Truth and Belief

[de Silentio]

Plato was deeply concerned with the difference between belief and truth.

What are some of your thoughts?

[perplexity]

I think that Plato should have got over it by now.

[Justin]

I haven't spent any time reading any of Plato philosophy but if your mind accepts something as belief, it seem that it would be your truth. What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

[Aristoddler]

I think Plato realized that his thoughts were taken as gospel by many people, and thought it would be amusing to instill foolish philosophies into their minds.

I believe it, so it must be truth...stupidity.

[pilgrimshost]

Anything can saticfy the need for truth, belief is so crucial to ourselfs that it isnt even important what it is in. To claim that one doesnt believe anything at all is a clear contradiction in terms. Therefore truth is definatly subjective and its only criteriar is that one acsepts it as truth. To eventually discover that a 'truth' is in fact not so or even the doubt of this certanty is raised can cause a critical imballance to the equilibrium; thus the void will need to be filled, with an answer to the dilema what is the 'truth'. I think it is never the issue weather it is fact or not but if it saticfys our understanding of our environment it will serve its purpose perfectly. So this is probably the absolute destiction of what makes us Human.

[Aristoddler]

truth is what fact is.

belief is what one chooses to percieve as the truth.

broken is what my shift button is right now.

[perplexity]

I perceive that comprehension differs.

The fact is that online dictionaries were already available:

Truth

Belief


-- RH.

[pilgrimshost]

Well actually the 'known' truth or fact of something is always later changed, altered or differs from the original 'fact' or truth of something. Regardless of what it is. So a deffinition of the word is not actually satisfactory, as the understood meaning is constructed as a tool for use in itself, as meanings of words also change in time also. Ultimatly its the mind or the personal self that dissides the creates something to be true, then in the future, something else either takes its place or it has a new set of 'truths' linked to it.

[perplexity]

How do we know this then, that the fact of something past is always changed later?

To be sure of a doubt such as that I'd have to know the truth of the past in order to compare it with my own recollection of it, in which case on which basis am I to trust my version as opposed to yours or his?

It was always rather self evident to me anyway that the present is always changing, so how come then that the past would rather be fixed, forever unchanged? Seems unfair to me, for the past to be so dead and done.

As I have opined before, if there is such a thing as free will, then there is no such thing as a fixed, pre determined reality. Logically there would rather be an infinite number of possible realities, and therefore an infinite number of previous realities also to be taken into consideration, for free will is the mother of perception, hence the invention of reality, just as much as determinisim is the deaf dumb and blind bastard son of it.

And before some mother ****** brother of a straw man attempts to announce as if on my behalf that this is somehow a "belief" of mine, allow me please to declare in advance that it is no such thing. My conclusion is rationally arrived at, according to the best available information and method, the modern alternatives to truth and belief, to be preferred if only because of their improved feasibility.

Information permits me at least to calculate a probablity. Truth and belief were never nearly so generous.

Give Plato a break. Let him be. ... doesn't do to speak ill the dead, no longer here to answer to us.

Guys go philosphical when some mean ***** gets the better of them. That is the way of it. C'est la vie.

--- RH.

[Aristoddler]

I only used Plato as an example.

Any named or unnamed man of philosophy in those times could have swayed the masses with pseudo-intellectual thoughts, if he so chose to do so.