Truth – Philosophical Dictionary

Oh Truth.
I’ve used the word, you’ve used the word, but what does it mean?  We want truth to mean “the way things are.”  In this sense it’s a fine word, in that it does describe something- things probably are a way.  The trouble of course is it seems difficult, if not impossible to ever know the way things are, to ever know this truth, so the word used in this sense will most be no good to us, even though it describes something that may be.

Another meaning for truth, and this one is actually in step with the first, is consistency in ideas.  What this means is you slap a big IF statement in front of your “truth” claims.  For example, I can say it is true that I am a Walrus, but I can say that IF it is true that we exist and existence is as it seems and our labels for things are accurate and so on, then it is true that I am a Walrus.  Nice, right?  So we just take the unknowns and bundle them into an IF statement.  Now, although this doesn’t give us any unconditional truth, and we may never know if those conditions are met, we can start to build an elaborate web of conditional truths, all solidifying and authenticating one another, and all based on the same IF statement.  This, basically, is what we have done, this is society, science, life, reality.  We don’t stop at “you can’t know anything.”  We move forward with a guess, with an assumption, and build bridges and bombs write down everything that his consistent.  When we run into trouble, when things are no longer consistent, we go back to that original concept and tweak it, or overthrow it.  This is called a paradigm shift.  That’s really what we’re talking about here – paradigms.

So when we speak of truth, speak of truths, we are really speaking in IF statements, but for the sake of time we eliminate the IF….  But let us not forget it is there.  It is important to remember our original assumptions, for they are most likely wrong, and when we are met with inconsistencies those willing to go back and re-examine their assumptions will have a much easier time of things – if that’s your thing.