Wednesday, August 3, 2011

SOMETHING is true

true - adj. 1. Consistent with fact or reality; not false or erroneous.


--The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language


Something is true. I wonder if anyone could make a reasonable statement that denies that.

The statement is meant in the most general of senses. It does not attempt to say what is true. You got here somehow. Right? Perhaps you were Big Banged into existence. Perhaps you were vomited forth by a giant rhinoceros. (I doubt that, Good Reader.) Even if you don't believe that you exist in any kind of reality and therefore that it is not necessarily true that you got here somehow, that in itself, if it is accurate, is true.

So what?

What follows is the opposite. For example, "getting here" in one manner will probably eliminate most other manners. So if the rhinoceros thing is true, then your hatching from an egg is probably false. If something is true, then contradictory things are false to the extent that they are actually contradictory.

If something is true, then a person might reasonably try to figure out what it is. That doesn't guarantee that they will find out, but they can look.

Some people have a real distaste for true-ness as a concept. Based on the behavior of some "truth-believers," this is understandable. But even if "truth-believers" are obnoxious-seeming at times -- SOMETHING is still true.

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