If our senses can deceive us and reality can be questioned then how far we can go with our thoughts. If our thoughts are based on what our senses perceives then our judgment on reality or anything can be questioned. To me it seems like that the whole debate is just a rhetoric battle.
Is it even important for us to find the bigger 'T' or small 't'? What makes a truth big 'T' and small 't'? How can one truth be more important than the other? To me, we seem to be trying to find an answer for a question that we don't even understand.
I think you bring up an important point- we don't understand what we're even looking for, so how can we decide what is truth/Truth? Not to say (I don't think, anyhow) that we should stop looking, but I think that it's an important point to note that we're very limited creatures indeed and so *we* can't decide what is/isn't true or not.
ReplyDeleteI think we've all hit a point in the T/t debate where our arguments are repeating things we've said before. I think the entire class is sufficiently vexed now. Except maybe Eli. He seems difficult to vex.
ReplyDeleteTruth -- T or t -- fails at the stasis of definition since two people will define T/truth differently; they may agree with some definitions, but will disagree with others.
ReplyDeleteTruth -- T or t -- like many things is essentially undefinable and relative. I remember talking with Dr G about pornography and what constitute porn, other than community standards. An example I gave her is that in Britain it is legal for a 17 year old young woman to be photographed topless. Not a big deal. Bring that same photo over to the US and you are in possession of child pornography: what is legal in one country isn't in another. This is why here in the US most cases of pornography are tried in communities that have very strict moral and ethical codes: they are more likely to find someone guilty of pornography (however it is defined) than say a similar jury in New York City or San Francisco.
Pornography, like T/truth, is subjective and fails the stasis of definition. So it should come as no surprise that the class is having a problem with this -- there are 20 some odd students with 20 some odd definitions of what T/truth is. There is some overlap, actually probably a fair amount of overlap in what we agree T/truth is, but there will always be an outlier who will disagree with the definition. Hell, I do it just to be Devil's Advocate. :-) But then as Dr G said, I'm a trouble-maker.
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ReplyDeleteI totally agree Tony ...
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The stasis of definition ...
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Is definitely out of whack on the search for (T)ruth ...
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And definition is definitely very important ...
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But I'll up the ante a bit ...
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The first step in rhetorical stasis anlysis is ... dah-dah-dummmm
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FACT ... and I ask: "is it a fact that we haven't already discovered the truth?"
If we can't define it how can we know whether it's missing?
I consider my rabble roused ...
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