(I started this one a long time ago, and browsing through old drafts decided it’s close enough to being coherent to publish. At one point I probably thought I had more to say about it–but thanks to memory loss, I no longer know what that might have been.)
People, particularly religious conservatives, often assert that truth, to be true in any meaningful sense, must be absolutely true. In keeping with my tenet that
We learn most from those who are different from us; they help us walk around our piece of reality and see it in new ways,
my discomfort with that assertion inspires me to write the following.
Consider the assertion: “Truth is absolute”. I start by wondering what that could mean? What could truth be that it could be absolute?
On the one hand, “truth” is thought to be a property of (some) propositions, something that applies to concepts or beliefs or to statements couched in language. If this is what one has in mind when invoking “truth”, how could truth be absolute? Language is slippery and malleable–how could statements couched in language be somehow absolutely true? Our beliefs and concepts, however well-warranted, are limited and context-bound; how could our concepts,our own ideas about reality, be somehow absolutely true? To assert that human pronouncements or human concepts are somehow absolute is, to my way of thinking, a form of hubris and as such dangerous. And I return to my original question: what could it mean for our beliefs or concepts or pronouncements to be “absolutely true” anyway? Always true, everywhere and everywhen?
Furthermore, it is easy to come up with truths that are clearly not absolute, regardless of what one may think “true absolutely” means.
And yet. . .and yet. I feel, have often felt, that the concept of truth solely as an attribute of propositions or concepts is somehow missing something. Certainly, we often use the word in ways that don’t fit that meaning. A work of art–a poem, a song, a painting–may strike us as “true”. But what else could “truth” mean, if it’s not a property of our propositional beliefs?
Addofio 
I suspect that people who take truth to be absolute are trying to say that, if something is true, it’s not merely “true for me and not for you.” If 2+2=4, this holds for everyone everywhere, not just for me. If there is a god who conforms to the Christian description of him/her/it, then the proposition “The Christian God exists” is not true only for Christians, but for everyone, everywhere, in all times, which goes at least partway toward explaining certain Christians’ behavior. The same could be said for other traditions, of course.
I think that “absolute” therefore means something like:
1. Being true for everyone, in all times and places, and
2. Being immutably so.
[NB: Come to think of it, component (2) is a subset of (1), because (1) includes the notion of “for all times.”]
So God, if God exists, doesn’t appear and disappear according to whether philosophical Buddhists or fundamentalist Christians are the largest global tradition. God’s always there, in which case philosophical Buddhists who adopt an overtly atheistic stance are wrong. If God doesn’t exist, it’s the Christians who are wrong. All of this follows from the law of non-contradiction, but whether we should always respect that law is a huge topic, given the importance of paradox in so much religious thinking.
Kevin
LikeLike
But there’s still that vexed question of language or human thought. “God exists” is a statement, formulated in language. Does it have only one, unambiguous and immutable meaning? Heck, no. Not even if qualified as “the Christian God”. The meaning of the statement changes; it is neither the same for all people nor immutable over time. So how can the truth value of the statement be the same for all people or immutable over time?
You might be able to speak of absolute truth regarding some statement for which there is universal agreement as to meaning–but first you gotta find that statement. And when you are talking about matters such as spiritual beliefs, it’s even trickier, since God, for instance, assuming God exists at all, is routinely taken to exceed our human capacity to conceive of God. So now we are making truth claims for a proposition which by definition no human can quite, or accurately, at least, conceive. Twicky at best to confirm any claims of absoluteness in such a case.
And if my model of reality has merit, then it’s pretty easy to create statements that would be true for one person but not another, or true at one time but not another. Only statements about the the Tao (as I called it) would even be candidates for being absolutely true or absolutely false–and even if we could formulate a sufficiently unambiguous statement about the Tao for it to be absolutely true (or false–either works), how could we know, absolutely, which it was? So what good would it’s absolute truth (or falsity) be?
BTW, 2 + 2 = 4 does not hold under absolutely all conditions. In an arithmetic modulo 3, 2 + 2 = 1. Just thought you’d like to know. Context matters even in math.
LikeLike
It’s a tricky situation, for sure, but I don’t side with the postmodernist camp, which tends to take the whole “we can’t know exactly what we each mean when we say something” to a silly extreme. That claim amounts to saying we can’t communicate with each other and, when we try, we communicate nothing. Besides, that claim, if true, itself falls victim to its own deconstruction, so in the end there are no claims at all– no truth if no clear propositions.
We know this can’t be right: we’d be paralyzed if we really thought of the world as (or, more intimately, FELT the world to be) fundamentally ambiguous, and most people obviously don’t go through their days paralyzed by the prospect of metaphysical ambiguity. They instead casually toss around all sorts of fuzzy words like “God” and “love” without wondering whether their interlocutors really understand the words in exactly the same way… and communication happens.
I agree that, on the one hand, reifying ultimate reality seems folly. Can it even be done? But “fuzzifying” it also seems to be folly– the empirical evidence suggests that it’s really not all that difficult for people to bandy the word “God” about, and to at least think they’re communicating something thereby. What’s the middle way?
At about this point, a Korean Zen monk would grumble, “You guys are talking about garbage.” So would my engineer friend, who in the grand tradition of all engineers can’t understand why people have such a hard time being clear with each other. In engineering, there’s no room for semantic pliability; words like “wave” have fixed, agreed-upon meanings; not to have the same idea in mind is to build deathraps instead of flyable 747s or inhabitable buildings. Engineering language gives us a hint that it is indeed possible for disparate people to converge on reality. Whether the engineer’s worldview is applicable to other aspects of life, though, is a different matter.
Kevin
LikeLike