What is truth?

Only serious answers please. One post per person.

Originally posted by josephw
Only serious answers please. One post per person.

Truth is knowing the reality of a situation.

The Word of God is Truth.

The absolute absence of all deceit.

The true is the real, whether we know it or not.

What we can understand of the true is limited both by what is accessible to the grammar of our consciousness, and by how that grammar translates our experience of the real. At that level, truth is in the isomorphism between our mental representations/translations and the real, the actual.

That grammar itself, however, is part of the larger syntax of the reality of which we are part—which implies coherence. (We would be unlikely to survive as a species, or even to exist to begin with, if the grammar of our consciousness were incoherent with the larger reality of which we are.) At the same time that it implies coherence, however, it also implies that our understanding is as much a product of the grammar of our consciousness as it is a product of the experiential data presented to our consciousness. That seems to me to be an epistemological loop that is existentially inescapable—and so one simply acknowledges it, and moves on. It seems as silly to complain about it as it would be to complain about gravity; as absurd to refuse to make any epistemological assertions, as it would be to refuse to walk just because we cannot float by ourselves in the air.

Whatever of reality is inaccessible to—that transcends—that grammar, is ineffable. Whatever experience of the real, inclusive of ourselves in and of it (e.g., the experience of non-separability), that cannot be adequately translated into conceptual content, is ineffable; it may be alluded to (e.g., in poetry or Zen koans), but not properly described. In other words—as the Zen Buddhists and the rishis of the Upanishads and Lao Tzu and others have long pointed out—one may have experiences of the true, i.e., the real, without necessarily being able to translate it into conceptual “truth-statements”.

Originally posted by josephw
Only serious answers please. One post per person.

Truth is what is. It cares not if we are comfortable with it, or ready to accept it.

Truth is an attribute of beliefs. A belief is "true" if it corresponds to reality.

Originally posted by josephw
Only serious answers please. One post per person.

Truth is reality.
Each person sees it differently, so to people, Truth is what they believe.

Originally posted by josephw
Only serious answers please. One post per person.

It is the silence that Jesus gives when asked by Pilate the same question.

Originally posted by stiletto57
The absolute absence of all deceit.

What do you mean by 'deceit'? Something like the malicious intent to mislead another (or the quality of having such intentions of character or the act of intending as such)?**

If so, I should think a lack of deceit is neither necessary nor sufficient for the utterance of truthful statements. Surely we can come up with examples in which a person means well; has the best of intentions; but is simply mistaken in the judgment he renders? Any such example will show that a lack of deceit is not sufficient for truth. Also, consider a man who somehow meets a traveler at a fork in the road. The traveler inquires which way to London. The man feels quite certain that Path A leads to London, whereas Path B does not. But suppose, actually, it is a fact about this world that Path B leads to London from the fork in the road, whereas Path A does not. So with every intention of deceiving this traveler, the man ends up uttering to the traveler that Path B leads to London. Wouldn't such a hypothetical show that a lack of deceit (again, taking deceit along the lines of the intent to mislead) is also not necessary for truth?

I think we would do better to think about truth along gaychessplayer's notion above (or vistesd's talk of isomorphism): basically that truth is a relational property that involves a correspondence between propositional content and facts about the world.

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**Alternatively, I guess, you could mean by 'deceit' the concealment of truth. But that doesn't really help us any because then the word to be characterized shows up in the characterization in a material way. So this wouldn't actually provide any real content in response to the question of what truth is.

It is what it is, no opinion required.
Kelly

Truth is one's perception of what is real.

Truth is ultimate reality. It is eternal and unchanging.

Thank you all for those very good answers. I agree with each one.

I found Kirksey's answer especially interesting, because I thought that if Pilot had waited a moment longer he would have found Jesus' answer to be the truth.

"I am the truth,.."

Originally posted by vistesd
The true is the real, whether we know it or not.

What we can understand of the true is limited both by what is accessible to the grammar of our consciousness, and by how that grammar translates our experience of the real. At that level, truth is in the isomorphism between our mental representations/translations and the real, the actual.

That grammar i ...[text shortened]... e., the real, without necessarily being able to translate it into conceptual “truth-statements”.

This answer really made me think. It made me ask myself whether "truth" has an object? Does there need to be "something true" for there to be a "truth"? Does the knowledge of the meaning of "truth" require there to be an object that is "true"?

Is "truth" something true?