Truth is a White Lie

@Reconstructo,

"Garbage men" is a great great metaphor, I admit. And we all have our shovels that we use in different ways. But this is not negative capability. From Wiki:

Keats' theory of "negative capability" was expressed in his letter to his brother dated Sunday, 21 December 1817. He says [1]
[INDENT] I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
[/INDENT] Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats, as a Romantic, believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence. It relates to his metaphor of the Mansion of Many Apartments.

Negative capability is a state of intentional open-mindedness paralleled in the literary and philosophic stances of other writers. In the 1930s, the American philosopher John Dewey cited Keatsian negative capability as having influenced his own philosophical pragmatism, and said of Keats' letter that it "contains more of the psychology of productive thought than many treatises." [2] [3] Nathan Scott, in his book Negative capability; studies in the new literature and the religious situation [4], notes that negative capability has been compared to Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit

@Reconstructo,

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 09:06 AM ----------

Yes, Zetherin,

A 1/2 truth, or a convenient truth, (same/same).

We are forced to live, as/if we know what we are doing or where we are going, in a land with too may corners in our future, which we cannot see around. But alas, one step at a time is our only option.

S9

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 09:22 AM ----------

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;112578 wrote:

Let me answer that. Boo Yeah. Absolutely. Yes the truth that the truth is a lie is also a lie. And the lie that the truth is a lie is also the truth.

Very poetic (if you're a really bad poet). Doesn't really mean anything, though, does it?

@Reconstructo,

Subjectivity9 wrote:

Yes, Zetherin,

A 1/2 truth, or a convenient truth, (same/same).

We are forced to live, as/if we know what we are doing or where we are going, in a land with too may corners in our future, which we cannot see around. But alas, one step at a time is our only option.

What is a 1/2 truth contrasted with? Are there different gradients of truth, such as 3/4, 5/6, 2/3?

How do we know when something is a 1/2 truth, as opposed to another kind of truth? How do we know when a truth is convenient or inconvenient?

I've never heard of such a thing. Did you just make this up, or is this a well-known understanding of truth I have missed?

@Zetherin,

Zetherin;112646 wrote:

What is a 1/2 truth contrasted with? Are there different gradients of truth, such as 3/4, 5/6, 2/3?

How do we know when something is a 1/2 truth, as opposed to another kind of truth? How do we know when a truth is convenient or inconvenient?

I've never heard of such a thing. Did you just make this up, or is this a well-known understanding of truth I have missed?

"Do you promise to state the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, So help you God?" Oath given in some courts of law.

@Reconstructo,

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 10:07 AM ----------

Ken,

K: "Do you promise to state the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, So help you God?" Oath given in some courts of law.

S9: Just because some foolish person requests an oath out of fallible mankind, doesn’t mean that it is magically made into a possibility.

Ask anyone who has worked a number of years in courts system, or you read a bunch of lawyer books, and you will soon find that very little truth (let alone justice) comes out of the courts these days.

S9

@Subjectivity9,

Subjectivity9;112636 wrote:

Ken,

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 09:22 AM ----------

No; people saying such stuff as limited truth are lying... The truth is a certain object...It is not the sort of objects as North might be that is a direction that changes as position changes... As conceived it is an absolute, and as such it is a moral form...Consider the world as idea... Some objects are conceived as morphs, and some as morphemes...Truth is a morpheme...It cannot be reduced, or modified... Something is true, or not... Consider truth in reference to a physical form, for example, of fish... Fish as a form excludes all other catagories... There are no half fish that are fish in fact...There are no half dog half fish, but there are Dogfish...And there are Cat fish too, but they do not modify the word fish to such an extent as to change the form...Fish is a whole class...

So is truth a whole class, but no being can be shown for the truth...Never mind the number of years for which people have hunted truth; because no one has filled out their limit...Because the truth is not a physical form, it is no being, and all meaning... As a meaning, truth cannot and should not be diluted...We might find some truth all mixed up with reality...How could we recognize it if our form/ideal of truth were all polluted to serve some individual purpose???... The truth is a single thing even as form... Aristotle once said: The line between vice and virtue is one that divides all of mankind...Mankind is a moral form, and was so, especially in his day... But; were it possible to divide all of humanity along any line they would not be humanity...Aristotle gets his point by telling a lie... All forms if they are not conceptual manifolds are morphemes... They represent one, and only one entire class....No matter how the fish are divided, their definition is still that of Fish...Because truth, as a form, does not represent a physical reality it can only be defined as an absolute, and an infinite...Compared to its ideal, the object, half truth, is not true at all.

I hope this helps..

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 03:03 PM ----------

The business of law is law, and not justice...

@mickalos,

mickalos;112644 wrote:

Very poetic (if you're a really bad poet). Doesn't really mean anything, though, does it?

The meaning is in the human mind, not in the sentence. We are all free to be humorless, reductive, etc. I'm not saying that you are being so, but this message comes off that way. I feel that I could play the role that you are playing, and play it well. But I like the pieces on this side of the board. I played the other pieces first, got bored with playing referee. I also got bored merely trying to enforce the rule of others. Hall monitoring is not for me. I'd rather be the class clown. I'd rather create.

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 04:19 PM ----------

Fido;112712 wrote:

.Compared to its ideal, the object, half truth, is not true at all.

It some cases we approach certainty. In others we don't. How many battles have been fought on incomplete information? How often do humans have to decide whether to trust a rumor? Life is full of gambling. To buy a used car or play the stock market is to venture forth into uncertainty, risk. And yet it also a risk not to choose, for this too is a choice. To some degree truth is manufactured by choice. As humans we only get to see the results of the action we did choose. Also science has continuted to progress. Newton's law were not the whole truth and yet they allowed us to create useful technology. Early telescopes were crap compared to those of today. Sure, there's a world out there but we see it thru the fogged-up window of our personality, and then only see a bit at a time. We can't be everywhere and we are always in the present, never the future or the past.

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;112725 wrote:

The meaning is in the human mind, not in the sentence. We are all free to be humorless, reductive, etc. I'm not saying that you are being so, but this message comes off that way. I feel that I could play the role that you are playing, and play it well. But I like the pieces on this side of the board. I played the other pieces first, got bored with playing referee. I also got bored merely trying to enforce the rule of others. Hall monitoring is not for me. I'd rather be the class clown. I'd rather create.

Your magnetic sense of humour is lost on me, clearly.

@Subjectivity9,

Subjectivity9;112652 wrote:

Z: How do we know when a truth is convenient or inconvenient?

S9: It is convenient when it works. Convenient doesn't mean untruth. It is another way of measuring, altogether.

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 10:07 AM ----------

K: "Do you promise to state the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, So help you God?" Oath given in some courts of law.

S9: Just because some foolish person requests an oath out of fallible mankind, doesn't mean that it is magically made into a possibility.

Ask anyone who has worked a number of years in courts system, or you read a bunch of lawyer books, and you will soon find that very little truth (let alone justice) comes out of the courts these days.

A truth is convenient when it works.

And what would Al Gore say about this, I'd like to know? According to Al, it is the convenient truths that are leading us into disaster, and it is the inconvenient truths that will rescue us.

Whether the statement comes out of the court system or not doesn't matter to what it means. It means that a proposition can fail to be true in two ways: it can embellish the truth, and say more than is true, and so, be a lie: or, it can omit somethings, and say less than the truth, and be a lie in that way. The half truth is a lie in the second way.

@mickalos,

mickalos;112729 wrote:

Your magnetic sense of humour is lost on me, clearly.

I doubt you laugh much in any case. This rudeness of yours does nothing for your position. It supports my point that "truth" is a just a tool, peacock feather, a golden phallus. We all want to flash a badge. Alright then. You are a defender of the Eternal Immutable Truth. You are nobody's fool. With the power of Logic you shall vanquish all pretenders. You and yours alone shall rule. Continue then, pile up the skulls of the fallacious. Over and out.

@Reconstructo,

Recon: +168; Meaning is in the mind....

And; We must work our way back from the truth, and in fact, from all the virtues...We stand before the virtues, and our virtues stand with us...Why does truth have the same meaning as all the virtues, and why does 'virtue' mean as it does???What we find essential in our liives is always before us as a goal...Do we want honor???Then why???If people could live without honor it is not because they have not tried...Can people live without truth??? It is never so near as distant, and never so obvious as obscure... We seek truth not out of ease; but out of necessity... Does the air have a meaning to a drowning man??? Humanity it entirely subjmerged... We find ourselves always in a bundle in need of sorting out, and how can we sort anything out without ideals to lay the thing beside??? Certainly meaning is in the human mind, but it is also a thing of culture holding the messages of all time, each one having a specific meaning we find, we hope, in time...The virtues, and truth included, mean life, and it is not just in the mind, but a thing, a reality we find, and as an infinite, by which to measure the finite...The virtues are the needs of life measured against the needs of existence... Each Virtue is this moment measured against eternity...What is truth...It is not a question all of humanity can answer, for only a portion of that sum lives...How we answer is the answer of our survival, and not only the physical, but moral survival... The virtues are the key to Valhalla...With those few meanings we can revive the great, or join them...We can stand with the certain winners against all life, and all meaning... Or we can join the fight humanity cannot possibly win, and must...

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 05:16 PM ----------

Reconstructo;112740 wrote:

I doubt you laugh much in any case. This rudeness of yours does nothing for your position. It supports my point that "truth" is a just a tool, peacock feather, a golden phallus. We all want to flash a badge. Alright then. You are a defender of the Eternal Immutable Truth. You are nobody's fool. With the power of Logic you shall vanquish all pretenders. You and yours alone shall rule. Continue then, pile up the skulls of the fallacious. Over and out.

Play nice...The truth is still a social form too... The fact that we are all after the same thing should make us natural allies...

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 05:45 PM ----------

Reconstructo;112725 wrote:

The meaning is in the human mind, not in the sentence. We are all free to be humorless, reductive, etc. I'm not saying that you are being so, but this message comes off that way. I feel that I could play the role that you are playing, and play it well. But I like the pieces on this side of the board. I played the other pieces first, got bored with playing referee. I also got bored merely trying to enforce the rule of others. Hall monitoring is not for me. I'd rather be the class clown. I'd rather create.

---------- Post added 12-19-2009 at 04:19 PM ----------

It some cases we approach certainty. In others we don't. How many battles have been fought on incomplete information? How often do humans have to decide whether to trust a rumor? Life is full of gambling. To buy a used car or play the stock market is to venture forth into uncertainty, risk. And yet it also a risk not to choose, for this too is a choice. To some degree truth is manufactured by choice. As humans we only get to see the results of the action we did choose. Also science has continuted to progress. Newton's law were not the whole truth and yet they allowed us to create useful technology. Early telescopes were crap compared to those of today. Sure, there's a world out there but we see it thru the fogged-up window of our personality, and then only see a bit at a time. We can't be everywhere and we are always in the present, never the future or the past.

Would you accept that one of anything on earth might well be represented by a numeral: 1??? If that could be considered true, then 1/2 of anything will never be one... Our concepts work because they represent a single, whole class of being.... Now, truth as it is found in reality is all mixed up, just as what we know, as the truth is, all mixed up with our ignorance and misunderstanding... We have to pick the corn of truth out of the crap of stupidity, ignorance, and deliberate misinformation, and make it our meal...

Certainly, when what we know is measured against the absolute of truth we cannot say we know truth....But what we know in no way effects the quality of truth, as a moral form and an absolute...That is the purpose of all knowledge, and that is the why of our whats, our forms... Each one is conserved...The meaning of truth does not change...It holds its identity, and this essential principal of all reasoning lets us measure the real against an abstraction of reality...We can approach absolute truth... We can count on it as one counts on a compass to point to the North...It does not matter that we cannot reach it...That is not the goal in life, but the means... It would not work as a form unless it were perfect, and it would be useless to our purpose if it were perfect in reality...It makes us what we are, trying to sort it all out...It does not pay well, but perhaps enough to be worthwhile...

If I may give you an example of conservation it is this: A line... If you have a line of a certain length, and you decide to cut it, then no matter how often or short you cut it, you still have a line... The definition is not changed by any operation on the object defined...If you find something false in reality putting aside the intent of the mistake, it is not half true any more than a line cut in half can be half a line...It can be half the length, but not half a line...And there again, length as a concept is not changed, but conserve...The concept is the same as an identity...In our case, truth is a certain identity, but since it represents no physical reality, its identity is total meaning... What does the truth mean???

@Reconstructo,

Ken,

No, it is the “Inconvenient Truths” that may destroy us.

It is seeing such an “Inconvenient Truth” in time that may save us.

It is only “inconvenient” to those who wish not to see it, or to change.

And:

I can see that you are a man who believes in absolutes, or one big truth that everyone can agree upon. It doesn’t seem to me, in all my days on this planet, that I have run into this place where you seem to be living, the land where everyone agrees on this one big truth.

That leaves us, does it not, with the problem of deciding who gets the controlling vote on what exactly Truth is?

So many wars have been fought over this mythical idea of Absolute Truth within finitude.

Now perhaps there is an Ultimate Truth of some kind, no doubt. But, it doesn’t seem to belong to mankind as he presently sees things, and I do not believe the human mind would have the capacity to recognize it in its fullness, if it could manage to squeeze itself into finitude.

S9

@Subjectivity9,

Subjectivity9;112790 wrote:

Ken,

No, it is the "Inconvenient Truths" that may destroy us.

It is seeing such an "Inconvenient Truth" in time that may save us.

It is only "inconvenient" to those who wish not to see it, or to change.

And:

I can see that you are a man who believes in absolutes, or one big truth that everyone can agree upon. It doesn't seem to me, in all my days on this planet, that I have run into this place where you seem to be living, the land where everyone agrees on this one big truth.

That leaves us, does it not, with the problem of deciding who gets the controlling vote on what exactly Truth is?

So many wars have been fought over this mythical idea of Absolute Truth within finitude.

Now perhaps there is an Ultimate Truth of some kind, no doubt. But, it doesn't seem to belong to mankind as he presently sees things, and I do not believe the human mind would have the capacity to recognize it in its fullness, if it could manage to squeeze itself into finitude.

S9

Well said. I think that's the point of staying loose, so that we don't find ourselves clinging to truths that have gone rancid.

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo,

It is said that, “When we stop growing, we have begun to die.”

Nature is constantly becoming, and never actually quite arriving, until we lay down for that last sleep.

Why, however, would we want a truth that was so final, that we would die of boredom? Our minds are not built to be content with such a happening. It is new interests that keep us keen, keep us alert, and nourish us unlike the stale bread of final truth.

Stimulation deprivation actually hurts, and at some point when we are being denied stimulation, we will begin to hallucinate.

Meaning must stay flexible in order to keep us amused and interested.

I believe that it is only fear, for the most part, that wants us to write our truths on a stone tablet; fear of confusion, fear of not being in charge of what will happen next, and most of all, fear of what might happen to us.

And viewed slightly differently, we love the myth of safety, which we hope can be obtained through knowledge.

S9

@Subjectivity9,

Subjectivity9;112808 wrote:

I believe that it is only fear, for the most part, that wants us to write our truths on a stone tablet; fear of confusion, fear of not being in charge of what will happen next, and most of all, fear of what might happen to us.
And viewed slightly differently, we love the myth of safety, which we hope can be obtained through knowledge.
S9

I agree. I also ask my self the question. Why do some have the guts to leave the safety of the absolute? And why do some defend the absolute? Does this tie in with religious instinct? What about the myth of genius and innovation within Western culture? Does this inspire us to go against the usual fear? And do defenders of the absolute defend it not just from fear but also because they feel a certain heroism in doing so?

I think depth-psychology should be applied to discussions of truth. I think we have to contemplate man in his wholeness, to see what he wants with truth in the first place.

I think "truth" is just a tool in the hand of a proud creative organism, whose words are perhaps his most impressive sort of tool. Any thought? And who are your philosophical influences? Any Nietzsche in there? Pragmatism? I think highly Richard Rorty, Nietzche, Wittgenstein, many many more.... I also think that linguistic philosophy is essential, as philosophy is made of words, and truth is made of words......

@Reconstructo,

There is a difference between ones truth and ones convictions...The people who cannot tell the difference are impossible...Even if you conceive of truth as perfect, it does not mean people have to be prefect to be true...

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;112819 wrote:

I think "truth" is just a tool in the hand of a proud creative organism, whose words are perhaps his most impressive sort of tool. Any thought? .

Apart from what that means, I suppose that you think it is true. Don't you?

@Reconstructo,

The truth does not only mean, but it is a means to an end... It has a certain purpose....

@Fido,

Fido;112854 wrote:

The truth does not only mean, but it is a means to an end... It has a certain purpose....

Is that true? Then what is the purpose of your truth that truth has a certain purpose?

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