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by coldtea 3 hours ago
"Objective reality" is only the source for the least interesting truth. The truths that really get people fighting over concern best courses of action, moral matters, aesthetic issues, and things like that, where there isn't some singular objective truth (and even if there was, nobody has access to it).
2 comments
Retric 1 hour ago
> thinks like that

These aren’t truths. It’s cases like “is the earth flat?” that have an answer in objective reality and people still argue about it where some people are simply wrong.

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coldtea 1 hour ago
What's addressed as truth is not some holy artifact handed out for us by God, or what some theory of Logic defines as such.

It's what people consider and call a truth. Language terms are defined by use.

And people absolutely argue, fight, unite, or even go to war, for the version of those that they'll consider and call the truth of such matters.

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Retric 1 hour ago
The English language has multiple independent definitions of the same word. You’re misusing that ambiguity here.

“sincerity in action, character, and utterance” is different than “the body of real things, events, and facts”

This distinction very much exists in how people talk about such things. You don’t need to “have faith” that something like gravity exists such that when you trip you can fall down. “We hold these truths to be self evident” isn’t how you talk about the distance between NYC and Boston.

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coldtea 27 minutes ago
>“sincerity in action, character, and utterance” is different than “the body of real things, events, and facts”

So? I didn't refer to truth in the former sense.

I said there are several kinds of meanings of the term "truth", and that the one that's about mere facts about things that can be measured objectively (the stricter version of your second definition) is the least interesting one.

The truths of the "We hold these truths to be self evident” variety, the truths of "this proposal is really bad", "this behavior is wrong", "this person is guilty", and many others even more nuanced varieties, are the ones that matter, and for those objective reality is nowhere near the "single source of truth", if it even applies at all.

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hallole 2 hours ago
You say that, but some people really do give you a hard time if you try to assert that there is one, definite, objective reality.
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