Quotations
"There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil." - Alfred North Whitehead It is assumed by almost everyone that the truth matters. It would seem to go against all our life experiences to suggest anything else, but is truth the be-all-and-end-all, and does the importance of the truth apply equally in all situations? And if the truth is so important, how do we go about finding it, and how do we know that what we think is true, really is? These are important philosophical and practical questions, many of which admit of extensive literature.
The opinion of the day, held by the majority, is often thought to be the truth, and perhaps self-evidently so. Yet we know from history how often we have been wrong with our world view. Looking at the world around us, for most of human history it was held that the world was flat, which we now know not to be true. Yet until relatively recently, to suggest otherwise was patently considered false and therefore not true. So we cannot take a majority consensus as evidence of truth, and the truth of many statements (or sets of ideas, and even belief systems) only seem obvious after some important discovery, idea or paradigm shift. As time goes by, opinion on certain important truths can oscillate and change dramatically. Even whole areas of enquiry that seemed 'beyond reasonable doubt' such as Newtonian physics have been shown to be incorrect and replaced by modern schema such as relativity.
When moving beyond the realm of simple logical statements and mathematics to the complex world of arguments, opinion, thought and belief, truth is not very clear cut, and often on inspection the whole idea can seem to crumble. To define truth, we may be reduced to something weak sounding such as: "something is true if it happens to be true". This may not seem to get us very far, but it is not clearly self-evident how far we can move from this seemingly tautological position.
There are also many situations where the actual truth can seem to be of very little importance. For self-preservation it is very useful to believe the truth of the statement that if you walk in front of a car it will at best hurt, but how about someone who believes in some extra-terrestrial being that is looking out for them? Imagine someone who is very ill and happens to believe in a benevolent creator of some form (this need not be a classical 'god') who will look after them. Their praying and talking to this Being in their mind helps them derive strength and make the pain of their illness bearable. Now, is the truth value of their beliefs here actually of any importance?
Couched in their terms, if they did not have such beliefs then they would find their pain harder to endure, and perhaps even they have belief in some sort of afterlife where things will be 'better' and this belief also helps them derive strength to deal with their circumstances. In a situation such as this, it is not at all clear whether the truth value of their beliefs is of any importance at all. If they die, and do indeed meet their maker, then they reduced their pain whilst ill and also then discover that their belief in some ethereal realm was 'true'. If on the other hand their belief turns out to be false, then again they die having found it easier to deal with their pain due to their beliefs - and since in this instance death is literally finality then there is nothing else to say on the matter.
Thus whether their belief(s) are true or false, it seems that merely having them improves their quality of life. And so it can be seen that the Truth is not always as important as it seems, which is just as well... if history has told us anything it is to expect surprises - many of our current beliefs are sure to be revealed as untrue by future generations.
Time: 11 Aug 2009 13:17:28
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