To tell the truth…
Almost all of us learnt in school --“Always tell the truth”. Since then, the more we can grasp the meaning of the truth, the more we comprehend the risks involved in telling the truth at the wrong time and wrong place! I browsed the encyclopaedia to know why telling truth doesn't do justice to us.
For thousands of years, philosophy is on its relentless quest for the answer to the question “what is truth.” According to philosophical reasoning, what one thinks true is true only when the criteria by which it is judged are true. The four main theories, in philosophy, proposed to answer this question, are the correspondence, pragmatic, coherence, and deflationary theories of truth.
The correspondence theory traces its origin thousand years back in the 4th century BC. Greek philosopher Plato proposed the theory based on intuitive recognition. The core of his argument was that true statements correspond to the factsthat is, agree with realitywhile false statements do not.
American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, in the late 19th-century, offered another answer. The pragmatist asserted that truth is that which experts will agree upon when their investigations are final.
A third theory of truth is the coherence theory that also concerns the meaning of knowledge. Coherence theorists have claimed that a set of beliefs is true if the beliefs are comprehensivethat is, they cover everythingand do not contradict each other.
At this juncture appear some theorists who advocate what is known as deflationary theories. They concur that there is a number of occasions in which a sentence such as “it is true that they've gone back on their word” can have different impact than the shorter statement “they've gone back on their word”. Ironically, here the use of “it is true” deflates quality of the statement alluding to that most of it is true.
Honestly, as I was telling, people don't let on truth when it means letting the cat out of the bag. Sometimes, truth is in inverse relation to happiness. The more truth is heard, the more it unmasks people.
In some cases people make a mountain out of a molehill and in some they sweep truths under the carpet. Truths are not all the time cohesive and truths may be conflicting as there are many sorts of truths.
In the course of time, truths, in permeation, gather diversity but deviating, grain by grain, from their fundamentals. In this line of reasoning, German philosopher and poet Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche gives a gnomic answer “Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins”.
However, after a long time, at least one person claimed that telling “truth” saved his honour, thanks to the Truth Commission. To stop short of details, he started electrically and swept into his car and, in a flash, mingled into the course of life.
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