Is truth relative?

Yes. Look at this discussion for more enlightenment.

Perhaps, but one interesting way to think about it in relation to the collective unconscious. Is there a form of truth in the possibility of universal ‘archetypes?’

It could be… or maybe not… it depends ;)

@peedub, would you say that Jung believed in objective truth through the universal unconscious? It seems to me that the universal unconscious is more a root for evolutionary psychology than anything. The point is interesting.

Personally, I absolutely do not believe in objective truth. Life is a sea of perception.

ive been thinking about this for a while. 1st of all, there are never only 2 options. there is a spectrum of answers to any question. if you say yes or no, you have to back it up.

if i talk to some americans and ask them if killing a bunch of iraqis is good, most will say yes. if i went to iraq and asked them the same question, they would say no. you have to look at both sides of the coin, and all the 360 degrees around it.

I think you’re right about Jung’s concept residing more in the sphere of psychology, I guess I was thinking about truth and its existence in a universal sense, objective truth. I started to think about concepts in our psyche that could be universal. Can these archetypes (his or other ones) be a foundation or starting point for think about truth as not being relative? What is truth exactly, anyway?

realistically, all of psychology is intended to he applied outside of psychology, ortherwise what’s the point? Jung had grand all-encompasing archetypes
like the animus, and then those that pointed to smaller instincts, like fear of the dark and of heights. So you would.have. to first think that those archetypes applied to everyone (which Jung did). Also there’s the fact that the universal unconscious is always changing, so can truth change and still be truth? Is truth now different from the truths that existed for our human and non-human ancestors, if you believe in truth at all?

very interesting

isn’t it :)

I really liked his essay on synchronicity

synchronicity is a funny concept. But if anything, synchronicity enforces relative truth. Its all based on the fact that perception makes two unrelated events seem related to a specific person they’re both significant too.

I hope I’m not mixing synchronicity up with something else.

I would agree that these ‘meaningful coincidences’ could be attributed to something in one’s subconscious, but there are always other possibilities. In the the same essay he discusses ESP, and the success of certain experiments related to. I guess thats a little of the topic though.

I’ve always known syncronicity as
being two acausal events, but events percieved to have meaning together. But I’ve never read the paper your talking about. Hum.

Wouldn’t it be most fair to say that a truth is only ever factual? Any statement that is made of opinion can never be true. The only truth, in that instance, is that the person stating their opinion truly feels that way. Facts are not debatable and are always either true or false. Truth cannot be relative.

that makes sense. Like, 2+2=4. The sky is blue (given that blue means the color that the sky… Is. That’s circular).

but 2+2 doesnt necessarily mean 4. it could be 2 apples and 2 oranges. that would equal 2 apples and 2 oranges. units must be involved. and how do we measure units? the SI system is completely arbitrary, aswell as the imperical system. to sum up, you have to specify what youre adding, and that doesnt even work because units are based on other arbitrary units.

But if you say “The number 2 plus the number 2 equals the number 4,” or it is simply understood that numerics are involved, then it totally works. Even if arbitrary units are involved, it is either true or false.

but the number 2 plus the number 2 = number 4 = number 2 times number 2, but it also equals number negative 2 times number negative 2, so you can say that 2+2=4=2*2=-2*-2. i just made 2+2 equal 3 other things.

EDIT: it also equals 3+1 and 4+0 and 94–90 and 10076–10072, etc…

but it still equals 4. That doesnt change anything that it can also equal something else.

Edit: unless we’re saying that truth is relative but relative truth is still true.

2+2=4, FACT. When speaking directly about the numeral 2, and adding the same to it, the sum is never greater than 4. This is not relative. No one said anything about what 2*2 is or what -2*-2 is. The statement was 2 + 2 = 4. No one mentioned anything about 2 being negative either. Those elements of the equation produce a separate truth.

since 2+2=4(A) and -2*-2= 4(B) and 4=4©, A=C, B=C so A=B.

@monsoon: what im saying is that not just 2+2=4, but many other things = 4 also. therefore, many other things equal 2+2.

fine, but does that prove that the statement 2+2=4 is not true?

But…all of those are TRUTHS.

@monsoon, thank you!

my girlfriends input: truth becomes relative when living things are involved

@monsoon, how so?

think that we’re in another society that has nothing to do with anything going on on earth. imagine that numbers were increasing in increments of 2, starting at 1, so the number system would go like 1, 3, 5, 7, ... this is not a wrong way of doing math, its just different, like how the babylonians used a base of 60, and how europeans had no number 0 before they met the arabs.

so in this system, there is no 2, there is only 1 and 3, but 1 is the 1st number in the order of numbers and 3 is the 2nd number, so according to our standards of their numbers, 1+3 (in their world) would equal 2(in our world).

i could go way off into tangents about code breaking and what NASA is doing to try to contact aliens, both of which use something similar to what i just described, but i wont because its late and i have lass tommorrow.

the key to this is to be open-minded

@spendy, well, in perception. And only a living thing can percieve.

That said, I would completely agree that there may be no such thing as “fact”, in that even the word “fact” is man-made. I guess this whole thing just took an incredible turn…I was thinking of it in very simple terms and considering only what we humans have defined as “fact” in our world. We have defined a set of standard “facts” by which to percieve.

Sidebar: has everyone else GQ’d xxpork for this question? :) lol

your kind of not being open minded. Look at my earlier comment where I said that I believe all truth is relative. I’m actually thrown a loop by 2+2=4, I’m being open to the idea that maybe there are things that are true.

Also, your other-society math doesnt change the fact that two units, when added two two units, become four units. It just doesnt.

Edit: I’m sorry I said your not open minded, man. Being defensive.

im sorry if i offended you. i meant it as a key to solving this problem. but 2 plus 2 units in another society could possibly equal 1 unit plus 1 unit in our society, depending on the base unit. in order for 2+2=4 to work, the base units must be identical. for us, its 0, for the babylonians, its 60, for the incas its 12 and for the ancient greeks, i think it was 5.

so isn’t that like a language thing? Like, yes, -2 to us is 58 or whatever to the Babylonians, but we’re trying to objective, so just take their number that equals two, right?

Anyway, my iPhones going dead. :)

this is almost 100% language. it is about code breaking and ties into things that have to do with life on other planets and contacting them, and also entropy (the state of order of the universe)(its a long tangent). basically, we took the babylonian system, found out that their base unit and our base unit are similar, and translated their numbers into ours.

@zack, so doesn’t the exact translation of a truth (if it was, in fact, true) still equal the original truth?

not necesarily because we translated 60(babylonian)=0(ours), so 64=4 RELATIVE TO THE BAYLONIANS. 16 could equal 4 RELATIVE TO THE INCAS, and 128,000,000 could equal 4 RELATIVE TO A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SOCIETY.

edit: and i really have to go to sleep, so dont be offended if i dont respond until tommorrow

Dude, I’m having a hard time with this. So universally, I know if Ultimate truth can exist then we have to conclude that no truth can also exists. my mind has a tough time bending around the fact that neither one has to exist at all. Thus, this grey alternative, may represent both universal non-relative truth as a well as < universal non-relative truth. Can you have two people staring at two different objects in different times and space and conclude they are looking at, Truth? man, time and space are relative too. . .
imperfect objects can be representations of real Truth, while Perfect objects may or may not be Truth, therefore I think Truth is universal and relative on the human side of this crazy paradox.
phew, sorry for any logical fallacies, but I’m trying to work this out in my head so that I too can sleep.
zzz

“Do or do not, there is no try.”- Yoda

This reminds me of what your saying, @voodoo. What it means is that saying I tried means nothing. You did the action, or you didn’t. You may have tried, but you still will fit into one of these categories.

So saying that something can be neither true nor… Not… True… Is redundant. If you’re saying that something is both true and not true, than its just not true.

Is it pink or not pink? Its neither, its green. Then its not pink. Otherwise elaborate, I’m not sure that that was truly your point. :)

Truth is never relative. People often confuse truth with opinion.

@big, but that’s a relative definition of truth. I could say that relative to your definition of truth, truth is never relative, but to some one else, it is.

This whole business is just glitch in language, I’m beginning to think.

@mtl zack, speaking in terms of the Babylonian system, please finish this:

60 + 60 = ?

according to the babylonian system, i think that would be 2 in the babylonian system, relative to us, and it would be 120 relative to the babylonian system.

So then, it would be safe to say truth is not relative. Truth does, however, in many cases, require translation. That’s where I was going with ‘doesn’t the exact translation of a truth (if it was, in fact, true) still equal the original truth?’

@spendywatson I thought that’s what I said. I was denoting original truth with the capitol T

@voodoo, sorry. My comment was in response to mtl zack.

yes, but only to the people who translated it and and the original society. its relative to the other societies, that havent translated it yet, or the societies who we do not even know about.

Wouldn’t it translate (if it were translated properly) into another truth, no matter the society?

yes, but the numbers would be different because it has a different base value.

can we please end this converstaion. we’re going on and on, and im going insane with work. im sorry for cutting you short, but i really dont have time, with school and all.

No problem. xxpork probably didn’t envision mathematical debate for this question anyway. :)

Alright, now spendywatson and Mtl zack, i have indeed envisioned mathematics in the discussion and i was planning on something like this to happen. After much pondering and deep thought, i have come to this: What we see as truth are just preconceived notions that have been established throughout our lives, and say you ask someone the questions you have been asking each other to suppose someone who never learned math, then 2+2 would equal what he wants, but as a society who has handed down the information of 2+2=4 we generally except that as the truth and anything otherwise to be false. In Columbus’ time, they KNEW that the world was flat but not until later did they discover that the world was actually round. So from these past mistakes we have to except that everything is a theory because at some point in time it may or may not be disproved. Now another conundrum is saying truth is relative, the sentence contradicts itself, the sentence is viewed as absolute if someone was to say it but then it wouldn’t make this universe relative because of the one absolute statement. If you wanted to make it correct you would have to say truth is relatively relative. Then if you add Quantum Mechanics to the equations then you can say that in the unknown then every answer possible is the correct answer at the same time, but only one answer will be the one we perceive to be the correct answer. If you look at it like a multiple choice question that you don’t know the answer to, then you can see that every answer is correct to you but you want to find the answer that the teacher will accept and give you points for. if you have any questions, responses, or contradictions you would like to present then please email me at KramerCook@aol.com, I am at school during the week but i will respond as soon as i can, most likely in a day.

I just started studying some engineering and am learning about what bases are, theoretically. I knew about the existence of bases before, but didn’t understand in actuality that we just happen to live in base 10.

It made me think of this post. My opinion is the same, but. idk.