|
Power Femme
How Do You Identify?:
Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
Preferred Pronoun?:
She
Relationship Status:
Married to a wonderful horse girl
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Lat: 45.60 Lon: -122.60
Posts: 1,733
Thanks: 1,132
Thanked 6,844 Times in 1,493 Posts
Rep Power: 21474852
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kobi
I was agreeing with Wagner.
At one time, people thought the world was flat. It was their truth, at that time. Then, we discovered the world was round. A new truth appeared.
It would be presumptuous for me as a mere human to think everything I take for granted as truth at this point in time is the end all and be all of the truth. At some point, someone may indeed be able to prove a new truth.
Hence, a collective hunch is an agreed upon reality which is subject to change as our knowledge expands.
|
I'm curious, why call it their truth and not their belief? It wasn't true, they believed it to be true but that didn't make it any less a false belief for all that. I understand that people do not old beliefs they *know* to be false but it seems that calling something 'their truth' gives a false belief a pride of place it does not merit. Did a 'new' truth appear or did humans finally get it correct? I would argue the latter. Certainly, all our knowledge (well, very large swaths of it) should come with the proviso of "to the best of our knowledge, at this time, subject to modification without prior notice". However, when that day comes in some knowledge domain or another what would be so wrong about stating "in 2010, humans believed this to be true. They were, of course, wrong about that because...".
__________________
Proud member of the reality-based community.
"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
|