Topics Philosophy

Question What's the criterion for the truth of a philosophical proposition? In philosophy as a general discipline, not in different doctrines. In science, it's the observed reality; in religion, it's the God's sayings revealed to its prophet and gathered in a book such as Bible, Quran, etc; in art, the matter is not the truth but beauty and seemingly the criterion should be the audience's experience when being exposed to the art work. But in philosophy what is it?

Accepted:
November 12, 2005

Comments

Much of it is consistency checking, and this involves playing off our intuitions against each other and trying to get rid of contradictions in our beliefs. The good news is consistency is a necessary condition for truth: if our beliefs are inconsistent they cannot all be true. The bad news is that consistency is not a sufficient condition for truth: there can be more than one system, where each system is interally consistent but where the systems are inconsistent with each other. But consistency turns out to be a suprisingly demanding constraint, particularly as you expand the set of beliefs in play, a set that will for example include scientific as well as philosophical claims. And notice that science too has limitations. Is is not as if observed reality enables scientists to prove their theories. They have a problem similar to the philosophers' problem of mutiple consistent systems. For no matter how much data a scientist gathers, there will always be in principle many theories that are consistent with those data but inconsistent with each other.