In commenting on a recent post, our reader and commenter Addofio, parsing the distinction between truth and opinion, says that “it all depends on what we mean by ‘true'”. Kevin Kim takes a good preliminary poke at the question over at his place.
Or, as my friend Anthony Bouza once explained it, in closing a commencement address:
Beauty is Truth,
and Truth is Beauty;
Rooty-toot-toot
and-a-rooty-toot-tooty.
As Addofio says, it all depends.
4 Comments
Gracias para el link. Your take?
Kevin
Well, I must quibble about your example of the horse. Both propositions: “a horse is an an animal” and “a horse is a mammalian quadruped” are true, and I wouldn’t say, as you did, that the second is “truer” than the first. If truth is found in a proposition’s having a “truthmaking” fact in the actual world, then both are equally true.
I will say, though — and this view has got me into some hot water over at You-Know-Who’s place — that propositions like “a horse is an animal” are not true or false at all in the absence of a mind to assign meanings to the terms involved.
But now I see that Bob Koepp has made the same point in your comments thread, so I might just jump in over there.
By the way, here’s Tony Bouza on YouTube. He and his wife Erica have been friends of ours for the past fifteen years or so; they spend their summers in Wellfleet.
He’s quite a character, and has had quite a life. Remember the movie Fort Apache, The Bronx? Tony was the Bronx’s police commander during those years.
Malcolm,
Thanks. Re: the horse example, I offered a response to Bob on that point. I tend to think that calling both propositions equally true obscures the fact that one is a slightly more comprehensive description than the other.
I think it follows that truth is dependent on minds if we grant that truth is the relationship between a proposition and reality. And yes, minds are what provide definitions: horses probably don’t go around thinking, “I am an animal.” Horses are just horse-ing, as some Zennists would say.
Kevin