This piece is written primarily as an introduction to questions about truth for beginning students in philosophy and for those who may not have had much experience studying philosophy. Because of this, the piece is not highly detailed, so I apologize to any of you who are more experienced in your studies of philosophy. Since the purpose of this blog is to bring philosophy out of the classroom and into our everyday lives, I think that introductory posts such as this one will better help us get acquainted with philosophy as a discipline and a way of life. I hope that it will stimulate some interesting discussion.
More often than not, you run into two opposing schools of thought when discussing ideas about truth, or "Truth," as members of one of the camps would have it. The members of these camps spend most of their time demonizing and criticizing each other, all the while ignoring any substantive questions associated with the idea of truth. These diametrically opposed schools of thought have both missed the point of how we can talk about truth. So the rest of this post will be an overview of the two camps. I will be providing my own solution to the problem in a later post.
First, I want to talk about the so-called, "correspondence theory" of truth. Philosophers who hold a correspondence theory of truth believe that if we are to consider something to be true, its truth must in fact correspond to reality. So, if you were to claim that all crows are black, some football players are from England, most Americans believe in God, or all dogs go to heaven, the truth of these claims would have to be verified by observing the facts of the particular state of affairs. Adherents of this view claim that it is the most reasonable way of approaching questions of truth since it provides you with an absolute standard by which you can measure if something is in fact true. This absolute standard, which many adherents refer to as an "objective" standard, stands in marked contrast to the second school of thought: relativism.
Relativism, in contrast to the absolutism of the adherents of a correspondence theory of truth, is the theory that there is no absolute conception of truth. Any attempts to demonstrate an objective standard of truth, according to the relativist, will end in frustration since there can be no absolute truth. There are many forms of relativism, so for the purposes of this piece I will focus on two: cultural relativism and individual relativism. Cultural relativists claim that the truth of a particular idea or statement depends on the culture or time in which it is expressed. For example, were an American to talk about freedom by criticizing another culture where women are subservient to men, the cultural relativist would claim that the American's view of freedom is true in the US, but not in that other culture. An individual relativist is someone who makes the says the ever popular, "what's true for you isn't true for me."
Now, why do I claim that both of these views miss the point? First, I want to highlight some of the positive ideas associated with each of the schools of thought. The absolutists rightly recognize that there is a standard way we can define truth, so that we can find a common way of identifying whether a statement is true or false. The relativists, specifically the cultural relativists, highlight an important insight on the nature of cultures. While embedded in a particular culture, you can find yourself accepting particular customs or practices which may not be accepted in another culture. This does not, however, mean that a particular custom is true in one culture and false in another; it merely takes differences in cultures into account in a way that many absolutists refuse to acknowledge.
The negatives of the relativist position tend to be more obvious to people, especially cultural relativism, since it would be difficult to condemn atrocities committed by one group against another if we were to completely follow this view. The problem with the correspondence theory of truth is that it does not take the passage of time into account. (With this problem of time, I am considering writing a piece on time in the future.) If there is a sense of things that are past, present, or future (have been, are, and will be), then if I claim "there will be a battle at sea tomorrow," we can only know the truth or falsity of the statement the following day. How do we avoid the problems posed by these opposed theories? You'll just have to wait for my upcoming answer in a later post.
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