rather specific, such as 'without the teachings of the Catholic Church'.

 

@wynn

MoM wouldn't have to mean the Catholic Church (even if he did) by that he could have said it to express his point.​

 

I'll leave it to him to clarify his position, and will respond if he does.

 

You are confusing truth for objective reality. Objective reality is not dependent on a person's approval or acceptance. It just "is".

Truth is correspondence between a conscious mind's representation of reality and objective reality. In other words, when some idea/notion in your mind matches objective reality, that match is a state called "true". When some idea/notion in your mind does not match objective reality, that mismatch is a state called "false".

 

Not at all! Doing so would be against his conviction that the Catholic Church is the highest representative of God on earth.
A part of holding an institution to be the highest representative of God on earth is to take for granted that it is the highest representative of God on earth, as opposed to trying to establish or argue for such a status.

 

This is just one theory of truth. As mentioned earlier, there are many theories of truth.

Do you disagree that there are many theories of truth? Do you believe that truth is something about which there can not be a theory?