The eyes of thinkers: a
historical insight
Aristotle
The respective Greek words meaning άληθής
[(ές), (γνος)], alithis, ès "true" and Άλήθεια,
Alithia, "Truth"
stayed constant throughout the classical period and associated with the
field of logic, geometry, and deductive science in general ; Plato also
uses these materials as a
teaching tool to illustrate his theory of ideas meant to contain any
intelligible truth.Aristotle, on a very different register, develops the
logic as a means of investigation of the speech, also useful in the
investigation of reality insofar as it allows to organize knowledge.
These
concepts "true" and "truth" were also associated, in the school of
Miletus
and later of Aristotle
again, to the sciences of observation - more exactly - because in this
context there is not a really a scientific method as we understand it
since Galileo - at the first
attempts to study natural phenomena - the "meteors" - and the living
beings; Aristotle never lost an opportunity to go watch the fish in the
lagoon of Pyrrha in Lesbos.
In both
cases, the binary and normative nature of these concepts is no mystery.
In the
Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote, "say that what is is not, or what is not
is, is false and say that what is, is, and what is not is not, is true
"(IV, 7).
Similar
statements are found in Plato, for
example the Cratylus
.
In
the second book of the Organon, On Interpretation, Aristotle
discusses the language and the formation of logical propositions, that
is to say, the parts of the speech subject to be be true or false, the
initial element is correspondence of a statement with a real fact.
We actually
say that the statement "The cat is on the carpet" is true because
the cat is actually on the carpet.
Aristotle
had the merit of systematically creates methods of reasoning that were
often vague or implicit with its predecessors.
The logic of
Aristotle first tried to identify the conditions necessary - obviously
not sufficient - of the truth, which resides in theform.
Thus, a
statement such as "the blue wall is red" does not need any external
referent to be declared false. The logic provides
the correct instrument of thought, not the material.
In Kantian
terms, it is the formal condition of truth, but not material
Aristotle
especially focuses on the syllogisms such as "every A is B", "Some A is
B", where the subject A and the predicate B replace concepts;
"every A is a B" means that the concept B is attributable to any subject
to which can be attributed the concept A.
Aristotle was aware that the syllogisms could not give account for all
the applications of logic ,
but they allowed him to establish clear rules for forming the negation
of statements, and also to distinguish the respective roles of the universalones
such as "all x is this" and singularones like " y is that."
The school of Megara
The
Megaras and the Stoics have methodically analyzed the logical of the
connections of the everyday language such as "and", "or" and the
negation of statements. Philon of Megara
extends the impact of conditional.
In its
version, P→Q is false if P is true and Q false, and is true otherwise,
without the speakers have nothing to worry about searching for causal
connections or psychological connotations; so proposals as ridiculous as
"if Greenland is built with candi sugar, then Charlemagne is the
greatest writer of the Middle Ages" are true.
This kind of consideration is important for the use of logical
connectors in full generality, because the rules apply even if you do
not know if the terms are true. This elimination of
psychological connotations from the relation of involvement was a great
improvement, but without immediate effect on the logic. Indeed, his
work fell into obscurity until the late nineteenth century.
Augustine of Hippo
Augustin d'Hippone sees the Truth as the ultimate
experience of the spiritual life. It addresses the
relationship of man with the truth through the issue of the dogma
teaching and its understanding. For him, there is no
"horizontal communication" between men. The dialogue is not
beween two, but between three persons. Any real
communication is "triangular": you, me and the Truth that transcends us
two and of which you and me are, the "classmates".
Among the
Augustin's work, The Teacher
is one of the most revealing of his thought. He develops a
recurring thesis until the end of his life. "When teachers have
explained with words all of these disciplines they profess to teach,
including virtue and wisdom, then the so-called followers examine in
themselves whether what has been said is true, by looking, of course,
the inner Truth according to their strengths. Then they learn, and
when they discovered in themselves that they were told the truth, they
glorify the masters, without knowing that they rather glorify the taught
than teachers, if indeed they have the knowedge of what they say.
But men are
mistaken by calling masters people who are not. "Augustin expressed
in its classic form: Foris admonet, intus docet, the warning is
out, education is internal. The language
(including words of Christ) warns outside, but only the Christ teaches,
the inner Truth. then it's with good
reasons that the gospel ask people not to call anybody on earth master,
"because the only master of all is in heaven."
Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
scrutinized precisely the book On the Interpretation of
Aristotle, also to his previous comments, as they emerge from their
influences and Arabic Neoplatonic by internal criticism at the thought
of the Greek philosopher. He developed a number of
themes such as truth of thought and discourse, the role of words in
relation to ideas and things, rules that eliminate the ambiguities of
everyday language, determinism and freedom.
For the Aquinaste, veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei:
the truth is the adequacy of the intellect to things
, so on this point his thoughts matches perfectly with Aristotle's.
Baruch Spinoza
The following text,
taken from the Metaphysical Thoughts, gives the impression that Spinoza
conceives of truth as adequacy of the idea with the object: "The first
meaning of True and False seems its origin in the stories, and we said a
true story, when the fact which was told actually happened, false, when
the fact never happened. Later, philosophers
have used the word to refer to the agreement of an idea with its object,
thus, we call true idea the one that shows a thing as it is in reality;
false, the one which shows a thing in a different way as it really is.
Ideas
actually are nothing but narratives or stories of nature in mind.
And then we
came to designate the same way, metaphorically, inanimate things, so
when we say 
real gold or fake gold, as if gold presented was telling
us something about itself, what is or is not in it.
But Spinoza
himself defines adequacy at the beginning of the second part of his
Ethics: Definition IV. By adequate idea I mean an idea that, considered
in itself and without regard to its purpose, has all
the properties, all intrinsic names of a true idea. The adequacy is
therefore based on an intrinsic criterion of truth, hence the geometric
method of construction of his philosophical system. Thus, we know an
object when we properly rebuild it from its causes, when we conceive it.
However,
knowledge through the senses is necessarily truncated and incomplete.
What we
perceive through the senses expresses our own nature more than the
nature of the perceived object. We can not explain it
further without going into the philosophical system of Spinoza.
Similarly, Spinoza
rejects the Cartesian conception, that only the trial, based on the
will, can be true or false. According to Spinoza,
each idea covers its own assertion, this is not the fact of any free
will outside to intriguing idea. Thus, I can not
believe that 2 + 2 = 4 without assert it ipso facto. We only can suspend
our opinion if other representations are questioning the value of a
first performance. So, when I dream, I am
generally unable to doubt what I see, and yet, once awakened, it is very
easy to deny my dream. However, a false idea
is qualitatively, inherently, different from an adequate idea.
The true
idea enables me with a same gesture to understand why it is true, and
why the false ideas are false. The truth is index of
self and of the falsehooh, says Spinoza (index sui et falsi).
Emmanuel Kant
Kant uses
the Aristotelian distinction between a nominal definition and a
definition that points to the cause or essence of which is to define
when he writes: "The truth is supposed to consist in the agreement of
knowledge with its object. According to this
definition simply verbal, so, my knowledge to be true, must be in
agreement with the object. But I only can compare
the object with my knowledge by this means, namely, by acquaiting
myself to it. My knowledge then will
be verified by itself, which is far from being enough for me to be
assured of the truth. Because as the object
is external to me, and the knowledge is in me, I can only judge whether
my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object.
This kind of
circular explanation was called Diallelos by the formers.
And the
logicians were accused of this error in reasoning by the skeptics, who
compared the acceptance of truth to the call for an unknown witness who
before the court would support his own credibility on the basis of that
of the man's who had called.
But the
validity of the assertion that in Greece the "logicians" actually
practiced this vicious cycle has not been evaluated.
GWF Hegel
Hegel examines the paradoxical nature of human
consciousness, which would like a full and complete truth when most
people usually can not a lot of things without disagreement.
But this
opposition, in which Hegel distinguishes a "positive" or "thesis"
movement and a "negative" where "antithesis" movement is the engine of
an evolution : the spirit of the universe grows to higher levels of
arousal and conscience. This process is
dialectical: it passes from one step to another, passing through the
contradictions of a historical, productive time, where antagonism once
subsumed led to the synthesis from which emerges a new truth.
We must
still note that in Hegel's theory there is in fact a intermediate
synthesis at the midth of the "antithesis" between "external opposition"
and "internal division"
To be continuedGood night
