On 23 Jun 2012, at 09:47, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 22.06.2012 08:03 Stephen P. King said the following:
On 6/22/2012 1:50 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote:
I have many questions.
One is "what if truth were malleable?" --
HI Brian,
If it was malleable, how would we detect the modifications? If our
"standards" of truth varied, how could we tell? This reminds me of
the debate between Leibniz and Newton regarding the notion of
absolute space.
If one assumes the correspondence theory of truth, then the question
would be if a reality were malleable.
Right. Which leads to the question; what does Brian mean by "truth is
malleable"?
Would this entail that arithmetical truth is malleable? What would it
mean that the truth of "17 is prime" is malleable. It looks like we
need a more solid truth than arithmetic in which we can make sense of
the malleability of the truth in arithmetic, but I cannot see anything
more solid than elementary arithmetic.
Some truth can be malleable in some operational sense, but this will
be only metaphorical. For example the "truth" that cannabis is far
more safe than alcohol, appears to be quite malleable, but this is
just because special interest exploits the lack of education in logic.
People driven by power are used to mistreat truth, but it is just
errors or lies. I guess Brian's question is more metaphysical, but
then in which non malleable context can we make sense of
metaphysically malleable truth? Perhaps Brian should elaborate on what
he means by "truth is malleable"? It seems to me that such an idea is
similar to complete relativism, which defeats itself by not allowing
that very idea to be relativized.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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