Theory Of Truth
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Correspondence Theory of Truth: In Depth Analysis
How can one say that what he is actually seeing is true or not? Are our senses perfectly reliable to be able to give us the truth in everything we see or simply just a mark on what we want to believe? Without our senses, how can one actually live in accordance with reality? These are the questions that I would want to address in my paper. According to Aristotle “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” is one way to describe the Correspondence Theory of truth. Simply put, it states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes that world. It is a view that corresponds to a fact. Surely, it is not just as simple as that. What we have now is not just a world that gives us what we need to know, but a world that gives us what it wants us to know. A scheming world where it leads us to believe the things that it wants us to believe.
On the other hand, NaДЇve realism is a claim that the world is pretty much as common sense would have it. Naive realism holds that the view of the world that we derive from our senses is to be taken at face value: there are objects out there in the world, and those objects have the properties that they appear to us to have.
Our senses are our bridge to the real world or the reality of things. It gives us everything we know and without it we will have a hard time existing or probably would not exist. We could see our surroundings and easily relate with it through our senses. It produces accurate information about the world around us. It gives us the beauty that makes our lives more meaningful. For some it is the ultimate source of facts and truth and the only source we can trust. But is it really that reliable? The correspondence theory of truth argues that truth is whatever corresponds to reality. I could say that what we believe through our senses is just a mere percentage of what really lies in the whole aspect of things. First, our senses are reliable but they are never perfectly reliable all the time. There are some distortions of reality that may seem true in our naked eyes. A variety of factors can contribute to errors in what we perceive and how we perceive it. A simple example of this would be the fact that when we you draw two circles with the same size and surround one circle with smaller circles and the other with bigger circles, the circle surrounded with bigger circles would appear smaller compared to the circle surrounded by smaller circles. If we only rely with our senses, we would actually just accept this information, but that would be a mistake. Our expectations, assumptions, and past experiences all combine to affect what we perceive. It is not just as simple as to what is real or not, but there are a lot of factors affecting it. Our senses are a poor means for separating true beliefs from false beliefs. Obviously we need more than that in order for us to be able to see what lays beneath the things that we already know.
Relying too much on our senses would sometimes make us miss valuable truths or facts that are not covered by the correspondence theory. It is not enough to say that once we don’t see things with our naked eyes they don’t exist anymore or once things aren’t connected with reality they aren’t true anymore. There is still certain degree of truth even though it is not what we defined it to be. Another argument on this view is the fact that if truth corresponds to a fact then, how about false? It doesn’t necessarily mean that if something is false it doesn’t have its basis already. We could not claim that it corresponds to nothing at all because that would mean that they are meaningless. False statements can also have its meaning although they aren’t proven by facts. If a statement is false then it must have its reasons why it is false. In the first place, we could not say that something is false without knowing the reason why it is false. We could not say also that they correspond to wrong facts, for how can we determine if it is legitimate or not.
There is a big difference between a perceived sensation and its reality. One may think that what it perceives is already true or real. Perception of the mind is not always true. It also has it flaws like with our senses. There are still a lot of things that needs to be learned before we can actually say that what we are seeing, hearing, feeling or tasting is the truth in reality. It may seem a bit confusing since if what we know is not real then what is real then? Accordingly, truth is correspondence to fact. Another take on this argument is that what one seems to be true may not be the same on what others think. For sure we have different experiences in life and this brings us different thoughts and point of views. One may have an idea that an apple is red because that is the color of the apple he grew up with. But also when a person grew up knowing that an apple is green then for him an apple is always green. It is not just on the things we see, but also on how we believe it through our past experiences. Our brain is