Types of truth in philosophical knowledge

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:46

Is the truth hidden in wine or "nothing is true, everything is permitted"? Philosophers have been trying to answer these and many other questions for thousands of years. With each new attempt to find real knowledge on the Promised Land, even more questions and paradoxes that are unsolvable at this particular moment appear. In this article, we will briefly describe the different types of truth in the humanities and philosophy.

Before proceeding directly to the classification, it is worth noting that in modern humanitarian knowledge there are as many truths as there are professions and occupations that have existed and still exist in different societies. So, for a religious person, the misfortune of a neighbor is a punishment for his sins or God's omen, for a lawyer it can be a crime or a violation of the law, and for a poet and writer it is a touching and charming story of a person's struggle with his grief. All these types of truth have a right to exist, since they lie in different fields of knowledge.

According to the mostpopular classification, the truth is divided into absolute and relative. The first is complete and whole knowledge about an object or phenomenon. On the other hand, relative truth says that absolute truth is unattainable. It is impossible to comprehend everything in knowledge, although one can approach it. Such kinds of truth in philosophy have given rise to two theories: metaphysics, which claims that absolute knowledge is real, and relativism, which laments the relativity of any knowledge.

Since ancient times, people have doubted the absoluteness of the truth. Sophists in ancient Greece expressed relativistic views in relation to this, for which they were criticized by Socrates. Hobbes, Diderot, Descartes and Leibniz, after Christian scholasticism in the 16th century, also argued that the idea of the creation of the world by God as an absolute truth has many gaps and is essentially untenable.

Service to relative truth is vehemently criticized by Friedrich Nietzsche in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Its relativity is manifested in the beliefs of the people or one of the rulers. Passing off a false theory as true knowledge, which, for example, was eugenics in the middle of the 20th century, a person manipulates others for his own selfish purposes. A real philosopher, according to the German immoralist, should serve real, non-transcendent truth.

How to understand what is truth? Its criteria and types are described in many philosophical and other scientific works. In short, the truth must obey the laws of logic, not contradict the already discovered facts of science, correspond to the fundamentalknowledge, be simple and understandable, be applied in practice, and should not depend on humanity.

Types of truth, which have already been mentioned above, are also supplemented by its objective type. Such truth is knowledge that does not depend on the activities of an individual and humanity as a whole.

Whatever kinds of truth may exist, philosophers believe that they can only be known through experience, sensation, reason. Or, as Ivan Karamazov said in the novel by F. M. Dostoevsky: “If there is no God, everything is allowed.”