Six Great Ideas: Truth (1982)

In this program, Mortimer Adler discusses with others the notion of truth.
#philosophy #epistemology

[@JonSebastianF]

00:00 Interview 1 01:47 Introduction 02:49 Interview 2 07:34 Seminar 1 09:16 Interview 3 10:42 Seminar 2 13:38 Interview 4 14:32 Seminar 3 24:52 Interview 5 27:22 Seminar 4 30:18 Interview 6 31:04 Seminar 5 35:14 Interview 7 37:45 Seminar 6 40:44 Interview 8 41:34 Seminar 7 47:45 Interview 9 49:16 Seminar 8 54:07 Interview 10 55:09 Credits _the interviewer:_ - journalist *Bill Moyers* _the seminarists, in order of appearance:_ - Germany's ambassador at the UN *Baron “Rudy” Rüdiger von Wechmar* - oil producer *Robert Mosbacher* - Sudan's ambassador in Canada *Francis Deng* - business and population advisor *Robin Chandler Duke* - English scholar *Betty Sue Flowers* - philosopher *“Koko” Soedjatmoko* - author *Jamake Highwater* - historian *Alan Bullock* - judge *Jon O. Newman* _other seminarists, not speaking in this episode:_ - schools superintendent *Ruth B. Love* - assistent president of the ILGWU *Gus Tyler*

[@planetvegan7843]

Thanks!

[@drawn2myattention641]

I share Adler’s love of truth, and yet I can’t shake three of Nietzsche’s ideas: that truth is a value among the other values, and not always the most important one, and that an unrestricted ‘will to truth’ must ultimately undermine every other value, resulting in nihilism.

[@TDNMAFT.]

I’m not very educated and I’m on this Godly pursuit to developing my understanding more about such things I have not read all of Nietzsche’s work though I would struggle to grasp a lot of it so I kindly ask if you can tell me why such things would lead one to nihilism…?

[@eniopasalic]

Six seems to me to be an incomplete number, there must be seven great ideas. Truth, justice, compassion, beauty, freedom, love and intelligence.

[@thomasd2444]

There are 102 great ideas book: A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas (1952; 2nd edition, 1990)

[@thomasd2444]

36:06 - Q: So opinions are STRONGER than truth? In many cases, yes -- in fact, stronger than ordinary opinions are deep-set prejudices -- much stronger. 36:25 - How do you explain that? Why is truth so often the victim?

[@bryanutility9609]

Where is the beauty video? That’s the most important one.

[@thomasd2444]

There may only be an ugly copy

[@horsymandias-ur]

Adler sounds oddly like Peirce here

[@thomasd2444]

30:27 - The Great Ideas of Western Culture 30:32 - There is no world culture, yet. 30:35 - 30:47 -

[@gettaasteroid4650]

Betty Sue Flowers lands a devastating Wittgenstein-Tarski attack on correspondence theory because elimination of false belief expresses a preference for true sentences over and above objects. Jamake Highwater also points out that truth is conditionally related to perspective and veracity, reminiscent to me of Donald Davidson's satisfaction relation

[@N00bmind]

What is the problem you see with preferring true sentences over objects?

[@gettaasteroid4650]

​@@N00bmind Betty Sue 19:10, and Jamake ~28:30, the problem is that elimination, ruling out statements and beliefs that are known to be false, is normatively destructive. Consider that even though vague statements can be true what do they correspond to? The die has been cast says Julius Ceasar. There's also the reality of abstract things like numbers, moral beliefs, conceptual language like negative objects that have no extension and therefore a begging correspondence.

[@N00bmind]

@@gettaasteroid4650 So you are saying that once we rule out something that is “false” we cease accounting for any potential flux and we lose methods of experimentation. Also, from my understanding, it seems it leads to a deontology?

[@gettaasteroid4650]

​@@N00bmind Another term for deontology is 'de re' which means 'all the way down'. The problem with elimination is that it does not go all the way down, this means that there will be normative work required to complete a correspondence theory that relies on its evolutionary epistemology or 'elimination'. It turns out that humans can do the normative work without a correspondence theory. Consider this: what work does a large language model do?

[@peterv7258]

@@gettaasteroid4650 There are aspects of your statements here that I do not understand. What does "normative work" mean? And I am not sure what your point is about the LLM. But, I would like to offer these comments about the above discussion. It seems to me that one of the problems they are having is that there is a difference in language meaning between them, and certainly a difference is certain assumptions and values. I am in agreement with Adler, essentially, myself, but I think that is discussion would benefit from delineated categories of truth, because in some senses the word truth is too vague to apply to the differing realms which they are quarrelling over. Observable scientific truths about material reality (which do have a somewhat provisional nature as technique and knowledge grows) are different from truths like historical study (which involves a degree of interpretations and analysis and is often viewed through contemporary lenses), and certainly purported truths like South America being racially inferior which just isn't true at all but which gets legitimated as truth by being published in the encyclopedia (well that's a different problem as to whether or not anything is true). Then there is the other one which so far in the video hasn't been directly addressed which is moral truths. I am of the thought that moral truths and religious truths are can be viewed as more certain than other types of truths because issues about what people should and should not do are in fact a less complex domain (in some ways) than what atoms are made of or what Saladin was thinking. I think the point that Adler is getting at is that moral truths which are true are as true as things which can be observed in nature, like the speed of light or Newtonian laws of motion or chemistry or engineering, which work when applied and create the expected result. Seems to me that what the others are arguing isn't whether or not things are or are not true but rather political angles about how the philosophy that things are true has been abused, which is a fair critique, but doesn't stop truth from being true. I think Kant's idea that we can never truly know what things are in themselves has a truth in it, but the extent of the usefulness of that truth is more aesthetic or spiritual than practical. That is to say it's the kind of thing that sound meaningful after you just smoked a joint, maybe, but it's slicing the cake the wrong way. Ther may be limits to how thoroughly humanity is capable of perceiving and articulating the "Truth" in some grand and overarching sense, and it may also be true that many formulas we use for trying to create systems that work in economics politics and whatever else are not true in a final and ultimate sense, though they can be useful, positing truth toward certain things like that is more a cultural bias than a rubric of truth. But that is because systems are complex especially regarding people and nature, and human nature. anyway, that's my 2 cents.