Many people, regardless of their origin, education, religious affiliation and occupation, evaluate certain judgments according to the degree to which they correspond to the truth. And, it would seem, they get a rather harmonious picture of the world. But, as soon as they begin to wonder what the truth is, everyone, as a rule, begins to get stuck in the wilds of concepts and wallow in disputes. Suddenly it turns out that there are a lot of truths, and some may even contradict each other. And it becomes completely incomprehensible what truth is in general and on whose side it is. Let's try to figure it out.
Truth is the correspondence of any judgment of reality. Any statement or thought is either true or false initially, regardless of the person’s knowledge of the matter. Different eras put forward their criteria of truth.
So, during the Middle Ages, it was determined by the degree of conformity with Christian doctrine, and under the rule of materialists -
scientific knowledge of the world. At the moment, the scope of the answer to the question of what is truth has become much wider. It began to be divided into groups, new concepts were introduced.
Absolute truth is an objective reproduction of reality. She exists outside our consciousness. That is, for example, the statement "the sun is shining" will be absolute truth, since it really shines, this fact does not depend on human perception. It would seem that everything is clear. But some scholars argue that absolute truth does not exist in principle. This judgment is based on the fact that a person cognizes the whole world around him through perception, and it is subjective and cannot be a true reflection of reality. But whether absolute truth exists is a separate issue. Now it is important that
this concept is intended for the convenience of its assessment and classification. One of the basic
laws of logic, the Law of Non-contradiction, reports that two judgments contradicting each other cannot be true or false at the same time.
That is, one of them will certainly be true, and the other will not. This law can be used to test the "absoluteness" of truth. If the judgment cannot coexist with the opposite, then it is absolute.
Relative truth is a true, but incomplete or one-sided judgment about an object. For example, the statement "women wear dresses." It is true, some of them really wear dresses. But with the same success it can be said and vice versa. “Women don’t wear dresses” - this will also be true. After all, there are ladies who do not wear them. In this case, both statements cannot be considered absolute.
The very introduction of the term “relative truth” became a recognition of mankind's incompleteness of knowledge about the world and the limitations of its judgments. It is also associated with the weakening of the authority of religious teachings and the emergence of many philosophers who deny the very possibility of an objective perception of reality. “Nothing is true, and everything is permitted” - a judgment that most vividly illustrates the direction of critical thought.
Obviously, the concept of truth is still imperfect. It continues its formation in connection with a change in philosophical directions. Therefore, we can confidently say that the question of what is truth will concern more than one generation.