How to think about truth
Jeremy Wyatt, Joseph Ulatowski,
Psyche,
Dec 05, 2022
This is a nice and reasonably sophisticated discussion of the concept of truth - a concept that lies at the core of our mission as educators. Most of us began life with a naive definition of truth - "True beliefs pick out facts that exist independently of our beliefs about them." Or some such thing. Objective truth. But is that what truth really is? Or what it should be? In this article, Jeremy Wyatt & Joseph Ulatowski argue that "your culture and the languages you speak may significantly affect the way that you think about truth." So might your thoughts about truth - what you learn, what you experience, what you think. To my mind, truth is an a property we assign to a sentence (or a proposition), and is defined relative to the system or model in which it is defined. If you think there's one and only one system or language that describes the world, then truth is objective - but when have we ever seen that?
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