Truth Essay
Amber May
How should truth be defined based on the knowledge one would have? There are endless theories that try to answer this question. Unfortunately, every theory has its contest. Would we even know if a theory was the truth? That is not even possible. We could never prove whether a theory was actually truth. It creates a loop. We would have to know what is and isn’t truth to prove what is actually true. Is truth relative, or is it absolute? How would we know?
Winkin made a statement about the Dutroux Commission, which was a court case in which a Belgian man named Marc Dutroux was found guilty of murder after he kidnapped, imprisoned and repeatedly raped six girls and murdered four of them, which states “. . . the Commission is based on a sort of presupposition that there exists, not a truth, but the truth. . .” However, as he talked on he stated that he believed that both Officer Lesage, who said he send Judge Doutrewe a file on Dutroux, and that Doutrewe, who denied ever receiving the file, were both telling the truth. He implied that truth is in relation to one person is not necessarily true in relation to another person. What is true depends on who is making the statement.
On another hand, the most popular theory of truth is the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory states that truth is a correspondence between a proposal or idea and some fact in the real world. This theory assumes that there actually is a real world whose existence does not depend on our own thought, beliefs and perceptions. It assumes that the real world exists and has always existed whether or not we were around to believe it or not. However, this theory is contested. It can be “wrongly assumed” that we can determine whether our beliefs correspond to an external realty or just our response to the external world through our senses. Perhaps the problem with this is that we cannot define the fact that the statement is suppose to correspond without using the true statement
How should truth be defined based on the knowledge one would have? There are endless theories that try to answer this question. Unfortunately, every theory has its contest. Would we even know if a theory was the truth? That is not even possible. We could never prove whether a theory was actually truth. It creates a loop. We would have to know what is and isn’t truth to prove what is actually true. Is truth relative, or is it absolute? How would we know?
Winkin made a statement about the Dutroux Commission, which was a court case in which a Belgian man named Marc Dutroux was found guilty of murder after he kidnapped, imprisoned and repeatedly raped six girls and murdered four of them, which states “. . . the Commission is based on a sort of presupposition that there exists, not a truth, but the truth. . .” However, as he talked on he stated that he believed that both Officer Lesage, who said he send Judge Doutrewe a file on Dutroux, and that Doutrewe, who denied ever receiving the file, were both telling the truth. He implied that truth is in relation to one person is not necessarily true in relation to another person. What is true depends on who is making the statement.
On another hand, the most popular theory of truth is the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory states that truth is a correspondence between a proposal or idea and some fact in the real world. This theory assumes that there actually is a real world whose existence does not depend on our own thought, beliefs and perceptions. It assumes that the real world exists and has always existed whether or not we were around to believe it or not. However, this theory is contested. It can be “wrongly assumed” that we can determine whether our beliefs correspond to an external realty or just our response to the external world through our senses. Perhaps the problem with this is that we cannot define the fact that the statement is suppose to correspond without using the true statement