Who can explain the knowledge of truth?

1. 40

   H P Roychoudhuryposted 13 years ago

   Who can explain the knowledge of truth?

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2. 80

   Wayne Brownposted 13 years ago

   If you examine the Communist Party's goals from 1963, you quickly realize that even then they placed a high priority on infiltrating the American educational system as a platform to dumb down America and dim its cultural beliefs by diminishing its history and knowledge base. Our educational system has shifted since that time to one heavily focused on the social aspects of society rather than the basic tools of education. We now teach our children the shame of America's history. We drop the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag from the classroom and we focus on teaching appreciation of everything but our own heritage. In the end, the whole system drives class envy and contributes to the breakdown of our society...a result which must please the Communists to no end. Education must come back to local control before it finds its roots. WB

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3. 61

   Stump Parrishposted 13 years ago

   Truth in contrast to knowledge.
   1  Truth
   By way of example, consider the moons of Jupiter The vast preponderance of the evidence suggests that the major moons have been there for millions of years. All the available evidence indicates that in 1610, at the time Galileo first said Jupiter had moons, it did in fact have moons.
   
   In this sense, we can define a notion of truth. This is meant to be an objective (not subjective) notion of truth. To me, the term “fact” is more-or-less synonymous with “truth”.
   
   2  Knowledge
   
   Now let us consider how knowledge differs from truth:
   
   •Throughout history up until 1610, nobody knew Jupiter had moons. There was a complete lack of knowledge.
   •There was at least a brief period when Galileo was the only person who knew Jupiter had moons.
   •Eventually larger numbers of people knew Jupiter had moons.
   This example shows that knowledge can change with time, and can be very unevenly distributed. By way of contrast, note that the truth didn’t change in 1610; only the knowledge changed.
   
   3  Belief
   
   Galileo had trouble persuading “The Powers That Be” to believe that Jupiter had moons. They didn’t want Jupiter to have moons, and some people have a powerful ability to not see what they don’t want to see.
   
   Here belief denotes more-or-less the same thing as knowledge, but by connotation it calls attention to the fact that people are often willing to believe things that cannot possibly be true.
   In the US, more people believe in astrology than believe in evolution.
   In some simple cases, knowledge is sufficiently well established that it can pass for absolute truth (in some narrow domain).  Those who claim to possess infallible inerrant “truth” are cranks, unaware of their own limitations, monumentally immodest and arrogant.
   
   4  Models
   
   As mentioned above in connection with green cheese, knowledge is in some cases sufficiently well established to pass for absolute truth.
   
   More commonly, though, knowledge is inexact. Knowledge does not need to be exact to be useful. For example, we are told that the radius of the earth is approximately 4000 miles. That value is not exact, but it is close enough for a range of practical purposes.
   
   As for truth, some philosophers speak of real, absolute, ideal truths that are not invented but may eventually be discovered. In contrast, as for knowledge, the vast bulk of our knowledge is in the form of models that are clearly invented.

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