Indian spiritual master, 1931-1987
The lonely path of the truth
Truth, for D’Mello, is a matter of personal discovery, something to be lived and experienced. No doctrines or Gurus should interpose themselves between the truth seeker and the truth. There is no need of institutions, sects or churches: ‘The Song of the Bird’ (his main book’s title) is enough to teach all what man needs; it is just a question to listen to it. Therefore the way of the Truth is simple; truth reveals itself to the heart of those who contemplates in silence.
True spirituality is not found in books, it is not a matter of knowledge but a matter of personal transformation. All theorizing about truth is futile. Most beliefs are a distortion of the truth, finding a priori justification for everything that happens.. The sole authority for the man in search of truth is the awakened man himself. Unfortunately few can endure the lonely path of the truth, preferring the shelter of their unquestioned beliefs. Religions with their doctrines are an obstacle to man’s personal quest for the truth, which is a lonely path. There can be no substitute to the individual search for truth: each one of us is responsible for the fundamental options he takes in his/her life.
To be in the truth, warns D’Mello, man must renounce the Ego that he is. Those who want to “push things” for the propagation of ‘their’ truth, expose their selfishness. Truth need no pushing. The folly of these anxious-ridden people! !!, for truth is not something to be spoken, proclaimed or propagated but only to be lived.
* D’Mello, Anthony, The Song of the Bird, Gujarat Sahitya Praksh, Anand, India, 1982
(English theologian, 1888-1976)
The belief in the unchanging character of truth that began with Platonism prevailed until the 19thc. During these centuries of classicism, the objective truth was looked upon as fixed and expressible in unchanging concepts outside the mind. Truth was regarded as so objective as to exist apart from any one’s possession of it. However from the 19th c. onwards, the ideas of ‘historical consciousness’ and evolution brought a different concept of truth. According to the new perspective, truth is affected by the relativity of history because truth is an affair of the human subject who is a historical being. Truth is a function of developing minds and is always marked by historicity. Human beings’ points of view, their experiences, concepts and language are constantly changing. People’s grasp of truth, therefore, changes as well. The static form of truth presented by orthodoxies and heredited traditions is a retreat from the responsability of living in history. A dynamic point of view about truth must prevail over the classical static one, inherited from the Greeks and pursued by Medieval Scholastic thought.
According to D’Arcy, many modern thinkers, obsessed in their denunciation of the static truth, exaggerate the impact of culture, society, history and subjectivity on human knowledge. D’Arcy espouses the view that there must be a way of reconciling the static and the dynamic, being and becoming, the fixity of doctrinal truth and its power to evolve, the content that remains and its expression that changes. Mankind reads and re-reads the doctrines which are stable and absolute. He quotes Newman’s famous dictum: “Change, there may be, but not of identity”.
* D’Arcy Martin, Humanism and Christianity, Meridian Books, 1970
( Contemporary British R.C. theologian)
D’Costa finds fault with the ‘classical’ threefold typology adopted by many theologians: exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. Exclusivism is the position that only one religion is true and the others ultimately false. Pluralism is the assumption that all religions lead to the same truth, namely the transcendent divine reality. Inclusivism is the mediated position contending that one religion is definitely true but that the saving truth can be found in incomplete form in other traditions.
D’Costa ‘s thesis is that both pluralism and inclusivism are concealed forms of exclusivism. From this he concludes that only the exclusivist position on religious truth is tenable.
Inclusivism, according to him, collapses into some form of exclusivity inasmuch as it does not affirm other religions as they understand themselves but only as elements that the inclusivist tends to prize. The inclusivist is thus a disguised exclusivist.
D’Costa devotes more space to a critique of all forms of pluralism, both Western (mostly John Hick) and Eastern (Radhakrishnan). The Western type of pluralism is influenced by Enlightenment modernity which denies the possibility of God’self-revelation. For Hick all religions are salvific paths to the one divine “Real”, but since this Real is absolutely incomprehensible, the attempts to specify it in the various religions is ‘mythological’. For D’Costa, such so-called “pluralist position” amounts to an exclusivist position in which the (hidden) faith of their authors is the ontological assumptions of Enlightnement modernity. The problem is aggravated by the fact that these authors do not recognize their own exclusiveness.
Radhakrishnan offers another type of religious pluralism. He claims that humans can have an intuitive apprehension of the Absolute. The experience of this direct communion with the Absolute is the core of Advaita Vedanta which ranks supreme is the religious hierarchy. Second are the worshipers of the personal God, third come the devotees of incarnate divinities.According to Radhakrishnan, all religions are true in some way but the absolute truth belongs to Avdaita Vedanta. D’Costa maintains that Radhakrishnan’s apparent pluralism conceals a subtle but clear form of exclusivism: not the exclusivism of Elightnement modernity but the exclusivism imposed by the excellence of Advaitic philosophy.
D’Costa concludes that pluralism does not exist, being in all cases a form of exclusivism. There cannot be many religious truths but only one at the exclusion of all others.
* D’Costa, Gavin, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York,2000; Theology and Religious Pluralism, Basil Blackwell, Orford, 1986
(Tibetan spiritual master, b. 1935)
Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, essential for human survival. To cultivate it, there is no need of temples and no need of complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple and its philosophy is kindness.
Among the many delusions of ordinary life, the sense of discrimination between oneself and others is the worst form, as it creates nothing but unpleasantness for both sides. To meditate on ultimate truth helps us to eradicate this sense of discrimination. It will help to create true love for one another. The search for ultimate truth is, therefore, vitally important.
According to the Dalai Lama, the only "definitive truth" for Buddhism is the absolute negation of any one particular view as the Definitive Truth. Therefore, Buddhism strongly discourages blind faith and the fanaticism that derives from exclusivism. It is wrong for any particular religion to consider itself as the only truth. One of the causes of conflict in the past as well as the present is the different religious traditions. Their differences are real, and even indispensable on account of the variety of mental and cultural dispositions. All the same, they all affirm the fundamental message of love and compassion.
The idea of religious pluralism, which is gaining ground in our time, has a positive and constructive value. We need to acknowledge a diversity of religious traditions which should coexist in respect of each other in their capacity to build a better world, a more compassionate and peaceful humanity.
* The Power of Compassion, A Collection of Lectures by the XIV Dalai Lama, Thorsons Element, 1995
(Contemporary American philosopher)
Postmodernism is not a theory as much as it is a concern for revealing the manipulative institutions and social structures that are embedded in modernist practices. It is deeply involved in the analysis and criticism of that form of rationality which associates reason with an autonomous transcendental subject capable of identifying truth in ontological terms. It is not a global attack on reason itself, neither a glorification of irrationality, but the rejection of all permanent standards of rationality by which to evaluate competing truth claims. Modernity (the Enlightenment) that postmodernism repudiates had adopted a cognitive vocabulary which claimed to be true for all human beings. It offered the prospect of attaining a universal truth in science, morality and art. History was the story of the progress of reason and individual freedom. Ultimately all knowledge would be unified and a consensus on truth would be reached. This European humanism dogmatically affirmed the privilege of universal reason. In place of having God as the guarantor of truth and knowledge (Descartes and before), the Enlightenment substituted reason as the totalizing activity of rational and autonomous subjects.
But for postmodernism this picture is vitiated because the gratuitous affirmation of humanistic “truth” is possible only by assuming that the subject can adopt a stance outside the social, political and linguistic legacy in terms of which rationality is defined. Since there are no “self-evident” truths apart from a self to whom they are evident, the process by which the selves are identified becomes a central concern for postmodernists trying to understand what is at the heart to the self-authorising character of reason. We can trust ourselves not to be deluded into thinking that we are acting rationally only if there is some way to verify that either the pursuit of a rational design for humanity or the disinterested pursuit of truth can occur independently of material relation of power, exclusion and domination. The postmodernist stance is that we cannot withdraw ourselves from those relations. Self-assured and self-authorising, the perceiving subject has no privilege stance for grasping himself and the world, because the subject does not control the linguistic ands cognitive means for assimilating what it knows. Therefore truth-claims about the self or the world are nothing more than unconscious suggestions about how we might speak rather than declarations about how things are.
Structuralism was the first strategy to denounce the demise of modernity. It indicated how the self and things in the world are intelligible in terms of their place in a network or structure of relations. However structuralism endorsed the view that there is something to be represented, and that there is a right order in which to make such representations. Structuralism retained the ontological commitments of modernity. The shift from structuralism to post-structuralism is the shift from the view that the network of social, cultural and linguistic practices represents some knowable truth about the world and the conditions of right thinking to the post-modern view that such practices constitute what is represented as truth, world and thought. Structuralism indicates how intelligibility is still possible because issues of subjectivity, history and truth are understood in the background of a network of relations. They are propped on the transcendent ground of structures. Intelligibility is still possible.
Unlike structuralists, poststructuralists do more than just situate issues of subjectivity, history and truth in networks of relations. They analyse and criticize these networks to prevent moving beyond the immediacy of experience to some transcendent ground. Any theory (structuralism included) and concepts falsify the nature of lived experience because they provide an order contrary to experience. For the poststructuralist, reality is nothing more than the complex ensemble of material, bodily drives and impulses, socio-political relations, and language differentiations. Thinkers and their ideas are intelligible only as functions of psychoanalytical, ideological or discursive exchanges; authors are the products of legal and institutional systems that determine the realm of discourses. Thus it makes no sense to say that an author’s text is meaningful in virtue of what he intends to say. Central ideas of modernist thought (self, certainty, rationality) are no longer allowed in philosophic discourse without acknowledging their biological, ideological and rhetorical heritage.
Thus postmodernity undermines the fascination of truth itself. At the same time it does not offer itself as the truth. It only aims at pointing out that no interpretation occurs apart from the material, ideological and linguistic conditions in terms of which it is intelligible. As these conditions are constantly changing, all we can legitimately do is make reference to those conditions as the context in which meaning emerges.
* Daniel, Stephen H., Postmodernity, Poststructuralism and the Historiography of Modern Philosophy, in International Philosophical Quaterly, Vol. XXXV, n_3, Issue n_ 139,Sept. 1995, p. 255-267
(French R.C. theologian, 1905-1974)
History shows that truth has always been hated by the powerful and disdained by the clever. But never more than in our times has truth been less loved. For our contemporaries to affirm the existence of truth amounts to dogmatism and intolerance. This kind of damaging reaction has many causes.
1.The progress and success of science in the 19thc. had developed an overwrought confidence that science can solve the last riddles of human existence and free man from the so-called metaphysical and religious certainties of the past. This positivistic stance is still held by a few today. However the contemporary attitude, less attracted by the scientific dogmatism of positivism, is one of deep-rooted agnosticism. The provisional character of scientific systems has put an end to the days of dogmatic statements. The notion of certainty is replaced by the notion of approximation. Nothing is final, everythig is provisional.
2. For the man of today, the subjective viewpoint of sincerity is substituted to the objective viewpoint of truth. The idea of an objective morality is replaced by an individual ethics of self-realisation. In the area of religion, more importance is attached to the genuineness of religious feelings than to the content of the faith to which one adheres. It matters litttle to which religion you belong provided you are sincere in your belief.
3. The criterion of effectiveness has become the criterion of truth. People judge by practical results. Whereas action should be the fruit of truth, the primacy of action over doctrine has relegated truth in the background.
Daniélou bemoans the modern betrayal of the idea of Truth. He turns to the Bible in which truth is the acknowledgment of what is most real and the sovereignly real is God. For the majority of people today what is most real is the world of their material existence and what is most unreal is the world of spiritual values and God. In contrast to this humanist self-sufficiency, the Bible takes the religious dimension as the measure of man in what he truly is, a being essentially related to God. To accept the truth, to acknowledge what is, is tantamount to saying ‘yes’ to God. The mind that insists on being utterly self-dependent chooses to live in falsehood.
* Daniélou, J., The Scandal of Truth, Burns Oates, London, 1962
(English naturalist, 1809-1882)
The truth about the evolution of species
The evolutionist Darwin has always been clear about the distinction between fact and theory if only because he has always acknowledged how far he is from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. He continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory - natural selection - to explain the mechanism of evolution. He wrote in The Descent of Man: "I had two distinct objects in view; firstly, to show that species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change. . . . Hence if I have erred in . . . having exaggerated its [natural selection's] power . . . I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations."
For Darwin, explanatory theory was equally as important in scientific inquiry as fact-gathering, and the test of the truth of a theory was its ability to group facts under a single generalization. "I believe in the truth of the theory [of natural selection], because it collects under one point of view, and gives a rational explanation of, many apparently independent classes of facts. It seemed incredible, he wrote, that "a false theory would explain, as it seems to me it does explain, so many classes of facts." ... Again, following the principles of positive science, the explanation had to be within the bounds of natural causation and had to employ causes and processes known or believed on good evidence to occur. Any hypothesis that met these two criteria could be held provisionally as work went on, and then modified if necessary. ... Natural selection, he thought, met both criteria; special creation met neither. It merely verbally accounted for species; it "explained" nothing.
Darwin acknowledged the provisional nature of natural selection while affirming the fact of evolution. The fruitful theoretical debate that Darwin initiated has never ceased. Scientists regard debates on fundamental issues of theory as a sign of intellectual health and a source of excitement. Evolutionary theory is enjoying this uncommon vigor. Yet amidst all the turmoil it has originated, no biologist has been lead to doubt the fact that evolution occurred; the debate is how it happened. They are all trying to explain the same thing: the tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms by ties of genealogy. Creationists pervert and caricature this debate by conveniently neglecting the common conviction that underlies it, and by falsely suggesting that evolutionists now doubt the very phenomenon they are struggling to understand.
Darwin suffered much at the hands of creationists, who usually, like so many of his critics, approached the Origin of species as if it were a proof of evolution, which of course it was not. Its supporters, on the other hand, commonly viewed it correctly as a hypothesis, based on plausibly ordered evidence and heuristic in purpose. In one of his letters to a correspondent, he modestly acknowledged : “Thank you heartily for what you say about my book; but you will be greatly disappointed; it will be grievously too hypothetical. It will very likely be of no other service than collocating some facts; though I myself think I see my way approximately on the origin of species. But, alas, how frequent, how almost universal it is in an author to persuade himself of the truth of his own dogmas”.
*Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the origin of species, John Murray, London. 1964 facsimile edition, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge.
(American philosopher, 1917-2003)
1. Truth is a basic and primitive concept. All theories of truth have failed to define truth because it cannot be defined. This is hardly surprising for the concept of truth is so basic that without it we might not have any concepts at all. This does not mean that Davidson is a ‘deflationist’ (ready to eliminate the concept): he takes truth to be an important, explanatory concept. It is crucial to meaning because without an idea of truth we cannot understand meaning in terms of truth conditions. Concepts like truth, knowledge, belief, etc, are the most elementary concepts we have. Why should we expect to be able to reduce these concepts to other concepts that are simpler? We should accept the fact that what makes these concepts so important must also foreclose on the possibility of finding a foundation for them. All semantic analyses presuppose a pre-analytic conception of truth. Truth is an indefinable concept but this does not imply that the concept is mysterious, ambiguous, or untrustworthy.
2. On the positive side Davidson attempts to trace the connections between the concept of truth and the human attitudes and acts that give it body. We know a great deal about how the concept of truth applies to the speech and beliefs and actions of human agents. We use it to interpret their utterances and beliefs by assigning truth conditions to them, and we judge those actions and attitudes by evaluating the likelihood of their truth.
All thought, all knowledge presupposes beliefs, and having beliefs presupposes a grasp of the concept of objective truth, which in turn depends upon interpersonal communication. Communication between speaker and interpreter depends on “an interpersonal standard of consistency and correspondence”. This interpersonal standard is an “objective” standard. The interpersonal standard of the community of minds can give us objective assurance that our view of the world must be largely correct. Most of our plainest beliefs must be true and their nature known to others because their truth conditions and therefore their meaning, is constituted by the public objects and events in the world that cause them.
Thus Davidson finds a basis for objectivity in intersubjectivity, that is, in the relations between people reacting simultaneously to each other and stimuli from a shared world. Davidson finds a middle ground between subjectivity and absolute objectivity, between matter of taste and an objectivity based on the ideal of correspondence. That middle ground, the only usable notion of ‘objectivity’ is ‘agreement’ rather than ‘mirroring’. The notion that we might aspire to an impersonal objectivity beyond the community of minds is a delusion. Thus if we want to improve our standard of objectivity, it is vital to take steps to broaden our interactions within the community of minds.
Davidson ‘s view supposes an epistemologically equal world shared by all and attempts to make rational the sense of different perspectives. Objective knowledge in terms of truth-seeking must arise from interpersonal communication. Truth interpretation is relative to our active critical dialogical practices, rather than any kind of theoretical framework (the theories of truth). Dialogue can bring out the most favourable that can be, subject to further criticism and progress.
* Davidson, D., The Folly of trying to define truth, in Lynch, M.P., The Nature of Truth, Bradford Book, Cambridge, Massachussets, 2001, 624-640
(British theologian, 1923-1999)
1. Truth exists only in living minds. The objectivity of truth does not contradict the obvious fact that truth is also and always related to the human mind. This implies that human truth is always involved in the developping process of human intelligence. Truth attained by man is conditioned by the historical process. There is a historicity of truth reflecting the historicity of man. The mind of man is an open dynamism which seeks and pursues truth by incessant questioning.
Man’s relation to the truth is one of unwearing pursuit, never of final possession. This pursuit of truth requires complete openness and absence of prejudices. The person in search of truth is capable to reach objective certainties, but these certainties are partial and perfectible. Human knowledge is necessarily perspectival and affected by the limited horizon of historical situatedness. Human truth cannot be formulated once for all in immutable concepts and irreformable dogmas.
This is not ‘subjectivism’ or ‘relativism’. The value and objectivity of human knowing is guaranteed by the questioning dynamism of man’s spirit. He is able to constantly question, review and thus perfect his limited certainties. He can at any time alter his standpoint and widen his horizon. The fact that he is capable of avoiding the imprisonment of the particular standpoint of any historical perspective is the proof that he tends towards an objective ideal.
2. Unfortunately some people are afraid of the openness that welcomes all genuine questioning. The holders of orthodoxies of any kind seek reassurance and security in the stability of the particular ‘truth’ that they want to impose on others. That security is bought at the price of checking the dynamism of the human mind with its unceasing questioning. The openness that constitutes man’s spirit is blocked.
In particular, a genuine religious faith cannot be secured by a policy of suppressing the onward drive of human questioning. To remove religious faith from questioning is to place it outside the sphere of truth, and thus destroy it. Every formulation of religious belief represents a limited understanding from a given standpoint. Statements of faith cannot be interpreted in a way that denies the historicity and consequent changeability of all human knowing. Ideologies of any kind, whether political or religious, use words as a means to preserve authority without regard for the truth. Truth is used and manipulated, not respected or sought. Truth is subordinated to authority, not authority put at the service of truth.
This is all the more damaging that truth is an absolute value that claims us unconditionally. There is no authentic human living with an unrestricted openness to truth and corresponding human love. If we consciously refuse truth in a particular instance, we corrupt our hold on truth generally, and we show that in maintaining our convictions we are not motivated by truth but by motives extraneous to the truth: fear, desire of gain, need for security. Those in authority who attempt to block the unrestrcited openness to truth by setting limits are compelling others to cut themselves off from reality and lapse into inauthenticity.
* Davis, Charles, A Question of Conscience, Herder & Stoughton, London, 1960, p.26-29, 64,74, 210-215
(British biologist , b.1941)
Dawkins is an atheist, a strenuous and militant one. He thinks religious belief is a dangerous virus, and that it is a crime to infect the mind of a child with it. He believes that "only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today." He calls religions "dangerous collective delusions," and he thinks that they are sinks of falsehood – and most of them have to be, since only one can be true.
Dawkins not only thinks religion is unalloyed nonsense but that it is an overwhelmingly pernicious, even "very evil," force in the world. His target is not so much organized religion as all religion. And within organized religion, he attacks not only extremist sects but moderate ones.
If you ask people why they are convinced of the truth of their religion, they appeal neither to heredity nor to evidence. No, they appeal to faith. Faith is the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Dawkins' critique of religion rests on three points. First, because different faiths make very different claims about the world, they cannot all be true; and none of the claims can be scientifically verified. Second, the choice among faiths is not based on rational consideration: the vast majority of people simply practice the religion of their parents. Finally, Dawkins considers religions to be vehicles of evil because they facilitate the labelling of people as either 'us' or 'them', fostering xenophobia and its attendant horrors .
The worse type of religious attitude is the fundamentalist brand. Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. By contrast, scientists believe, not because of reading a holy book but because they have studied the evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books.
Dawson rebuffs the argument that religion and science operate on separate dimensions and are concerned with quite separate sorts of questions. Religions, he argues, have historically always attempted to answer the questions that properly belong to science. Thus religions should not be allowed now to retreat away from the ground upon which they have traditionally attempted to fight. They do offer both a cosmology and a biology; however, in both cases it is false.
Dawkins discusses religion as practiced. Not surprisingly, he finds little good to say about it: religion for him is the root of much evil and its disappearance from the world would be an unmitigated good. Throughout “The God Delusion”, Dawkins reminds us of the horrors committed in the name of God, from outright war, through the persecution of minority sects, acts of terrorism, the closing of children's minds, and the oppression of those having unorthodox sexual lives. No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion.
*Dawkins Richard, The God delusion, Bantam books, 2006
(Indian Hindu reformer, founder of the Arya Sam‚j, 1824-1883)
According to Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the neo-Hindu movement called Arya-Samaj, the Vedic revelation is the norm of universal truth. The Vedas are the sole authority for the ascertainment of truth. Man by nature is fallible and finite, unable to come to the knowledge of truth by himself. If he comes to know anything at all, it is because he has been taught by others who possessed that knowledge. All knowledge comes by tradition from the first human beings (the rishis or seers) who obtained it from the eternal source of knowledge, God. Man can know truth only if it is revealed to him by God. The Vedas are the words of God, they are “a-paurusheya”, that is, there is nothing human in them. The truth and the knowledge contained in them are perfect, eternal and infallible.
Wherever and whatever truth is to be found has proceeded from the Vedas. They contain not only religious truth, but every knowledge, every scientific truth. In modern times the scientists are simply re-discovering the scientific knowledge which is contained in the Vedas from the beginning of the world. The Vedas contain the totality of all truths: religious, moral, social, political, etc.
The Vedas alone are the supreme authority in the ascertainment of true religion. There can be only one true religion and that religion is the one based on and derived from the Vedas. Being the religion revealed by God once and for all, the Vedic religion is not the religion for Hindus only, it is the universal religion at the exclusion of all other religions. For Dayanand the fact that religions are opposed to each other is the proof that one of them can only be true and the others false. Other religions than the Vedic one are “the product of ignorance”. The salvation of the world lies in rejecting all the false religions and accepting the one true religion as revealed in the Vedas.
* Dayanand Saraswati, Satyartha Prakash, ;See Daniel, P.S., Hindu response to religious Pluralism, Kant Publications, Delhi, 2000, p. 68-88
(Maltese born psychologist, b.1933)
The importance of creativity rather than argumentation to find the truth.
One should go beyond ‘what is’ or ‘the truth’ to explore ‘what may be’, or ‘possibility’.
1. De Bono scorns the view of those who look for absolute truths and are trained to believe that there is only one truth. So much of our thinking, talking and arguing is directed to finding this one truth. The majority of people feel that all one has to know is ‘the truth’ after which all our energy is spent in defending this truth. Furthermore, if you are convinced that you have the truth, then anyone with a different version must be wrong. That attitude has been the origin of so many wars, persecutions, hatreds, etc. over the past centuries.
The traditional habits of Western thinking are inadequate, our belief in their adequacy are both limiting and dangerous. These traditional habits include: the critical search for the 'truth', argument and adversarial exploration, and all the characteristics of rock logic with its crudities and harshness. These habits of thinking, claims De Bono, were ultimately derived from the classic Greek ‘gang of three’: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who hijacked Western thinking. So they became the established thinking of Western civilization.
Philosophers need this idea of a single, universal and permanent truth in order to play their philosophical games. Society needs this idea of truth in order to administer the legal system. In real life, however, this notion of truth is highly artificial and very limiting. De Bono suggests we strive for "proto-truths," which may be no less true, but as the term implies they are also easily discarded when better truths are discovered.
2. Rather than argumentation, argues De Bono, one should use creativity to find the 'truth'. We need to accept that there may be multiple truths - as in perception or value differences. One of the functions of creativity is to create such possible alternative truths. Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. The process of creativity helps to go beyond ‘what is’ or ‘the truth’ in order to explore ‘what may be’, or ‘possibility’.
Perceptual creativity is involved with looking at things in different ways and finding values.
For De Bono, our reliance on analytical thinking may be a good way to think, but it is not enough. He describes a number of different thinking methods designed to fully explore any subject matter by thinking in parallel and ways to generate alternatives, possibilities and ideas through applying what he calls ‘lateral thinking’. This is almost the exact opposite of argument, adversarial, confrontational thinking where each party deliberately takes an opposite view. Parallel thinking goes further. In traditional thinking, if two people disagree, there is an argument in which each tries to prove the other party wrong. In parallel thinking, both views, no matter how contradictory, are put down in parallel. If, later on, it is essential to choose between the differing positions, then an attempt to choose is made at that point. If a choice cannot be made, then the design has to cover both possibilities.
*De Bono Edward, 'Parallel thinking', Viking, London and Penguin Books, London, 1994
(Belgian biblical exegete, 1914 - 2003)
1. There are different kinds of truth: metaphysical, historical, scientific, logical, ethical, religious. In each case the relation of truth to history is different. De la Potterie exposed the main models of the relationship between truth and history.
A. Truth separated from and transcendent to history
- The Platonic tradition locates truth in the stable transcendent world of ideas, existing outside the flow of time, at the level of eternity. The changeless and immortal truth has no contact with history.
- For the rationalist tradition inaugurated by Descartes the abstract truth of mathematics and logic is the model of all truths. It is a timeless and universal truth like the Platonic truth isolated from history but with a radically new approach from the locus of truth (Plato’s world of ideas) to the criterion of truth (Cartesian reason). Lessing’s (see Lessing) well-known saying is another expression of the same concept of transhistorical truth: “Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason”.
B. Truth immersed in history
- G.B.Vico (see Vico) (+ 1744) is one of the precursors who identifies truth with historical truth. Truth, for him, is the truth that human beings bring gradually into being by their activity in the course of history. The true is convertible not with being but what is made, fabricated or produced. Truth is human truth, the operational concept of truth. Vico is thus at the origin of the modern view of truth as immanent in history. This idea has developed in two opposite directions.
- According to historicism, the truth of history consists in the truth of past facts, or the retrospective truth. This current of thought has lead to historical positivism which makes fact and truth completely identical. “Scientific” objectivity is recognised the supreme and sole criterion of truth. The human factor which plays an essential role in history is neglected.
- According to Hegelian Idealism, truth will be attained only in the future when the unfolding of history reaches its end. Hegel conceives truth as the becoming, the gradual realization and the growing awareness of the Absolute Idea. For him the trans-historical Platonic world of ideas is no longer separated from the historical reality of our world. In a way Hegel has blended truth with history in emphasizing the dynamic nature of truth and its eschatological tension.
C. Truth immanent in the human person
Existentialism is preoccupied with the concrete existence of the individual. Truth has nothing to do with the flow of history. The person is the place of truth. The merit of existentialist philosophy is to have shown, against Platonism, rationalism and historicism, that truth is not a purely objective datum, independent of the human person.
- According to the atheistic Existentialism of Stirner ( followed by Nietzsche), every individual is his own absolute norm.”Truth is what is mine, the false is anything that owns me” (Stirner). The individual is his own criterion of truth. The idea of truth is connected with that of power. History exists only in function of the self and cannot be the place of truth. The break between history and truth is complete.
- According to the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard, the egoistic self of atheistic existentialism is replaced by “an individual before God”. Truth consists in the authenticity and depth of religious feeling and faith in God. The important thing is not so much the object of belief as the how of belief. Truth is in the subjective attitude. “Subjectivity is truth”. One does not reach the truth without committing oneself to it. Genuine truth must be interiorized. The historical side of Christianity, the question of truth and history, is of little concern for Kierkegaard.
2. The Christian concept of truth: the divine revelation
The word “truth” in its Christian use, does not refer to God but to the revelation of God. This revelation reaches completeness in Jesus-Christ. De la Potterie shows how the three different aspects of truth analyzed above (transcendence, historicity and interiority) are unified into a synthesis in the idea of Christian revelation.
a) Historicity and eschatology.
Since the word “truth” means “revelation” to a believer, it is obvious that this revelation takes place in history. This does not mean solely the ”truth of facts” of historians. If Christian truth is located on the level of history (the horizontal dimension), this truth consists in the presence and self-manifestation of mystery in the heart of historical events (the vertical dimension). Moreover the historical truth has an eschatological dimension, a polarization toward the future. It includes both an “already” and a “not yet”. The full knowledge of the truth is reserved for the end of time.
b) Transcendence
Because the historical facts manifest a mystery, they are open to transcendence. Christian truth is truth as revelation that comes to us from God. The God of truth is God as he reveals himself in Jesus Christ. The transcendence proper to truth does not belong solely as in Platonism to the world of eternal ideas, that is, metaphysical entities cut out of history, but to the incarnate, historical Word of God (Jesus-Christ) who is the truth in history that leads beyond history and is an opening to transcendence.
c) Interiority and immanence
Christian believers are called to appropriate the truth for themselves, to “do” the truth and make the truth of Jesus their own. The believer must make the truth his own and interiorize a truth that is not subjective but has an objective existence antecedent to and independent of this appropriation.
* de la Potterie, Ignace, "History and Truth”, chap.6 in Problems and perspectives in Fundamental Theology, René Latourelle and Gérard O’Collins, Paulist Press , NY, 1982
(French R.C. priest and philosopher, 1782-1854)
Individual reason, left to itself,can only end in absolute scepticism. It discovers strong reasons to doubt about everything. On the other hand every human being spontaneously believes in a great number of truths, indispensable to social, moral and physical life. In order to distinguish true from false certitudes, one naturally adopts universal consent as the rule. It is not “private sense” or individual reason which can attain the truth but common sense or the universal consent, the general reason of humanity.
The first of these truths demonstrated by the unanimous consent of peoples is that God exists. From this Lamennais assumes that God, in creating man, gave him a set of primordial truths with words destined to express them and transmit them to others. Thus each individual naturally adheres to truth with an invincible belief. It is because God has created all human beings alike that universal consent is the supreme rule to adhere to what is true. Philosophy should therefore begin by an act of faith in primitive truths, received from tradition by language and the consent of humanity.
The individual cannot find truth. Truth is in tradition transmitted from generation to generation from its divine original source.
* De Lamennais, Essai sur l’Indifférence en matière de religion, in Thonnard, History of Philosophy, Desclée, Paris, 195O, p 729-731
(French philosopher, 1925-1995)
Deleuze conceives reality as an anonymous field, devoid of subjects and individual persons. Existence is impersonal and the universe is indefinite, without identity of self or ego. He conceives it as the field of “impersonal desires” . Desire is the creation of life, a positive will to power and not a negative exigency or want. Against western traditional thought (even against Freud), Deleuze stresses the positivity of desire, as the leading force of invention and ”difference”. Indeed Deleuze’s philosophy is a philosophy of “difference”. He abhors philosophical systems which endeavour to think the unity of the multiple in reducing the other to the same and to explain the many by the One. Deleuze is above all attentive to becoming, to the events that are always new. Desire is the force of invention and difference, causing the breakdown of “the same”, of all ordinances, rules and norms and, ultimately of truth itself. The philosopher is not one searching for a truth in the heaven of eternal ideas. Rather he is the thinker who produces new ideas and “concepts” always open to falsifications and rectification.
Deleuze links the traditional concept of truth to the principle of identity and the categories of resemblance and repetition. But in his world everything is different, everything is equally important or unimportant, never the same. No comparison can be established between phenomena that are always new and incommensurable. Unity is an illusion. The universe is a chaos, a succession of unrelated instants, the Heraclitean singularity of each moment, the result of sheer randomness. For the “desiring machines” to which Deleuze reduces human beings, there can be no responsibility, no constraint of any kind, no legitimate organisation and no acknowledgment of any truth, but only the earthly paradise of ephemeral and scattered enjoyments that result from productive desires.
* See Parrain-Vial, Tendances Nouvelles de la Philosophie, Centurion, Paris, 1976, p.93-118
(Greek philosopher, 460-370)
Sense perception does not lead to the truth : the truth of things is not what they appear to be
Democritus's atomist metaphysical theory states that the world is composed of hard indivisible particles of matter moving through empty space. He speculates that atoms have shape, mass and motion. He proposes that the senses yield no knowledge, or at best, "obscure" knowledge. "The truth is that what we meet with perceptually is nothing reliable, for it shifts its character according to the body's dispositions, influences, and confrontations" . The most telling limitation of the senses is their inability to see objects smaller than a certain size. "Whenever obscure knowledge can no longer see the objects because of their smallness, and also cannot hear or smell or taste them nor perceive them by touch, the investigator must then have recourse to a finer means of knowing". By this, Democritus means rational investigation, the kind of reasoning that produced a theory of reality, a "metaphysical" theory, according to which what is real is moving mass of atoms in a void.
Sense-perception does not satisfy our thirst for explanation. We perceive myriad changes going on around us all the time. The senses might be able to detect, with greater or lesser accuracy, that they have taken place, but they are silent on the question of why they have. For Democritus, what explains what we sense is the action of tiny indivisible particles of matter, atoms, which cannot be detected by the senses. What appears to the senses as a smooth, continuous surface, say a slab of polished marble, is in reality a conglomeration of atoms with a great deal of empty space between them. For the atomists, things in reality are not what much like what they appear to be.
Democritus says there are two kinds of knowing, one through the senses and the other through the intellect. Of these, he calls the one through the intellect ‘legitimate’ attesting its trustworthiness for the judgement of truth, and the one through the senses he names ‘bastard’ denying its inerrancy in the discrimination of what is true. To quote his actual words: “Of knowledge there are two forms, one legitimate, one bastard. To the bastard belong all this group: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. The ‘bastard’ knowledge is concerned with the perception through the senses, therefore it is insufficient and subjective. The other is legitimate and separate from that”. Then, preferring the legitimate to the bastard, he continues: “When the bastard can no longer see any smaller, or hear, or smell, or taste, or perceive by touch, but finer matters have to be examined, then comes the legitimate, since it has a finer organ of perception. This second sort of knowledge, the ‘legitimate’ one, can be achieved through the intellect, in other words, all the sense-data from the ‘bastard’ must be elaborated through reasoning. In this way one can get away from the false perception of the ‘bastard’ knowledge and grasp the truth through the inductive reasoning. Therefore, the knower after taking into account the sense-impressions, can examine the causes of the appearances, draw conclusions about the laws that govern the appearances, and find out the causality (aetiologia) by which they are related. This is the procedure of thought from the parts to the whole or else from the apparent to non-apparent (inductive reasoning).
* See Burnet J. , Early Greek Philosophy, Kessinger Publishing, 2003
(American philosopher, b.1942)
1. Faith in the truth has a priority claim that sets it apart from all other faiths. The goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture. Indeed saying would not go at all without the ideal of truth. Truth-telling is, and must be, the background of all genuine communication, including lying. After all, deception only works when the would-be deceiver has a reputation for telling the truth.
Scientists have faith in the truth, but it is not blind faith. It is not like the faith that parents may have in the honesty of their children. It is rather like the faith anybody can have in a result which has been independently arrived at by ten different teams.
2. Agreeing that truth is a very important concept, epistemologists have tried to say just what truth is-- without going overboard. Just figuring out what is true about truth turns out to be a difficult task in which definitions and theories that seem at first to be innocent lead to complications that soon entangle the theorist in dubious doctrines. Endless philosophical controversies around the notion of truth have had some mischievous consequences. Some have concluded that truth itself was nothing estimable or achievable after all. Give it up, they seem to be saying: truth is an unachievable and misguided ideal. In fact these sceptics are forgetting all the points about truth that all sides agree upon.
3. The problem is that often people do not want to know the truth. The reason is because truth can hurt. When one pretends to take the truth for the highest good - which it is not - it is evident that much harm can be done. Is it not better to lie and suppress the truth in order to prevent some human sufferings? To leave people in ignorant bliss of the truth may be right in few cases: but they are exceptions to the rule.
4. It is a more unsettling fact that people often don't want other people to know the truth. Adult members of our species have all the right to know the truth. It is shockingly paternalistic to say that we should shield some people from the fruits of civilization. Education may turn them into something radically different. They will lose many of their old ways. Some of this will be good riddance, and some, no doubt, will be tragic. The well-meaning policy of tolerance for traditional policies that deny free access to the truth-seeking tools of science is often a policy in the service of tyrants. The idea of informed consent is one of the cornerstones of liberty. In some cultures, the very idea of informing the people so that they might consent or not is viewed with hostility. Hopefully in the next century it will become more and more impractical for leaders to preserve the uninformedness of their people.
* Dennett, Daniel, "Faith in the truth", Tufts Center for Cognitive Studies (Amnesty Lecture, 1997)
(French philsopher, 1930- )
Derrida’s project is the denunciation of the “metaphysical enclosure” that Western culture has imposed in order to justify the established order. To achieve the “deconstruction” of Western metaphysics he claims that all meanings and values (truth included) are our own invention. In ruining the “sacred” truths and pulling down the order based on it, man affirms himself and liberates others. This is on the agenda of those called ‘post-modernists’ whose world is bereft of all authority. However, different post-modernists adopt different approaches to the problem. Derrida’s specific strategy consists in identifying the fault of Western culture in its ‘logocentrism’, that is, the belief that the world really is as our concepts describe it. Derrida adopts the nominalist arguments that concepts are nothing more than human artefacts. The true purpose of concepts is not to describe the world but to fortify our power over it.
Western metaphysics, for him, has been built over binary oppositions of concepts, such as intelligible-sensible, object-subject, true-false, space-time, being-nothingness, etc. The task of philosophy is to go beyond these binary oppositions in order to reach the deeper level and the source of these ‘differences’. Derrida wants to rediscover the original unity of conceptual oppositions (which he calls in French “differance” with an “a”). He rejects the fundamental character of language that the truth of a proposition consists in “reference”, that is, in its power to correspond to what is. He endorses the linguistic revolution of structuralism which allows the complete dissociation of language from its extra-linguistic reality. Language functions for itself as a game between signifier and signified. In his theory of language, “differance” takes the place of reference.
Underlying all systems of traditional metaphysics is the concept of “presence”: to be is to be present. The coincidence of being and knowing is the measure of truth. Derrida’s fundamental deconstructive project is that the coincidence of what is and what is known – which is the measure of truth – is an impossibility for finite minds. Truth is the knowledge of Being but for Derrida we are never in the presence of Being, but always of a representation which refers to another representation. We are imprisoned in “traces” (the mark of meaning, but not the full revelation) and therefore there is no perception, no presentation and no intuition of being , no truth. There is a free play of meaning: “anything goes”. We are liberated from meaning. It is for us to decide what a text means. We are free to decide because after all ‘all interpretations are misinterpretations’.
Derida’s purpose is not to reveal meaning and truth but to reveal the “unmeaning” in all texts. He does not want to offer a metaphysics of his own: his intent is to be “parasitic” in offering a therapy that disabuses one of the illusion of knowledge in pursuit of truth.
* See Parrain-Vial, Tendances nouvelles de la Philosophie, Centurion, Paris, 1976, 80-92
(French philosopher, 1596-1650)
1. For Descartes the search for truth is the search for certainty. The true is the certain, that about which there is no doubt. The major risk in life is to be cheated and live in error rather than in truth.
The main problem of Descartes is not to determine the nature of truth. Indeed for him truth is known by ‘nature’, it is a primary notion, it is ‘transcendentally clear’. The question for him is to distinguish the true from the false. What are the truths that are evident for the mind?. Evidence is the mark of truth, even more, it is the presence of the truth. The impossibility to doubt gives evidence. The danger is to take an apparent evidence for a genuine evidence. To reach evidence, the mind must have clear and distinct ideas. It is something experimented by the mind itself which serves as a criterion of truth and nothing outside it. Truth is not the correspondence or similarity between ideas and things. Truth is what is conceived clearly and distinctly by the mind.
2. Descartes takes the mind for having a natural predisposition for the truth. Every one possesses the natural light of reason, by which to make the difference between the true and the false. The problem of truth and certainty is a matter of personal meditation; it must be approached on the first person by an exercise of interior thinking. Amongst things we believe, there are false things and true things. To establish something firm one has to empty one's mind of all traditionally accepted views and opinions. Once this is done we can begin the work to fill the mind with simple truths and then more complex ones. Therefore it is necessary to begin with a universal methodical doubt about everything so as to find which philosophical knowledge is undoubtedly certain. The first precept of Cartesian philosophy is “to receive for true only that which I know to be evident, so that there is no way of doubting about it.” In writing this Descartes rejects the argument of authority but much more. For him evidence consists in the intellectual intuition of a clear and distinct idea, characterised by indubitability and excluding all possibility of error.
According to him, the two domains of religion and ethics are not subjected to doubts. Religious truths pass beyond reason and cannot be submitted to the philosophical method. Ethics deals with the practical side of life and is more concerned with the good than with the truth.
3. As reason is the only way to establish certain knowledge and reach the truth, Descartes takes mathematics as the ideal and rock of evident knowledge. Mathematics alone can clear out the confusions and uncertainties of philosophy. The mathematical method uses two mental operations by which true knowledge can be reached: intuition of self-evident principles and demonstration or the logical inferences from self-evident propositions. The use of intuition and deduction in a mathematical way will lead philosophers to absolute truth and certainty.
4. Like in mathematics, truth in philosophy begins with the apprehension of clear and distinct ideas. Any idea that appears to us as perfectly clear and distinct is true. That is why the Cogito is taken by Descartes as the paradigm of truth. In the Cogito my reality is manifest in my thinking, in the clear idea I have of myself as a thinking subject. This first truth, the evidence of the self, which is nothing outside thought itself, serves as the foundation of all other truths that will be deduced from it. It leads to the certitude that God exists, that this God is truthful and veracious and therefore it leads to the certitude of an external world.
5. The rule of evidence according to which any idea that appears to us as perfectly clear and distinct is true needs an ultimate foundation. This internal evidence is based on the external evidence of God’s veracity. Man exists in a world entirely created and ruled by God who has wanted that man may know the world and find the truth about it. He has implanted in our minds the same eternal truths than those he has implanted in the universe. He is the foundation of the correspondence of our thoughts with reality.
God has established laws in nature like a king in his kingdom. Being all powerful, he could have made two plus two equal five. He has freely created the laws of nature and the laws of the mind; he could have created them in another way. According to Descartes. no truths are ‘autonomous’ ; they are all created truths.
All this shows that for Descartes the proof of God's existence is essential for his conception of truth: the truth of our clear and distinct ideas are assured by the existence of the Creator God. The conformity between mind and reality has been established by a God who in his veracity does want to cheat human beings.
* See Lavine, T.Z., From Socrates to Sartre, Bantam Books, New York, 1984, p.92 sq..; Quilliot R., La Vérité, Paris, Ellipses, 1997, p.45-64
(Australian philosopher, b. 1938)
A theory of the truth term is not a theory of truth
The focus of the correspondence theory is on the nature and role of truth, the focus of the deflationary theory is on the nature and role of the truth term. The former focus is metaphysical; the latter, linguistic.
Deflationism “deflates” truth itself: it is a kind of eliminativism. There is no reality of truth, but only a linguistic use of it. There is nothing positive to say about the nature of truth. Still deflationists have no objection to the use of the term truth, for its linguistic use is important. In contrast correspondence theorists are realist about truth and want to explain its nature. The term truth denotes a property that applies to reality.
Thus the deflationist has little to say about the metaphysics of truth but much to say about the linguistic role of ‘true’, whereas the correspondence theorist has a lot to say about the metaphysics of truth but little to say about the linguistics of ‘true’.
The deflationists demonstrate that the term ‘true’ has an ‘expressive’ role. When we react to another’s statement and say “That is true”, the role of the truth term is to “say the same thing” without need of repetition. In such a case deflationism amounts to redundancy: one can dispense with the truth term altogether. But there are cases of linguistic use in which the term ‘true’ is useful: mostly in indirect speeches (“What he said is true”) and generalizations (“all men are mortal, is true”). The deflationary view supports the “ equivalence thesis” according to which the term ‘true’ points at an equivalence: its role is to say ‘the same as’. To say that ‘Snow is white’ is true is not to relate the statement in some way to the world but simply to say that snow is white.
The confusion in the literature of deflationist theories is that their theories of the term truth are presented and taken for theories of truth. Devitt mentions several cases among which the notorious semantic theory of Tarski as well as the ‘disquotational’ theories of truth. None of these theories explain truth, they explain the truth term.
The correspondence theorist can, and should, grant that the truth term has the logical role emphasized by deflationist. But he rejects the deflationist view that the term has no other role : he holds that it also has a descriptive role. He believes that truth has a nature and causal role that need explaining.
* Devitt, Michael, The Metaphysics of Truth, in Lynch, M.P., The Nature of Truth, Bradford Book, Cambridge, Massachussets, 2001, p.580-611
(Spanish-born Canadian philosopher, 1922- )
1. Truth is not the correspondence of mind to reality. Truth is the making of the facts to have meaning. We do not discover the truth for the truth is not in the facts. We make things to be true. Before the truth we make , there is no truth, no pre-existing ontological objective truth. The only truth is an epistemological subjective truth. Therefore truth cannot be understood as the correspondence or conformity of mind and reality. It is not the passive and obedient recognition of a pre-existing order. According to the correspondence theory of truth, knowledge is always knowledge of the truth so much so that if there is falsity, it is on account of reasons extrinsic to knowledge (such as prejudices, insanity, etc.). It regards knowledge as an innocent reading of reality and sheer obedience to the fact. In other words knowledge is infallible because it simply recognize what is. But then, says Dewart, this theory for which error is always a sin amounts to a justification of intolerance and dogmatism. No doubt, when our knowledge is true, we can say that there is conformity of mind to being. But that does not mean that this conformity is the truth of knowledge - as is stated by the correspondence theory. We must say on the contrary that the truth of knowledge is the foundation of this relationship of conformity. In other words truth cannot be defined from a standpoint outside our experience.
2. Truth is the creative dynamism of the mind that transcends itself in the process to order the universe. It is the achievement of knowledge. It pertains exclusively to the subjective mind. It is not “to do justice to the world as we know it” but rather “to do justice to ourselves when we become conscious of the world”. We all the time wants to conceive new and improved meanings and in that sense we are intent to the truth. This very dynamic movement of self transcendence is the truth that impels man forward. However the outcome of this pursuit does not always satisfy. The meanings, theories, and interpretations we give can be failures and we become aware of this afterwards, not at the moment we create them. If we keep running after the truth all the time, it is with the possibility of error at every corner.
3. It is very important to explain error in knowledge. The manner with which the correspondence theory explains error is wrong. Error is not a “sin” but a part of the knowing process. Any speculation about truth must respect the reality of error. Both truth and error belong to our experience. Errare humanum est. Error is as much human as truth. Truth and error stand at the extreme poles of our experience. They are contrary , but not contradictory. They must be accounted for together. The experience of truth implies the possibility of error.
We always pursue the truth, we are always coming to the truth, we keep running after it, but we never stand in the truth. Truth is the quality of knowlegde which increases as knowledge grows in ordering reality more and more - for instance in finding new scientific theories. We never experience being mistaken now, but only afterwards do we experience having been mistaken. It is only later that we realise our error and want to avoid it. Error is always retrospective. We progress in knowledge by trial and error. The opposition of truth and error is the opposition of pursuance - avoidance .
Therefore error is not a deviation from a pre-established order, not a failure to discover reality, but a failure of consciousness to realise itself - a false ordering or interpretation. Error is relative to truth and truth to error. Error is an intrinsic part of our knowledge. “Man lives in error” writes Heidegger. “All our theories are in a way false”, writes Popper. Dewart, with them, acknowledges the intrinsic fallibility of all knowledge. The human intellect is by nature fallible.
There are criteria of verisimilitude – as Popper says – but no criteria of truth. As we grope to the truth by trial and error, error is not abnormal. On the contrary it plays an important part of the growth and evolution of truth. There can be no progress without mistakes. And as there is no infallible truth, we should always remain tolerant of errors.
* Dewart, Leslie, The Foundations of Belief, Burns Oates, London, 1969, p.80-90, 300-325
(American philosopher, 1859-1952)
1. Life, for Dewey, is made of problematic situations and their solutions. Knowledge is the name he gives for the product of competent and controlled enquiries. The conclusion reached as justified by enquiry is named “warranted assertion”. This settled outcome of enquiry is the final ‘judgment’ that Dewey distinguishes from the ‘propositions’ which are intermediate. The propositions possess the property of ‘means’ (relevancy, efficacy) but not the properties of truth or falsehood. Truth and falsehood are properties of the end or conclusions of inquiries. The judgment alone, that is, the final settlement, has direct existential import. It effects a transformation of the initial indeterminate situation. The judgment or the conclusion of the enquiry warrants true belief or knowledge which Dewey likes to call “warranted assertion” – because we are “warranted to assert them”. The problematic situation finds its solution in the warranted assertion, the expression of true knowledge obtained at the end of competent enquiries.
For Dewey the problematic situations in need of solutions are not of the private and personal type, but public and objective. Dewey avoids speaking like James of truth as “what satisfies” because the expression suggests an emotional satisfaction of an individual. He is concerned with the transforming of objective problematic situations by objective appropriate methods, as is achieved for instance in the field of scientific research.
2. Dewey agrees to call his view a kind of correspondence theory of truth. However what he means by correspondence does not reflect the classical notion of correspondence of thought and reality. Dewey takes correspondence for operational and behavioural. ‘Corresponding’ means ‘answering’ like a solution ‘answers’ a problem, like keys are answers to locks, etc. Dewey’s vague notion of correspondence is one holding between situations, one problematic and the other unproblematic, because it is the solution that answers the problem.
*See Thayer H.S., Meaning and Action, The Bobbs- Merril C, New York, 1968, p.192-200
(Buddhist philosopher and logician, c. 530-600)
Dharmakirti's epistemological approach is pragmatic and empirical: he asserts that there is no point in discussing things that can never be verified by sense experience and that have no impact on the physical world. In his pragmatist system, all statements and cognitions are subject to falsifiability: a statement is true only as long as subsequent perceptions and analysis do not show it to be false. In addition, Dharmakirti believes that there is no point in discussing merely theoretical topics (such as Brahman or atman) and that an essential test of validity is the possibility of effective activity (artha-kriya). Practical application is one of the conditions of valid knowledge. In his system, statements become true through a process of verification: they must be able to withstand subsequent analysis and be corroborated by relevant perceptions. Those that meet this test may be accepted as true, while others (even statements contained in Buddhist scriptures) should be rejected.
Dharmakirti only accepts the pramanas of direct perception and inference, and rejects others that are accepted by the Nyayikas, such as comparison (upamana) and scriptural testimony. Comparison is unreliable because it is not based on direct experience, and scriptural testimony only convinces those who already accept the cited scriptures as normative. Dharmakirti asserts that any truth claim must be verifiable by analytical reasoning and direct perception. Direct perception is defined as being "free from conceptuality and incontrovertible." In his system, only the first moment of perception counts as direct perception, and subsequent moments are overlaid with conceptuality. They are not produced by cognition of a directly perceived sign, but instead are merely based on the initial perception and interpreted by the mind. Hence Dharmakirti emphasizes that universals are not real but products of the mind. They are elaborated on the basis of the resemblances we perceive.
In keeping with the Buddha's injunction that people should carefully examine all scriptures in light of their own experience, Dharmakirti rejected any move to privilege a scripture or set of scriptures. Any doctrine, truth-claim, or scripture must be able to withstand analysis by reasoning and the test of direct perception. In respect of those things that cannot be verified by perception or inference, the testimony of scriptures is useless. Only simple-minded innocent people, unable to know the truth and falsehood by themselves, are deluded to the belief that for everything they should fall back on the scriptures. They have blind faith in every word of the scriptures at the expense of perception and inference which are the sole means for the knowledge of the truth.
* See Ch. Sharma, A critical survey of Indian Philosophy, Rider & company, London, 1960, p.130-142
(French philosopher 1713-1784)
The only way to truth: holding to what can be verified and proved
Diderot was one of the originators and interpreters of the Age of Enlightenment, the 18th-century movement based on the belief that right reason, or rationalism, could find true knowledge and lead mankind to progress and happiness. Diderot was no original thinker. He forcefully argued that “the greatest service to be done to men, is to teach them to use their reason, only to hold for truth what they have verified and proved."
“The philosopher, he wrote, contents himself with being able to unravel the truth where he can perceive it. He does not confound it with probability; he takes for true what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is only probable. He does more, and here you have a great perfection of the philosopher: when he has no reason by which to judge, he knows how to live in suspension of judgment...
Skepticism is the first step towards truth.”
“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. The philosophical spirit is, then, a spirit of observation and exactness, which relates everything to true principles...”
Diderot was convinced that the greatest enemy of truth was religious faith. “If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless”
See Diderot, L'Encyclopédie, (1750-1765)
( American philosopher, b.1938)
The absolute truth of the three primary philosophical truths
We could all save ourselves a great deal of trouble, if only we would learn the distinction between objective and subjective propositions, between public context and private context, between objective knowledge and subjective introspection or belief, and between what assertions can be genuinely argued and those which cannot be argued. A knowledge of the distinction between matters of truth and matters of taste is essential.
The knowledge involved in the public context category is "objective" in the sense that it is "out there" to be verified by any rational person using the proper techniques. The knowledge involved in the private context category is "subjective" in the sense that it is "in here," that is, in one's own mind. With the exception of statements about our internal physical, mental, and emotional states, we usually refer to this latter kind of knowledge as "beliefs." And if a belief is actually verified as true, it is no longer a belief. It becomes an objective proposition within the public context and is known to be true, either absolutely or to some degree of probability. It becomes, then, knowledge, and not mere opinion or belief.
1. Objective propositions are assertions derived from sources of knowledge which can be publicly experienced and that are capable of public verification. This means that, in so far as evidence, proof, or demonstration is concerned, whatever is contained within the category of objective propositions must be accessible to the public at large in some way or other and at some time or other. This is the case with propositions stating facts acquired through direct observation, as well as with self-evident propositions acquired through thinking, such as the principle of identity and the principle of non-contradiction. These two forms of propositions can be publicly experienced and verified by any rational person. Such propositions have the quality of absolute certainty or certitude.
2. Subjective propositions are assertions derived from and within a "private context." Subjective propositions include all assertions derived from sources of knowledge which cannot be publicly experienced and whose propositions are not capable of public verification. This means that, in so far as evidence, proof, or demonstration is concerned, whatever is contained within this category is not accessible to the public at large in some way or other and at some time or other. Internal states we all experience, whether physical, mental, or emotional, are private states and any statement we make about these internal states of body and mind belong in the category of assertions derived from and within a "private context." These statements may be true; they are not, however, publicly true or objectively true.
The category of subjective propositions also includes assertions derived from sources such as intuition, mysticism, revelation, and certain sources labeled "paranormal." Intuition is always a personal experience. The mystic's experiences are private. Revelation, whether human or divine, demands "faith" as its criterion of belief. If human or divine revelations were public knowledge, we wouldn't need any "faith" associated with them, for faith is needed only where no acceptable public verification exists or is possible. We refer to these as personal beliefs, or religious beliefs, and so forth. These beliefs as beliefs (at least at the present time) are not capable of public verification and are not, therefore, "rational", eventhough they may not be “irrational”. If a belief becomes publicly verifiable, it ceases to be a belief, and it enters the category of objective propositions or assertions of a "public context"; it becomes a fact or state-of-affairs. It is knowledge, not belief or mere opinion.
3. Are philosophical propositions to be included in the category of objective propositions? According to Dolhenty we need to accept the absolute truth of the primary philosophical truths, otherwise the entire structure of knowledge falls apart and we end up in universal skepticism, where nothing at all can be known. The primary philosophical truths are three in number:
- The First Fact is my own existence, expressed as the proposition "I exist."
- The First Principle is the principle of contradiction, expressed as the proposition "It is impossible for something to be and not to be at the same time in the same respect."
- The First Condition is the essential trustworthiness of my reason, expressed as the proposition "My reason is capable of knowing truth."
Each of these truths is absolutely certain. Deny the truth of any one of them, and it is impossible to have knowledge at all. We know that these three primary philosophical truths are included in the category of objective propositions because any rational person can verify them.
There are other philosophical truths which can be placed in the category of objective propositions, that is, any philosophical proposition which is based on the truth of the primary truths and which uses properly the inductive and deductive methods available to us, and is capable of being verified by any rational person, falling into the category of objective propositions and constitutes, therefore, objective knowledge. Such assertions are either true or false, absolutely or to some degree of probable certitude, and can be the focus of rational argumentation.
* The Jonathan Dollhenty archive, Truth and certainty, See internet
(French intellectual, 1922-1997)
"To govern is make-believe” wrote Machiavel. To write is also make-believe. The writer shares with the politician the infamous secret that one can make anything with words. It is the power and the obligation to make people believe which in the long run debilitates belief. “By sheer force of having to speak of God” said a preacher, “I do not know any longer what I place behind that word!” As soon as one decides to speak or write, one has to give the impression to believe and the words come to our help. The “make-believe” takes precedence over “believing” and becomes its substitute and guarantee. Strange sects in which each member finds the justification of his/her belief in borrowing from others without any one of them prepared to answer for him/herself! But history is replete with testimonies of writers, teachers and preachers who, in a moment of sincerity, have given expression to their doubts. In fact what one expects of “people of faith” is excessive: that they give day and night the proofs of the sincerity of their commitment.
* Domenach, J.M., Ce que je crois, Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1978
(English radical Christian theologian, 1934)
1. Truth with a capital T is dead. There is nothing interesting to say about it.. We can only look ‘locally’ at truth and then we find it to be highly regional, variegated, human and under dispute. This truth is socially produced, historically developed, plural and changing. We may make some progress by working at the varous local uses of ‘truth’ but the big, global capital-T Truth is a myth.
2. Of all the theories of truth, the only one which marks a real advance is the pragmatist one. The truth for us is what is good to hold and this kind of truth has only a limited period or serviceability. Truth is what best serves our purposes. Even then in that sense one can say that religious beliefs are true, at least for a moment as long as they work well in our lives. No more than that can be said because we have no standpoint outside our own lives from which to conduct an enquiry into our beliefs.
3. Truth is no longer something “out there”. It is a way of words, a matter of narratives and story-telling. The story-teller is now making the truth. Truth is no longer self-identical in eternity; instead it lives and grows and changes in time. The preacher’s or the interpreter’s job becomes one of creating new truth. He is no longer a servant of the truth, but has become some one whose job is the endless production of truth. The old notion of an immutable truth out there is replaced with a new notion of truth. We have to get free from the classical binary opposition between truth and fiction. We ought to be thinking in a new way, which is “thinking truly outsidelessly”. This means that stories must come first in making the world intelligible and meaningful. Fiction precedes factuality, and then after fiction come theories, evidences, arguments, viewpoints.
In other words we have to get rid of the bogey of a realistic ontology, the notion that there is something out there prior to and independent of our language and our stories, and against which they can be checked. We must make our own fictions come true and do as if they were something out there to vindicate our beliefs. Then we understand that all our experiences are merely produced from within us by the story we have chosen to live by. This makes the view of life lighter and more playful. During the playing of games small benefits may be received according to the rules. Such benefits can be real enough within the game and relative to its objects.
4. In any case, truth-seeking is not the business of religion. The proper function of religion is not the revelation of any truth but the betterment of the self. Ancient Buddhism did not care to teach any doctrine, any truth. It only provided a therapy for the suffering condition of mankind. In religion we should give up truth and instead think in terms of remedial moves and therapeutic procedures.
* Don Cupitt, Creation Out of Nothing, SCM Press, London, 199O p.40-45; Taking leave of God, SCM Press, London, 1981, chap.7; What is a Strory? , SCM Press, London, 1993, p.22-25, 82-92
(Belgian philosopher theologian, 1902-1985)
Human beings have a passion for truth as well as for freedom. These two values define human life in what is its most precious and specifically human aspiration. Whatever great, beautiful and noble has been achieved in the course of history, has sprung forth from the insatiable desire for truth, justice and freedom. We speak of a turning point in history when these values have been at stake, whether in rise or decline, for better or for worse.
But it is remarkable that, to be genuine, truth and freedom have to sustain each other. They are necessarily complementary. There can be no truth without freedom and no freedom without truth.
1. On the one side, freedom is rooted in our being open to the truth. This means that truth only can make us free. We are free on account of being rational and spiritual beings. A certain brand of contemporary existentialism promotes the idea of ‘absolute’ freedom, or freedom ‘for nothing’. It is a freedom unrelated to truth and rationality, a freedom that is pure choice and arbitrary will to power, no longer the right undertanding of human freedom that exists at the service of values. Human freedom has a clear direction and function: it is that without which man cannot realise the truth of his essence.
2. On the other hand truth is rooted in freedom. It can develop only in a climate of freedom. Where there is no freedom, there can be no truth. Without inner freedom, with mind and will subject to inner compulsions and deep-rooted prejudices, the sincere pursuit of truth is an illusion. Without external freedom, in a social climate unfavourable to dialogue and the open expression of one’s own conviction, authoritarian compulsion – whether religious or political – is a grave obstacle to the pursuit of truth in collaboration.
* Dondeyne, Albert, La Foi Ecoute le Monde, Editions Universitaires, Paris, 1964, Chap.3, p.67
(Contemporary New Zealander philosopher of religion)
1. Religious beliefs rest on interpretations. Most of the so called descriptive statements of religions are interpretations. In religion the testing of truth-claims is not whether there is enough evidence to verify some descriptive propositions or whether the religious statement is in correspondence with reality. Rather it is to find out whether the religious beliefs as interpretations are well supported, and what phenomena do these religious statements try to interpret. Thus the question is : are these interpretations correct? Do they lead to the truth?
For instance one should not ask whether the divinity of Christ is true, but ask what does it mean for the belief in the divinity of Christ to be true. The question is to examine what has led people to believe that Jesus is divine. This point at least is verifiable while the first is unverifiable. If the resurrection of Christ is said to be ‘true’, it is not true as a fact but as an interpretation that presents the resurrection as a fact. What needs evaluation ( is it true or false?) is not the fact but the interpretation of the fact, the reasons for believing in the fact.
According to Donovan, to admit that religious claims are more in the realm of interpretation than in the realm of definite description, need not involve giving up the ideal of objective truth. Interpretations may be correct and the statements that express them can count as true statements. Besides, the question of truth-telling in everyday situations is often not just a matter of correspondence between descriptions and observable facts. It is far too simple an approach to treat questions about truth – in religions as elsewhere – as a matter of evidence based on the verification of descriptive propositions.
2. However the big question remains: in what circumstances do interpretations lead to the truth? How to evaluate the correctness of an interpretation? Undoubtedly, through his religious interpretations the believer finds profound meaningfulness. But how can he know if this is not an elaborate game of make-believe? How should one test the apparent discovery of significance, the supposed grasp of meaningfulness? At most these discoveries of meaningfulness make the believer’s interpretation a reliable guide , an appropriate model. They are more like ‘proposals’ or ‘suggestions’ that satisfy the believer, much like a scientific theory satisfies the scientist in his interpretation of the facts of experience. What is sure is that the religious claims and interpretations must have some points of contact with human experience.
* Donovan, Peter, Religious Language, Sheldon Press, London, 1976, p100-109
(Dutch jurist and philosopher, 1894-1977)
Truth requires the transcendent light of Divine revelation
The neo-Calvinist Dooyeweerd makes the distinction between Truth and our knowledge of truth, and endeavours to link them. He contends that there is no "truth in itself" while at the same time contending that absolute Truth is to be found (in the Divine). He also accounts for how it is that our partial, relative knowledge of truth relates to Truth and is not totally random: because of Divine Revelation from a God who will not cheat or deceive us.
He admits that we all have an human ‘experience of truth’: still there is no 'truth in itself'. These are the 'truths' as they exist in our experience as individual entities such as in propositional form, in philosophy, science, etc. This is what many thinkers talk about when they discuss 'truth': our experience of truth.
Dooyeweerd asserts that our experience of truth is relative and fallible, nonetheless he believes there is an absolute Truth. Dooyeweerd never says 'there is no truth' but 'there is no truth in itself'. The 'in itself' is important, and relates to his fundamental proposal that nothing in this cosmos nor in our experience is self-dependent. Still he contends that there is an absolute Truth - located in God, in the Divine, to whom all else refers.
Dooyeveerd examines the relationship between Truth and our experience of truth: it rests on two things, namely, revelation and orientation. The Divine proactively reveals Truth to us in ways we can engage with, and we orientate ourselves either towards or away from the absolute Truth. Therefore, though Dooyeweerd rejects the positivist idea that we can in principle seek and attain absolute truth (and that there is no such thing as Divine Revelation), he does not thereby sink into a hopeless aimlessness that characterizes much post-modernism. This explains why for him religious presupposition is so important: our presuppositions are tied up with the degree to which we are orientated towards absolute Truth.
If absolute Truth is in God, and our experience of truth is always fallible, then the Divine needs to take the initiative in revealing itself to us. Truth requires the transcendent light of Divine Revelation, which enters our temporal horizon only through faith.
*Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (Edwin Mellen Press, 1997)
(Russien essayist and philosopher,1831-1881)
The futility of speculations (scientific and philosophical) in its search for truth
“If it came to a showdown between rejecting Christ and the truth, I would side with Christ over against the truth!” Dostoevski’s well known utterance reveals his desperate struggle against speculative truth and the human dialectic that reduces "revelation" to knowledge. The following passage from his Notes from Underground expresses the concept of the futility of speculative philosophy: “Men”, he writes, "yield at once to impossibility. Impossibility means a stone wall! What stone wall? Why, the laws of nature, of course, mathematics, the conclusions of the natural sciences. For instance, once they have proved that you are descended from the ape, it does no good to frown; accept it as it is, like twice two is four in mathematics. Just try to dispute that! For goodness' sake, they will shout at you, you can’t dispute it—twice two is four. Nature does not ask your permission; she is not concerned with your wishes or with whether her laws please you or not. You are obliged to accept her as she is, and therefore you must accept all her consequences as well."
Dostoevsky is aware of the meaning and significance of all the general and necessary judgments, these obligatory, coercive truths to which man's reason has to submit. Inspired by the Scriptures, he exerts all his strength in order to break away from the power of knowledge. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, he resorts to the Biblical story of Original Sin and the Fall of the first man. He reveals the meaning of the words: "Ye shall be knowing," with which the Biblical serpent tempted our forefather and continues to tempt all of us to this day. The “stone walls" of speculative philosophy and the "twice two is four" of scientific knowledge are only a concrete expression of what is contained in the words of the tempter: “ye shall be knowing”. Knowledge has not brought man to freedom, as we are accustomed to think and as speculative philosophy proclaims; knowledge has enslaved us, has put us wholly at the mercy of the so called ‘eternal truths’.
Where speculative philosophy sees "truth,"—that truth which our reason tries so eagerly to obtain and to which we all pay homage—Dostoevsky sees the "absurdity of absurdities." He renounces the guidance of reason and not only does not agree to accept its truths, but assails our truths with all the power at his command. “Whence came they, he asks, who gave them such limitless power over man? And how did it happen that men accepted them, accepted everything that they brought into the world; and not just accepted, but worshipped, them?”
Not unlike Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, "withdrew from the general," or, as he himself expresses it, "from the allness." And he suddenly felt that it was impossible and unnecessary for him to return to the allness; that the allness—i.e., what everyone, in every time and place, considers to be the truth—is a fraud, is a terrible illusion; that all the horrors of existence have come into the world from the allness toward which our reason summons us.
Confronted with eternal truths, men offer no resistance, but accept everything that they bring. They see their salvation in knowledge, in gnosis. But in Dostoevski’s philosophy which opposes revealed truth to speculative truth, the first man was afraid of the limitless will of the Creator; he saw in it the "arbitrariness" that terrifies him, and began to seek protection from God in knowledge which, as the tempter had suggested to him, made him equal to God, i.e., made him and God equally dependent on eternal ‘uncreated truths’.
*See Anderson, Susan Leigh; On Dostoevsky, Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2001
(French mathematician and philosopher of science, 1861-1916)
1. Duhem contends that the object of scientific theories is not to explain reality but to describe it. This is for him the way by which physical science is rendered autonomous from the metaphysical enterprise. The task of metaphysics is to explain reality in finding its first causes and fundamental structure. On the contrary physical science does not speculate on the true nature of reality.
Still when Duhem contends that scientific theories describe reality, he does not mean thereby what realist theories understand by ‘describing’, namely, exposing what reality truly is. A true physical theory is not a theory that explains how physical appearances conform to reality; rather it is a ‘system of mathematical propositions meant to represent in the most satisfactory way a group of experimental laws’. Thus scientific theories are primarily constructions of the human mind. They do not refer to something observable: they are only fictions. Scientific theories are not issued from facts or experience, they precede them. The scientist imposes his views on reality. When he uses such words as ‘atoms’, for instance, he does not claim that reality is such, but only that recourse to this representation is useful. Duhem’s rejection of atomism is based on his instrumentalism (or fictionalism): physical theories are not explanations but representations; they do not reveal the true nature of matter. Theoretical propositions are not true or false, but convenient or inconvenient. The purpose in science is efficiency: scientific theories are all different manners to represent reality in a way that satisfies the mind. Duhem’s viewpoint seems to have much in common with ‘instrumentalism’, the great adversary of the realist conception.
2. However Duhem admits that science has not only a practical aim. It is also concerned with the knowledge of the world. Scientific theories are not merely subjective, ideal and abstract: they tend to become a reflection of a “real order” of things. Duhem concedes that by a kind of intuition, the scientist is lead to affirm his faith in a real order of which his theories are an image, progressively clearer and more faithful to the real. Pure instrumentalism cannot satisfy. One has to go back to some sort of ‘realism’, still not the realism that claims to describe reality as it is truly is. On the one hand one can never know whether reality is such as scientific theories say they are. On the other hand scientific theories do not only aim at acting upon reality, they aim also at providing representations, the most conform to reality and the world in which we live.
* Duhem Pierre, La Théorie Physique, son Object, sa Structure, rééd. Paris, Vrin, 1981
(French theologian-philosopher, 1920- )
1. Duméry follows Nietzsche and Sartre in taking the values as man’s creation, truth included. Still unlike them he does not profess atheism. He conceives God on the model of the One of Plotinus, a totally transcendent Absolute, attributeless, beyond the categories of good, true, beautiful, etc. Such a divinity is not the locus of Truth. God has left to human beings to discover the truth by themselves. It is therefore meaningless to treat religious truths as received or revealed truths. The religious person is not dispensed from searching for the truth, he has to find it like any one else. On that account his position is not at variance with the philosopher’s one. But whereas the philosopher uses reason and experience in his search, the religious person looks for the truth through the instrumentality of sacred scriptures and traditions.
2. Duméry’s intention is to find a way of reconciling truth and freedom in religion. In assenting to an externally so-called revealed truth, the believer loses himself in it and alienates himself. The concept of a truth imposed from the outside on the self is destructive of freedom and the cause of religious fanaticism. God does not want to destroy the human freedom he has created. Genuine religion cannot dispense human beings from thinking and acting by themselves. It should be able to harmonize religious truth with human freedom. A religious believer must be as free before truth as an unbeliever. Every one, whether believer or unbeliever, is called to “establish” the truth, to take an active part in the discovery of the truth. There is no pre-existing body of truth that can restrict man’s autonomy. Truth does not “precede” man, for God has left to man the freedom to be the source of truth.
* Duméry, Henri, Faith and Reflection, Herder & Herder, London, 1968, p.6-15
(British analytic philosopher, b.1925)
Dummet professes semantic ( or linguistic) anti-realism. That means that for him the nature of our world is dictated by the nature of our language. There is no point of view outside language from which to make sense of the really real and to assert its truth or falsity.
There are many sentences in our language whose truth-value we can never know, because their truth-conditions transcend our epistemological capacities. Such sentences – for instance “God is good” - may be meaningful but ‘undecidable’. Sentences that describe state of affairs that reach beyond our ability to know them cannot be called true or false. Unknowable truth-c