Over the past year I have been thinking a lot about the nature of truth. It all began with an independent study in
modal logic I took in the spring semester of 2003 at Tabor. At this point I won't go into the details of how I got from "there" to this blog. However, suffice to say that somewhere along the way I became suspicious of the whole notion of necessary truth (e.g. the idea that a proposition such as '7 is a prime number' is not only true but is necessarily so: it
must be true). This was only the beginning. Now I have come to the point where I question the whole notion of truth as it is conventionally conceived. What my questions are and what answers can be given to them is at the heart of the purpose of this blog.
Let me preface any further discussion with the statement that I realize there are certain tricky issues to be dealt with when we start to question the idea of truth. For example, the existence of something we might call God. It seems straightforward that if one questions the idea of truth, then one is thereby questioning the idea of God--i.e. one is questioning the
existence of God. At this point, however, I contend that this is not the case, even though it seems to be 'straightforward.' This is only one example.
Since this is a blog and therefore is a rather informal way of developing philosophical ideas, I do not intend to be entirely systematic in my approach. This implies a certain element of incompleteness to my ideas as they are described here. But the purpose of this blog is not to definitively answer my questions about truth, but to raise some issues in an environment which is more public than, e.g., my own mind or in my journal (the two places that the ideas to be discussed here have already been considered for some time). This is my purpose; this is my hope.
To conclude the first post of this blog and hence to initiate a philosophical journey of sorts, let me say that the ideas expressed here are not intended to be original. If any of them are, then I hope they will accomplish something good. However, most likely these ideas have been anticipated somewhere by someone either in the present or in the past. In that case, I do not care. This is because of the corollary purpose of this blog: to be an exploration. If ideas are not original but are arrived at through one's independent meditation or reflection, then the ideas are just as valuable. True learning does not happen by knowing what others have said or written, but by truly "owning" the ideas one encounters--i.e. coming to the ideas on one's own steam, so to speak. This is the secondary purpose of this blog: to be an intellectual exploration.
