Understanding Truth, Existence, and Science: A Philosophical Inquiry
Truth and Knowledge
Truth: Truth is that which goes unnoticed in objective knowledge (Aletheia). This implies revealing what happens unnoticed. The Hebrew word for trust is certainty, which references knowledge that cannot have error and is justified; otherwise, truth is falsehood.
Criteria of Truth
The criteria serve to distinguish truth from falsehood. The criteria are:
- Authority: An assertion is accepted because someone of higher authority deems it certain.
- Tradition: Based on and taken as true because it is said and traditionally accepted.
- Correspondence between thought and reality: What is thought corresponds to reality, and in some cases, can be verified by experiments.
- Logical Consistency: What is checked is not in contradiction with what is known throughout.
- Utility: Things are true when they serve a purpose.
- Evidence: Things cannot be denied and cannot be doubted.
Theories of Truth
Theories of truth explain and seek to answer and understand what truth is. The theories are:
- Correspondence Theory: The truth is the correspondence between what is thought and what is. (Thomas Aquinas)
- Coherence Theory: Coherence is prioritized. (Hegel)
- Pragmatist Theory: Truth is linked with utility; the truth is useful and provides benefit. (William James)
- Consensus Theory of Truth: Dialogue is used to discover the truth, without forcing others to convert. (Peirce, Apel, Habermas)
Philosophical Questions
Philosophical questions arise from doubt or suspicion of a situation characterized by disillusionment. Radical questions go to the root of the problem and often have a double objective: questions related to humans and questions related to the outside world.
The Origin of the Universe
Answering questions about the cosmos is cosmology. The Judeo-Christian Genesis (Bible) offers a mythic creation theory involving God. However, the Big Bang theory is now more acceptable as the origin of the universe, though it raises many questions. Will the Big Crunch occur? Why did it explode? Has it happened before?
The Meaning of Existence
When asking about the meaning of existence, there are three meanings of ‘sense’: order (purpose), value, and meaning to apprehend. For many people, there is a mystery. To the question, “Does life have meaning?”, there are three possible answers:
- No, life is absurd. (Sartre)
- Yes, there is direction, but only when you are alive; it gives an inherent meaning to life.
- Yes, after life, the afterlife gives a transcendent sense.
Death
Humans are the only animals known to know they are going to die and think about death. For Plato, philosophy is a preparation for death, to face it calmly with a pure soul. This also helps you face it critically. (Plato, Cicero). Epicurus said death is nothing when you are not, and when you are, death is not present. Kant contradicted this.
Science and Knowledge
Science is almost the only knowledge that can give us trust, objective certainty, and reliability. Science provides knowledge of things. To address this question, we have found two theories: falsificationism and inductivism.
Inductivism
Rudolf Carnap believed that science identifies with objective and reliable knowledge, and scientific theories are derived from experience. Empirical verification is needed; otherwise, it has no sense. However, this conception has a problem: it may not be possible to have valid laws for all phenomena of the same type. For example, how can we know with certainty that all swans are white? If, for a long time, only white swans are seen, people may think that all swans are white (universal statement), but when a black swan is found, all these ideas change. Carnap defended that the laws obtained by inductivism are probably true, only assuming that all swans are white.
Falsifiability
Karl Popper criticized inductive reasoning, stating that one cannot prove the truth of a thesis (universal statement), but one can show it to be false by finding a single case that negates it. There is no justification to go from a particular statement to a universal one. Popper advocated that we say, “The statement ‘all swans are white’ is false.”