Abstract
What is truth? Two thousand years ago, Pontius Pilate asked Jesus that question, and philosophers have been asking it ever since (and before too). Science devotes itself to finding truth without bothering to define it except by pragmatic criteria. Can such and such phenomenon be verified? Does thus and thus theory predict new phenomena? Is the so-and-so concept gaining acceptance among experts? As one scientist put the case: “Only God can define absolute truth, and I don’t believe in Him.”
As light illuminates both itself and darkness so truth is its own standard and the criterion for error.
—Spinoza
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Notes
The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought pp. 279, 485, 605.
Ibid. In a sense, anything that exists is perforce an element of truth, but the root meaning of epistemology is “system,” hence the emphasis on relationships.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1992, vol. 27, p. 572. The astronomer was Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier.
Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 62. The comment was made within a brief autobiography Lincoln prepared for John L. Scripps circa August 1860.
Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, “Goedel’s Proof,” in The World of Mathematics, vol. 3, pp. 1668–1695. His proof may or may not cover the inability of theorems to prove their own axioms, but no one has ever achieved that feat in practice.
Much has been written about Euclid’s postulate (assumption) on parallel lines never meeting no matter how far extended, because it seemed less like a self-evident assumption and more like a theorem to be proved. The attempts to do so led to different (non-Euclidean) geometries. This in no way detracts from Euclid’s Elements as a deductive model.
Rhodes, p. 261. Bohr used the word idiots rather than fools.
C. W. Ceram, ed., Hands on the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), pp. 159–161, 163–164.
The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes p. 555.
Robert B. Downs, Books that Changed the World ( New York: New American Library, 1956 ), p. 80.
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© 1997 George M. Hall
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Hall, G.M. (1997). Truth, Logic, and Communications. In: The Ingenious Mind of Nature. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6020-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6020-7_7
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