Truth

Truth is most often used to mean being in accord with fact or reality, or fidelity to an original or standard. Truth may also often be used in modern contexts to refer to an idea of "truth to self," or authenticity - wikipedia

The interesting thing here is the convergence of these ideas, and more recent understandings in evolutionary genetics:

What we have here is the beginning of a solid evolutionary analysis of truth. It's been a while coming. It faces political issues. It won't be popular. But it may be true.

Science has a crude but effective definition of truth. While not a definition in any accepted sense, it is a defining criteria. It is effectively what gives truth in science it's cajones. It is a social process in which the stumblings of the many out-vote the fraudulent tendencies of the few. A carefully crafted game in which truth tends to win over time - however corrupt the institutional politics. That's Bitcoin.

Out of this drops the value of diversity, and the technical problems of centralising, or cleaning truth - by defining it.

Truth is not a mapping, or an assumption, or a property of logical analysis. The above are simply components (some useful other not) in a process of evolutionary stumbling. Nor is this relativistic, and simply social. It is law, and law is part social, part logical, part scientific. It is situated in time, and has no meaning outside of time.

We agree with Karl Popper when he says that truth does not exist - but is something we tend towards, and with Einstein where our uncertainty increases like a perimeter shadow as we move closer to the light.

In this context truth is related to lying. You can't have one without the other.

And science, or rather reality is the court of knowledge. In this court time is our friend. It is agreed block-by-block, and through our mutual witnessing we construct a path, which we can retrace, as we move forwards to a greater understanding of reality.

Our evidence rests on the understanding that alien minds of which we have no control, have reached the same consensus. It is the very doubt about their existence, and our inability to agree with their processes that give weight to our judgement.

When Byzantine Generals agree on something for long enough, in the continual presence of fork, we have to explain the result. One such explanation is the agreement is true. There are others. But we have moved closer to truth.

The commonly understood opposite of truth is falsehood, which, correspondingly, can also take on a logical, factual, or ethical meaning. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in several contexts, including philosophy, art, and religion. Many human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most (but not all) of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself. Commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to an independent reality, in what is sometimes called the correspondence theory of truth.

Other philosophers take this common meaning to be secondary and derivative. According to Martin Heidegger, the original meaning and essence of "Truth" in Ancient Greece was unconcealment, or the revealing or bringing of what was previously hidden into the open, as indicated by the original Greek term for truth, "Aletheia." On this view, the conception of truth as correctness is a later derivation from the concept's original essence, a development Heidegger traces to the Latin term "Veritas."

Pragmatists like C.S. Pierce take Truth to have some manner of essential relation to human practices for inquiring into and discovering Truth, with Pierce himself holding that Truth is what human inquiry would find out on a matter, if our practice of inquiry were taken as far as it could profitably go: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth..."

Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. Language and words are a means by which humans convey information to one another and the method used to determine what is a "truth" is termed a criterion of truth. There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth: what things are truthbearers capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that faith-based and empirically based knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective or objective, relative or absolute.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously suggested that an ancient, metaphysical belief in the divinity of Truth lies at the heart of and has served as the foundation for the entire subsequent Western intellectual tradition: "But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests--that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is Truth; that Truth is 'Divine'..."