Truth and Reality: Understanding the Nature of Knowledge
The Problem of Knowledge of Reality
One of the main activities of philosophy is to carry out an analysis of the actual activity of knowing. The theory of knowledge is called gnoseology. It is the part of philosophy that studies the origin and nature of knowledge. Its aim consists of finding out if it is true or false in the ratio between what we know and reality itself. Our knowledge originates in experience, apart from data collected by the senses. These data are then sorted by human understanding. The brain establishes the relation between the individual mind and everything outside of it. This relationship is much more complicated in humans than in the rest of the animals.
1. The rational capacity of human beings is not limited to passively capturing data, but also tries to understand what is perceived, explain it, describe it, and predict its possibilities.
2. What surrounds us are not just static objects, but also physical people that vary according to the context or the historical and social situation.
3. An additional complication: when we know, we assign a meaning and significance to things. For example, a movie is interesting for one person, but boring for another, and the interpretation is subjective.
4. This brings us to the central problem: if knowledge is limited and conditional, it is determined both by the ability of our senses and by the subjective circumstances that shape my interpretation.
Different Senses of Truth
It is not possible to give a single definition of truth. Throughout history, different ways of seeing reality have been given:
- For the Greeks, reality is what remains identical. For this reason, truth is identified with things that remain. Discovering what things are, their being, can only be achieved through reason.
- In the Roman world, the Latin word *veritas* refers to the accuracy and rigor when we think something and express it through language.
- In the medieval Christian world, the concept of eternal truth is added. The principles are revealed to the action of men by God.
- After the sixteenth-century Renaissance revolution, the need arises to verify the judgments claimed by science about reality. One of the philosophers who contributed the most to clarify the concept of truth was Leibniz, who distinguished between truths of fact, which refer to reality, and truths of reason, which refer to the content of thought.
Truth Relating to Reality
The term “truth” establishes an identification between the real and truth. It is the unveiling of what is hidden. This is how the Greeks understood it. For example, Plato considered that humans live in a material and changing world. For him, truth lies in the eternal and immutable world of ideas. Therefore, if we want to know the truth about realities, we must get rid of prejudice and direct our intelligence toward the only thing that is truly real.
Truth Refers to Knowledge
The term “true” can also be attributed to knowledge. Knowledge is true or false according to whether the propositions used to communicate said knowledge are true or false. For this reason, a distinction should be made between truth as coherence (proper to formal sciences) and truth as adequacy or correspondence (characteristic of empirical science).
Truth as Coherence
A proposition is considered true if it is not inconsistent with other propositions of the theory or knowledge to which it belongs.
Truth as Adequacy and Correspondence
According to this theory, truth is our representation of objects or facts, and it corresponds exactly to how these objects and facts are given in reality. It would imply that the individual is passive in its relationship with reality. However, Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenth century, changed this conception: the mind acts on the object of knowledge. In conclusion, to know, we perceive data that are subject to the laws that govern our brain. This is why truth cannot be understood as an exact correspondence between each thing. It is a correspondence between the data that reality gives me and the interpretation that my mind makes of them. However, we should not fall into skepticism. The truths of experience are never complete, absolute, and final truths, but are limited and imperfect, and can always be expanded or even rejected when the natural and social sciences make a new discovery.
The Pragmatic Truth
American pragmatism, in the early twentieth century, made a major rethinking of how to understand truth. Thus, for these philosophers, everything that is useful and leads to effective success is true. In this sense, a proposition is true if the results produced when applied are positive. For William James, true knowledge must satisfy and construct ideas according to the needs and interests of men.
Criteria of Truth
How do we know what we think, and how do we know it? What should we rely on to distinguish what is true from what is false? We need a decision criterion to judge between true and false. The problem is: Is there a single, infallible criterion to be certain of the correctness of our knowledge? For formal sciences, there is no problem: just consistency between various propositions, and that they do not contradict other demonstrated truths. For this reason, every empirical science should adopt different criteria of truth. Some of the criteria on which humans rely for security in their beliefs are:
- Tradition: Any word or action whose origin is in the past is considered true in primitive societies. In modern society, we call this tradition. We must verify if what is said now is a lie or not.
- Authority: Based on trust, we simply consider the falsity or error of their word unthinkable. However, sometimes over-reliance on a doctrine can lead to dogmatism.
- The feeling of psychological or moral certainty: This criterion is based on an internal conviction and fidelity to ourselves. Subjectivism believes that there can be no universal truth.
- Evidence: We believe that something is evident when it is presented directly or immediately to the individual so clearly that we consider that it need not be demonstrated. In the field of science, the evidence of propositions is always secured through verification.
- Intersubjectivity and dialogue: Something can never be considered objectively true if it is only affirmed by one person. On the contrary, it must be shared by many individuals, becoming an accepted truth through dialogue. For example, in the scientific context, a hypothesis is accepted by the whole community if the assertion can be verified by repeatable experiments, if there is consensus.
In conclusion, no criterion of absolute truth depends on the context of science, on the means to obtain it, and on where we are moving. The search for obvious truth remains one of the ideals of science, philosophy, and any human being.