FREE ESSAY ON RELATIVE TRUTH

RELATIVE TRUTH

One version of relative truth is used when people disagree. A person might say Well, that
may be true
for you, but its not true for me. The implication here is often that there is no real
truth to the matter but
is instead a matter merely of belief. You believe what you want to believe and I'll
believe what I want
to believe and let's go on our merry way. You can see what a boon to self-deception a
mechanism like
this could be. You can believe anything and no one would have the right to tell you that
you can't
rationally believe it.
So, one can isolate oneself and one's beliefs from the critical evaluation of others,
because what also
goes without saying in this framework of relative truth, is that no one besides yourself
can tell you what
is true for you. The closest another could come would be to say something like It's true
for me that
it's not true for you. This is never actually done in the 'true for me' game. But if it
were, then since all
that the other would be expressing is what is true for them, even though your beliefs are
the subject of
their 'truth', there opinion has no real importance (except to them). It is only true in
their world which
is inaccessible to you. You can dismiss it and forget it.
We can see that by this view true for me just means that I believe it. The word 'true' is
in there to
give the belief its own legitimacy. You may ask: What does 'I believe it' mean?. There
doesn't seem
to be any way of answering this without saying I believe it to be TRUE. And so we see
that for it to
mean anything to have a believe, we must already presuppose that there is an actual truth
or falsity to
the matter that is the subject of the belief. This is another thing denied by the
relativists. He often says,
there is no real truth, only what is 'true for me'.
It is as if the relativist by the mere act of believing something can make it true in
his/her reality. And
this suggests that everyone has a different reality. Of course, we all have a different
concept of reality,
but there is only one reality. Thus, the confusion that the relativist makes between
belief and truth is
mirrored in a confusion between concept of reality and reality. If everyone really does
make their
own reality, then you are alone in your world and everyone else is your entertaining
fiction. You are a
solipsist, the only real person in the world. Now this is real isolation.
But anyone who tries to think about this in a serious manner, doesn't really believe it.
We know, for
instance, that a belief can be wrong. If a belief can be wrong, it is because there is a
truth out there
that the belief conflicts with. If beliefs could never be wrong, there would be no reason
to ever change
a belief, unless it became clear that something else would be a happier thing to
believe.
So, most relativists don't believe that 'all truth is relative' but instead that there
are some relative truths,
especially in those areas where people argue the most: Politics, religion, ethics. But
the reasons given
above would still apply except to a smaller domain of discourse. And so we can see that
if there were
any area where the truth of something was just a matter of believing that something, then
the
legitimacy of that belief is questionable as coherent.
If you think it is coherent, then try spelling out the meaning of It is true for me and
try explaining what
information is conveyed by an 'it is true for me' assertion. One might think that it
means 'I believe it.
But what sense does it make to 'believe it' unless you 'believe it is really true'? Thus
to hold a belief at
all requires the presupposition that there is truth, otherwise the belief would be
nothing.
If all truth were relative then language would be worthless when attempting to convey
information, for
that information would only be about your reality in which I have no access. But even if
only certain
areas were the domain of relative truth, then claims in those areas would carry no
information, and
would be the equivalent of babble. Language would serve no use in that domain of
discourse