Re: re: How about wanting everyone to know the truth
Both of these statements are meaningless without a definition of "truth".
There are strong, sophisticated arguments that "truth" in a technical sense can only accurately refer to formal truths – that is, tautologies under a formal system (a logic) that express sentences reducible to the axioms of the system under its production rules. Even there, of course, it's extremely easy to accidentally introduce a contradiction, rendering the entire set of statements inconsistent and therefore useless. (See Gödel, Chaitin, Kolmogorov, Löb, etc.)
Theories of "truth" which attempt to extend it out of the formal realm, even the ones that may people think are obvious such as naïve realism, quickly run into problems.
Charlie's proposition is supportable under various arguments, such as solipsism and Descarte's Evil Genius. In short, any human perception of truth has to begin with an assumption of trust in the individual's cognitive processes – that what you think is logically consistent in fact is, and you're not being deceived by mental defect or manipulation. Any realism has to begin with an assumption of trust in the evidence of the senses; even with technological instruments at some point the human reasoner has to perceive and interpret some report of the evidentiary data. Those are both subjective assumptions.
Realists posit that natural "truth" exists in the universe independent of human perception and cognition. That's a position you can hold and defend, but ultimately it's an act of faith, as is the belief that the universe is anything other than a construct of your own mind.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
