Patricia Illingworth, a Northeastern professor of philosophy and law, said that we don’t all have to agree on something for it to be true. But we do need to believe that truth exists. Illingworth said I would distinguish truth from what is agreed upon.
Elusive definition of truth
Generally, we can define truth as a statement about the way the world actually is. The truth seems like something we naturally comprehend and while intuition can help us a great deal in understanding what it is, surface definitions present us with unique problems and you will then lay out some terms and concepts that will help us to get a better handle on understanding what truth is. A belief is true if it is consistent with other beliefs we have. Let’s briefly look with the help of a seemingly simple example, suppose you examine an apple and determine that it is red, sweet, smooth and crunchy. You might claim this is what the apple is. Put another way, you have made truth claims about the apple and seemingly made statements about real properties of the apple but immediate problems arise. Let’s suppose your friend is color blind and when he looks at the apple, he says that the apple is green. He also makes a truth claim about the apple but it is different than your truth. Well, you might respond that’s an easy problem to solve because apple is already known by its red color. The challenge is that the view of truth is very closely tied to our perspective on what is true.
Would you prefer the truth even it is hard?
Sometimes people don’t’ want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed. The illusion of truth occurs because there is a flaw in the processing of reality. As humans, we have the tendency to say that familiar things are true. So, this is just our perception which makes us believe in those things which we actually feel around.
Anchal Kapoor