Objective Truth

 If there is no objective truth then whatever a person says is true. This leads to contradictions.

When there is a contradiction, one statement must be false and the other must be true.

John, for instance, is either at home or he is not. If someone says John is at home and another person says John is not home, only one of these statements can be true. Similarly, it is either right or wrong to date your professor who is already married.

Protagoras, a Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, maintained "man is the measure of all things." Protagoras is saying each individual determines what is true, and nobody else. If I am the "measure", then I determine what is true; I determine what is right and wrong.

In many ways this is the Age of Protagoras. In today's moral climate individuals decide for themselves what is true, and then they decide what the right thing to do is. Our laws function in this manner, and now our schools more and more.

An objective truth or good does not appear to exist any longer; it's only what is "true for me," and what is "right for me.

Objective truth serves to establish norms of moral behaviour whereby a person can say what is right and wrong.

Man is not the measure of all things. Objective truth is the measure.

Objective truth refers to information or statements that correspond to reality independent of individual perspectives, emotions, or biases. It remains constant regardless of who observes or interprets it. The concept finds its roots in logic and empirical evidence, emphasizing the necessity of verifiable and repeatable facts. 

In philosophy, the idea of truth as objective is straightforward: some things will always be true and other will always be false, irrespective of our beliefs or opinions. Our personal convictions have no bearing on the facts of the world around us. That which is true remains true, even if we stop believing it or cease to exist altogether.

Most people, in their daily lives, implicitly act as though they believe in objective truth. We assume that our clothes will still be in the closet in the morning, even though we stopped thinking about them during the night. We expect our keys to be where we left them, even if we don’t actively believe this at the moment. These assumptions are rooted in the idea that things happen independently of our beliefs.

Scientific research also operates under the assumption of objective, independent truths. Scientists make predictions based on theories and then test those predictions. If the tests succeed or fail, it doesn’t matter how many researchers believe in the outcome—the results stand on their own. This process relies on the existence of objective truths that remain unaffected by our subjective beliefs.

While there are logical and pragmatic reasons for assuming that truth is objective, some skeptics challenge this position. Nevertheless, our daily functioning depends on the idea that certain things are objectively true, regardless of our individual perspectives.  So, whether we’re discussing the height of Mount Everest or the length of a banana, objective truth remains a fundamental concept in our understanding of reality.

Common Sense Principles Of Discussion

 

         Effective and civil discussion is absolutely essential in reestablishing science on its firm foundation. Since discussion has

in recent times become less and less clearly centered on its purpose — which is to get to the truth — we find we have

developed bad habits of discussion. Indeed it often happens that, despite our good intentions, discussions degenerate

into incivility. It is our hope that the following thoughts will help restore the right emphasis and civility in conversation.

l) The aim of discussion is to arrive at a precise statement of a problem and a true answer. It is profitable if progress in achieving this goal is made even if there is not ultimate success.

2) The first step in critical thinking must be to state a problem clearly in the form A is B, or at least that A is not B.

Many disagreements arise from not being clear about what problem is to be solved.

3) lf you are speaking to someone who has more education and knowledge in the field under discussion, give deference

to him. This means that conversation will not equally split with each person speaking 50 % of the time. Clearly, the

one who has more knowledge will necessarily have to spend more time relating it.

a)

The receiver of knowledge should not resent the giver merely because the giver gives more, i.e. speaks more. Indeed,

like the receiver of a wonderful material gift, the spiritual gift of knowledge should be received with sincere appreciation. Few who receive a gift of gold will respond with accusations of unfairness about the inequity involved of them not being able to respond in kind. Rather, most will receive it with great thanks and enthusiasm as lottery winners do. Since the spiritual gift of knowledge is literally infinitely more valuable, the gratitude of the receiver of knowledge

should be immense.

b) One essential way of showing gratitude to the giver, which is also an exercise of justice, is to remember his gift and acknowledge him to others. Remembering is key in the process of finding and verifying trustworthy sources, for one needs to remember who has given what to be able to note whose information is reliable.

The giver should always act and respond charitably to the receiver, never using his knowledge as a club to assert superiority. Instead, the giver should remember that his own knowledge is ultimately itself a gift. Even first hand knowledge is not our own, for it ultimately comes from the external world, which in turn is from God.

c)

Both sides should be grateful for the opportunity for discussion, because, if nothing else, it is an opportunity to be present to your fellowman, through the exercise of the highest human power: the intellect. After all, you are conversing with a being made in the very image of God and in that very conversing you are manifesting and seeing manifested that image, which is man’s intellectual power. Beyond this, the receiver should be thankful for the new understanding he receives and the giver for the new perspective opened up to his own mind by carefully answering the points made

by the receiver. For each party, it is the opportunity to serve his fellowman.

Letter To A Physicist

 

This letter was an answer to a physicist who asserted that science has priority, not philosophy.

        There is ’science’ then there is the ’scientific method’; you do not seem to acknowledge their differences. Knowledge, prediction (even if mathematical) is science as much as philosophy is science. The philosophical a priori that one need to do ’science=knowledge’ can make all the difference in how I view the usefulness or nature of the ’scientific method’, a method based on logic, therefore philosophy.

For example, if I assume philosophically (you might say scientifically, having your experimental goal in mind) that ’all there is’ is, or can be, mathematically accessible or understandable. That assumption is a philosophical one, not a scientific one.

The Scientific Method measures and counts, If I assume that all I care and worry about can be measured and counted so far so good. We are all witnesses to how far that Scientific Method has taken us.

I do not for an instant doubt or question the utility, the grandeur of the Scientific Method. Far from me the thought. But in the realm of Knowledge (Science if you will) it is only part of the story.

In the realm of Knowledge science is limited

BRAIN DEATH

 This an introduction to an article from the National Library of Medicine.

The article can be found here: Brain death and true patient care - PMC (nih.gov)

Summary: Though legally accepted and widely practiced, the “brain death” standard for the determination of death has remained a controversial issue, especially in view of the occurrence of “chronic brain death” survivors. This paper critically re-evaluates the clinical test-criteria for “brain death,” taking into account what is known about the neuro-critical care of severe brain injury. The medical evidence, together with the understanding of the moral role of the physician toward the patient present before him or her, indicate that an alternative approach should be offered to the deeply comatose patient.

Importance of Philosophical History.

 

The following from a Gilson Reader illustrates quite well I think the point I was trying to make to my brother which is: “ a philosophy or philosopher can only be understood in the context of the history of philosophy.”

 By  turning the concrete into a mosaic of clear ideas, the mathematical method of Descartes raised difficulties whose solution was sought throughout the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the nineteenth century it led in the end to despair—despair of philosophy itself.

How can the domain of pure thought ever be in touch with the domain of pure extension when the property of substances is to be mutually exclusive? This is what Descartes does not tell us. He allows us a thought (not a soul), and extension (not a body): he is unable to account for the union of soul and body.

 

. . . The occasionalism of Malebranche, the pre-established harmony of Leibniz, the parallelism of Spinoza are so many metaphysical “epicycles to solve an ill-stated problem by rescuing, with the aid of complementary devices, the very principle which make the problem insoluble.

 

Again:

What is the most striking difference between the Greek notion of the deity and the notion of God common to practically all the seventeenth-century philosophers? The best answer we can imagine is that, apart from Anaximander, who in a rather cryptic statement said that “the first principle of all things is infinite,” no known Greek philosopher ever posited an infinite being as the cause of all that which is, whereas Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, and practically all the other metaphysicians of the seventeenth century conceived of God as the primary cause of all that which is, and they did so on the strength of he principle hat, if there is a God, He must needs be an infinite being. The remark applies even to the only one among these philosophers who was not a Christian, namely Spinoza. God, Spinoza says, ”is a being absolutely indefinite, that is a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” What can be the cause for this radical change in perspective? The only answer we can imagine is that this cause is to be found in the theological speculation which starting from the biblical notion of a

Creator of all beings, led the men of the middle ages to conceive infinity as a positive conception of being.

 

Again:

. . . Even Spinoza cannot be fully accounted for without taking into account the speculation of the middle ages. To overlook what happened to philosophy in the thirteenth century is to deprive the history of Wetsern thought of its continuity and, by the same token, its intelligibility.

BELIEF

        Starting from a quite general analysis of the basic attitude of "belief", we have arrive directly at the Christian mode of belief.

 For to believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world; taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly. Using rather more traditional language, we could say that to believe as a Christian means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things.

 It means affirming that the meaning we do not make but can only receive is already granted to us, so that we have only to take it and entrust ourselves to it.

Correspondingly, Christian belief is the option for the view that the receiving precedes the making--though this does not mean that making is reduced in value or proclaimed to be superfluous. It is only because we have received that we can also "make". And further: Christian belief--as we have already said--means opting for the view that what cannot be seen in more real than what can be seen. It is an avowal of the primacy of the invisible as the truly real, which upholds us and hence enables us to face the visible with calm composure --knowing that we are responsible before the invisible as the true ground of all things. 

To that extent it is undeniable that Christian belief is a double affront to the attitude that the present world situation seems to force us to adopt. In the shape of positivism and phenomenalism it invites us to confine ourselves to the "visible", the "apparent", in the widest sense of the terms; to extend the basic methodology to which natural science is indebted for its successes to the totality of our relationship with reality. 

Again, in the shape of techne it calls upon us to rely on the "makable" and to expect to find in this the ground that upholds us. The primacy of the invisible over the visible and that of receiving over making run directly counter to this basic situation. No doubt that is why it is so difficult for us today to make the leap of entrusting ourselves to what cannot be seen. 

Yet the freedom of making, like that of enlisting the visible in our service by means of methodical investigation, is in the last analysis only made possible by the provisional character that Christian belief assigns to both and by the superiority it has thus revealed.

UGLINESS

     To be in error is by definition to be out of touch with reality as it is. Error is therefore at least misleading, even when it is presented unwittingly and in good faith, and because it is out of touch and often with an element of beguilement, there is in it an element of the ugly. 

        New ageism serves as an example of what we mean. By mingling Oriental texts with a sprinkling of scientific terms and bits of literature and religion that may appear to the unwary to bestow an aura of respectability, contemporary gurus make assertions that are actually nothing more than airy, vague sentiments with no foundations in the actual world: "Field of infinite possibilities . . . the unbounded, ever-loving universe  . . . [we are]all sisters of a mysterious order . . . space and unified field . . . our age of awareness . . . conscious energy field". These romanticized but vacuous feelings may mislead millions into thinking their problems are being solved in some mysteriously ultimate manner. New ageism is pseudosophistication devoid of evidence and serious thought, quite the opposite of the beautiful.

Proposing what may tickle some ears, new ageism makes few or no moral demands, for one need not worry about responsibility to God, about a need to say no. Hence, there is no fear of responsibility and punishment for the choices one makes. A recent critic observed that "the spiritual peace and enlightenment offered by pop gurus doesn't require a lifetime of discipline.  It requires only that  you suspend judgment, attend their lectures and workshops and buy their books or tapes."