[Daktoria]

I suppose that's true, but it's a little too close to "consensus" for me.

If you think correspondence and consensus are similar, then pragmatism is the closest to empiricism.

Heck, pragmatism subscribes to radical empiricism. Even Kant's original Critique of Practical Reason revolves around aesthetics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_empiricism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant- ... lObjReaTru

[grassroots1]

I took pragmatism to mean that the truth changes based on what is convenient to the person doing the evaluation. We all do this to some extent in that we have a bias toward opinions we already hold and so to some extent we shape reality around our existing thought processes and frameworks. But truth and objective reality is something that exists independently of our perception of it, so even if your conception of what the truth is has changed, that does not mean that reality has changed. Since I think reality exists independently of the mind and can be evaluated empirically and scientifically, I think truth can be determined empirically and scientifically.

[Daktoria]

I took pragmatism to mean that the truth changes based on what is convenient to the person doing the evaluation.

Yes. Verisimilitude is part and parcel with falsifiability. It determines acceptable margin of error.

We all do this to some extent in that we have a bias toward opinions we already hold and so to some extent we shape reality around our existing thought processes and frameworks. But truth and objective reality is something that exists independently of our perception of it, so even if your conception of what the truth is has changed, that does not mean that reality has changed. Since I think reality exists independently of the mind and can be evaluated empirically and scientifically, I think truth can be determined empirically and scientifically.

OK, but this doesn't sound empirical at all. Empiricism strictly emphasizes sensory perception, not conceptual judgment.

Correspondence is probably best for you. You're looking for anticipated conceptions that correspond to sensory data.

I'm not sure why you believe consensus and correspondence are similar now either.

[Section Leader]

Other.

Truth is a zeitgeist.

[Fraqtive42]

On second thought, I should add that Coherence is a necessary feature of truth as well.

[onemalehuman]

For me a test might be the unversality of something.

If 2 + 2 = 4 in all circumstances, then this is true.


The closer something is to being correct in all possible scenarios it could occour, the closer it is to being considered true.



The sun rises in the east. This is objectively true.

So for me I consider truth to be something objective. It is true because it is.

.

the sun is the solar system's north magnetic star. So it rises in the East, is directly opposite the position of earth at noon, sets in the west, and midnight is the opposite side of the solar system's north magnetic pole while the planet electromagnetic poles are perpendicular to the axis between the two sphere's equators giving the electro north and south opposing seasons during the space time exists between socistices and equinoxes during the revolution around said star in a fixed position of constant balancing as a sole solar system within a sole galaxy of the galaxies here now being balanced the same way in this same instant. Want to play relativity some more?

So why is dawn called East and not leading edge of circular motion around the star? Noon the front half facing the star, dusk the trailing half and midnight the back half while the seaonal opposites are top and bottom halves?

Six sides of the real moment rounding off the corners of squaring off theory against theology so male and female lifetimes adopt character roles in societal evolution every generation denying the real moment only exist presently.

2 and 2 of what makes 4 of what else? That is why subjectivity is existential, to prevent exponential thoughts within indivivdual sole results of ancestry. Create a common sense so no body uses all their own collectively 4 physical and one induced because of everything working as one lifetime of compounded elements from the periodic table the planet consists of as well. Inception, conception, death, and extinction. Fill in the other 4 corners of life's plants and animals, being predatory or prey and male and female means to reain part of the moment presently here now.

Time directs what to believe in not understand the functions taking place currently all the time.

[FrenchFried]

Other, truth is a lie.

[Baff]

the sun is the solar system's north magnetic star. So it rises in the East, is directly opposite the position of earth at noon, sets in the west, and midnight is the opposite side of the solar system's north magnetic pole while the planet electromagnetic poles are perpendicular to the axis between the two sphere's equators giving the electro north and south opposing seasons during the space time exists between socistices and equinoxes during the revolution around said star in a fixed position of constant balancing as a sole solar system within a sole galaxy of the galaxies here now being balanced the same way in this same instant. Want to play relativity some more?

So why is dawn called East and not leading edge of circular motion around the star? Noon the front half facing the star, dusk the trailing half and midnight the back half while the seaonal opposites are top and bottom halves?

Six sides of the real moment rounding off the corners of squaring off theory against theology so male and female lifetimes adopt character roles in societal evolution every generation denying the real moment only exist presently.

2 and 2 of what makes 4 of what else? That is why subjectivity is existential, to prevent exponential thoughts within indivivdual sole results of ancestry. Create a common sense so no body uses all their own collectively 4 physical and one induced because of everything working as one lifetime of compounded elements from the periodic table the planet consists of as well. Inception, conception, death, and extinction. Fill in the other 4 corners of life's plants and animals, being predatory or prey and male and female means to reain part of the moment presently here now.

Time directs what to believe in not understand the functions taking place currently all the time.

Irrelevant.
Relabel "east" with any other word of your preference, the sun still rises from the same direction every day.

[Wellsy]

Whilst consensus is a useful heuristic on many things, we look to others to see what the crowd is doing (or believing) to guide our own thoughts and actions. But it doesn't seem to really make much of a point about truth itself as something can clearly be prevalently believed whilst still not being true. I suppose a hesitation towards it is that many views and opinions in their early stages or suppressed by dominant forces or interest for its incompatibility can often hold more truth than that commonly prevails.
Coherence doesn't seem acceptable in that an assertion and it's refutation can both be coherent and one left in some sort of skeptical paralysis. Many things are coherent whilst not necessarily being correct though might double down on how strict something being coherent is to be, though it'd likely lose its colloquial meaning.
Pragmitism I think can fail in that some things can be quite useful whilst not true, necessary illusions perhaps. I see the example made that classical physics has in some sense been refuted and superseded by relativistic and quantum physics. But this doesn't mean classical physics is without use.
And the correspondence theory is inadequate on the basis that it is circular and excludes the perceiving subject.
http://braungardt.trialectics.com/projects/my-papers/lacan-parmenides/

The second reason for Lacan’s rejection of the adequation theory is the elimination of the subjective dimension of truth. It assumes that the knowing subject is self-transparent. What is the difference between a proposition “p” and “p is true”? Against deflationary theories of truth, which claim that there is no difference, one can argue that the second proposition, “p is true” is a proposition about a proposition: it adds not more content, but another dimension. This dimension is no longer independent from the subject. Whereas traditional theories of truth only consider the polar opposites true/false, Lacan considers the opposition truth/lie. The reason for his emphasis on the “I am lying” example is exactly this: If one only thinks of the relationship between concept and reality for the question of truth, as the adequation theory does, then one has already foreclosed the dimension where the question of truth gains its relevance for us: the human dimension. Subsequently, on the level of concept/reality alone, the “I am lying” becomes a paradox, because “I” can only be understood as an entity that thinks: being has ontological priority. (This is the shadow of Parmenides.) The contradiction dissolves if one separates “I” from being; the separation shifts the dimension of truth from concept/reality to subject/Other (understood as the locus of the signifier) or to the relationship subject/language. In order to gain such a two-dimensional view of the concept of “truth” one has to accept the priority of the signifier in relation to the signified as a well as in relation to the subject.

Representatives of the adequatio theory realized that although truth is always truth for somebody, it cannot be subjective. They argue that the subject has to be excluded from the definition of truth because we live in a common reality (the facts of the world are the same for all of us). The exclusion of the subject is done with the assumption that the mind – as mirror – is self-transparent and that the subject in its particularity can be separated from the epistemic process. Because human consciousness can be self-referential it is easy to assume that the “I” is identical with itself; the next step is the subtraction of the subject from the equation of truth, even if it is the subject that enunciates the truth-statement. For Lacan, then, the correspondence theory hides the deeper split between the subject and the real as well as the split within the subject itself. What remains is the construction of a common reality.

For every speaking being, the cause of its desire is, in terms of structure, strictly equivalent, so to speak, to its bending, that is, to what I have called its division as subject. That is what explains why the subject could believe for so long that the world knew as much about things as he did. The world is symmetrical to the subject — the world of what I last time called thought is the equivalent, the mirror image, of thought. That is why there was noth­ing but fantasy regarding knowledge until the advent of the most modern science.” 26

But I wonder what truth is in regards to Hegel's works who speaks of acquiring absolute knowledge through his dialectics, transcending the tension of contradictions and thus avoiding the paralysis of skepticism in order to produce something positive instead that resolves contradictions.
http://braungardt.trialectics.com/philosophy/philosophy-in-the-19th-century/hegel/hegels-grand-synthesis/

This brings us to an important point: Hegel says that it is just this insight into dialectic, that negativity involves contradiction, which characterizes scepticism. [67] In this sense, then, dialectic is a mode of thought or way of seeing things which can lead to the ruin of knowledge. This is a fascinating aspect of Hegel’s philosophy, that it is one and the same insight and way of thinking about things — the insight into the dialectical force of negativity inherent in things — which characterizes both scepticism {the ruin of knowledge) and the speculative philosophy which is the way to what Hegel calls “absolute knowledge.”

I take the impression that Hegel isn't neatly situated in the dichotomy of materialist or idealist in the commonly conceived sense, similarly with Marx as influenced by Hegelian philsophy presumably.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm

Spoiler: show

Before discussing the concept itself we must first consider the terms “ideal” and “ideality”, that is to say, we must first define the range of phenomena to which these terms may be applied, without analysing the essence of these phenomena at this point.

Even this is not an easy task because usage in general, and scientific usage in particular, is always something derivative of that very “understanding of the essence of the question” whose exposition our definition is intended to serve. The difficulty is by no means peculiar to the given case. It arises whenever we discuss fairly complex matters regarding which there is no generally accepted interpretation and, consequently, no clear definition of the limits of the object under discussion. In such cases discussion on the point at issue turns into an argument about the “meaning of the term”, the limits of a particular designation and, hence, about the formal attributes of phenomena that have to be taken into consideration in a theoretical examination of the essence of the question.

Returning to the subject of the “ideal”, it must be acknowledged that the word “ideal” is used today mainly as a synonym for “conceivable”, as the name for phenomena that are “immanent in the consciousness”, phenomena that are represented, imagined or thought. If we accept this fairly stable connotation, it follows that there is no point in talking about any “ideality” of phenomena existing outside human consciousness. Given this definition, everything that exists “outside the consciousness” and is perceived as existing outside it is a material and only a material object.

At first sight this use of the term seems to be the only reasonable one. But this is only at first sight.

Of course, it would be absurd and quite inadmissible from the standpoint of any type of materialism to talk about anything “ideal” where no thinking individual (“thinking” in the sense of “mental” or “brain” activity) is involved. “Ideality” is a category inseparably linked with the notion that human culture, human life activity is purposeful and, therefore, includes the activity of the human brain, consciousness and will. This is axiomatic and Marx, when contrasting his position regarding the “ideal” to Hegel’s view, writes that the ideal is “nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought”. [Capital, Afterword.]

It does not follow from this, however, that in the language of modern materialism the term “ideal” equals “existing in the consciousness”, that it is the name reserved for phenomena located in the head, in the brain tissue, where, according to the ideas of modern science, “consciousness” is realised.

In Capital Marx defines the form of value in general as “purely ideal” not on the grounds that it exists only “in the consciousness”, only in the head of the commodity-owner, but on quite opposite grounds. The price or the money form of value, like any form of value in general, is IDEAL because it is totally distinct from the palpable, corporeal form of commodity in which it is presented, we read in the chapter on “Money”. [Capital, Vol. I, pp. 98-99.]

In other words, the form of value is IDEAL, although it exists outside human consciousness and independently of it.

This use of the term may perplex the reader who is accustomed to the terminology of popular essays on materialism and the relationship of the material to the “ideal”. The ideal that exists outside people’s heads and consciousness, as something completely objective, a reality of a special kind that is independent of their consciousness and will, invisible, impalpable and sensuously imperceptible, may seem to them something that is only “imagined”, something “suprasensuous”.

The more sophisticated reader may, perhaps, suspect Marx of an unnecessary flirtation with Hegelian terminology, with the “semantic tradition” associated with the names of Plato, Schelling and Hegel, typical representatives of “objective idealism”, i.e., of a conception according to which the “ideal” exists as a special world of incorporeal entities (“ideas”) that is outside and independent of man. He will be inclined to reproach Marx for an unjustified or “incorrect” use of the term “ideal”, of Hegelian “hypostatisation” of the phenomena of the consciousness and other mortal sins, quite unforgivable in a materialist.

But the question is not so simple as that. It is not a matter of terminology at all. But since terminology plays a most important role in science, Marx uses the term “ideal” in a sense that is close to the “Hegelian” interpretation just because it contains far more meaning than does the popular pseudo-materialistic understanding of the ideal as a phenomenon of consciousness, as a purely mental function. The point is that intelligent (dialectical) idealism – the idealism of Plato and Hegel – is far nearer the truth than popular materialism of the superficial and vulgar type (what Lenin called silly materialism). In the Hegelian system, even though in inverted form, the fact of the dialectical transformation of the ideal into the material and vice versa was theoretically expressed, a fact that was never suspected by “silly” materialism, which had got stuck on the crude – undialectical – opposition of “things outside the consciousness” to “things inside the consciousness”, of the “material” to the “ideal”.

The “popular” understanding of the ideal cannot imagine what insidious traps the dialectics of these categories has laid for it in the given case.

Marx, on the other hand, who had been through the testing school of Hegelian dialectics, discerned this flaw of the “popular” materialists. His materialism had been enriched by all the achievements of philosophical thought from Kant to Hegel. This explains the fact that in the Hegelian notion of the ideal structure of the universe existing outside the human head and outside the consciousness, he was able to see not simply “idealistic nonsense”, not simply a philosophical version of the religious fairy-tales about God (and this is all that vulgar materialism sees in the Hegelian conception), but an idealistically inverted description of the actual relationship of the “mind to Nature”, of the “ideal to the material”, of “thought to being”. This also found its expression in terminology.

But I don't really know the details of how Hegel engages with Descartes dualism and what he takes from Spinoza. But I'm sure there could even be some skepticism and critique thrown to the epistemology of Hegel that I wouldn't understand. But I think it might point to a better conception of what truth should be than something like the correspondence of truth which leads to imagining some God's all seeing eye rather than the difficult task of considering how we can conceive of truth (if such a thing is possible). I assume the correspondence theory has some favor with British empiricism. Which sounds like it also fits with the sense that empirical objects exist and the properties we perceive in them but aren't actually part of the object itself are some sort of unexplained subjectivity that's ignored as it's not objective and truth has to be objective.
http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/2014/04/13/ilyenkovs-dialectic-of-the-abstract-and-the-concrete-i/

Ilyekov then reviews the failure of the empiricism of James Stuart Mill:

“For example, value in general, value as such, may according to Mill be conceived in abstraction, without analysing any of the types of its existence outside the head. This may and must be done precisely for the reason that it does not exist as a real property of objects outside the head. It only exists as an artificial method of assessment or measurement, as a general principle of man’s subjective attitude to the world of things, that is, as a certain moral attitude. It cannot therefore be considered as a property of things themselves, outside the head, outside consciousness.

According to this kind of logic, of which Mill is a classic representative, that is precisely why value should be regarded only as a concept, only as an a priori moral phenomenon independent from the objective properties of things outside the head and opposing them. As such, it exists only in self-consciousness, in abstract thinking. That is why it can be conceived ‘abstractly’, and that will be the correct mode of considering it.”

Hence why everything is so simple for the empiricists as material reality has been rigorously defined in advance as existing outside of the head that much of sophisticated philosophical enquiry into the nature of logic was seen as wasted effort. This mode of thought is the dominant one in western philosophy whereby we can dispense with abstract thought being a reflection of anything in the material world as this is completely fixed, unchangeable or static. All that is required is to gather more knowledge of the real existing state of things whereby we accumulate more understanding of it; a mere piling up of more and more facts about the objects of investigation before us. In this sense abstract thought has no real place in philosophy and definitely not in logic but deserves to be placed in the field of ethics or morals.

Ilyekov dismantles the faults of this system by recourse to the advances in logic made by Hegel.

But perhaps this would help situate their epistemology.
Hegel and Marx don't fit within common philosophical distinctions it appears as they try to resolve the unbridgeable contradictions into some sort of whole, something more complete. Can see that they both reject a kind of foundationalism in either rationalism or empiricism but reconcile the empirical world with a developed abstractions that return to the concrete to identify the essence of things. And in this, the mediation of it is found in human activity, one's actual relation to the world.

[One Degree]

It appears Pofo has lost some deep thinkers. Interesting topic to revive, but the consensus appears to be 'truth is fleeting' and therefore of no real importance. What people need/want is what determines the truth of the moment.

[MistyTiger]

This is an interesting topic indeed.

I think that if something is true, it lasts. I am still puzzling over how truth is fleeting.

Truth of the moment is different than a lasting truth and that distinction should be made. One is like a fad and the other is an established truth that will never change.

[Wellsy]

I was thinking about counselling and ended up thinking about how in both it and teaching, you don't go forthright in trying to tell people how shit is but have to kind of cultivate an interest, a desire, a change in perspective from them.
http://www.siue.edu/EASTASIA/Tim%20Huson_12-01-2008.htm

Spoiler: show

eaching with an Empty Bucket
According to one well-known model of teaching, the teacher has a big bucket of water from which the students will try to gather a few drops to put into their empty buckets. It's nothing new to say that this model creates dependency and cheap imitation, and not the independence of thought needed to change the world and resist tyranny – which I think are needed today. In both the West and the East, this view has long ago been challenged by a variety of teaching models that focus on the development of latent potential in the student and the role of the teacher as facilitator in bringing the student to the position where she can activate that potential.

There is a long tradition of such teaching in both East and West. The Socratic teaching depicted by Plato is usually characterized by the teacher's use of dialogue to draw the student into making his own conclusions based on his own internal reasoning process. One might think that this reasoning process is social, not individual, if it weren't for the importance given to the role of Socrates' little demon (daimonion) or voice, which invokes a non-social aspect.[8] Again, with the view of education found in Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic there is something structurally similar to the teachings of Chan Buddhism – the world we normally live in, the one the cave-dwellers see flickering on the wall of the cave, is an illusion and education consists in liberation from that illusion in the "turning of the soul."

If we fast-forward some 2300 years, to Friedrich Nietzsche, we again find the Socratic motif, this time as liberation from the dominant herd-oriented thought: "Your teacher can only be your liberator. And that is the secret of all education: it doesn't offer artificial limbs, wax noses, bespectacled eyes – rather, what these borrowings can give is only the false effigy of education."[9] Again, education comes from inside, and not from outside. And the liberation is not only psychological, but also involves a changed view of reality itself. But here as well, no view is offered as to how teacher plays the role of facilitator. That view comes up, I believe, only when education is seen in terms of liberation from the illusion of an errant discourse and, thus, the teacher's role is seen as an intersubjective symbolic intervention into the student's errant discourse, enabling the student to break from the illusion and achieve the satori of Zen Buddhism or psychoanalytic cure.

And it got me back to thinking stuff expressed by Lacan which complicates the truth/false dichotomy.

Spoiler: show

Here's a piece about the pathological nature of cheating.

If we formulate the example of jealousy in terms of the common reading of the formula of fetishism, we get the following statement: 'I know my wife's not cheating on me, but all the same I believe she is cheating on me.' Here, the pathological character of jealousy amounts to the opposition between knowledge and belief: the husband's suspicion is pathological because it opposes his knowledge, and as soon as it proves to be founded, as soon as this external opposition between knowledge and belief is dismissed (in favour of knowledge), the pathological dimension of his jealousy vanishes, too.

Lacan's formula is founded on a more radical concept of the pathological, on a radical notion of mystification as an inherent characteristic of jealousy, which as such remains pathological despite better knowledge. The formula given above entials two key operations. The twofold operation consists of the 'repression' of the belief and the formation of a substitute; that is, rationalisation (Zizek, 1991, p. 242), assuming, say, the following (chauvinistic) form: 'I know she's not cheating on me, but a statistical fact remains that women are cheater not to be trusted.'

Let us oppose this example the formula that doesn't require 'external' negation: 'I know she is cheating on me, but all the same I believe she is cheating on me.' IN the first case the belief ('That she's cheating on me') is 'repressed' because it pragmatically contradicts better knowledge ('that she's not cheating on me'); that is because, it negates the very content of knowledge. In the second case, this ground for 'repression' falls away, since belief in this case neither contradicts knowledge nor negates its content. But the 'repression' nonetheless remains in place and so does jealousy's pathological character. The gist of this pathological nature of jealousy can be formulate as follows: 'You know you are being cheated on, so why are you still jealous? Why do you still believe she's cheating on you when in fact you know well she's cheating on you? Why are you rationalising?

Imagine a husband who suspects that his wife is unfaithful and hires a detective who confirms his suspicion. Yet the husband doesn't want to act upon his knowledge; he refuses to draw the consequences and decides to keep on living the old way. It would be too simple to claim that he doesn't want to know and that he would much rather sacrifice his knowledge (of her unfaithfulness) in favour of his belief (in her faithfulness), sticking to the lie and 'repressing the truth. Such a reading misses the fact that he believed in her unfaithfulness, not faithfulness, and that his decision to stay with her is not a decision to believe in her faithfulness despite better knowledge. The situation is more complex: despite his knowledge of her unfaithfulness, he keeps on believing in her unfaithfulness. His knowledge is not disavowed by a naive illusionof her faithfullness; he disavoids it in an 'enlightened' way by continuing to believ ein her unfaithfulness, which enables him to stick to his (mere) suspciion. The fetishist disavowal thus negates without engating the predicate - knowledge is disavowed not by way of not believing, by not wanting to believe, but, more radically, by believing in it, by wanting to believe. THe husband is deceiving himself by way of the truth. He knows he is being cheated on, but, he continues to act as if he believed he is being cheated on (by, say, performing the usual rituals of suspicion and yielding to excessive outbursts of jealousy). This surplus of belief at work in materiality of his actions, this 'too-muchness' of knowledge, forms the element that engages his enjoyment and effeectively makes his jealousy pathological.

The key element of my formula of 'fetishism without the fetish' thus concerns a contradiction, reduced, in this reading, to its degree zero. The subtraction of the 'external' negation between my knowledge that x and my simultaneous belief that non-x doesn't substract from the contradiction as such but, on the contrary, presents it in its minimal and purely formal state, as a pure gap, a formal surplus of knowledge, which has no content but stands for a pure self-distance of knowledge, for its inherently inconsistent character.

The same point is expressed by Zizek about how the real question isn't about whether something is true, but more about questioning the reason one interprets it or is motivated to affirm that truth, the theoretical perspective that interprets the fact in a certain way.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/2361

And exactly the same goes for the looting in New Orleans: Even if all the reports on violence and rapes had proven to be factually true, the stories circulating about them would still be “pathological” and racist, since what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: “You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!” In other words, we would be dealing with what could be called lying in the guise of truth: Even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.

And this complicates a theory of truth which I think helps make some more sense about that earlier quote about Lacan's approach where he rejects the correspondence theory of truth which treats the subject as a mirror of reality.

The correspondence theory utilizes a mirror model between subject and world; the removal of the mirror leaves us in the dark concerning the real.

The second reason for Lacan’s rejection of the adequation theory is the elimination of the subjective dimension of truth. It assumes that the knowing subject is self-transparent. What is the difference between a proposition “p” and “p is true”? Against deflationary theories of truth, which claim that there is no difference, one can argue that the second proposition, “p is true” is a proposition about a proposition: it adds not more content, but another dimension. This dimension is no longer independent from the subject. Whereas traditional theories of truth only consider the polar opposites true/false, Lacan considers the opposition truth/lie. The reason for his emphasis on the “I am lying” example is exactly this: If one only thinks of the relationship between concept and reality for the question of truth, as the adequation theory does, then one has already foreclosed the dimension where the question of truth gains its relevance for us: the human dimension. Subsequently, on the level of concept/reality alone, the “I am lying” becomes a paradox, because “I” can only be understood as an entity that thinks: being has ontological priority. (This is the shadow of Parmenides.) The contradiction dissolves if one separates “I” from being; the separation shifts the dimension of truth from concept/reality to subject/Other (understood as the locus of the signifier) or to the relationship subject/language. In order to gain such a two-dimensional view of the concept of “truth” one has to accept the priority of the signifier in relation to the signified as a well as in relation to the subject.

Representatives of the adequatio theory realized that although truth is always truth for somebody, it cannot be subjective. They argue that the subject has to be excluded from the definition of truth because we live in a common reality (the facts of the world are the same for all of us). The exclusion of the subject is done with the assumption that the mind – as mirror – is self-transparent and that the subject in its particularity can be separated from the epistemic process. Because human consciousness can be self-referential it is easy to assume that the “I” is identical with itself; the next step is the subtraction of the subject from the equation of truth, even if it is the subject that enunciates the truth-statement. For Lacan, then, the correspondence theory hides the deeper split between the subject and the real as well as the split within the subject itself. What remains is the construction of a common reality.

For every speaking being, the cause of its desire is, in terms of structure, strictly equivalent, so to speak, to its bending, that is, to what I have called its division as subject. That is what explains why the subject could believe for so long that the world knew as much about things as he did. The world is symmetrical to the subject — the world of what I last time called thought is the equivalent, the mirror image, of thought. That is why there was noth*ing but fantasy regarding knowledge until the advent of the most modern science.” 26

And whilst I'm not that acquainted with Lacan, it does at least seem to speak to some sort of mediation in our relationship to reality. And Althusser, someone who I think was influenced by Lacan, expressed that we have a symbolic relationship with one another.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.

And this makes me think of those who use triads perhaps to help overcome the limitations of dualism.

Dichotomies and Triads
Hegel always took care to foreswear, somewhat counter-factually, any commitment to triads, Marx cared not a hoot for any such thing, but Peirce was insistent on the importance of the triadic relation. I side with Peirce on this issue. Wherever we see a relation, we look for the mediating term.

The dichotomous relationships which lie at the heart of positivist, structuralist and poststructuralist theory act, in my view, as a barrier to understanding. The dichotomy acts in two ways: firstly, in response to every proposition, it asks what is denied, excluded or reflected; which is all very well, but secondly, it splits the universe into two independent realms according to what is given and what is denied or reflected. As a result of the failure of the two worlds to be perfect mirror images of one another (there can be no final one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified), each then becomes a self-sustaining and meaningless tautology. The rupture of the world of activity into signifiers and signified is the archetypal case. Dichotomy is the logic of choice for the professional dogmatist, since by its means he can rule in a world composed entirely of text, unchallenged by events in the world beyond the text.

The Peircean or Hegelian trichotomy on the other hand, responds to every relation, every contrast and every meaning by asking what mediates the relation. This has the effect of everywhere generating yet new avenues for enquiry, and instead of rupturing the field of activity into mutual alien and meaningless realms, makes connections between what was otherwise separated. Fichte’s notion of activity, mediating between subject and object, did away with dualism of Kant’s transcendental subject and thing-in-itself. Although Fichte’s activity was not itself mediated activity, it was Fichte’s insight which opened the way for the Hegelian and Peircean systems. The sign-object-interpretant trichotomy is the archetypal case.

To which Lacan has a theoretical triad of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.
I don't know much about Lacan nor what each part of his triad really means and how they relate to one another.
But if it did make sense to me, then might be able to understand the above passage

The contradiction dissolves if one separates “I” from being; the separation shifts the dimension of truth from concept/reality to subject/Other (understood as the locus of the signifier) or to the relationship subject/language. In order to gain such a two-dimensional view of the concept of “truth” one has to accept the priority of the signifier in relation to the signified as a well as in relation to the subject.

That last part where there's a relationship between the signifier, the signified and the subject.
The material form of something/symbols, the concept it's meant to evoke and the percieving person.
I don't get what it means to give the signifier priority and how this relates to the above points where subjectivity isn't a direct relation to the world though that is part of it for sure.
And maybe this has to do with the subject not being a coherent self/I.

[One Degree]

Truth is recognized by its simplicity. You will not find it in through intellectual writings.

[Saeko]

Truth is recognized by its simplicity. You will not find it in through intellectual writings.

Especially not in pseudo-intellectual writings like Zizek and Lacan.

[mikema63]

I like the coherence theory of truth, seeing as I don't believe it's possible to truly know things to be true in the way people mean when they talk about truth.

At best there are things that we can be very certain of, like that we exist in some form or another, math, that things are real, etc.

[One Degree]

Or perhaps truth based upon our own interests.
Thou shalt not kill because I don't want you to kill me.

[mikema63]

People believe things that benefit them that's certainly true, but then again most people don't think of things like truth in the deeper philosophical context we are talking about.

Someone believing a thing is different than the idea of something being true in the philosophical sense.

[Wellsy]

Truth is recognized by its simplicity. You will not find it in through intellectual writings.

I would imagine simplicity or complexity would be irrelevant to the status of an epistemology.
Even in simplicity there is complexity and effort required to boil it down I believe.
Something like François de La Rochefoucauld's maxims of Musashi Miyamoto's Dokkōdō don't come with ease.

Or perhaps truth based upon our own interests.
Thou shalt not kill because I don't want you to kill me.

This perhaps sounds like a pragmatist approach to truth, where the utility of something marks it with truth. But there's a lot that can be untrue and still useful, lies that help to some end. Things we know are false but are still useful, which again would coincide with Zizek's point of how people know things to be false yet they still function as if it's true. Which in regards to ideology is important because many people are under the impression that if people were simply given the right facts that/information, everything else would naturally follow from that awareness.

But, moving on...
what I'm thinking about is in what way our our relation to reality isn't simply empirical and it is a great fault of empiricism that it treats the subject as a mirror of reality and abstraction as superfluous by avoiding it entirely.
http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/2014/04/13/ilyenkovs-dialectic-of-the-abstract-and-the-concrete-i/

Hence why everything is so simple for the empiricists as material reality has been rigorously defined in advance as existing outside of the head that much of sophisticated philosophical enquiry into the nature of logic was seen as wasted effort. This mode of thought is the dominant one in western philosophy whereby we can dispense with abstract thought being a reflection of anything in the material world as this is completely fixed, unchangeable or static. All that is required is to gather more knowledge of the real existing state of things whereby we accumulate more understanding of it; a mere piling up of more and more facts about the objects of investigation before us. In this sense abstract thought has no real place in philosophy and definitely not in logic but deserves to be placed in the field of ethics or morals.

Any theory of truth that isn't considerate to our subjectivity will most likely be insufficient.

[One Degree]

You lost me. If you know something is untrue but useful, it has nothing to do with recognizing truth. You have simply ignored truth and then use it as an argument against recognizing truth.

[Wellsy]

You lost me. If you know something is untrue but useful, it has nothing to do with recognizing truth. :?: You have simply ignored truth and then use it as an argument against recognizing truth. :?:

Well the utility of something doesn't tell you what truth is really, you can find something useful and have no understanding about it except that it's useful, so utility isn't really much of an epistemology. Though I do have the impression that it didn't place truth purely in the bounds of reason and emphasized acting upon the world in the same way that folks like Engels emphasized the proof was in the pudding of interacting with the world.
Another point in relation to your sense of the truth being simple I think you might find interesting is how in education. People are often intentionally taught something that isn't exactly true in order to advance their knowledge so that they can later on grasp the more complex points that are thought to be truer. Conceptual tools that don't reflect the truth but are useful to eventually learn it.

But what I was thinking was something I said earlier that was quite strong, too strong, where spoke about classical physics being made false by quantum physics.
But truth and falsity is probably more of a partial thing than true = 0 and false = 1 for certain things and not others.

Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.

As it seems some classical physics equations have just been made more nuanced with improved understanding rather than outright rejected.

And as a general claim though cbf trying to think stuff up, my point about lies being useful seems to be a point that utility isn't inevitably touching on the truth. But then might want to put qualifiers on what kind of utility we're thinking are finding out the truth.