I had a discussion about this with my TOK teacher (who was my english teacher this year) and we discussed how logic actually works and what that means in terms of truth. The simple Syllogism can only prove negatives, as we have seen, and since everything can be boiled down to the syllogism in some sense, proving something to be true beyond a show of a doubt is impossible, yet proving something false or ambiguous is comparitively easy. Namely, negative statements are truth statements that state that something is not true, which means that they're different from truth statements, since when its all said and done they dont really say anything at all. To avoid sounding long winded, for all cases where a conceivable alternative can be found that differs from a truth claim, the truth claim is invalid. A conceivable alternative can be found for all claims involving empirical observation, which is all claims save internal ones, which are not claims because the idea of making a truth claim to oneself is largely superfluous.

Anyways, as to your first question, "Absolute truth that is not negative DOES NOT exist." Is a negative statement because I'm declaring that a set of truth claims cannot be validated. My own claim belongs to the set of claims that deny other truth claims, which I have named the set of negative claims. There also exists the set of ambiguous claims, which are also negative claims in a sense, but also positive ones. Since they're both positive and negative, they are not non-negative, and thus have the potential to be true. Now, you could argue that I am saying "negative truths do exist," but that's not actually what's implied by that statement, what the statement does imply is that negative truths have the potential to exist, which is an ambiguous statement. The main problem is identifying which statements fall in to which category, because clever wordplay can switch them around. The key is that the statement must be positive, and not the wording, for a truth claim to be impossible to justify.

Anyways, @ Vrael, I know that we all follow the scientific method when dealing with pragmatic truth and all that, but you can in no way say that empirical observation doesn't apply an unsurmountable error in every piece of data you use it to achieve. The only thing you know for sure is that you have the ability to gain information by observation, which says nothing about the information itself. In an argument about something else, I wouldn't criticize using the rational/empirical approach, but here it needs to be noted that the only reason this works is because experiments are attempted with the result either being able to disprove the theory, or leave it ambiguous. Many such experiments are performed, and eventually if a theory cannot be proven wrong, and is rationally sound, it becomes "truth" until proven otherwise. Anyways, to defend Descartes a bit, "I think" is not an empirical premise. The flaw in your argument stems from the fact that you forget that empirical validation doesn't apply when no senses are used, and that Descartes did not use any sensory information in his argument, thus making your protest against his conclusion invalid.

Saying that absolute truth does not exist is a paradoxical statement, in that if absolute truth does not exist, the "absolute truth" that there is no absolute truth is false. There would be at least one absolute truth.

Therefore, absolute truth does exist.

Syphon, if you had read the previous posts you would have realized that that is much of the debate at hand, whether or not a false statement is really a truth. Your simple restatement of the original proposal does not contribute to the discussion, and further, it is trite. JaBoK has already endeavoured to show that what you said is false, and I'd rather not have him repeat himself needlessly. In the future, take the time to read the discussion at hand and contribute positively (maybe not all, but most, or enough to gain a handle on what is happening).

Right, that statement defeats itself.

But as I stated earlier, this can easily be modified to: "There is only one absolute truth, this one. (lets name this idea 1)" In which case I couldn't find any way around until just now. If the statement "There is only one absolute truth, this one." were true, then all other statements would be false. If I were to make a claim saying that idea 1 is true, then according to idea 1 that claim I just made CAN'T be true, since the only claim that can be true according to idea 1 is idea 1. If this isn't convincing and for some reason my statement claiming idea 1 were able to be true according to idea 1, then lets say I were to say that the statement stating that idea 1 were true, were true, then according to idea 1, that statement can't be true. That means that it must be false. If the statement stating that the statement claiming idea 1 is false, then shouldn't idea 1 be false according to the falsity of the statement stating that idea 1 is false?

In shorter terms, I just disproved my earlier claim of "There is only one absolute truth, this one" by making a completely different claim that the idea that "There is only one absolute truth, this one" is true, which must be false according to the idea that "There is only one absolute truth, this one", which shows that the idea that "There is only one absolute truth, this one" has an internal contradiction.

To Jabok:

I was thinking..

A positive truth, according to what I understood from your explanations, is one that states that something is true. Negative ones state that something isn't true. For a claim to state that something isn't true, it is implying that itself is true in order to make the claim (which really is not essential to my argument). So if I were to say: "Thing A is false" that would be a negative statement (lets name this statement 1). Now if I were to say that statement 1 were true, that would be positive statement (which is actually exactly what statement 1 implied), and since this is a positive statement it cannot be true according to your idea that "The only truths are negative". I have just shown that the negative statement named Statement 1 isn't true, by making a positive claim pertaining to its validity, contradicting the original idea that "The only truths are negative" by using the original statement's own rules.
You already covered the idea about confusing what the statement might imply, but I showed the contradiction in the idea that "The only truths are those that are negative" without using that statement's implications against itself, I used a whole other statement.

If the statement "The only truths are those that are negative" actually implied that "negative truths have the potential to exist" then the original statement should be: "It is possible that the only truths are negative ones", or "Maybe the only truths that exist are ones that are negative", as the word ONLY is not ambiguous at all.
If clever wordplay can disprove a statement by switching the category of which a statement falls into, then that statement is flawed or nonsense. If it were nonsense, then it can't be a truth. Now, I never even tried to say that "The only truths are those that are negative" wasn't negative, I simply said it was true (which is itself a positive statement).


You were saying something about proof to show that you can't know anything for certain since you can't prove anything for certain, or something like that. I can't really read back about this either, if you could remember you original idea and re-post it, that would be great.. But ATM I can't remember what we were talking about =[

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Jun 3 2009, 5:50 am by CecilSunkure.

Only recently have I really understood (I think) what Jabok was saying about positive/negative statements, and here's what I think it boils down to:
"There are no absolute truths" is equivelent to:
"There are absolute truths" being invalid.

So yes, it's a "true" statement, but only if you add the "no" in there, but as a single truth statement it is false (assuming it's actually false). So I was right about this:
The property of language in this case, could be called the double negative, adding "no" to an otherwise false statement, which produces a true statement.

If you say that your are certain that nothing can be certain, you are contradicting yourself, and your statement is self-defeating. If you say that it might be that a property of language is just confusing us, then you are also saying that there is a chance that it might be a language property, or it is uncertain to whether or not it is a language property. Now, are you certain that it is uncertain that it is just a language property? You are following a chain-link a idea in which you try to avoid the contradiction by creating another contradiction to destroy the older one.

I once had a friend that did this. They told me "It is impossible to know anything for certain. Am I sure? I don't know." The last part "I don't know" is a claim to absolute certainty that she is unsure of whether or not you can know anything for certain. My friend then began adding "links" to her chain of uncertainty, but at the end of the chain there was always a claim to absolute certainty in one form or another.

You seem to be doing the same thing in a slightly different package. I claimed that "if uncertainty is absolute, then there is an absolute truth that all things are uncertain" is a contradiction. Then you stated that idea I just showed in quotes might be a property of language that appears to create a contradiction. You added another link to the chain, that link being a claim to absolute certainty that it might be that a property of the language is confusing us.

This can also be considered a priori based mode of thinking. I believe I have already gone over the definition of a priori, and your last claim falls under that category of priori based thinking; "I believe there is a way for what I want to be true, but I just haven't found that way yet. Can you prove that there isn't a way for what I want to be true that isn't yet discovered?"

What I'm getting at is that it isn't a property of language that makes it appear to be a contradiction, its simply a will that you possess to not believe that absolute truth exists that causes you to make statements blaming the contradiction on something else and creating a new contradiction all together.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 3 2009, 6:17 am by CecilSunkure.

I can assure you that this is not the case, it really doesn't matter to me which way it falls, I just call things how I see them.
I'm really not trying to decieve you or sneak around your arguments or anything, as to me this whole thing is rather inconsequential, just here is what I see:

If you say:
"I am certain that nothing can be certain"
I completely agree that that is a contradiction. If nothing can be certain, then you can't be certain of that. However, if you take only the part
"nothing can be certain"
it may stand on its own, uncontradicted, as a statement. It does not automatically contradict itself, because you cannot be certain of it itself.
The positive version of it:
"Things can be certain" would therefore be false, if the negative version is true.

I may have mistakenly implied that I actually believe that "nothing can be certain," so I wish to quell that: I don't believe it, and I didn't intend to say anything about whether or not things actually are certain or uncertain, merely that there is no flaw in the logic behind uncertainty being a possibility, nor in the possibility of certainty.

As for this:
The "I don't know" part is not a claim to absolute certainty. She simply isn't sure whether or not it is impossible to know anything for certain, which is not contradictory.

One notable thing though, is that it may be impossible to verify or know that uncertainty is certain, both by the nature of uncertainty being uncertain (and therefore not able to be certain), and by the reasoning that to prove uncertainty absolute we would need to know everything, and if uncertainty were actually true, we could not know everything.

And I believe you're wrong about all the "a priori" nonsense, not to mention it's rather irrelevant.
If I may cite wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori

Sorry, I more of wanted to say that a will to argue back at me drew that response, not your beliefs (as you stated what you thought in like, your first post).


Saying I'm not sure whether as to whether or not you can be absolutely sure about anything is the same as saying "I'm uncertain as to whether or not I am uncertain." Which means "I am certain that I am uncertain that I am uncertain about whether or not I can be certain about anything" which is a contradiction, and this is what I meant about the chain-link reference. You can't say you are uncertain as to whether or not you are uncertain, unless you are certain that you are uncertain as to whether or not you are uncertain as to whether or not certainty exists.


In order to state that "Nothing can be certain", you have to be certain that nothing can be certain. I'll agree that the statement "Nothing can be certain" all on its own is not a contradiction unless someone states it, in which case requires certainty in one form or another.

Yeah I am completely wrong there. My misuse of the term "priori" comes from an old debate a long time ago, and I took the definition of what I priori was out of context just like someone else did back in that old debate, and I never really looked into what a priori actually was, I just took that old definition someone else made as true.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 3 2009, 7:13 am by CecilSunkure.

Well, since I'm not going to be able to quote everything you've stated, Cecil, I'll go over the main points. First off, you completely missed the boat on my definition of statement, which is why none of this is fitting together for you. Once you introduce negativity, you cannot remove it. You attempted to use logic to make a negative statement A and a positive statement B that was verifying A. The problem is that you failed to realize that by extension, statement B is negative because it was asserting that a negative statement was true. I've tried to explain this several times now, and it falls in to what I defined as statements and how negativity and ambiguity were acquired. By that regard, your disproval of my conjecture of truth is false, due to misrepresentation of said conjecture.

The reason I said clever wordplay was because I was warning you not to confuse yourself with it, and its obvious you didn't exactly heed that warning, because you made the mistake I warned against making, which was to falsely claim a statement to be positive when it was truly negative. For recap and removing ambiguity, I did not state that the only truths are negative. All truths simply must have a negative component. Ambiguous statements can be true, as well, but they have positive and negative components. Namely: This flower may be green implies that this flower is not absolutely green and implies that the potential to be green exists for this flower, which are two statements that are positive and negative. Either statement can be converted to either positve or negative without changing the negativity.

So, for reference: All statements are positive or negative or ambiguous. Statements that are exclusively positive cannot be proven to be true, and thus cannot be absolute truth.

We define that a statement becomes negative as soon as it asserts that something is not, or that something may not be. All statments that follow the latter are also positive, but since they have a negative component they may be true. This is rooted in the idea that logic can never use an "If P then Q" syllogism to prove that P is true, only that P is negative or that P is unknown. By that regard, since unknown has a negative component, a syllogism, which is the root of logic, can only ever prove statements with negative components, and is well suited to do either, since every experiment performed leads to one such conclusion. I've already shown why internal logic does not classify as a statement, and that appears to be the only hole in the conjecture.

So now any statements that would be positive statements that try to say that A would be true are actually negative, if the A is a negative statement? It sounds like you are just bending your own rules, and as I tried to show, I constructed two completely different statements.

I think from here on not much more can be said on my part, or yours, unless someone brings in something new to talk about.

I'm going to have to just disagree with your last post, as I don't think my positive statement is negative by extension, I think that is just a flimsy defense to your argument you constructed because you foresaw that I might say something of the sort. Just because you saw what was coming, doesn't make you right.

Here's another thought: In order to know with certainty that something is false, you have to know what the truth is in order to know that something isn't true. Now, according to what you have said, from what I understand, negative statements have a component in them that say that something isn't true. In order to say that something isn't true you need to know what the truth is. If someone is to make a statement that you can be absolutely sure about, and it is a negative statement, then you have to be absolutely sure of what the negative statement is saying false ISN'T. If you are sure of the truth of a matter when saying something is false, then you should be able to construct a purely positive statement regarding that truth. Lets say I say that I know that there is not black hole in our galaxy. Now, in order to know that there is no black hole, I need to know what is there, and I should be able to say "There is simply empty space in our galaxy with exception to the orbiting planets and the sun" (which is a positive statement).

If you say that my positive statement is simply a negative statement by extension, then I would say that all positive statements are negative statements by extension. If I were to state that something is true, then I would also be stating what isn't true, since truth is mutually exclusive between being false and being true.

If I were to say something like "God created the earth", that would seem a purely positive statement. Although, in extension, this statement is also saying that the earth was not created by chance, and that the earth was not created without design.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 3 2009, 3:56 pm by CecilSunkure.

Cecil, you're again taking this the wrong way, because you haven't started using my definition of "statement." Claiming that it is true to say something is false is the same thing as saying that that thing is false, because the statements are irreperably linked by logic and not language. Logically, the example with A and B results in B being negative, but superficially, B appears to be positive. This is because when you simplify the logical argument, you end up with a negative. If you want to dismiss the idea entirely, you can go right ahead, but don't claim you can disprove something unless you can actually do so.

Anyways, saying that a thing is false is not saying that you know the truth. The basic principle of logic is the understanding that this isn't the case. (Axiom: if P, then Q .: if Q, maybe P; if not Q, definitely not P) This means that logic can never prove something is true, unless it is derived from the axiom. (Ie: If P, then Q .: if P, Q) As an example, I will say that god exists and will smite anyone who says the word "peanut butter" three times in a row. I test this theory, and am proven wrong. The only knowledge I have is negative, because I don't know if god exists yet, or even of what nature one would exist in if it did. All I know is that nobody smited me when I said peanut butter a few times, and even if I was smited I wouldn't know for sure if it was a god or just a freak accident. With the black hole example, we could examine the area and find no infrared radiation of the spectrum emitted by a black hole, and know that there was no black hole there, though we still wouldn't know what was there by any sense. As to your last example, there are an infinite number of ways the earth could have been created, some inconceivable, and I argue that you can only know that one way is not true, and never that one particular way is true.

Regardless, positive statements are ones that require the presence of infinite negative statements. Truth is not mutually exclusive between false and true, even if each given statement is as such. (false or true) That being said, the reason this discussion is taking place is because often times we are left with "I don't know" as an answer, as in the case of all positive statements. If you wanted to break it down to things that were actually mutually exclusive, you would need categories, and proof that the statement must lie in one category. This creates an ambiguous statement, because all it does is bring one closer to the truth, as does the scientific method.

"There is no absolute truth" cannot work as an alone statement, like your "nothing can be certain" example, because, accourding to the OP, "Absolute Truth: A truth that is the same at all times, in any place, for any reason, despite the opinions or beliefs of anyone." Therefore, the statement there is no absolute truth has to be absolutely true, in every context. Which it isn't, QED.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jun 4 2009, 12:03 pm by Mini Moose 2707. Reason: Contempt of both moderation and the rules.

A Catch-22 if you will.

Premise: If something is an Absolute Truth(E), then it must be a truth that is consistent at all times(I)
Premise: If a truth is not consistent(I), then it is not an Absolute Truth.
Since an Absolute Truth is consisten at all times, it follows that all absolute truths must either be consistent, or not be Absolute Truths.
Since all Absolute Truths must either be consisten, or not Absolute truths, it follows that no Absolute Truth can be both inconsistent and an Absolute Truth.
Since an Absolute Truth can only be an Absolute Truth if it is consistent, then it follows that the definition of an Absolute Truth is an Absolute Truth since it is consistent.

@ Jabok


But I didn't actually claim something was true for that truth to say that something is false, I claimed something was true to show that the original statement claims itself false.

There is mutual exclusion between true and false. I never said there is truth, and there is only one false. I know there are infinite amounts of false, but what I was pointing out is that there is no in between between true and false. Knowing this, in order to claim that something is false with absolute certainty, you have to know what the truth is in order to know that what you are saying is false, is false.

With that in mind, your idea that only truths with a negative component can are true is defeated, since in order to state that something is false to create a negative, and to know with certainty that your negative is true, then you have to know the positive. If you know with certainty the true on the opposite end of your false, then you should be able to construct a completely independent statement, which is positive, from your negative one. And of course, you keep saying I can't do that because you are simply taking the logic of the idea and separating it into two statements. If you go down that route, then that means that every single statement anywhere is negative.

If I were to say that something is absolutely true, then I would automatically know what is false as well, and by stating a truth I am in fact labeling all other options as false, and therefor every statement ever regarding truth is negative. By the same token you say I can't attack a negative statement with a positive one because they are really one in the same in logic, then that should apply to all statements being positive, not just the ones that pose a problem that I bring up.

You shouldn't be able to communicate to me, through these forums, an argument made of pure logic, since in order to tell anyone about it you have to use language as a tool to do so. So you can't use that as a defense, saying your logical argument appears to be false just because I am talking about it with language, which is a different entity. Actually, I don't think you should be able to understand a purely logical argument without thinking about it in the form of communication.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 5 2009, 2:34 am by CecilSunkure.

No, you don't. I have a device which measures wavelengths of light, but it is only fairly accurate, say within 100 NM of the actual wavelength. Now, someone says that Stop Signs are green, but I don't believe them, so I take my device, and measure the light coming off the stop light. If Green is let's say, 600NM (just for the example) and the length I measure is 800NM, well, I know that "Stop signs are green" is false. I don't know what color stop signs actually are because my device isn't accurate enough, but I know they're not green. You might have to know something, but not necessarily the truth.

If you define green as 800 nm, then there is no in between being 800 nm, and not being 800 nm. This means there are two choices, being 800 nm, or not being 800 nm. Your device showed that the color detected is not within its range of error for the scanned color to be green. You can say that the stop sign is not green, with the truth being stated that the stop sign is somewhere in the range of 500-700 nm. You can not however say with certainty that the stop sign is not green without knowing that the stop sign isn't within the range of being 800 nm.

You didn't eliminate the need for a truth claim, you just made a broad truth claim. The claim "The color of the stop sign is somewhere within 500-700 nm" is a claim to a truth, and without knowing this, you can't say with certainty that the stop sign isn't 800 nm.

Let me take another stab at a better example then. We have a single beam of light from a lazer or flashlight or something, and we have a box, set up something like this:
x------>[ ]
Now, if we're standing perpendicular to the beam of light, down a few feet from the box, we will be able to see if the light comes out the other side of the box. Let's take the case where it doesn't come out the other side. What can we say about what's going on inside the box? There could be something inside the box preventing the light from getting through, or there might not be a hole in the box on the side where the light is going to come out or there could be a gas inside the box that absorbs all the light, we have no idea.
In this case we can say that no light is getting through the box, but we can't make a claim as to the truth of what's happening, because our data is only sufficient to tell us that no light is getting through.

To say that you know light isn't going through the box, you have to know that something is stopping the light from going through the box. If you don't know if the light is being stopped or not inside the box, you can't know if the light is traveling through the box. If you state that you know light is not going through the box, you have to know that something is stopping the light from going through the box (or that there is no light at all) in order to make that negative claim with absolute certainty.

The truth claim: Something stops light from traveling through the box.

The negative component: Light is not going through the box.

Saying one or the other of these two is really saying both at once, since there is either light traveling through the box, or not.

Not necessarily. Perhaps light acts differently inside the box. Perhaps the light coming out the other end simply isn't detectable because of whatever the inside of the box did to it (made it a super-high frequency or something). Perhaps the light is being scattered through a million tiny lenses and the light coming out the other end simply isn't detectable because of that. All we know so far is that the light which went into the box is not coming out of the box, but we can say nothing as to what happened to it inside the box. To make the claim that "something is stopping the light from going through the box" you are drawing upon the statistical probability of all other lights which you have observed. You have never seen light simply stop in mid-air without cause, so you believe that it will act no different inside this box; this is a statistic however, not a certainty, so your truth claim is not a truth, because its premise "light acts the same way in every circumstance" is not necessarily true.

Yes, you can know if the light is traveling through the box or not, because we would be able to see the light coming out the other side of the box.

False. I simply set up my light-o-meter at the other end of the box, and it tells me that no light is coming out. I have no idea why the light isn't coming out, because I'm not making the assumption that light will act consistently in every circumstance. I can say
"no light is coming through the box" with certainty because that is the observed effect, but having not witnessed the cause I can make no claims towards it.

Now on the converse side, if I can't assume that light always acts consistently, why can I assume my light-o-meter will? If I trust neither assumption, then I can't know anything about the damn setup at all. Even if my light-o-meter tells me that light is coming out the other side of the box, there could be a wall inside the box and a second light bulb, so I'd have no idea what's going on. If we take some reasonable assumptions to be true, like that our detection apparatus works correctly, and that light always acts consistently, the we can say "something stopped the light", but if we took a case where we can't make every reasonable assumption to be true, like this:

We have discovered how to create some new X particle and we're trying to figure out what it does, so we put an X-particle-gun and point it at an X-particle-detector, both of which we know to be operational, inside a room which detects if X particles hit it. So we fire the gun and we get no readings on the detector, or from the walls of the room. Well, we have no assumption to make about this X-particle, so all we can say is that the detector didn't detect it, but we can't say anything about what actually happened to it. Maybe it teleported out of the room for all we know, or it bounced off another few particles and is just floating around undetected in the room.

Then we can find out the falsities without knowing any truths.

Truth claim: For some reason (some cause) light is detected entering a box and not detected leaving the box.

Without a cause, you wouldn't have seen a change in the light. How do I know that? Because the light entering the box is different from the light exiting the box. How do I know that it is the same light? I don't have to know that. How do I know that the light just isn't detectable? Well if the light entering the box is detectable, and the light exiting the box is undetectable, that would be a difference.

However, you can not say for certain that there is light detected entering and no light detected exiting without knowing that something caused your results. You don't have to know what caused your results, maybe the light just decided to hide itself and not come out, though that would still be a cause. If you don't know whether or not something caused you to obtain results, then you can not know whether or not your results are results or not. Therefor, you can not be certain of a result without being certain there is a cause for that result. You can not have a result without a cause, and you can not have a product without a reactant. So on and so forth.

But you can say something happened to it, it being the X particles. That something would be that the X particle was caused to become undetectable.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 7 2009, 12:23 am by CecilSunkure.