Question This has been bugging me for quite some time now. Is knowledge truth? Is truth knowledge? Are these concepts the same?

Accepted:
March 24, 2009

Comments

It is a requirement for something to be genuinely known to be true that it is true. So knowledge implies truth (in the sense that if X knows that so-and-so, then it is the case that so-and-so).

But that doesn't make knowledge the same as truth. The implication the other way around doesn't hold. There are truths that you don't know, that I don't know, and indeed that no one right now knows (maybe because nobody has bothered to find them out, maybe because the time has past when anyone could check, or because the truths are about far-off events like meteorite strikes on the far side of the moon, or for other kinds of reason).

Leaving ominiscient deities out of it, not every truth is known. But we might wonder whether every truth is knowable, in principle, e.g. by a suitably placed and sufficiently smart observer. The trouble with that idea is in spelling out the "in principle".

Question This has been bugging me for quite some time now. Is knowledge truth? Is truth knowledge? Are these concepts the same? Accepted:March 24, 2009

Question This has been bugging me for quite some time now. Is knowledge truth? Is truth knowledge? Are these concepts the same?

Accepted:
March 24, 2009