Truth And Falsehood

Reveals a breakthrough in documenting a new era of human knowledge. Only in the last decade has a science of Truth emerged that, for the first time in human history, enables the discernment of truth from falsehood. Presented are discoveries of an enormous amount of crucial and significant information of great importance to mankind. Truth and Reality, Dr. Hawkins states, have no secrets, and everything that exists now or in the past- even a thought- is identifiable and calibratable from the omnipresent field of Consciousness itself.

The book presents a thoroughly elaborated logical theory of generalized truth-values understood as subsets of some established set of (basic) truth values. After elucidating the importance of the very notion of a truth value in logic and philosophy, we examine some possible ways of generalizing this notion. The useful four-valued logic of first-degree entailment by Nuel Belnap and the notion of a bilattice (a lattice of truth values with two ordering relations) constitute the basis for further generalizations. By doing so we elaborate the idea of a multilattice, and most notably, a trilattice of truth values – a specific algebraic structure with information ordering and two distinct logical orderings, one for truth and another for falsity. Each logical order not only induces its own logical vocabulary, but determines also its own entailment relation. We consider both semantic and syntactic ways of formalizing these relations and construct various logical calculi.

"What is truth?" has long been the philosophical question par excellence. The Nature of Truth collects in one volume the twentieth century's most influential philosophical work on the subject. The coverage strikes a balance between classic works and the leading edge of current philosophical research. The essays center around two questions: Does truth have an underlying nature? And if so, what sort of nature does it have? Thus the book discusses both traditional and deflationary theories of truth, as well as phenomenological, postmodern, and pluralist approaches to the problem. The essays are organized by theory. Each of the seven sections opens with a detailed introduction that not only discusses the essays in that section but relates them to other relevant essays in the book. Eleven of the essays are previously unpublished or substantially revised. The book also includes suggestions for further reading. Contributors Linda Martín Alcoff, William P. Alston, J.L. Austin, Brand Blanshard, Marian David, Donald Davidson, Michael Devitt, Michael Dummett, Hartry Field, Michel Foucault, Dorothy Grover, Anil Gupta, Martin Heidegger, Terence Horgan, Jennifer Hornsby, Paul Horwich, William James, Michael P. Lynch, Charles Sanders Pierce, Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, F.P. Ramsey, Richard Rorty, Bertrand Russell, Scott Soames, Ernest Sosa, P.F. Strawson, Alfred Tarski, Ralph C. Walker, Crispin Wright

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic comes an impassioned critique of America’s retreat from reason We live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked and discounted by the occupants of the White House. Discredited conspiracy theories and ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, and Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases. How did truth become an endangered species in contemporary America? This decline began decades ago, and in The Death of Truth, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to this gathering storm. In social media and literature, television, academia, and politics, Kakutani identifies the trends—originating on both the right and the left—that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science, and common values. And she returns us to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly and eerily relevant. With remarkable erudition and insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and points toward a new path for our truth-challenged times.

Western societies are under siege, as fake news, post-truth and alternative facts are undermining the very core of democracy. This dystopian narrative is currently circulated by intellectuals, journalists and policy makers worldwide. In this book, Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou deliver a comprehensive study of post-truth discourses. They critically map the normative ideas contained in these and present a forceful call for deepening democracy. The dominant narrative of our time is that democracy is in a state of emergency caused by social media, changes to journalism and misinformed masses. This crisis needs to be resolved by reinstating truth at the heart of democracy, even if this means curtailing civic participation and popular sovereignty. Engaging with critical political philosophy, Farkas and Schou argue that these solutions neglect the fact that democracy has never been about truth alone: it is equally about the voice of the democratic people. Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy delivers a sobering diagnosis of our times. It maps contemporary discourses on truth and democracy, foregrounds their normative foundations and connects these to historical changes within liberal democracies. The book will be of interest to students and scholars studying the current state and future of democracy, as well as to a politically informed readership.

"The Value of Philosophy" is one of the most important chapters of Bertrand's Russell's magnum Opus, The Problems of Philosophy. As a whole, Russell focuses on problems he believes will provoke positive and constructive discussion, Russell concentrates on knowledge rather than metaphysics: If it is uncertain that external objects exist, how can we then have knowledge of them but by probability. There is no reason to doubt the existence of external objects simply because of sense data.

From ancient Rome to the current Internet age, this sweeping history of ideas explores how different epochs wrestled with the issue of truth and lies.From the ancient Greeks and Romans to the modern era, how have people determined what is true? How have those with power and influence sought to control the narrative? Are we living in a post-truth era, or is that notion simply the latest attempt to control the narrative? The relationship between truth and power is the key theme.Moving through major historical periods, the author focuses on notable people and events, from well-known leaders like Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler to lesser-known individuals like Procopius and Savonarola. He notes distinct parallels in history to current events. Julius Caesar's publication of his Gallic Wars and Civil Wars was an early exercise in political spin not unlike what we see today. During the English Civil War and the Enlightenment, pamphleteering coupled with the new power of the printing press challenged the status quo, as online and social media does in our time. And "fake news" was already being used by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in nineteenth-century Europe and by the "yellow journalism" of American newspaper magnates William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer near the turn of the twentieth century.The author concludes optimistically, noting that we are debating and discussing truth more fiercely today than in any previous era. The determination to arrive at the truth, despite the manipulations of the powerful, bodes well for the future of democracy.

How the philosophy of Giambattista Vico was influenced by eighteenth-century Neopolitan painting Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.