Truth and Relativism

“Truth is most often used to mean in accord with fact or reality or fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal.”

Is truth an actual thing or is everyone’s idea of truth different? Can one person’s truth be untrue to someone else? Do things need to be accepted to be true?

If there is no “truth”, then there can be no knowledge. Truth, in terms of TOK is universal. A lot of things don’t even have to be accepted or believed to be true. For example, I believe that 5 + 5 = 11. However, the truth behind this math is 5 + 5 = 10. In regardless whether I believe or accept the truth, it remains at 5 + 5 = 10.

“Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration.”

The concept of Truth Relativism is a view that absolute truths do not exist, and truth depends on something else. To throw in an example, the expression “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, what is beautiful or ugly depends on the beholder, who is the person viewing it so it assumes that an absolute view of beauty does not exist. Relativists would believe that absolute truths do not exist. They would believe instead, that truth depends on external factors such as experience, culture, etc…

In my opinion, I think empiricism links to this content of truth. Empiricism is how we obtain knowledge from this world and is one of the greatest utility. In various ways, our senses are correct but it can also deceive us. The knowledge we obtain from the world isn’t always the same, we’re just more dependent to the opinions surrounded by people. Not only this affects it but our environment and our experiences can affect the way we perceive things. What we see may differ from what is truly there. Our mind often creates an image opposite to what is actually there. This relates to truth because it both obtains knowledge and without them we would be more isolated, causing unable to communicate with nature and human.

An Inspiring quote I heard during TOK class "It works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it".

Bible and the Koran

Can they both hold the truth?

Expanding…

Emotion

The scientist Edward O. Wilson has defined an emotion as 'the modification of neural activity that animates and focuses mental activity.

Some type of emotions:

• Happy
• Sad
• Anger
• Fear
• Confidence

The list could go on for a very long time but the point trying to be established here is that there are many emotions felt by the humans.

We found out that it can be both, satisfaction is classified as a feeling but is a state of mind one feels satisfaction when hormones are produced by the brain to do this. Also, pain is classified as an emotion, but it is a feeling based on physical means; when you get hurt you feel pain.

Emotions play a very big role in our way of making diction's and in are interaction with the world may depend on our emotions. There is a perfect example of this shown buy a famous case, of Phineas Gage.

Reason

Topic

Classification

Classification is to arrange or order by classes or categorize. In our daily basis, people always classify in the society we live in nowadays, to maintain an organized mind and arrange or sort things with differentials. We often classify because of physical appearance, and its function.

 There are different types of classifying such as giving example of school; students often classify other pupils as popular, nerds, funny, etc… classifying is a powerful tool when it comes to remembering and also gives us basic information about the object that we have classified that had been obtained by classifying. Just by seeing which category it fits in, we can know its function instantly.

 Is classifying always useful in our life? It gives several benefits, makes our life less complicated but it also has negative aspects which affects the society or contribute to the point where the world is divided into different cultures, nationalities and religions. Overall, classification tends to create stereotypes for example; people with glasses are usually considered nerds or book worms. We classified people with glasses with the basic information received from the category and simplified it.

We classify everything as it is our natural human behavior and for example in my case would be when buying a game from a store, I classify them by genres such as action, shooting, etc… To conclude, classifying gives us huge benefits but it could also create huge conflicts when it comes to society.