Rushmila Alam

“What I tell you three times is true” (Lewis Carroll) Might this formula – or a more sophisticated version of it – actually determine what we believe is true?

“The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people.” – Chinese fortune cookie. Often, what other people tell us is what we believe to be true. Even history is just a story told by other people. It is not possible to determine what has happened hundreds of years ago through empirical observation. Therefore we have to believe that what has been told is what is true. Most of our knowledge concerning certain specific classes comes to us from authority particularly since it is not possible for us to perform each experiment to determine whether what we have been told is true. But in other cases, just because someone tells us something three times or perhaps three people tell us the same thing, it does not mean that it has to be true. However, this does not stop us from believing that it is. Therefore what other people tell us does determine what we believe to be true, but it does not affect whether it is true.

What is truth? “Truth” is “the state of being the case; the body of real things, events and facts; a judgement, proposition or idea that is true or accepted as being true”. There are three tests to determine whether a statement is true or false. These are the correspondence test, the coherence test and the pragmatic test. The correspondence test, developed by Bertrand Russell, states that a concept is considered to be true, if the subjective mental concept is checked against a real object/event and corresponds to it. For example, if someone tells me that there is a car parked on the street, I can go outside and look and if there is a car, then the statement will be true, otherwise, it will be false. According to the coherence theory, a claim can be accepted as true if it harmonizes with other facts that have already been accepted as true. If someone states that he saw a cow jump over the moon, we can immediately dismiss his claim as being false since we know that it is impossible for that to happen because of the presence of gravity. The pragmatic theory of truth depends upon the subjective experience. It states that those concepts, which are proved to be worthwhile or useful, are true. For example, a person would accept his or her religious beliefs on a pragmatic basis. There are also three characteristics of truth – truth is public, and applies to everyone; truth is independent of anyone’s belief, that is, something may be false even if everyone believes it to be true, or it may be true, even if everyone believes it to be false; and finally, truth is eternal. Therefore, a statement would have to satisfy these criteria for it to be true. Even if every single person in the entire world told me that the sun revolves around the earth, it would not make it a fact.

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Truth and belief are totally different concepts. Even if it is not true that the sun revolves around the planet, and everyone told me that it did, I would believe that is true and would justify it by the fact that the sun appears at different positions during the day. “Belief” is “conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence”.1 To say that “this is true” is different from saying “I believe that this I true”. Belief in something could be a result of our own ...

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