13.3. Problem of Truth

Truth is usually understood as correspond­ence of knowledge to object. Truth is adequate information about an object obtained through its sensuous or intellectual perception or report about it and characterized in terms of its reliability. Truth thus exists as a subjective or spiritual reality in its information and axiological aspects rather than as an objective reality. The value of knowledge is determined by the measure of its truth. In other words, truth is a property of knowledge itself rather than of the ob­ject of cognition.

Knowledge is reflection, and it exists as a sensuous or conceptual image of any degree of complexity, e.g., a theory as an integral sys­tem.

Truth must be defined as an adequate reflection of an object by the knowing subject, which reproduces reality such as it is by itself, outside and independent of consciousness. It is the objective content of sensuous, empirical experience as well as of the concepts, judgements, theories, and finally of the entire integral picture of the world in the dynamics of its development. The fact that the truth is an adequate reflection of reality in the dynamics of its development lends it special value connected with the prognostic dimension. True knowledge enables people to organize their practical activities in a rational manner in the present, and to foresee the future.

But mankind rarely grasps truths other than through extremes and errors. The progress of knowledge is not smooth. The history of science abounds in examples of errors being accepted as truths over hundreds of years. An error is an undesirable yet natural zigzag on the path towards truth.

Error is the content of consciousness that does not correspond to reality but is taken for the truth. The whole course of mankind's cog­nitive activity shows that errors, too, reflect — albeit in one-sided form — objective reality, they have a real source, an earthly basis.

Errors have their epistemological, psychological and social foundations. But they should be distinguished from lies as a moral-psychological phenomenon. Lies are a distortion of the actual state of affairs of which the goal is deceiving someone. A lie may be both an invention of something that did not exist or a deliberate conceal­ment of something that did. Logically incorrect thinking can also be a source of lies.

What we have said here mostly applies to cognition in the natural sciences. The situation is more complicated in social cognition. It is important to give analysis of facts to the point of revealing the truth and the objective causes which condition a given social event.

Absolute and relative truth. The system of scientific knowledge, and even everyday experience, is not a stockpile of ex­haustive information about being – it is an endless process, a move­ment, as it were, up a staircase leading from the lower stages of the limited and approximate to a more comprehensive and deep grasp of the essence of things.

Truth is historical. In this sense it is a child of the epoch. The concept of finite or immutable truth is no more than a ghost. Any object of knowledge is inexhaustible, it is constantly changing, it has a great variety of properties and is connected with countless threads of relationships with the surrounding world.

Each stage of cog­nition is restricted to the level of development of science and prac­tice, by the historical conditions of the life of society. Scientific knowledge, including the most accurate and reliable knowledge, is probabilistic. Truth is relative inasmuch as it reflects the object within certain limits and relations which constantly change and de­velop, rather than does it fully and exhaustively. Relative truth is limited true knowledge about something.

Mankind has ever striven to come close to knowledge of absolute truth. Absolute truths include ascertained facts, the dates of events, birth, death, etc.

Stated with complete clarity and authenticity, absolute truths do not encounter any further counter-arguments. In other words, abso­lute truth is identity of concept and object in thought – in the sense of complete coverage, of coincidence of essence and of all the forms of its manifestation. Absolute truth is a piece of knowledge that is not refuted by the subsequent development of science, but enriched and constantly re­affirmed by life.

The term "absolute" is also applied to any relative truth: inas­much as it is objective; it contains something absolute as one of its elements. Any truth may therefore be said to be absolute-relative. New scientific truths by no means discard their predecessors – they rather complement the latter, make them more concrete and include them as elements of deeper and more pro­found truths