Category: Truth

Brazen Lies and Big Lies

1) Brazen lies.  Here is an AI-generated definition: "A brazen lie is a bold and shameless falsehood, often told without any attempt to hide or conceal it." 

The AI-generated definition is on the right track, but it is not quite right: it blurs the line between a falsehood (a false statement) and a lie. A lie is not the same as a false statement. For one can make a false statement without lying: one may sincerely believe that what one is asserting is true when in fact it is false. The intention to deceive is essential to a lie: there is no  lie without the intention to deceive. A lie, then, is an intentional misrepresentation of what one either knows to be the case or sincerely believes to be the case for the purpose of deceiving one's audience.

So that is what a lie is. But not all lies are brazen lies. A brazen lie is a lie told boldly and shamelessly.   

2) Big lies.  I would define a big lie as a brazen lie so outrageous that an ordinary person would think the liar had to be telling the truth because no one would have the chutzpah to say something so outrageous unless  it were true. Example: Alejandro Mayorkas's claim that the border is secure. 

Biden Broke his Promise, but Did He Lie? Promising, Lying, Predicting

I have no respect for Joe Biden, but a very high degree of respect for Jonathan Turley, who writes:

President Biden's decision to use his presidential powers on Sunday to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the president used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past controversies about the use of this pardon power, Biden has cemented his legacy for many, not as the commander in chief, but as the liar in chief. 

The question is not whether Biden is a liar; he is. The question I am asking is whether he lied when he promised not to pardon his son.  He did in fact make that promise on several occasions, and he did in fact break it.  Those are known facts. But did Biden lie when he made that promise? What Turley says implies that he did lie.  I beg to differ.

I should make it clear that I am not defending Biden. The man is morally corrupt to the core and a national disaster. I am merely using him to focus a question that interests me, namely, if a subject S promises to do X at time t1, and refuses to do X at some later time t2, did S tell a lie at t1 by his act of promising at t1? (I assume that the circumstances at t2 do not prevent S from delivering on his promise.  I also assume that no weightier consideration such as a death threat justifies a change of mind on the part of S with respect to X during the period from t1 to t2.)  

Can one lie about a future event? If not, then how could Biden's promising not to pardon his son be a lie? The pardoning was later than the promisings. It was therefore future relative to those promisings and had yet to occur. At the time of the promisings, there was either no fact for Biden to lie about, or no fact he could have known about. Either way, Biden did not lie when he made his promises, promises that he later broke.

On one natural way to think about the future, it ain't real until it happens.  If we think about the future in this way, there was no fact for Biden to lie about when he made his promises, in which case he did not tell a lie when he made his promises.

On another way to think about the future, all future events are tenselessly real.   If we think about the future in this way, then there is (tenselessly) a fact for Biden to lie about at the times of his promisings, but there is no way anyone not possessing paranormal precognitive powers could know what this fact is. 

I am assuming that to lie is to issue a verbal or written statement intended to deceive one's audience about a state of affairs that the issuer of the statement either knows or believes to be the case.  If so, then one cannot lie about what may or may not become the case, or about what is tenselessly the case but not accessible to our present knowledge.

Turley's response, based on the quotation above, would presumably be that Biden lied about his intention to pardon Hunter.  Now if one forms a firm intention at time t to do X (or not do X) in the future, then at t there is the fact of  the forming of that intention. That is something one can know about and lie about.  

It is reasonable to conjecture that Biden at the time of his public promisings had no intention of delivering on his promise not to pardon his son, or, equivalently, had the intention to not deliver on the promise. But then the problem becomes: how could anyone know what Biden or anyone intends?  Preternatural powers aside, one cannot peer into the mind of another and 'see' what is going on there.  

And so we ought to distinguish between promise-breaking and lying.  It is verifiable that Biden broke his promise: we simply compare the publicly accessible records of what he said with the publicly accessible record of his pardoning.  What we cannot know is the nature of the inner mental intention behind the outwardly expressed promises.  Hence we do not and cannot know whether Biden lied about his intention.  

Let's not forget that the man is non compos mentis, not of sound mind. He is suffering from dementia. It is entirely possible that the superannuated grifter forgot or suppressed an original intention to not pardon his worthless son.  If so, he broke a promise but did not lie.

And so, pace the estimable Turley, the massive case for Biden's being a liar cannot be and need not be augmented by citation of his pardoning of the apple that fell not far from the tree.

In sum, one can break a promise without lying. This argument-form is invalid:

1) S promised to do (or refrain from doing) X.

2) S broke his promise.  

Therefore

3) S told a lie.

Promising is relevantly like predicting. Both are future-oriented. Many predicted in 2016 that Trump would lose the 2016 election. They were wrong in their prediction. Were they lying when that made their predictions? Of course not.  Either the proposition Trump wins in 2016 had no truth-value prior to the election, or it had a truth-value, but one not known to the predictors. Either way, there as no lie.  That's blindingly evident.

Promising is trickier, and so it is harder to think clearly about it.  S's publicly accessible speech-act of promising  to do or refrain from doing X is animated by S's mental and thus publicly inaccessible intention to do or refrain from doing X. The difference is that while one can predict one's own behavior — taking a third-person POV with respect to oneself — one is the agent of one's own actions and omissions.

Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man

David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile:

In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical. [. . .] You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.

Brooks sees good in both worlds, and does a fair job of characterizing the differences between them, but nowadays he finds himself "rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time." But why the tilt toward the Blue?

You guessed it: the Orange Man.  Brooks speaks of "Donald Trump’s desecration of the Republican Party."  Desecration? But surely no political party in a non-theocratic system such as ours is sacred. You can't desecrate what is not sacred. But let that pass. There is far worse to come.

We are told that Blue World "has a greater commitment to the truth." Really? "This may sound weird," Brooks admits, but it is worse than weird; it is incoherent. One cannot both support the Blue commitment to "your own truth" and invoke the truth. If there is the truth, it cannot vary from person to person. What can so vary is only one's personal attitude to the truth, whether by way of acceptance, rejection, doubt, etc.  The truth is invariant across personal attitudes.  Truth cannot be owned. There is no such thing as my truth or your truth, any more than there is my reality and your reality.  Claudine Gay take note. This is an elementary point. Philosophy 101. Brooks needs to think harder. But then what can you expect from a journalist who writes for The Atlantic?

But not only is Brooks embracing incoherence, he is also maintaining something manifestly false.  If there is anything that best characterizes the current Blue World  in action it is the thorough-going mendacity of the members of the Biden-Harris administration from Biden on down. Do I need to give examples? It is enough to name names: Biden, Harris, Granholm, Mayorkas, and the list goes on.  In Mayorkas, the Director of Homeland Security, the mendacity takes an Orwellian turn into the subversion of language: "The border is secure, as we define 'secure."  His very title is an Orwellianism: he is actively promoting, as is the whole Biden-Harris administration, homeland insecurity.

The truth is that truth is not a leftist value. Leftists will sometimes speak the truth, of course, but only if it serves their agenda. Otherwise they lie.  What animates them is not the Will to Truth, but the Will to Power.  

Brooks again:

But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. 

I hate to be so disagreeable, but that is just preposterous.

Could Brooks define 'lie'?  Does he understand the distinction between a lie and an exaggeration? Has he given any thought to the difference between a lie and a counterfactual conditional? After winning in 2016, Trump famously boasted, 

Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted the above — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. For there was no underlying fact of the matter about which he could have even tried to deceive his audience.  Counterfactual conditionals are about merely possible states of affairs.  That is why they are called counterfactual.

Has Brooks ever thought hard about what a conspiracy theory is? 

The Blues are "more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth"?  How's that for a brazen lie what with their de-platforming and cancellation of their opponents  not to mention the recent assaults on the First Amendment by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Assuming that God exists, could the atheist’s denial of God be reasonable?

I say Yes to the title question; Greg Bahnsen, glossing Cornelius Van Til, says No. 

Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is 'reasonable' to believe in him. (Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, P & R Publishing, 1998, p. 124, fn. 108, emphasis added.)

This is the exact opposite of clear. Atheists believe that there in no God, and thus that the Christian God does not exist, and the philosophically sophisticated among them have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists using both 'logical' and 'probabilistic' arguments.  So how could it be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is reasonable to believe that God exists?  Bahnsen's claim makes no sense.  It makes no sense to say to an atheist who sincerely thinks that he has either proven, or rendered probable, the nonexistence of  God that it is nonetheless reasonable for him to believe that God exists even if in fact, and unbeknownst to the atheist, God does exist.

Bahnsen is missing something very important: although truth is absolute, reasonableness is relative.  This is why an atheist can find it unreasonable to believe that the Christian God exists even if it is true that the Christian God exists.  Let me explain.

I do not need to spend many words on the absoluteness of truth. I've made the case numerous times.  Here for example. In any case, whatever  presuppositionalists  such as Bahnsen think of the details of my arguments, they will agree with my conclusion that truth is absolute. So that is no bone of contention between us.

Reasonableness or rational acceptability is something else again.  It is not absolute but can vary from person to person, generation to generation, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, and in other ways.  Let's quickly run through a few familiar examples.

1) Falling bodies. It 'stands to reason' that the heavier an object the faster it falls if dropped from a height. It's 'logical' using this word the way many ordinary folk often do.  Wasn't Aristotle, who maintained as much in his Physics, a reasonable man? But we now know that the rate of free fall (in a vacuum) is the same in a given gravitational field regardless of the weight of the object in that field.  So what was reasonable to Aristotle and his entire epoch was not reasonable to Galileo and later epochs. Rational acceptability is relative.

2) For the ancients, water was an element. For John Dalton (English chemist, early 19th cent.) it was a compound, HO. For us it is H2O. Has water changed over the centuries? No. Truth is non-relative. What it is reasonable to believe has changed. Rational acceptability is relative.

3) Additivity of velocities. It 'stands to reason' that if I am on a train moving in a straight line with velocity v1  and I throw a ball in the direction of the train's travel with velocity v2, then the velocity of the ball will be v1 + v2. It also 'stands to reason' that this holds across the board no matter the speed of the objects in question. But this belief, although reasonable pre-Einstein, is not reasonable post-Einstein. Once again we see that rational acceptability is relative.

4) Sets and their members. Suppose S is a set and T is one of S's proper subsets. Then every member of T is a member of S, but not every member of S is a member of T. Now suppose someone comes along and asserts that there are sets such that one is a proper subset of another and yet both have the same number of members.  Many if not most  people would find this assertion a highly unreasonable thing to say.  They might exclaim that it makes no bloody sense at all. And yet those of us who have read Georg Cantor find it reasonable to maintain.  If N is the set of natural numbers, and E is the set of even numbers, and O is the set of odd numbers, then E and O are disjoint (have no members in common), and yet each is a proper subset of N which the same cardinality (number of members) as N.

5) When I was a very young boy I thought that, since I am right-handed, my right hand and arm had to be weaker than my left hand and arm because I use my right hand and arm more. Was that reasonable for me to believe way back then? Yes! I had a reason to hold the empirically false belief. Of course, my little-boy reasoning was based on a false analogy. If you flex a piece of metal back and forth you weaken it. If you a flex a muscle back and forth you strengthen it. Use it and use it up?  No, use it or lose it!

Examples are easily multiplied beyond all necessity. The point, I trust, is clear: while truth is absolute, rational acceptability is relative. What is true may or may not be reasonable, and what is reasonable may or not be true. 

What Bahnsen and the boys appear to be assuming is that both truth and reasonableness (rational acceptability) are absolute.   Well they are — but only for God, only from God's point of view.  God is the IRS, the ideally rational subject. He knows every truth and he knows every truth without possibility of mistake. So for God every truth, being a known truth, is in accordance with divine reason, and everything in accordance with divine reason is true.  But we do not occupy the divine point of view. To put it sarcastically, only a 'presupper' does.

But of course neither we nor the presuppositionalists occupy the divine point of view. They only think they do.  But that conceit is the whole essence of presuppositionalism, is it not?  

An Overlooked Argument for the Resurrection

Michael J. Kruger

In my jargon, the argument is rationally acceptable, but not rationally compelling (rationally  coercive, philosophically dispositive). There is no getting around the fact that, in the end, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. In the end: after due doxastic diligence has been exercised and all the arguments and considerations pro et contra have been canvassed. The will comes into it.

Don't confuse argument with  proof or faith with knowledge.  And forgive me for this further repetition: We cannot decide what the truth is, but we must decide what we will accept as the truth. The truth is what it is in sublime and objective indifference to us, our hopes, dreams, needs, wants,  and wishes. But the only truth that can help us, and perhaps save us, is the truth that we as "existing individuals" (Kierkegaard) existentially and thus subjectively appropriate, that is, make our own. In this sense lived truth is subjective truth. In this sense, S. K. is right to insist that "truth is subjectivity" in Concluding Scientific Postscript.

More in this vein in Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth.

Politics, Lies, and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination for president, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

We know, of course, that Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election. Suppose an Anti-Trumper calls me a liar for asserting (1).  Have I lied?  That depends on what a lie is.

What is a lie?

A lie is not the same as a false statement. For one can make a false statement without lying: one may sincerely believe that what one is asserting is true when in fact it is false. The intention to deceive is essential to a lie.  No lie without the intention to deceive. A lie, then, is an intentional misrepresentation of what one either knows to be the case or sincerely believes to be the case for the purpose of deceiving one's audience.

Now what is the case is actually the case as opposed to possibly the case. So on the definition just given, one cannot lie about the merely possible.  It follows that one cannot lie about what might have been or what could have been. Therefore, I cannot be fairly accused of telling a lie if I assert (1). There simply is no fact of the matter as to whether or not, had Jeb won the nomination, Hillary would or would not have won the election.

On my analysis, then, there are two necessary conditions for a statement's being a lie.  (i) The statement must express a person's intention to deceive his interlocutor(s), and (ii) there must be some actual fact about which the one who lies intends to deceive them. Note that one who lies on a given occasion need not be a liar because a liar is one who habitually lies, and one who lies needn't be in the habit of lying.

Can one lie about a counterfactual state of affairs?

It follows from my analysis that there cannot be any lies pertaining to counterfactual states of affairs. Counterfactual conditionals, however, have as their subject matter counterfactual states of affairs, which is to say, states of affairs that are really possible but not actual.  So no counterfactual is a lie. Note that I said really possible, not epistemically possible. I am assuming that Reality, with majuscule 'R,'  is not exhausted by the actual or existent: there are merely possible states of affairs that subsist mind-independently. (That which subsists is but does not exist.) 

But what I just wrote is not self-evident: I don't want to paper over the fact that the problem of the merely possible and its ontological status is deep and nasty and will lead us into a labyrinth of aporiai and insolubilia.  More about this later.

Now (1) is either true or if not true, then false, but no one knows, or could know, which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).  

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing?  I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation.  And the same goes for a person who denies (2). Consider a second example. 

Donald Trump famously boasted, 

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. Again, there is no underlying fact of the matter. 

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong. 

Before proceeding to a third example, let me record an aporetic pentad  for later rumination and delectation:

1) Counterfactuals have truth-values: some are true and the rest are false.

2) The true ones are contingently true.

3) Contingent truths have truth-makers.

4) Truth-makers are obtaining, i.e., actual states of affairs.

5) Counterfactuals are about non-actual, merely possible, states of affairs.

These propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. Is the problem genuine or pseudo? If genuine, how solve it? Which proposition should we reject?  I hope to come back to this problem later.

A third example. London Ed quotes and comments upon a recent assertion of mine:

“He [David Frum] neglects to observe, however, that the devastation of that country [Ukraine] would not have occurred had Trump been president.”

Ed comments:

Trump’s presidency ended January 20, 2021. The invasion of Ukraine was 24 February 2022. What might have happened (another counterfactual) under a continued Trumpian presidency that would have prevented Putin’s invasion? The build up of Russian troops began March and April 2021, although the Russian government repeatedly denied having plans to invade or attack.

What might have happened is that Putin would have been dissuaded from invading  Ukraine out of fear of what Trump would do to him and his country should he have invaded.

Related: Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science

God, Doubt, Denial, and Truth: A Note on Van Til

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., P&R Publishing, 2008, p. 294: "To doubt God is to deny him."

I take that to mean that to doubt that God exists is to deny that God exists. The obvious objection to this is that doubt and denial are very different propositional attitudes. In most cases, one can doubt that p without denying that p.  I can doubt that Biden will get a second term without denying that he will. 

In almost all cases. But in every case?  Suppose we replace 'p' with 'truth exists.'  Can we doubt that truth exists without denying that truth exists.  No! In the case of truth, the distinction between doubt and denial collapses. 

To doubt that truth exists is to presuppose that truth exists. For if you doubt that truth exists, you are doubting whether it is true that truth exists.  The same goes for denial. If you deny that truth exists, you affirm that it is true that truth does not exist. 

Whether you doubt or deny that truth exists, you presuppose that truth exists. Truth is such that doubt and denial are the same. Truth cannot be doubted and it cannot be denied. The existence of truth is the ultimate transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations, doubt, denial, affirmation, predication, reasoning, and so on. So we may say:

To doubt truth is to deny her.

Of course, it remains that case that doubt and denial are different propositional attitudes. But in the case of truth, doubt becomes denial.

Therefore,  if God is identical to truth, then Van Til is right: "To doubt God is to deny him." If God is identical to truth, then God is the ultimate transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations, including giving arguments for God's nonexistence! If so, then Van Til and his followers are not begging the question against atheists and agnostics by simply assuming what they need to prove; they are giving a noncircular transcendental argument for the existence of God.

But is God identical to truth? Is it true that God is identical to truth? These remain open questions. I grant that if God is identical to truth, then God exists as the necessary condition of all affirmation, denial, and argument, including atheistic argument.  But how do we know that the antecedent of this conditional is true?

It may be that in reality apart from us, God and truth are the same. But from our point of view, the only POV available to us, God and truth are not the same. To see this, note that it is conceivable (thinkable without contradiction) that God not exist, but not conceivable that truth not exist. So it might be true that God exists and it might be true that God does not exist.  The 'might' in the preceding sentence in both of its occurrences is epistemically modal. It is epistemically possible that God exist and epistemically possible that God not exist.  For all we know, either could be the case. But it is epistemically necessary that truth exist: we cannot help presupposing it.  Given that we know anything at all, truth must exist. So the argument could be put like this:

a) That truth exists is epistemically necessary: we cannot help presupposing that it exists.

b) That God exists is not epistemically necessary: we can conceive the nonexistence of God.

Therefore

c) God cannot be proven to exist by proving that truth exists.

Therefore

d) The Transcendental Argument for God fails as a proof.

‘Post-Truth’

A buzz word much bandied about in 2016, usually in connection with Donald J. Trump.

Top o' the Stack.

You will learn something from this piece if you have an attention span. Too much twit-shit and your span may shrink to a point. You may transmogrify into a tweeting twit whose brain is fit only to flit.

Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth

From a December, 1985 journal entry.

……………………

Why does Søren Kierkegaard maintain that truth is subjectivity, and in the Danish equivalents of those very words? What could he mean by such a strange assertion?

To rehearse the obvious: S. K. does not mean that truth is subjective or relative, varying with persons, places, times, perspectives, or any other index. The Dane presupposes that truth is objective. But then what could the central claim of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "truth is subjectivity," mean?

Since Kierkegaard assumes the objective truth of Christianity, and does so without question or caveat, the only issue for him is the subjective appropriation of Christian truth. To appropriate is to make one's own, and the one in question is not the abstract one in general, but in every case the concrete existing individual. S. K.'s greatness is his honesty in expounding the demands that genuine Christianity makes on the would-be Christian and in exposing the state-sponsored Christianity Inc. of his day. Given the tacit presupposition of Christianity's truth, it makes sense for S. K. to say that truth is subjectivity. For it is not the objective truth of Christianity that is an issue for him, but the individual, and thus necessarily subjective, task of becoming a Christian. That is my charitable reading of the famous dictum.

But to be precise in our use of terms, truth is by its very nature objective, not subjective; what is subjective is truthfulness. Only a person can correctly be said to be truthful in the primary sense of the term. It would make no sense to describe propositions as truthful any more than it would make sense to say that persons have truth-values or stand in entailment relations or correspond to reality.

Objective truth and subjective truthfulness, though distinct,  are related. (It is worth noting that 'objective and 'subjective' in the immediately preceding sentence are redundant qualifiers: truth would not be what it is if it were not objective, and truthfulness would not be what it is if if were not a personal attribute.) They are related in that one can be truthful only by respecting the truth, by living in accordance with it, by refraining from lying, deceit, and deception, by telling the truth.

Subjective, lived, existential truth is entirely vacuous if disengaged from objective truth; at the limit subjective truth thus disengaged is indistinguishable from vicious self-will. It then becomes what in contemporary parlance is called 'my truth.' But there is no such thing as my truth; truth by its very nature is objective. What is mine can only be my appropriation or non-appropriation of the truth, truth that cannot be mine. One cannot appropriate and live the truth unless there is truth to be appropriated.

I said that truth and truthfulness are related. But I don't want to give the impression that while truthfulness requires truth, truth can subsist without truthfulness. That may be, but it is not obvious and may be reasonably controverted. So I now take a further step by stating that truth and truthfulness are mutually implicative. They are, if you will,  'dialectically related:' no one without the other, and no other without the one. It is clear that truthfulness implies truth; less clear, but arguable is that truth implies truthfulness. That is to say: there cannot be objective truth without subjectivity, without a truthful subject.  Can I prove it? No. But I can make a case for it, a case that renders the thesis reasonable to believe.

Truth is made for the mind at least in this sense: Objective truth is necessarily such that is it possibly recognized by someone. Truth mediates between mind and reality.  Truth is the truth of reality in both the objective and subjective senses of the genitive. Truth is about reality, but it is also reality's truth. Reality's truth is reality's intelligibility, its aptness to be understood. So if it is objectively true that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, then that truth, that true proposition, is necessarily such that it is possibly recognized or known by someone.  But it cannot be possibly known unless there actually exists someone who can know it. Now what is really possible must be grounded in the abilities and powers of actual agents. But there are many truths that are not possibly known by any finite agent. And yet they too are possibly known because knowability is an essential property of every truth. Therefore, their knowability is grounded in the actual power to know of an actual being. "And this all men call God."

Now that was rather quick, wasn't it? But I meant it merely as a sketch for an argument to be laid out rigorously. (The modal moves I made invite close scrutiny.) So laid out, the argument still won't be rationally compelling, but then no substantive argument in philosophy or theology for that matter is rationally compelling.  But many such arguments do supply grounds for reasoned belief which all that is available to us here below.

So suppose God exists. He is the truthful subjective source of all objective truth. In God, truthfulness and truth are one, the subjective and the objective coalesce. The mutually implicative relation of truthfulness and truth is as tightly grounded as could be. This is exactly what we should expect give the divine simplicity for which there many arguments. 

To sum up. Truthfulness for us here below is a matter of the subjective appropriation of objective truth. Read in this sense, S. K. 's dictum is defensible. It is not truth that is subjective, but truthfulness. 

There is no truthfulness without truth. This is well-nigh evident if not self-evident. That there is no truth without truthfulness is less clear but arguable as above.