A Critique of Truth

The notion that there is some Truth in the world (or represented by this world) has been a long and popularly held belief in Western culture. Dating back to the pre-Socratics, Truth-believers have made up a serious constituency of philosophers. It has been called different things: God, the One, Perfection, the Oversoul, etc. Yet in modern times, this traditional belief has come under serious attack. I hope to lay out some of the criticisms of this belief in an Absolute here.

Of central nature to this belief is the fundamental belief that this Truth exists independent of human experience. It is a priori, so to speak. Our everyday experience, however, easily rejects this notion. Our definitions of things are contingent only upon their use or intended use. Think about a water bottle (one happens to be sitting right next to me, making it a handy example). It is only a water bottle because I use it to store water and to drink water from. If I used it to prop up books (as I do with my other "water bottle") it only continues to be a water bottle insofar as it is intended for the aforementioned purposes. To suggest that there is a perfect idea of a water bottle and that all water bottles obtaining in our world are manifestations of this perfect idea (as was common in Ancient Greek thinking) is utterly absurd.

But what does this suggest about the world as a whole? We could reject the idea of perfect ideas of things and still accept some type of Absolutely Real world, but this is also clumsy. Consider a star of David. As noted American philosopher William James wrote, you can treat it, "as a star, as two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexagon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, etc."(Pragmatism and Humanism in Pragmatism). What it is, then, depends upon our perceptions of it.

Modern relativistic and quantum physics supports this conclusion. Einstein's relativity is classicly illustrated by the example of a person on a train throwing a ball up into the air. To the person on the train, the ball goes straight up and down, but to a person observing the train from afar, the ball appears to have traveled in a perfect parabola. In modern quantum mechanics, the measurement of a particular particle compels it to take a specific form. This is the most extreme example of how our idea of some objective Reality is totally flawed. Nature itself is rejecting the notion. She says, "I will fool you, young ignorant scholar. You think that if you measure me, the Reality of the world will be revealed. Hahaha, how naive! I can prove to you that your measurement of me alters the world, for the result would have been different if you hadn't measured." What is real in this circumstance? Our attempt of understanding Reality is naturally thwarted. We clearly then must reject this dogmatic teaching of an Absolute, of a Reality, of Truth. We have many truths, many realities.