Danieltwotwenty wrote:Jac if you could indulge me further I would like to ask another question, If truth is a reality and what we believe this truth is is based on facts, logic and reason, do you think it is possible that we currently don't have all the facts, logic and reason in our current state of existence concerning any given situation, are we able to make a claim of absolute truth from that? Forgive me if this is a stupid question.
It's not a stupid question. I would, again, be careful about making generalizations. It some questions, it is certainly possible that we lack enough information to claim that we know the truth. And it is possible that we mistakenly believe that we do have enough information but that future information proves that we were wrong. In such cases, it should be easy to see upon reflection that we drew an incorrect conclusion because we made a false assumption along the way. For instance, suppose a man driving a police car pulls me over, shows his badge, and proceeds to write me a ticket. Suppose further that I was, in fact, speeding. Given all that, would you be surprised if I went home and told my wife, "I got a ticket today"? Of course not. But suppose it turns out later that I discover that the "officer" was actually an imposter and he was actually collecting information from people to engage in identity theft. My mistake was not in believing that I was pulled over (I was) by a man presenting himself as a police officer (that was the case), but rather in drawing the conclusion that this man actually was an officer. Had I taken the time to call the station at that moment, I would have found that the man was not who he claimed he was. So my faulty conclusion came from the premise, "All men who so present themselves as police officers are genuine."
This is why I said that we should be willing to subject all of our beliefs to scrutiny, that is, to doubt. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we find that we still missed something. That's why peer review is so helpful. But having said all that and recognizing that sometimes we just miss it, we cannot say from THAT that we cannot make truth claims in any cases at all. In the above scenarios, we saw several truth claims that were indisputably true. The problem, again, was with our assumptions and therefore our conclusions. And that is
always the case when it comes to missing premises.
And, again, it depends on the type of question. Sometimes we can't know all the facts (we just don't have or can't have access to enough information). At other times, we know we have all the facts (for example, here is a problem I want you to solve:
How many dots follow this sentence? . . . . . . .
Excluding the dot under the question mark, there are seven dots. I can be absolutely certain of that because I have all the information. The same applies to many mathematical or philosophical problems. And all that goes to the difference in deduction vs induction. The former is always correct if the reasoning is sound and the premises true. The latter is always correct if we have all the variables we are reasoning about (i.e.,the dots above), but we usually don't have that. In scientific claims, for instance, we usually only have representative samples/measurements that we
assume will repeat themselves. But that assumption may be wrong if we missed some underlying variable we don't know about, so while our certainty may be highly warranted, it may not be absolute.
