What is Truth?

What is the truth and how can we discover it?

Unlike Descartes who of course begins by doubting everything, I think we begin with our "world" - the world in which we live and inhabit and which we daily articulate to ourselves - and accept it all. We make an assumption of truth.

Yet as we proceed in this world, as it is lived, we discover that what we think as "true" is not always what others think. Perhaps we discover this directly in talking to someone, perhaps we read a book about other events in different times and places, perhaps it isn't even articulated, perhaps we see someone doing something we think they shouldn't be doing.

We begin to be aware of all sorts of claims to truth.

In some of these disagreements we might immediately feel we know the answer. Often these might be moral truths - from an early age we might be convinced killing animals for food is wrong, or ambitious truths - we want to be a doctor or a lawyer, or practical truths - friendship is valuable and being accepted by our peer group is important.

As we get older and are able to read more, discuss more, we become aware of conflicting claims to truth and perhaps wider "truth tribes" - and we might feel instinctively that we belong to one of these wider truth tribes and find something of an identity in such a belonging ("I am agnostic", "I am a buddhist", "I am a Marxist" etc).

Thus our "world" shifts as we reflect on different truth claims, different criteria of what constitutes truth. Sometimes we have particularly profound experiences which causes us to fundamentally question our "world" and the particular "truth tribe" we align with. This is what makes a religious conversion - in which reflecting on religious ideas and values, the religious "world" suddenly makes more sense than the previous one we had been inhabiting. 

Yet also it can make a non-religious conversion - in which the believer, from inhabiting a religious truth tribe - and therefore interpreting what they are experiencing in terms of that religious "world", one day feels such a world no longer matches what they believe to be true and so they step into some other world, an "agnostic" one perhaps, or even a "non-theist" religious world.

For people who reflect on truth and have a strong disposition to articulating what they believe, there is a constant shifting of many inner parameters and sensibilities. We can imagine a whole list of criteria about truth:

1. Suffering can have value
2. Material wealth is necessary but not important
3. Art can express important truths
4. The sciences only contain empirical truths
5. Family connections are important
6. Caring for the planet is important
7. A just political system is possible and important to establish
8. etc

This isn't just about truth as feeling or emotion. We all know arguments about ethics are never just "I feel this is right" against "I feel this is wrong", it is possible to have logical, rational reasons for ethical positions, the same as for religious and political positions. Rather there are usually logical arguments on both sides and we have to make a judgement as to which side most persuades us it is closer to the truth.

Even this way of expressing truth is of course open to debate. Some might say only scientific claims are truth or false and any other type of claim (moral, religious, political, aesthetic) is only expressing a preference or a disposition, not the same sort of claim to objective truth as science provides. 

In framing truth within a "world" I have rejected such a view as already being an example of one such "truth tribe" - and so this dance for truth goes on until we fall exhausted or, we are ecstatically transported into a new reality in which we finally see things are they really are.