Wiki-pistemology...The Nature of Truth...?

If an objective reality exists then objective truth exists. Truth is simply the correspondence of a statment with reality. Many people conflate skepticism (the idea that we cannot know, or cannot know for certain, what the truth is) with relativism (the idea that there is no objective truth). But the two ideas are quite separate, as we can demonstrate:

Please toss a coin and cover it before looking at it.

You cannot tell whether it is "heads" or "tails". This is skepticism.

It is however either heads or tails. This is objective: the coin's position is not relative. If you do this with a friend and you both guess differently it is not "true for him that......" and "true for you that....": the coin is one way and one of you is wrong. We may have no way of deciding between your two theories. One of them is still right, the other wrong.

A vote makes no difference: a vote is one way we DECIDE what we will call true or false rather than a way that effects truth or falsity. If that coin is heads rather than tails and suddenly 1,000,000 people vote for "tails" does the coin suddenly flip in repsonse to the vote?

So, information transfer will have no effect on objective truth because information transfer is a statement about how we decide what to consider true or false rather than what is true or false. It may well have great effects on epistemology: which IS how we decide true or false rather than what is true or false.

It seems easier to go after your questions in reverse order. But first, a disclaimer. I am not going to pretend that I can prove any of this. You're digging deep into epistemology and metaphysics and I'm sure you know it. All that follows is my take on it. Now, one step at a time.

Is there ANY kind of truth? I think so. But I make this conclusion rather in the logical-analytic sense. If truth is what works, then it would seem to exist because some things work and some do not.

Are any of these truths subjective? I think this is pretty clearly so from evidence as well. There is no ONE diet plan that works well for everyone, there is no ONE colour that everyone finds pleasing. Some truths work for more people than others, and some seem to be limited at times to just one individual.

Are any of these truths objective? Here is the hard question. We will be unable to demonstrate it in anything approaching a geometric sense, owing not only to the 'problem of induction' but also our practically very limited exposure to All Things That Ever Are. However, I think that the vast majority of reasonable people would have to allow that science, math, and logic have worked pretty blasted well so far... so they would seem to be the closest thing to sources of objective truth that we are likely to have right now.

BUT owing to my functional definition of truth, this means that some scientific 'objective' truths will be trumped by subjective ones. It may well be that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor, but it also seems conceivable to me that it might be more useful to believe that this is not so at times. And I can conceive similiar overrides for any number of other scientific, objective truths (though I do have trouble imagining such for a few of them).

Taking all this into consideration, I don't think consensus-based information sources such as Yahoo!Answers are damaging to the concept of objective truth at all. Quite the contrary - it is all too easy to find a 'best' answer that is disagreeable, obviously unworkable, and otherwise flawed no matter how limited a person's knowledge is likely to be. Faced with the disconnect between what really works and what people voted for as working, I think a site such as this can be instrumental in creating the kind of doubt that might serve to root out OTHER dogmatic non-truths that may be dwelling in a reader's head. Especially here, where it is so easy to return, see, and try each answer in turn. If ANY answers are true (not just the best one) it is possible for someone to discover it if they wish. Or discover that nobody has the right answer, no matter what the answerers may think.

Awareness of not-knowledge is, of course, what Socrates is usually remembered for, and I suspect we do so much remembering of him because it's a lesson that all too many people still need today! Peace.

I always thought of the idea of voting for "correctness" and community acceptance of ideas (group voting) as a bit insidious. The value of an answer appears to be a manifestation of group think. And as the group that votes tends to be small, one is left to question the value of a statistically insignificant population. This whole Y format is a bit of a farce anyway. Many ideas that we post (especially in philosophy) are done an injustice by not allowing iteration on topics between the question creator and the person answering. So "correctness" is a one-shot deal.

As a tool, it can be informative at times - but it shouldn't be thought of as anything more than an entertainment medium at best. And yes, I'm basically invalidating my own efforts here on Y.

This venue can never deliver completely objective truth. The guarded sites are the only ones that can. That is because they are subject to some form of critical peer review. When you get down to the very basis of "our truth", it is a voted "best" answer that we call a concensus. 1+1=2 only because it is how we define what 1 is. Which goes on to define all the rest of the numbers.

There is no such thing as objective truth. Truth in all of it's forms is subjective, hence why it's has this indefinite number of forms. All "truth" comes through the filter of human experience, which pollutes it with innumerable biases and misconceptions (which stem out of this filtering). All that the Internet does is make this more obvious by presenting such abundant forms of "truth".

Where human's are assigning the values, votes probably carry the most weight.

Truth will almost certainly wait until all the votes are in, and tallied, before defining itself [humor].

//////////////////////

I've been thinking your question over for a while now.

As a serious attempt to address your question, my thought is, probably it's not of much consequence, either way.

The part of your question that missed expression, mass-media, documentary television, general attempts from every direction to encourage opinion-forming without much depth of thought and sketchy information, are probably the basis for most opinion in 2007.

These opinions are held to be self-evident by those who hold them, held to be truth without any need for further discussion.

Any sustained observation of QA interactions seems to confirm the premise that people aren't here looking for answers. They're here as a re-affirmation process for what they already believe they know.

Or as a means of finding playmates and admirers of a certain age group and sex.

If we're spending time here it's almost certainly not because we honestly believe what we say here bears any influence in areas of truth.

We're either here to have some fun, however we might define 'fun'. For some it's groupies. For others, it's observation of human interactions. For others, it's probably piquing the imagination, allowing the absorption of previously unconsidered ideas.

For some, it might just offer interesting character traits to be worn by fictional individuals in some future work of a literary nature.

But any way you cut it, truth has almost nothing to do with it, and what is said or done online isn't going to have any bearing on beliefs and actions of people using it.

Why can't I resist the hard questions?

"Democratic Truth" is what we seem to have had for ages, with the exeption (possibly,) of "proven" science...

"Objective Truth" seems to be an ideal that is currently beyond us, our science seems objective, but we only know that these "laws" work in our space, our time, our perceptual "stage." And we seem to want to assure ourselves that our sciences are universal and objective, even though we have so far only been able to test them in a microscopic fragment of our solar system...Which begs the question, "do other stars have different laws?"

The problem for finding and defining "objective truth" lies in our tools...Language, for transmitting ideas, and formulating perspective, can lead to many misleading and mistaken presuppositions.

Our minds automatically consider that they are separate from the universe (like an eye looking outward,) when the "universe" itself is a scale model that we create ourselves...

And so we have a mind observing itself with a tiny portion that is reserved for the conceptual "eye" ("I.) The realization of this fact is often seen as the "awakening of the trancendent," one sees that "we are everything and everything is us," but I wonder if that realize that they are simply seeing the unity of our internally created universe with our ego (as they are, indeed, one and the same,) or if there is a "true" connection (aside from the neurological/biological,) beyond that "internal unity," between consciousness and space/time/mass/energy as many mystics seem to believe...

Within the context of language and democratic society, democratic truth is as good as we can reasonably expect right now, like democratic sanity ("most people think and feel like "X" so anyone who's psychological parameters fall outside a reasonable variation of "X" is insane...)

Its mob rule, really, but we fear the alternative...

Tyranny.

Our truths can only be objective TO US individually, because we each dwell in our own created {ReALity] any "real truth" is inevitably lost in translation...We can only "resonate" truth into an "alien" universe...And for that, concepts work better than words, art works better than concepts, and culture builds a common frame for us to view our common ideals...

like anything you read, you should not trust it blindly. you take everything with a grain of salt. that hasn't changed with the web. it can be a good source of information, but you should always find 2nd and 3rd sources as well.