“Context is all” (Margaret Atwood). Does this mean that there is no such thing as truth?

To answer this question it is first necessary to define truth. One of the best definitions of truth is a ‘justified true belief’, but it can also be defined as a statement proven or accepted to be true. In essence truth is very hard to define, and so we are going to take ‘the truth’ as something which is believed to be true by the majority of people. This is because as a society, we take to be true what others see as truth, and what our ideals are based upon.

Friedrich Nietzsche is known to have said “there are many kinds of eyes… and consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths’ and consequently there is no truth.”. This implies that because the context of truth and the individual opinion matter so much truth cannot exist, as it is always changing. The context of information is a very important factor in how truth is viewed. However, it has not been agreed upon whether a reliance on context means that there is no such thing as truth. This essay is going to explore several different ways of finding truth, and how they relate to Atwood’s view of context, and then a conclusion will be made as to what extent the connection between contextual information and fact means that truth is nonexistent.

The first method I am going to look at is the correspondence theory. It insists that truth depends on how the world behaves, not on an assertion made by someone else, or on how one feels it should be. A statement is only true if, and only if, it corresponds to something in reality. This is described well by Thomas Aquinas “A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality”. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was brought about by thinking in a correspondence mindset, and it has had many bearing on how we see the world today. This theory is based on the reliance of ‘how the world works’ as its context to information. This agrees with Atwood’s statement about truth and context; however it does not imply that therefore there can be no such thing as truth, it is more centered on the idea that truth without context is not applicable to our lives. On the other hand, there are three main problems with this theory which cause it to be criticized by modern thinkers of today.

The first criticism of this theory is the problem with facts. The theory relies on a truth being equivalent to a fact, however that beings into play our reliance on what is fact. Certain facts are depended on more than others, for instance we take the fact that ‘London is the capital of England’ with more certainty than the general fact that ‘all metals can be shaped’, or the negative fact that ‘there are no monkeys on mars’. There is no strict book of fact, and the facts we use can, and do change - for instance it was once thought that the world was flat – this means that since our facts change then so can the truths around us. As to whether there is no such thing as truth, in this case it could be argued that since we cannot be sure that our views will not change we cannot be sure that the truth is accurate, and so in a sense there is no such thing as truth. Critics of this theory would use Margaret Atwood’s statement as proof that there could be no real truth, as opposed to setting a condition wit which truth should be viewed to make it relevant.

Join now!

The second censure of this theory is that correspondence can never be absolute. Experiences can be described with ample detail, and pictures can give us a sense of how something should look: however, the fact is that the truth described will never be the same as the truth experienced. The painting ‘Still life of fruit’ can give a good representation of fruit, and show us what it looks like and give us a sense of the texture and taste of it, however you cannot eat the painting, and so you cannot experience it in the same way as the artist. This ...

This is a preview of the whole essay