incoherent. There are, certainly, small areas regarding issues of personal taste and comfort where a very limited restriction of truth to perspectives seems appropriate. The statement “This ice cream is good!” might be an apt example. It could be true for you — from your perspective, given your tastes — but not for me. But that is very different from the statement, “This ice cream is three years old!” which is a standard truth claim and is not subject to relativistic restriction. Compare the difference between “It’s too hot in here” and “It’s over 90 degrees in this room.” It is the latter statement that is a better example of standard claims about reality. And it is either true or false. No relativity of perspective muddies the water.
Truth is your intellectual and existential tie to the world. Believing a truth, or stating a truth, is like hitting a target. Falsehood misses the mark. Truth anchors you to reality. Falsehood cuts your connection to the way things really are. People need truth like they need air, or food, or water. Falsehood, by contrast, damages, diminishes, and even kills. Something can seem “true for me” but really be false. Nothing can be true for me unless it’s true of me, or about me, or just simply and objectively true. Truth is ultimately an accurate correspondence with reality. And yes, sometimes it’s hard to determine, and the most we can do is to judge it in connection with our best efforts, the preponderance of the evidence available, or in connection with testing the most advanced theories we currently have available. Yet, as good old common sense tells us, truth is ultimately a matter of representing reality about things outside the confines of our own perspectives.
The complete definition of knowledge
One necessary condition for knowledge is belief. (See the earlier section “Understanding Belief.”) A second is truth (as it is explained in the immediately preceding section). Knowledge is built on true belief. But these two conditions are not alone sufficient for knowledge. I can believe something, and my belief can be true without my actually knowing the thing believed. More is needed.
Suppose that you were somehow to conjure up for yourself right now the belief that, at this very moment, the world’s richest man is brushing his teeth. Imagine you actually make yourself believe this, by sheer force of will, or you are hypnotized into believing it. And suppose further that, by extraordinary coincidence alone, the richest man in the world happens at this very moment to be polishing those shiny molars, nearly ready to rinse and spit. You have the belief. And the belief happens to be true. But you have no evidence of its truth. No proper connections have conveyed the truth to you. Imagine you just got lucky and happened to hold the belief at a rare moment when something was going on that made it true. Philosophers will deny that you had real knowledge of the fact stated. You did not know that the man in question was brushing. A wildly lucky coincidence of correspondence is not the appropriate attainment. Seneca (the practical Roman Stoic philosopher) pointed out a parallel situation by declaring that, “luck never made a man wise.” Luck can’t confer knowledge either. An amazing coincidence is not a connection sufficient to create something as solid as knowledge is meant to be.
Philosophers insist that, in order for a state of belief to qualify as knowledge, there must be a real link, a proper connection, a tie of some sort like a causal chain, between your mental state of affirmation and the state of reality which makes that affirmation true. Furthermore, this link must be of the right sort to properly justify my having that belief. If I see my cat Mollie on the bed and that visual perception has caused me in normal ways to form the belief that “Mollie is on the bed,” then most philosophers will grant that my belief counts as knowledge. I don’t just believe she is on the bed; I know it.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS: A RANDOM SAMPLE
The difference between truth and falsehood can indeed be the difference between life and death. Consider the following statements, which, if false, in the right (or wrong) circumstances could be your last:
“This is not as dangerous as it looks.”
“We’re not that close to the edge.”
“I’m sober enough. Come on, it’ll be fine.”
“No, this is how you connect the wires.”
“If it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
My point? There is an absolute difference between truth and falsehood. And it matters!
Knowledge is properly justified true belief. If you were looking at a live broadcast on CNN of the world’s richest man, properly identified as such, leaning over his bathroom sink, brushing his teeth, your resultant true belief that “The world’s richest man is now brushing his teeth” would then have been properly justified and could have counted as real knowledge. You could also use that link to defend your claim to know that the man in question was brushing away. The question “How do you know?” would then be suitably answered by the response, “I’m seeing it right now live on CNN.”
What exactly is proper justification? What counts as a sufficient reason, or as adequate grounds, for a belief to be reasonably held, and to count as knowledge? The poet Ovid advised all of us long ago, “Do not believe hastily.” And his advice was good. And we need to explore this question of justification more thoroughly.
Truth and rationality
We live in a world of wildly irrational beliefs. People seem to believe all sorts of crazy things. If you ever venture into the darker corners of the web or onto the strangest social media feeds of our time and actually read what is said there, you may find yourself astonished. If you venture out from your comfort zone and expose yourself to some of the more outlandish claims people make these days, you quickly realize that they don’t appear to be doing it as a joke. There seems to be no limit to what some people can believe, or seek to spread online for others to believe. The various social media in our time have proved that beyond any doubt, in case you ever had any doubt. In fact, it has often been observed that there is a strong tendency in human life for people to believe whatever they want to believe, whether those beliefs are even remotely rational, or justified, or not.
You should want to be reasonable in your beliefs because, when used well, reason can connect you more reliably to truth. It’s then important to value rationality as a road to truth, and thus to knowledge. But that means you need to know what reason is. You need to understand something about rationality and why you should value it in your ongoing quest for truth in the world.
The prominent twentieth century philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: “The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered it in the most astonishing ways.” That comment applies well to imagination, but also to reason. Reason is just the power you have to organize and interpret the materials of your experience in the
