What is truth. The concept of truth in philosophy

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:43

Many people, regardless of their origin, education, religious affiliation and occupation, evaluate certain judgments according to the degree of their correspondence to the truth. And, it would seem, they get a completely harmonious picture of the world. But, as soon as they begin to wonder what the truth is, everyone, as a rule, begins to get bogged down in the wilds of concepts and wallow in disputes. Suddenly it turns out that there are many truths, and some may even contradict each other. And it becomes completely incomprehensible what truth is in general and on whose side it is. Let's try to figure it out.

Truth is the correspondence of any judgment to reality. Any statement or thought is either true or false from the very beginning, regardless of the person's knowledge on this matter. Different eras put forward their own criteria of truth.

So, during the Middle Ages, it was determined by the degree of conformity with Christian teaching, and under the rule of materialists - the scientific knowledge of the world. At the moment, the scope of the answer to the question, what is truth, has become much wider. It began to be divided into groups, new concepts were introduced.

Absolute truth is an objective reproduction of reality. She exists outsideour consciousness. That is, for example, the statement "the sun is shining" will be the absolute truth, since it really shines, this fact does not depend on human perception. It would seem that everything is clear. But some scientists argue that absolute truth does not exist in principle. This judgment is based on the fact that a person cognizes the whole world around him through perception, but it is subjective and cannot be a true reflection of reality. But whether there is an absolute truth is a separate question. Now it is important that this concept is intended for the convenience of its assessment and classification. One of the basic laws of logic, the Law of Non-Contradiction, says that two mutually negating propositions cannot be both true or false at the same time.

That is, one of them will necessarily be true, and the other - not. This law can be used to test the "absoluteness" of truth. If a judgment cannot coexist with its opposite, then it is absolute.

Relative truth is a true, but incomplete or one-sided judgment about the subject. For example, the statement "women wear dresses." It is true, some of them do wear dresses. But the opposite can also be said with the same success. "Women don't wear dresses" would also be true. After all, there are some ladies who do not wear them. In this case, both statements cannot be considered absolute.

The very introduction of the term "relative truth" was an admissionhumanity of the incompleteness of knowledge about the world and the limitations of their judgments. This is also due to the weakening of the authority of religious teachings and the emergence of many philosophers who deny the very possibility of an objective perception of reality. "Nothing is true, and everything is permitted" - a judgment that most clearly illustrates the direction of critical thought.

Obviously, the concept of truth is still imperfect. It continues its formation in connection with the change of philosophical directions. Therefore, we can say with confidence that the question of what is truth will worry more than one generation.