{"id":2508,"date":"2021-08-03T15:54:31","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T15:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/08\/03\/true-for-and-true\/"},"modified":"2021-08-03T15:54:31","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T15:54:31","slug":"true-for-and-true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/08\/03\/true-for-and-true\/","title":{"rendered":"True For and True"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are expressions that should be avoided by those who aim to think clearly and to promote clear thinking in others. Expressions of the form, \u2018true for X\u2019 are prime examples. In a logically sanitized world, the following would be verboten: \u2018true for me,\u2019 \u2018true for you,\u2019 \u2018true for Jews,\u2019 \u2018true for Arabs,\u2019 \u2018true for the proletariat,\u2019 \u2018true for the bourgeoisie,\u2019 \u2018true for our historical epoch,\u2019 and the like. Such semantic prophylaxis would disallow such sentences as \u2018That may be true for you but it is not true for me.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

The trouble with expressions like these is that they blur the distinction between truth and belief. To say that a proposition p is true for S is just to say that S believes or accepts or affirms that p. This is because one cannot believe a proposition without believing it to be true. Of course, S\u2019s believing that p, and thus S\u2019s believing that p is true, does not entail that p is true. This is obvious if anything is. There are true beliefs and false beliefs, and a person\u2019s holding a belief does not make it true. If you want to say that S believes that p, then say that. But don\u2019t say that p is true for S unless you want to give aid and comfort to alethic relativism, the false and pernicious doctrine that truth (Gr. aletheia<\/em>) is relative.  'Woke' folk love such obfuscatory expressions, but you don't want to give aid and comfort to them, do you?<\/span><\/p>\n


\"Truth<\/a>A belief is always someone\u2019s belief. This relativity of beliefs to believers explains why one person\u2019s believing that p and another person\u2019s believing that ~p is unproblematic. But truth is non-relative, or absolute. This is why it cannot be the case that both p and ~p. If you have truth, you have something absolute. There is no such thing as relative truth. Relative truth is not truth any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck or artificial leather is leather or faux<\/em> marble is marble. In the expression, \u2018relative truth,\u2019 \u2018relative\u2019 functions as an alienans<\/em> (as opposed to a specifying) adjective: it alienates or shifts the sense of \u2018truth.\u2019 Just as it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of leather, real and artificial, it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of truth, relative and absolute. Suppose someone sets out to list the kinds of leather. \u201cWell, you got your horse leather, cow leather, alligator leather, artificial leather, real leather, artificially real leather, naugahyde, Barcalounger covering . . . .\u201d One can see what is wrong with this.<\/span><\/p>\n

The word \u2018absolute\u2019 scares some people. But the only reason I use it is to undo the semantic mischief caused by \u2018relative truth\u2019 and \u2018true for X.\u2019 In a logically perfect world, it would suffice to say \u2018true\u2019 or \u2018leather.\u2019 There would be no need to say \u2018absolutely true\u2019 or \u2018real leather\u2019 \u2013 \u201cThis here jacket a mahn is REAL leather, boy . . . .\u201d If \u2018relative\u2019 and \u2018artificial\u2019 are (in the above examples) alienating adjectives, then \u2018absolute\u2019 and \u2018real\u2019 could be called de-alienating: they restore their rightful senses to words that semantic bandits divested them of.<\/span><\/p>\n

One reason \u2018absolute\u2019 scares people is that it suggests dogmatism and infallibilism. Thus if I say that truth is absolute, some people think I am saying that the propositions I affirm as true I affirm as unquestionably or undeniably true. But that\u2019s to confuse an ontological statement about the nature of truth with an epistemological statement about the way in which I accept the <\/span>propositions I accept. It is consistent to maintain that truth is absolute while being a fallibilist, where a fallibilist holds that either no proposition held to be true, or no member of some restricted class of propositions held to be true, is known with certainty.<\/span><\/p>\n

In sum, my point is that \u2018true for X\u2019 should be avoided since it gives aid and comfort to the illusion that truth is relative. But why exactly is that an illusion? I\u2019ll leave that question for a separate post.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are expressions that should be avoided by those who aim to think clearly and to promote clear thinking in others. Expressions of the form, \u2018true for X\u2019 are prime examples. In a logically sanitized world, the following would be verboten: \u2018true for me,\u2019 \u2018true for you,\u2019 \u2018true for Jews,\u2019 \u2018true for Arabs,\u2019 \u2018true for … Continue reading “True For and True”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,128,361,228],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-matters","category-reason-and-rationality","category-relativism","category-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}