This thread is about truth and the role that it plays in thought/belief. Many people, myself included, hold that truth is correspondence to fact/reality. Let's look at how this works...

When we say that X is true, we mean that that's the way that things are, that X is the case, that X is an accurate representation of reality, that X matches up to the facts at hand... in short, that that corresponds to fact/reality.

This makes truth 'objective'; as in it is not determined within the subject's thoughts, but rather that our thoughts only claim to be matching up to the way things are. All belief necessarily presupposes it's own truth. I believe X, means I believe X is true. However, we can clearly see that belief is insufficient for truth. If truth were entirely determined by belief, then we would have two separate people believing diametrically opposing things and they both would be true. We already know that X cannot be both true and false simultaneously. So, if person A holds X, and person B holds not X, then at least one of them is wrong, and possibly both. Again, this shows that truth is not a matter of belief, and that belief presupposes it's own truth/reality correspondence.

I'll leave it here for now...

Questions, remarks?

I think indifference will set you free faster than truth.

Indifference: The imprisonment of the soul in a purgatory of nonexistence.



Sleeping and never waking.

I disagree that the past "exists."

As you said, "there are nothing but "remnants" of the past. Remnants are remnants. They are clues perhaps. But they are certainly not "the past" itself.

A thing or an event can only exist in the present.

No Independent Access to Reality

The objection that may well have been the most effective in causing discontent with the correspondence theory is based on an epistemological concern. In a nutshell, the objection is that a correspondence theory of truth must inevitably lead into skepticism about the external world because the required correspondence between our thoughts and reality is not ascertainable. Ever since Berkeley's attack on the representational theory of the mind, objections of this sort have enjoyed considerable popularity. It is typically pointed out that we cannot step outside our own minds to compare our thoughts with mind-independent reality. Yet—so the objection continues—on the correspondence theory of truth, this is precisely what we would have to do to gain knowledge. We would have to access reality as it is in itself, independently of our cognition of it, and determine whether our thoughts correspond to it. Since this is impossible, since all our access to the world is mediated by our cognition, the correspondence theory makes knowledge impossible (cf. Kant 1800, intro vii). Assuming that the resulting skepticism is unacceptable, the correspondence theory has to be rejected, and some other account of truth, an epistemic (anti-realist) account of some sort, has to be put in its place (Cf., e.g., Blanshard 1941.)

This type of objection brings up a host of issues in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and general metaphysics. All that can be done here is to hint at a few pertinent points (cf. Searle 1995, chap. 7; David 2004, 6.7). The objection makes use of the following line of reasoning: “If truth is correspondence, then, since knowledge requires truth, we have to know that our beliefs correspond to reality, if we are to know anything about reality”. There are two assumptions implicit in this line of reasoning, both of them debatable.

(i) It is assumed that S knows x only if S knows that x is true—a requirement not underwritten by standard definitions of knowledge, which tell us that S knows x only if x is true and S is justified in believing x. The assumption may rest on confusing requirements for knowing x with requirements for knowing that one knows x.

(ii) It is assumed that, if truth = F, then S knows that x is true only if S knows that x has F. This seems highly implausible. By the same standard it would follow that no one who does not know that water is H2O can know that the Nile contains water—which would mean, of course, that until fairly recently nobody knew that the Nile contained water (and that, analogously, until fairly recently nobody knew that there were stars in the sky, whales in the sea, or that the sun gives light). Moreover, even if one does know that water is H2O, one's strategy for finding out whether the liquid in one's glass is water does not have to involve chemical analysis: one could simply taste it, or ask a reliable informant. Similarly, as far as knowing that x is true is concerned, it seems the correspondence theory does not entail that we have to know that a belief corresponds to a fact in order to know that it is true, or that our method of finding out whether a belief is true has to involve a strategy of actually comparing a belief with a fact—although the theory does of course entail that obtaining knowledge requires obtaining a belief that corresponds to a fact.

More generally, one might question whether the objection still has much bite once the metaphors of “accessing” and “comparing” are spelled out with more attention to the psychological details of belief formation and to epistemological issues concerning the conditions under which beliefs are justified or warranted. For example, it is quite unclear how the metaphor of “comparing” applies to knowledge gained through perceptual belief-formation. One might also wonder whether competing accounts of truth actually enjoy any significant advantage over the correspondence theory, once they are held to the standards set up by this sort of objection.

In one form or another, the “No independent access to reality”-objection against correspondence theoretic approaches has been one of the, if not the, main source and motivation for idealist and anti-realist stances in philosophy (cf., e.g., Stove 1991). However, the connection between correspondence theories of truth and the metaphysical realism vs. anti-realism (or idealism) debate seems less direct than is often assumed. On the one hand, deflationists and identity theorists can be, and typically are, metaphysical realists while rejecting the correspondence theory; and advocates of a correspondence theory, on the other hand, might be metaphysical idealists (e.g., McTaggart 1921) or anti-realists, maintaining that facts are constituted by mind or maintaining that what facts there are depends somehow on what we believe or are capable of believing.

2) You can prove a negative just as far as you can prove a positive. "I think, therefore I am" proves that I exist and it also proves that I don't not exist, at the very least to me.

"The way things are/were" (the truth of things) being dependent upon individual observers, cannot be known objectively, especially by a single perception.

So, if truth of "the way things are/were" cannot be known objectively then to speak of something as "truth" (objective truth) is pointless because it depends on perspective and opinion (are these not subjective things?)

The only things that can be called "true" are statements.

False.

My love is also true, and my love is not a statement.
I used to practice archery. My aim was often true.
The wheels on my bike are true.
I have had true friends.

This is the nirvana fallacy. Suppose it is true we cannot achieve perfect objectivity - that doesn't mean that speaking of objective truth is pointless, not at all. This line of reasoning is convenient for people who wish to deny reality. It seems logical, but it is not.

Suppose it is true we cannot achieve perfect objectivity - that doesn't mean that speaking of objective truth is pointless, not at all. This line of reasoning is convenient for people who wish to deny reality. It seems logical, but it is not.

Imagine an experiment.

A man enters a room (a controlled laboratory experiment.)

In that room there are three tables and there appears to be a glass sitting on each table.

Table #1: There is a glass sitting on the table.
Table #2: There is a glass sitting on the table.
Table #3: There is a glass sitting on the table.

All statements are true only if there are three glasses, each sitting on the respective tables. Correct?

But the Observer cannot know if these statements are true. The man, the observer, sees three tables and each table appears to be in the room and each table appears to have a glass sitting on them.

However:

Table #1. is a hologram. In reality, there is no glass sitting on that table.

Table #2 is a real glass sitting on the table.

Table #3 has no glass at all, but the observer has been hypnotized into seeing a glass sitting there.

The point being, we cannot know what is true as is corresponds to the way things are/"were" because we cannot know objective reality.