What is Truth

The question 'what is truth' precedes ‘where is truth’. Is truth in the mind, within a book, on the tip of a statue's nose or within a crisp apple? Soren Kierkegaard being not a dunce might have upgraded his paradigm of truth theory were he alive today.

Truth theory offers several versions one should know. I prefer correspondence theory and its emphasis upon communication. Truth is a process of verifying subject-object relations. For example, one says that it is raining, so Sally looks out the windows, sees that it is and determines the statement 'it is raining' is true. If, alternatively, it had been snowing, she would have determined the statement was false.

Yet truth is a relationship within communication. One might ask if communication is subjective or objective equally well. Truth is a relationship amidst words rather than a thing in-itself, except as a relationship about words. Thus John begins his gospel with, In the beginning was the word. One realizes that Jesus, and God, implicitly are truth. They not only transcend everything material of the Universe, they are the authors of it from which everything else that is not God, is contingent being.

Pontius Pilot rightly asked 'what is truth' before giving Jesus unto the mob for sentencing by default. Jesus had said that the kingdom of God is within you. Also that the truth will make you free. And of course Jesus is the truth and sets free from the sin-debt (not a relative and subjective state) those receiving the Lord as their personal Savior. Pilot did not recognize the truth within or without yet he was fearful of it, knowing that he knew nothing too well, except for worldly objective facts such as that he would be chastised by the Emperor if he let someone go free that some said was a sedulous king.

Sometimes I open the Bible randomly when I haven't read it in a while and/or am a bit tired as a way simply to not put off reading it more. Saturday I took a bicycle up a small mountain topping out around 5000 feet. After completing the day's exercise, a bit tired, I opened my Gideon's bible randomly to Matthew 8:1 "When he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him." Once again I was mildly shocked at the relevance of the Bible to situations I am in during life.

That made me think about Jesus and crowds. The kingdom of God is within each individual, yet the Lord knows what is within each individual, and their thoughts, while no other does (except the other two members of the Trinity). I am glad that no crowd followed me when I came down from the mountain. I can do without crowds. Jesus did not view crowds as so many strangers or even acquaintances though. As God, he could view even a large crowd personally IMO.

Soren Kierkegaard seems to have taken the inward philosophical path for his primary development while Hegel should have taken the outward path more so than he did. IMO The Phenomenology of Mind is a brilliant analogy of evolution phenomenalities of the Big Bang thermodynamic time-arrow so far as it might have been presented in his day. And though human intellectual development increases too over time (such as the history of ideas compiles), I believe that Kierkegaard is far more correct than Hegel with epistemology. Kierkegaard and Hegel could be said in a way to have been talking/writing past one another.

Basically physics differs from epistemology and communications. Communications allow things to be muddled up very well and easily. Back in the day, circa 1835, it was too easy to unify philosophically distant topics such as mind and cosmology in one wrong, or partly correct, system. Kierkegaard generally avoided the errors of that sort unlike G.W.F. Hegel (though I like Hegel's works too). Words probably have a nominal character rather than Platonic realist, and one uses them freely with whatever degree of skill one has. Some people could use more words and better learning, while others might be better off with less.

Language is a phenomenal tool with the original application of a field-expedient utilitarian pragmatic nature. It is still used to allow individuals to learn more about the experience of life and where they are at, as well as what to consider true or false. Language exists with lexicons each with a personal ontology (according to Quine). Mass, energy, the quantum field wherein people are embedded and self-aware as well as aware of others, are aspects of being. Some want to locate this or that phenomenon in coordinate A or B...N with absolute precision, while the field itself is only relatively located withing the great unknown.