IS THE MAJORITY ALWAYS RIGHT? -WHAT IS TRUTH? By ethics scholars: Archbishop Fulton J Sheen & Jan Paul Lubek - Lary 2005 ============================================================================ The majority is not always right! Majority is right in the field of the relative but not in the absolute (and within criteria too). Majority is a legitimate test so long as voting is based on conscience and not on propaganda. Truth does not win when numbers alone become decisive. Numbers alone can decide vote outcome for the beauty queen, but not for true, lasting justice. Beauty is a matter of taste, but justice is tasteless and sour. Right is STILL right if nobody is right, and wrong is STILL wrong if everybody is wrong, at any time, at any place. The first poll in Christianity was unjust, wrong. Barabas was freed because of Christ (Barabas, freed soul but in what sense?), Roman tradition of releasing one Jew prisoner for the Passover. But it was all for humanity's salvation, through His Death men were to be made free. It happened at Passover time when a lamb was substituted for the people and went to death in atonement for their sins. The Savior should suffer and the sinner go free. The Book of Exodus had proclaimed that the sinner was to be redeemed with a lamb, but the Lamb could not be redeemed. The Savior could not be released but the sinner could, did the sinner realize what happened? What is truth, who is right ? Depends whom you ask, but are they true or right ? Theories of Truth: ==================== Correspondence Theory of Truth: The correspondence theory is often traced back to Aristotle's well-known definition of truth: 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, or of what is not that it is not, is true! It is noteworthy that this definition does not highlight the basic correspondence intuition. Although it does invoke a relation (saying something of something) to reality (what is), the relation is not made very explicit, and there is no specification of what on the part of reality is responsible for the truth of a saying. The definition offers a muted, relatively minimal version of a correspondence theory. (For this reason it has also been interpreted as an impure precursor of deflationary theories of truth.) Aristotle sounds much more like a genuine correspondence theorist in the Categories (12b5, 14b15), where he talks of underlying things that make statements true and implies that these things (pragmata) are logically structured situations or facts (his sitting, his not sitting). Most influential is his claim in De Interpretatione (16a3) that thoughts are homoiosis of things. Although he nowhere defines truth in terms of a thought's likeness to a thing or fact, it is clear that such a definition would fit well into his overall philosophy of mind. The best known is the metaphysical version presented by Thomas Aquinas: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus - truth is the equation of thing and intellect - which he restates as: judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality (De Veritate Q.1, A.1&3; Summa Theologiae Q.16). Aquinas credits the Neoplatonist Isaac Israeli with this definition. But there is no such definition in Isaac. It originated with the Arabic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes (Tahafut, 103, 302), and was introduced to the scholastics by William of Auxerre (cf. Boehner 1958; Wolenski 1994). The formula equation of thing and intellect is intended to leave room for the idea that truth can be applied not only to thoughts and judgments but also to things (e.g. a true friend). Saint Tomas Aquinas explains that a thought is said to be true because it conforms to reality, whereas a thing is said to be true because it conforms to a thought (a friend is true insofar as and because, he conforms to our, or God's, conception of what a friend ought to be). This notion of thing-truth, which played an important role in ancient and medieval thinking, is disregarded by modern and analytic philosophers but survives to some extent in existentialist and continental philosophy. The now classical formulation of the theory appears in Moore (1910-11, chap. 15) and Russell: Thus a belief is true when there is a corresponding fact, and is false when there is no corresponding fact (1912, 129; cf. also his 1906). The self-conscious emphasis on facts as the corresponding portions of reality - and a more serious concern with falsehood - distinguishes this version from its precursors. Russell and Moore's forceful advocacy of truth as correspondence to fact was, at that time, an integral part of their defense of metaphysical realism. Their formulation is indebted to one of their idealist opponents, H. H. Joachim (1906), an early advocate of the coherence theory, who had set up a slightly more involved correspondence-to-fact account of truth as the main target of his attack on realism. Later, Wittgenstein (1921) and Russell (1918) developed logical atomism, which introduces an important modification of the correspondence approach. Further modification, and a return to more overtly semantic versions of the approach, was influenced by Tarski's (1935) technical work on truth. (cf. Field 1972, Popper 1972). Medieval authors who prefer a semantic version of the correspondence theory often use a peculiarly truncated formula to render Aristotle's definition: A (mental) sentence is true if as it signifies, so it is (sicut significat, ita est). This emphasizes the semantic relation of signification while remaining maximally elusive about what it is that is signified by a true sentence. Foreshadowing a favorite approach of the 20th century, medieval semanticists like Ockham (Summa Logicae II) and Buridan (Sophismata) give exhaustive lists of different truth-conditional clauses for sentences of different grammatical categories; they systematically refrain from associating true sentences in general with a single ontological category. Redundancy Theory of Truth: According to the redundancy (redundant) theory of truth, or the disquotational theory of truth, asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to asserting the statement itself. For example, asserting the sentence " 'Snow is white' is true" is equivalent to asserting the sentence "Snow is white". Redundant theorists infer from this premiss that truth is a redundant concept, in other words, that "truth" is a mere word that is conventional to use in certain contexts of discourse but not a word that points to anything in reality. The theory is commonly attributed to Frank P. Ramsey, who argued that the use of words like fact and truth was nothing but a roundabout way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic muddle". Redundant theorists begin by inquiring into the function of the predicate "is true" in sentences like " 'Snow is white' is true". They reason that asserting the longer sentence is equivalent to asserting the shorter sentence "Snow is white". From this they infer that nothing is added to the assertion of the sentence "Snow is white" by quoting it, appending the predicate "is true" (or is it), and then asserting the result. The theory is commonly attributed to Frank P. Ramsey (1927), though there remains some debate as to the correct interpretation of his position (Le Morvan 2004). Most predicates attribute properties to their subjects, but the redundancy theory denies that the predicate 'is true' does so. Instead, it treats the predicate is true as empty, adding nothing to an assertion except to convert its mention to its use. That is, the predicate "is true" merely asserts the proposition contained in the sentential clause to which it is applied but does not ascribe any additional property to that proposition or sentence. "It is true that I am bald" means the same thing as "I am bald". There are many other theories of truth, but the ones I mentioned, I thought should be somehwat explained. Truth is relative to it's times, situations, people, surroundings, politics.