Do you believe truth is relative?

Question

I am not concerned with religious views on this matter. This is a philosophical question that does not concern "ultimate authority". Do you think there is a such thing as objective truth? That is, something that is true, regardless of what you think or interpret?

The reason I asked for religious views not to be brought in is, I get the argument for right and wrong a lot. Fact is, right and wrong are human conceived concepts, and are irrelevant outside the human experience. Right and wrong IS a point of view. That's not what we're here about, however.

I agree that to know anything with absolute certainty is impossible given our flawed methods of perception. But do you think that means all truth is subjective, and there's no such thing as objective truth? I actually know several people who believe this. They are called relativists.

What do you think?

Again, I see a lot of people bringing in Right and wrong as an example of subjective truth. Let me go ahead and debunk this.

Right and wrong are within the human experience, and the human experience only. It's a concept that's opinion based off fact. That's why we have to ask questions about morality. "Do you think it's wrong to kill..." Truth isn't about what you think--it may be true that you're thinking it, but it either IS, or it isn't. Otherwise, it's opinion. It may be true that you hold an opinion, and that it alters your mindset so much that you believe it's true--but that doesn't make it true. Opinion isn't even based on truth. It's based on personal interpretation alone. To say that the color red is the most pleasing is an opinion. It is objectively true that you find it pleasing. But the pleasing in itself is subjective, because the experience that finds it pleasing is a subjective one. To be pleased is, therefore, inherently subjective.

What I'm getting at, however, is that opinion is irrelevant to truth. Truth is based on unbiased facts, and because interpretation is biased (which is why it varies), it isn't fact. It's something entirely separate. It's fact that you interpret it that way, but that's about as far as the marble rolls.

When we discuss objective truth, we're referring to what IS and what ISN'T, regardless and despite belief, hope, desire, wishful thinking, and the like. The fact that people once believed the Earth was flat didn't make it true. The only truth in the matter was that people had a misconception. Just because it was "true to them" doesn't mean it was true. Subjective truth is overridden by objective truth. Subjective truth is subjective "truth". That is, "truth" is a belief, and a belief alone, and isn't necessarily TRUE at all.

"Truth" of the subjective sort, that is.

The very question of the matter that relativists bring up is, if we didn't exist, would truth still remain? My point is, all reason would go to say that if the entire human race was obliterated, the Universe and all the truth of its existence and laws would still go on objectively, without a subjective mind to ponder it. A lot of people say that truth only exists subjectively. I believe this, so it's true [to me]. But what the hell does that even mean? It's true, to me? Why must we make the distinction "to me"? It says that it's not true outside of "me". *I* am still subject to ultimate, objective truth, whether I like it or not. It says that "true to me" is simply interpretation, and irrelevant, because a subjective experience is making that interpretation. The fact is, you're subjectively interpreting an objective truth. Whether or not we can successfully, objectively interpret it is irrelevant of whether or not it exists.

Answer 1

No. I believe that truth is a manifestation of its own. it is through will the way man interprets. we use our minds and languages that limit our ability to perceive things in a non-linear progression.
We view from perspectives rather that from full absorption. we speak from viewpoints rather than form the point of the fact. it is hard for us to become one with a truth, and even when we do, we are ill-equipped to convey it.

Answer 2

Before we can talk about what kinds of truth there is, we first have a slightly larger question to address: is there ANY kind of truth?

I happen to think so. But I make this conclusion rather in the logical-analytic sense. If truth is what works, then it would seem to exist because some things work and some do not.

I think it is pretty clear that some truths are subjective from evidence as well. There is no ONE diet plan that works well for everyone, there is no ONE colour that everyone finds pleasing. Some truths work for more people than others, and some seem to be limited at times to just one individual.

Are any truths objective, then? Here is the hard question. We will be unable to demonstrate it in anything approaching a geometric sense (as you observe), owing not only to the 'problem of induction' but also our very limited exposure to All Things That Ever Are. However, I think that the vast majority of reasonable people would have to allow that science, math, and logic have worked pretty blasted well so far... so they would seem to be the closest thing to sources of objective truth that we are likely to have right now.

BUT owing to my functional definition of truth, this means that some scientific 'objective' truths will be trumped by subjective ones. It may well be that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor, but it also seems conceivable to me that it might be more useful to believe that this is not so at times. And I can conceive similiar overrides for any number of other scientific, objective truths.

This creates an interesting tension. There are objective truths that are nearly universal, but there are also subjective truths which are subjectively MORE true. It wouldn't seem that an overriding subjective truth invalidates an objective truth... they're just exceptions that are circumstantial.

A parallel would be gravity - because you can create reference frames where the effect of gravity disappears, it is called by physicists a 'fictional force'. This doesn't mean there IS no gravity... just that sometimes you can't see its effects.

Answer 3

I believe that some truth is relative
I believe that some truth is absolute.

It all depends on the underlying facts and how solid they are. For instance we know the earth revolves around the sun. This is not an relative truth.
Now as the facts become more subjective, so does the truth.
For instance One can claim it is wrong to kill another human being.
Many would claim that this is an objective truth.
But is it?
As one introduces more facts more and more people would disagree with the totality of the statement.
For instance is it wrong to kill a murderer
Is it wrong to kill a serial killer
Is it wrong to kill someone that just killed someone on the spur of the moment.
is it wrong to kill someone that is in the active process of trying to kill you and your family?
Now different people will have different answers to the above questions.
The answers can change also depending on the circumstance.
For example some may be against the death penalty until it is their actual family member is killed.

Now, how can one know if there are any objective truths.
Easy.
As ALL subjective facts change the underlying truth remains the same.
Personally I cant think of any example of this ergo there is no objective truth.
I do not like the term subjective truth but I would agree that all truth is either absolute or relative.

Answer 4

pure relativism is not logically possible. Because uttering the phrase "Everything is relative" is, in fact, making an objective statement. If you say there are no universal truths, you are making a statement that there is a universal truth that there is no universal truths. See the logical dilemma?

A = A. This is a philosophical statement that dates back to at least Plato. There is for certain one universal truth; that logic exists. Without logic, there can be no knowledge. Even existentialist schools are a form of Neo-platonism, and platonism is grounded in the idea of A = A. Ask your relativist friends what 2 + 2 equals. If they say "4", call them out; they just uttered an objective truth; that mathematics exist is evidence that logic, and therefore universal truths, exist. Even if we are living in the Matrix, or everyone is a figment of my imagination, 2 + 2 still equals 4

However, like you said, perception and past plays a powerful role in what we consider a truth, especially in something like human ethics. The classical example is the persian monarch, who was comparing the culture of the greeks to the culture of one of the tribes (I forget the name of the tribe) under his rule. The Greeks buried their dead, to keep his spirit preserved. The Tribe ate their dead, to imbue his spirit and memory into the tribe. To the Greeks, the idea of eating their dead was wholly noxious, and to that tribe, the idea of burying their dead was traitorious. Where is the truth? Were the Greeks right or were the tribesmen right?

The truth is that the disposal of the dead is a morally neutral act; a matter of customs, not ethics, and that while customs and ethics are sometimes interchangeable, there appears to be a consistent pattern to all successful societies, which implies universal truths in ethics, even if we are not in full understanding of those truths.

Answer 5

Can one know the existence of a trancendental, objective reality within the limits of finite experience-- and if so, under what conditions? I think that Plato's metaphysic of participation provides some insight that an objective, transcendental reality can be known in this world. However, modernity has problems with the condition for the possibility that Plato postulates as a basis for such knowledge-- rational inference, which seems to lack the dense empiricism that marks the tired logical positivism of our times. In terms of relativism, I have always had difficulty with the premise that the only universal, objective reality available to us is that all things are relative-- a premise that seems by its nature to relativise the universality and objectivity of such a claim. John Henry Newman's insight has been helpful in this regard as well, finitude does impose limitiations on human perception and knowing. However, this mitigation is not so much that we cannot know anything or that such a limitation completely disables our capacity to discern whether or not a premise of experience corresponds to the truth. Our way of inquiry through this dilemna is that we can make a prudential judgement about such matters, and through what he called the "illative' sense, and come to some degree of certainty in regards to such things as moral judgements and our perception of transcendental realities such as goodness and truth.

Answer 6

I believe there is objective truth.

The problem is our small, very very limited vision of that truth. I think The Truth, all capitals, is too huge for our human minds to really understand all of it.

Remember the story about the blind men who wanted to know what an elephant was?

One blind man touched the side of the elephant and said "An elephant is like a wall." Another blind man grabbed the trunk and said "No, an elephant is clearly like a snake." Another blind man was holding the elephants tail and said "You two must be stupid or something; I'm touching the elephant and it's obviously like a rope." Another blind man was feeling the elephant's leg and said "All of you are crazy. I'm right here touching a real elephant and my sense of touch tells me that an elephant is like a tree."

Pretty soon they all start arguing over who has the right "view" of the elephant and then they start fighting and all of them fall fighting into a mud puddle and become filthy.

Moral: They were all right.

If they could have gotten together and put all their pieces of The Truth together, they would have a much better idea of what it was. But instead they preferred fighting and name-calling and trying to prove their superiority over the others, so in the end, not only did they stay ignorant about The Truth, they got good and filthy fighting too.

That's how we are. Except for the mentally challenged and the insane people, we all have bits and pieces of The Truth.

The more we talk about it and share our viewpoints, the closer we'll get to the big picture of the whole elephant.

Sadly, fundamentalists of all religions and the conservative aspects of the government are afraid of this. If people start seeing The Big Picture Truth, the fundamentalists and conservatives will lose their power to control people.

Answer 7

Well, you kind of load the question when you specify that no religious argument be brought in. In that sense, you are quite right that without the idea of God, or Heaven, or Zeus, or whatever superior or supreme being you choose: no, there is no objective standard for right and wrong as we ordinarily concive it. You are left with the purely naturalistic morality of 'might makes right'. For soem reason, of all the atheistic philosophers, only Nietzsche seemed to realise this, only he coined the more atractive phrase 'Beyond Good and Evil'.

Regarding your more specific question, just because something cannot be known to a 100% certainty doesn't necessarily imply that nothing can be known.

Take the classic 'point of view' question: is the glass half full or half empty? It may be a clever intellectual exercise to phrase this in such a way that it seems to be a profound insight, but neither the question nor the responses alter the fact that there is a glass container which is holding 50% of its capacity of water.

Of course you can go on to the extremist, and to my mind, absurdist, lengths, of questioning Is the glass really there? But that ends rapidly in the brick wall of solipcism, which quite literally takes you nowhere.

Answer 8

The problem with identifying a universal truth ( which is what your question implies) is the lack of absolute certainty. You and I could pick an object and agree on every minute facet of its existence, but 1) who will define the truth of the object and 2) does our perception of the object constitute a universal truth? We may label it as objectively true only to discover later on that the object was false - our evaluation being a false truth. It is important to separate the objective reality from the notion of the objective truth.

Answer 9

Very simply, all truth must be relative for humans. Because we each have our own, indepent minds, we can choose to look at the world however we want despite what may or may not be genuinely true. For instance, despite the absurdity of saying the earth is flat, people still believe it. This shows that while some truth should be absolute (the earth is relatively round), because people can choose not to believe it, and because no one techically "knows all (and therefore the TRUE nature of anything) truth sadly must be relative.

P.S. In response to the above post, because you used the relative term "everything," the statement "everything is relative" itself is relative (or paradoxical causing its nullification from an argument), thus allowing relativism to exist.

Answer 10

you may extremely try something without difficulty first, like what's certainty or would I are conscious of it if i spotted it, or is it extremely in straightforward terms a single physique of certainty or are there separate truths approximately many concerns. comfortably, many human beings communicate approximately fact in an extremely non secular vogue without relatively determining what it way in that sense, thinking that their utilization approach the entire element, or get exhilaration from it notwithstanding misapply it in different meanings. There are time that fact is relative, for representation while you recount some element that got here approximately to you or testify in court docket, you ought to be telling the actual fact as you recognize it, yet that may not in shape what relatively handed off. certainty is additionally absolute in that the assertion "evolution is a certainty" is right. yet while you say that a deity is the certainty, then you relatively start to extremely lose sight of what certainty approach. Edit: i'd say that absolute certainty some discipline isn't oftentimes expressible by using a elementary announcement.

Answer 11

I am an older person with old-fashioned ideas. Things are either true or false; black or white, no in-between. 2 + 2 = 4...TRUE. Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President JFK...TRUE. Sen. Edward Kennedy never paid the price for the death of Mary Jo Kopekne at Chapaquiddick...TRUE.
Relativists are good people...FALSE.
You brink up several things here: TRUE/FALSE; religion/philosophy; subjective/objective; knowledge/perception.
As I indicated above, truth is objective. Relativism is merely a cop out; people don't want to face up to their responsibility and claim that things are relative.
This goes along with "situation ethics" and is just another way of avoiding responsibility.
Of course, this is what the police do: it is okay for them to speed and beat their spouses, but not okay for the general population. It is okay for politicians to embezzle, but not the general population. The same applies to CEO's.
Of course, this is not to say that all police, all politicians, all CEO's are crooked, but so many of them are that it casts a shadow upon the rest.
If you want an excuse for doing/not doing something, then you will want relativism/situation ethics.