Fact and Truth – Regarding the Difference between Them
Uploaded by palma on Oct 09, 2000
Sam Vaknin's Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web SitesThought experiments (Gedankenexperimenten) are facts in the sense they have a “real life” correlate in the form of electrochemical activity in the brain. But it is quite obvious that they do not relate to facts. They are not a true statement.
A question can be posed: do they lack truth because they do not relate to a fact or are the two facts disjointed? How are Truth and Fact interrelated?
One answer is that Truth value is a shorthand to describe the possibility that an event will occur. If true – it must occur and if false – it cannot occur. This is a binary world of extreme conditions of being. Should all possible events occur? Of course not. If they do not occur would they still be true? Must a statement demonstrate a real life correlate to be true?
Instinctively, yes. We cannot conceive of a thought without brainwaves. A statement which remains a potential seems to exist in the nether land between truth and falsity. It could become true by materializing, by occurring, by matching up with real life. If we had the ability to show that it will never do so (ad infinitum), we would have felt comfortable to classify it as false. This is the outgrowth of millennia of concrete, Aristotelian logic. Logical statements talk about the world and, therefore, if a statement cannot be shown to relate directly to the world, it is not true.
This approach, however, is constructed upon some underlying assumptions:
First, that the world is finite and not only finite – but also close to its end. To say that if something did not happen than it is not true is to say that it will never happen (meaning that time and space – the world, in one word – are finite and are about to end momentarily).
A second assumption is that truth and falsity are mutually exclusive. Quantum logic has disproved this one. There are real world situations that are in both realms, the true and the “not-true”. A particle can “be” in two places at the same time. This fuzzy logic is incompatible with our daily experiences but if there is anything that we have learnt from physics in the last seven decades is that the world is incompatible with our daily experiences.
Thirdly, that the psychic realm...