Note: I have tried to keep the philosophical nonsense to a minimum on this blog, because it is dull as dishwater. I have been inspired, however, and inspiration is a horrible thing. If you have no interest in philosophy, you are welcome to keep scrolling, although I think you might find what I have to say provocative, even if you aren't of a philosophical bent. Also, I was going to quote from Parmenides' poem directly, but I can't find my copy of the Penguin Press book on the pre-Socratics. Dammit.
Over at Pomomusings Adam Walker-Cleavland asks about truth. I answered, but I want to give a more full answer here. Sitting in the background of this post are philosophers as varied as the pre-Socratic Parmenides, the American post-modernist Richard Rorty, the German philosopher of science Kurt Hubner, the Austrian-born, British-based philosopher of science Karl Popper, and many others.
Parmenides wrote two poems long ago - one called "The Way of Truth", the other, "The Way of Opinion". In the former, he argued that truth, being unitary, was essentially a dimensionless point; indeed, that reality, being truth, was a dimensionless point. In the latter poem, he argued that our perception of reality, limited as it is, is incapable of perceiving the truth that can only be grasped by the human mind; arguing from appearances, what we know from experience, leads only to false opinions.
Plato and Aristotle, essentially, wrote extensive commentaries on Paremnides, Plato taking issue with the simplicity of his vision, Aristotle actually agreeing, but arguing the matter was a bit more complex. Since that time, few philosophers have been as radical in their view of the nature of truth. Few have grasped the fact that, if one begins with the proposition that "truth" is singular, complete in and of itself, and eternal, it leads inexorably to the idea that all that is, in reality, is a dimensionless point, formless and uniform.
While we have moved far beyond Parmenides in the millenia that have followed him, his essential point is one I take to be inarguable. If one takes the position that "truth" is unitary, universal, and eternal, then the very idea of multiple true statements about the way the world is, is unthinkable. If truth is unitary, it is unitary. Otherwise, there is no such thing as truth. We in the west are inheritors of a tradition that views truth as unitary, but only in the sense that single statements about states of affairs exist as true; one cannot hold equally valid, yet opposing, views on a state of affairs and insist both are true. This is what is known as the correspondence theory of truth; our statements about matters of fact must have a certain verifiable relationship to the matters of fact of which they speak. On this basis rests much of our science, both physical and social, and our law.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the correspondence theory of truth is bunk. What appears to be a theory of truth is merely a way of describing how we talk about discrete matters of fact. Facts are not truth, merely unique events that can be plotted on a graph, telling us the spatio-temporal relations among a variety of physical instances. X was standing at such-and-such longitude and latitude at a certain moment in time - this is a fact, but it is not true, because it refers to nothing eternal, only to an instance of time.
What this means for science, of course, is that when we say it is "true", what we really mean is that is factual; it relates our understanding of the relationships among a certain number of facts, positing various ways in which these relationships cohere. These are not "true"; scientific theories, rather than being true, are only assumed to be not proven decisively untrue yet. As long as they work, they are the best way we have of understanding relationships among matters of fact.
Personally, I agree with Richard Rorty that questions of truth are not so much wrong-headed as uninteresting. Because "reality" is opaque to language - because many of our arguments over the truth-value of science are, in essence, arguments over words about reality, not reality itself - and because there is no meta-lingusitic judge to which all can appeal for the correctness of one's view, we end up arguing over definitions. More interesting are the ways we figure out, through language, story, and our readings of various texts, how to live in the world. There is nothing special about "truth", nothing talismanic, nothing final, nothing ultimate to the view that, if we grasp the truth, we have a hold of something that definitively addresses all sorts of matters.
As a Christian, of course, there is the matter of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel proclaiming, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me." Pilate's question to Jesus, "What is truth?", during the "trial scene" of the Fourth Gospel, needs to be understood in this light, as well as Jesus' refusal to answer verbally - what you see is what you get, in other words.
As a Christian, I do not believe "truth" is something human beings are capable of grasping; rather, I believe human beings are grasped by the truth, and live within it as a life-changing reality, indefinable yet nonetheless transforming. This living, indeed never-dying reality - how does one define what is by its very definition beyond description? - is what we call faith. It, like truth, is a mystery, but one within which we live, and through which we hope, and by which we love. There is no definition of truth; there is only the living in and through it, allowing Jesus' silence to echo in our own in the face of the ineffable.
