From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Dec 06 2005 - 12:25:52 GMT
Resend
Hi Case,
I like your approach to truth -- coming at it from various sides instead
trying to beat it into static form by a frontal assault. To your random
thoughts, I's like to add a few of mine:
Truth is a high quality set of intellectual patterns.
Truth is the essence which all true statements share.
"The truth is so simple that it is regarded as pretentious banality." Dag
Hammerskold.
How do you recognize the truth? Well, like beauty, you just feel it.
Knowledge based on verification runs into the Uncertainty Principle.
Knowledge based on rationality and logic runs into Godel's Theorem.
Scientific humanism cannot stand because it asserts a general truth which
it denies exists, e.g., "It's true that truth is provisional."
No rational philosophy can be verified by the philosophy itself. One must
simply assert his philosophy is better than others, based on explanatory
power or beauty.
Truth standards are logical consistency, agreement with experience,
economy of explanation, explanatory power and trust in the motives of the
truth teller.
And my favorite:
"As long as we insist on identifying 'understanding,' with 'rational
explanation' of the sort familiar to science, we will inevitably end up
with turtle trouble: either an infinite regress, or a mysterious self-
explaining superturtle, or an unexplained ring of turtles. But in the end
a rational explanation for the world in the sense of a closed and complete
system of logical truths is almost certainly impossible. We are barred
from ultimate knowledge, from ultimate explanation , by the very rules of
reasoning that prompt us to seek an explanation in the first place. If we
wish to progress beyond, we have to embrace a different concept of
"understanding" from that of rational explanation." Paul Davies
Platt
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