forum for week of 28 November: pragmatism

I really agree with the statement "all truths are merely convenient fictions". Just like with ethics/politics, right or wrong is dictated by the culture and situation, truth in epistemology can in fact be quite arbitrary. We don’t know that there are objective truths out there. And even if they did exist, we simply don’t have the capacity to know that.

Like mentioned in class, we don’t actually know that the elliptical motion of the planets around the sun is in fact true; there could be some complicated motion at work, which creates this seemingly elliptical motion instead. If this were true, then perhaps, we are only using the simplest, most efficient explanation to explain what we observe, rather than the right one. So I think whatever “truths” we think we have are deemed true because we make them true.