Why should "THE TRUTH" be bound/limited by such human comfort food notions as "Meaning" and/or "Common Sense"?

Question

D@mn you people (term of endearment, of course); y'all did it to me AGAIN!!! … There are so many thoughtful answers here that I am at a TOTAL Loss as to which one to choose. ... You made this mess, you fix it too! LOL :-)

THANKS EVERYONE for your WONDERFUL answers.

Answer 1

There is, of course, no solid reason to believe that Truth (with a capital T) is meaningful, reasonable, understandable, or common sensical. Every endeavor (EVERY one!) that we undertake is done with certain assumptions about the way reality works, and it's quite possible that some of those assumptions are wrong.

BUT if you don't make those assumptions, you can't do ANYTHING. If you're a solipsist who doesn't believe anything your senses tell you, then you can't interact with the world (and there may not be a world to interact with). If you're a nihilist who doesn't believe it's even possible to produce a meaning or a purpose to your actions, then you have no sound reason for doing anything.

THAT is the reason why we assume that it is even possible to understand what's going on. Because if we don't make that assumption, we are incapable of doing anything. And maybe we are wasting our time pretending all these things...

...but then again, maybe we're NOT.

Answer 2

I don't see why it should be. The truth, presumably, is an objective thing that exists whether or not we know anything about it. What we can know with some certainty is the content of our beliefs, so I know, for example, that I believe that this question was posed by human being and not by a computer, chimp, or extraterrestrial being, but I can't know for certain that this belief is objectively true. And I couldn't know this even if I saw you typing away, because you could be a cleverly disguised chimp or alien. For that matter, I could be hallucinating everything, and my keyboard might not really exist.

The question "How can we know that our beliefs correspond to the objective facts?" is, I think, deeply unanswerable. That's why it's interesting.

We use concepts like "meaning" and "common sense" as ways to assess our beliefs because it's the best we can do. And it's better than nothing. If a sentence has no meaning then it can't be true. (It can't be false either.) If a belief corresponds to common sense, then that counts in favor of its probable truth on the assumption (and it is an assumption) that the background beliefs constituting common sense are largely true. But of course, they might be wrong, in which case, corresponding to common sense would not be a good thing - truth-seeking-wise.

Answer 3

Because when someone asks, "What do you know?"
in response to the other's conclusions about the truth
then the other is capable of responding appropriately.
If not for explanation through communication then all
things could likely be assumed as truth, subjectively
speaking, because the self can only hold a single
opinion on any single topic at any single instant
in time. Therefore, verification, the motivation of truth,
would be negated for every instantaneous judgement,
and every judgement being a single opinion in such
a context would preclude the possibility of verification
for that judgement.

Answer 4

THE TRUTH is boundless. It is not property of human conscience nor of common consensus. Neither is it within the dominion of a flexing human ego which is naturally inclined to seek self-justification - whether this is based in truth or half-truths.

If truth denigrates to limits or controls, truth loses it's essence, thereby it's basis in truthfulness and is reduced to subjectivity, opinion, or agenda. Truth at this juncture fails to be truth.

The human mind & senses - free of emotion and free of personal reasoning - may witness truth, but human consciousness interprets what it thinks it has witnessed. Truth is always truth, when it is free of human/conscious intervention and when it is without borders, boundaries, loyalties, agenda & limits.

Only the ego would try to trick us with a question which asks, "why SHOULD the truth be bound...." offering us with an incalculable, fallacious argument which has no basis, meaning or intersection in common sense, or least of all, in truth itself and therefore no possible answer.

Answer 5

Because truth is a human notion, tied up in human understanding and language.

Is this that i am pointing at "truth"?
Can we have TRUTH independent from a symbolic representation (language, art, math, etc). Can truth exist without language to describe it as such?

No...!! We just have "Reality" in the absence of language...

But this, too, as soon as it is spoken, takes away from the "Realness" of the "Reality" we were trying to describe in the first place. Just like in every translation, something is inevitably lost, so goes it with the translation from the REAL to the SYMBOLIC....

As soon as we speak, we have lost something or gained something or altered something about the thing which we attempt to describe because it is filtered through our personal-perspective lenses which we inescapably wear AT ALL times

The symbols of our languages reflect our ideas, which reflect ideas, which reflect ideas...like, for example, "meaning" and Common Sense

Answer 6

I feel that TRUTH is not bound or limited by anything other then you or I. Yes truth has a comforting aspect to it, but that comes from our souls having been freed from the weight of a lie. Also our conscious play a big role in feeding us gratitude for not stuffing more junk down its throat, such a lie.

Answer 7

"The Truth" should not be bound by any matter human or not. The human mind sometimes finds the truth to hard to handle or process. Due to the robot like teaching we are taught by our system. If they didn't teach it to us, it must not be true, right? :-)

Answer 8

The only limitation is evidence. Without evidence, we can know nothing. "Meaning" is simply an interpretation of evidence, which is convenient for reasoninng; it has no intrinsic value.

Answer 9

gobbledygook!