I tend to think of it more that truth is what actually transpires, and my reality is a story I tell myself to approximate that truth.
The story I tell myself is 99% based on the stories told me by those around me, assuming they’re real and not just another part of my own narrative of invented inside my consciousness.
That last 1% is a mix of sensory experience, chemistry and randomness.
One wonders what happens when you find out some are atheists, some are Christian’s and there’s that random hippy-buhddist guy that is mostly full of shit.
As others have mentioned, it really depends on the context of the question- philosophy? Religion? Politics? Whether it rained or not?
It is useful to assume objective facts. For example I’ve only ever seen things falling down. I have formed a model in my head and so far my predictions concerning gravity have always been useful in my life. You’re free to not believe in it but then your life will be more like a 1yo toddler in a baby’s high chair who has to try 500 times a day if the spoon will continue to fall on the ground the next time.
It’s kind of useless to say it’s a subjective and a matter of belief if things fall to the floor or to the ceiling or not at all. Or the spoon is a unicorn or you might not exist.
Meh, Polyamory isn’t the same as an open relationship. It comes with commitment and lots of emotional entanglement.
I mean people say it takes two in a relationship. Maybe it’s three. But you gotta ask physics if it has some matrimonial to spare for you or it’ll be a one-sided thing.
As I said, it depends on how you define truth. If it’s enough that people agree with you, your distance from the generally accepted truth can vary widely, depending on the donor of people you base it on. The fact that people agree with you doesn’t make something true on its own.
Effectively the question is: How reproducible do you want your truth to be?
If you only need your buddy to come to a similar truth you may not need to argue that much. But to convince a perfect stranger you will probably have to make your case properly. How did you arrive at your truth? Which conformable facts do you base it on? Which predictions does your claimed truth make, that might validate it?
When the model in your head mirrors the observation. That’s truth.
That conclusion is unsupported. Only the facts are truth.
When your mental model matches your observations and makes accurate predictions about expected values for observations that indicates that your model is at least close to the truth.
However if you control the observations, you have to be careful not to introduce a bias. For example you might be tempted not to make certain observations that would falsify your model. Or you might be tempted to not make observations that would require you to expand your model. But in both cases you admit your model doesn’t match reality and what good is it at that point?
Not quite. The truth is what the facts are based on.
Take the speed of light in vacuum, for example. We don’t know its true value. We have measured it repeatedly, to high precision, using various different methods. Those measurements are or facts. Based on those facts we estimate the speed of light in vacuum to be 299,792,458 m/s. We are quite confident that this value is at least very close to the truth, sure to how many measurements we made and how close they’re bunched together.
But if in the future more precise measurements suggest that it’s in fact closer to 299,792,458.135 m/s then we’ll learn that we’ve been less correct before.
Consensus is a kind of testing for truth, but truth itself. Hopefully, people will believe true things in aggregate, but sometimes your peers will agree on an untruth.
A philosopher would say that there is no truth, or at least we can’t be sure we know it. After all, what is “truth” when everything you perceive might not even exist?
An educator would say there are some things we can know for ourselves, like what “too hot” feels like or what “tasty food” is, some things we have to rely on experts for, like “how far away stars are” or “what the earth is made of”, and some things that aren’t objective at all and so can’t be known, like “who deserves this” or “what is immoral”. These are all kinds of truth.
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