How do you know if you are right?

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From where do you know that you have found the truth? Any opinions?

This stems from here: Homosexuality and Religion

But it's an interesting question is it not? What on earth or in heavens tells you that your opinion is the right one? By whose authority can you claim that you are in the right?

If a discourse is a way of discerning the truth of something it should be noted that a discourse can be held with other means than spoken or written word. Can a discourse be a way of discerning the truth?

If you would agree that an unbridled discussion might be a valid way to find the truth about something, then would it not lead into arguments that have no basis on coherent logical chains of thought, but instead are appealing to our emotions. Then it might be worth to pose this question: Are emotions in fact irrational or not?

Consider what would be the most efficient rhetorical ways of convincing someone of the rigteousness of your argument. Consider what ways have been largely used in the known history of mankind in justifying the creed, the cult, and the systems of belief that give the leaders more power than only the physical force that they have at their disposal. Then answer me: How do you know if you're right.

 

Wise people are aware that they can never be 100 percent correct and accept it as a part of life. The important thing is to make the best decision possible with as much evidence as possible. If you use reason instead of faith and collect evidence from as many different view points as possible, you can be content to know you made the best decision possible. Ofcourse we can never completely escape our biases and ignorance, but alas we are imperfect creatures.

 

One of the biggest fallacies in debating/arguing is that someone must be "right". To me everyone is "right" because all opinions are valid. I may not agree with someone's opinion. I may even think they are an idiot for what their opinion is, but I will never deny someone their opinion.

Trying to prove an opinion as "right" is a fool's game.

 

What does it mean to be correct?

What is an evidence?

So using reason is rhetorically more effective than using faith?

What is an opnion? A statement concerning what? Individual mindsets? To what do these mindsets relate to? Are there any points of reference we can relate our opinions to? If there aren't any, then we can't escape solipsism. However, alterations in the way our brains function change the way we perceive the world, and the way we think. The changes and their effects are systematical up to a degree, because they do not vary enough. Can we therefore come into a conclusion that a human mind is completely secluded from common points of reference?

Would you agree that there are patterns that are not dependent on a human mind?

What does it mean to agree with someone?

 

To be of the opinion supported by the greatest/strongest evidence.

A piece of information - be it an idea or the presence of some tangible item that proves the idea - that lends credibility to an argument.

Absolutely. By definition, faith is a belief in something for which one has no proof. Reason draws from evidence - what is real and verifiable, and the conclusions one can logically draw from this evidence - whereas faith relies on ideas one believes to be true but ultimately cannot prove. The difference between faith and fact.

What one considers to be correct based on his interpretation of the evidence or situation in question.

Of course - but such patterns elude us and we are bound by our own flawed human interpretation of the world.

When your interpretation of a truth is as close to theirs as possible.

 

I think it was a conversation between a man and Mohammed that went something like this:

"Mohammed, how do you know if you are doing something wrong?"

"If something pricks your coincence, give it up."

I'm not of the Islamic faith, I'm a Christian reformist, but that truely is one of the greatest things ever said.

 

So, to be correct is

And an opinion in the previous sentence is

So to be correct is what one considers to be correct? Based on the interpretation of of the greatest/strongest piece of information that lends credibility to the argument depending of the situation in question?

What is credibility?

And reason draws from pieces of information that lend credibility to an argument?

...is the same as agreeing then. But is the truth dependent on whether you agree with someone else or not?

So there are patterns that are not dependent on a single human mind and these patterns are elusive because the human mind is flawed.

How is the human mind flawed?

 

No, you flipped it around. An opinion is one's interpretation of something, and being correct means that interpretation is the one most in line with the facts that support it. Simplified, the correct opinion is the one that has drawn the most logical conclusion from the facts available.

One may consider gravity to be an illusion, but the evidence hardly supports that. So no - merely considering yourself correct doesn't make it so. In stating a fact, one can be incorrect - but not necessarily when stating an opinion. "Gravity is an illusion" is not correct in a general sense, but "I believe gravity is an illusion" is stating a fact. That is what that person believes (assuming they're telling the truth).

The capacity for something to hold the greatest amount of truth; or, the degree to which the argument can stand up to scrutiny and disproof.

Not necessarily. Truth depends on the context and the individual. Take Coke and Pepsi for example. To me, Coke is great, and Pepsi is swill. That's truth to me. But it's hardly truth to everyone. It's not "wrong" to say that Pepsi is swill (or great), it's just my truth. In a higher sense, to a Christian, their truth is that Jesus was the son of God. Holding this to be true is essential to being a Christian. A jew holds that he was merely a prophet, and so for a jew this is not truth.

There's only so much we can know, absorb or understand. This one I think would be fairly obvious, considering the fact that here we are, questioning how we decide what is true/real/correct or not. If our minds weren't flawed, would we have to ask that question? Or any question, for that matter?

[ November 17, 2006, 22:56: Message edited by: Death Rabbit ]

 

I think I did understand that being correct means your interpretation of something is most in line with the facts that support that interpretation of something.

I take it that facts are these pieces of information - be it ideas or the presence of some tangible items that prove the ideas - that lend credibility to an argument.

So credibility is

Is truth the same as to have an interpretation of something that is most in line with the facts that support that something?

So the truth can be a belief in something for which one has no proof, and it depends on the context and the individual?

Does the ability to question the means to arrive to the truth necessarily lead to the the conclusion that it is our minds that are flawed? Logically perhaps, but only if you accept certain premises, if you agree that flawed is 'that which is not perfect'. But what does perfect mean?

[ November 18, 2006, 10:16: Message edited by: Iku-Turso ]

 

The Spirit of God. I realize that satisfies nobody, but it doesn't mean it's false.

If reason denies faith, then it denies all posibilities derived from it. If any of those are true, logic then may fail in certain situations. To me, reason does not paint a complete picture of the situation...

What if that evidence is not on this Earth? Assuming that God exists, and that he doesn't live on this planet (could you imagine the annoying jerks that would continue to harrass him?), then the opinions relying on that evidence, despite it's truthfulness, would be rejected?

So then since between 1/6 and 1/4 of the worlds population believes in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Does that lend credibility to Christianity? Take that how you will.

Lack of proof does not mean false.

Actually, I've heard that in Christian doctrine as well. In the Book of Alma (in the Book of Mormon), I've heard it described in more detail from the point of view of one who's been through it.

 

@Gnarfflinger: So what tells you that your opinion is the right one is

and yet

They're all believing this and are not satisfied that The Spirit of God tells you that your opinion is correct?

Do you mean by faith that it is believing in something? It wouldn't be very constistent and thus reasonable to deny believing in something, if in order to decide whether something is true or not you have to have a belief which relates to facts and if credibility is "The capacity for something to hold the greatest amount of truth; or, the degree to which the argument can stand up to scrutiny and disproof."

Maybe not, but it would seem that lack of proof does not lend any credibility.

If there is no discernible evidence of something, I would think that the subject in question is truly incredible.

So is irrationality required as well in order to paint a complete picture of the situation?

 

The ammount of people who believe or disbelieve something carries no bearing on whether or not it is true. More than half of Americans thought that Iraq had connections to 9/11 with absolutely no evidence to support it. All evidence, in fact (even the early evidence), pointed to the opposite conclusion. Still, over half of Americans believed that hogwash, nevertheless. A good third of Americans still believe it, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary......and the fact that the Bush administration has even publicly eaten crow over this one.

Just because a majority believes something doesn't make it true. Something is "true" when it is supported by facts. Opinions which are supported by verifiable fact always have more merit than opinions which are not.....even if a vast majority espouses the opinion which is not factually supported. Consensus, much like might, does not necessarily make right.

 

What gives the other person the conviction that I'm wrong?

They are extremely unlikely to be fully correct, but this doesn't mean that if you are right, you automatically are 1% wrong and there is no real obstacle to being fully right now or then. There's a lot of sense in what you say, but if you absolutise it, it becomes just another opinion-based assumption, guesswork, whatever.

 

Faith, earlier defined, is the belief in something for which there is no proof.

To this logic, Faith has been considered suspect under scrutiny, but it does have infinite capacity for truth in the abscence of disproving fatcs. This lack of proof also means that it cannot be disproven. It's capacity to contain truth varies directly with the accuracy in transmission from source to source. A translation error here or an erronious extrapolation there can reduce the capacity for truth.

Yes, God is incredible. His Glory is beyond mortal comprehension. But his existance cannot be disproven until an exhaustive search of the universe reveals that there is no such place as Heaven. Good luck with that...

I believe that was not brought up to establish truth, but credibility. After 9/11, any Muslim based state that thumbed it's nose at the US could credibly be involved in such a plot. The heightened emotion (something which, for the most part, defies reason) makes a Guilty until proven innocent belief seem logical. It held credibility until it was proven wrong.

WMD's however, are another story. It would be credible that any delays involving UN weapons inspectors would have enabled Iraq to ship the WMD's elsewhere before they let the UN people in to inspect the facilities...

 

You need facts to support something in order for it to be considered true. Are facts dependant of the consensus?

Is truth as approximation acceptable?

What seems to give the people the feeling that they're in the right and the other one is wrong is generalized conclusions derived from facts and conviction of one's righteousness.

Is truth something that up to a degree we shouldn't be concerned about? Is it a valid goal?

If we should abandon the search for thruth, would credibility be a more valid goal? Would credibility be in itself enough without the ideal of truth? Can either one of them be defined without the other one?

Is believing in something that is beyond mortal comprehension even possible? Is truth required to comprehend something?

Do you have to know something before you can claim anything to be true? What is knowledge?

 

You don't need to be 'right', you just have to prove the other person wrong

 

As a very wise friend of mine once said, "Don't try to keep up with the Joneses; Drag them down to your level, it's cheaper..."

Being right is an egitistical concept

 

I love this logic, the process of elimination, last man standing

Since faith can not be placed under scrutiny due to its nature it should also never gain the benefit of ever being used to prove/justify anything. Faith's defense of being undenyable isn't a shield, it's a wall, it works both ways since as well as being undenyable it is also unproveable. I dare say when searching for the truth any aspect that requires faith should just be left alone and ignored. The search for truth can be considered to comparing apples and finding the one that is red in a bunch of green apples whereas anything to do with faith is an orange.

 

The problem in this case is that we knew it was wrong the same day the attack happened (we already knew it was Al-Qaida, that Iraq had no connections to them, and that the attackers were Saudi), but the press and the pres. continued reporting an involvement between Iraq and 9/11 well past the time at which the truth of Iraq's non-involvement was incontrovertible. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Americans still blindly followed their leader.

 

Alright, first off, there seems to be a big confusion around this: Opinions are not facts and do not relate to facts. An opinion can neither be right or wrong. Opinions are things like 'Chocolate is good (tasting, not moraly).' The statement 'I think chocolate is good.' on the other hand is a statement of fact, but only a fact of your opinion (i.e. I have this opinion and it is a fact that this is my opinion).

Facts and truth, on the other hand, are totally different and may indeed be right or wrong. They are also absolute. Let me repeat that: FACTS ARE ABSOLUTE! If someone dies, it doesn't matter what your perspective on the issue is, that person died (within a singular definition of 'died', which is another issue). If I have $100 in my bank account, that is how much I have, regardless of my perspective on the issue. Now some things related to facts are relative, such as 'I am rich.' If I only have $100 to my name, by modern standards I am not rich, but by the standards of the Great Depression I'm doing pretty well. This is relative, and your perspective changes how you percieve things, but the basic facts of the universe do not change.

So:

Correct, provided you are really trying to talk about opinions and not facts. Trying to prove an opinion right or wrong is a fool's errand.

To be correct, or right, is to be in agreement with the realities of the universe (which are absolute, but not unchanging).

This is a little more complicated. Evidence is what you accept as proof of a fact. Usually this means it leads to a logical conclusion that a fact is indeed a fact. This 'logical conclusion' however, may be nothing more than that the given 'fact' is the most likely explanation. Evidence rarely, if ever, absolutely proves something, and a claim that the evidence supports can often be wrong without the evidence being wrong.

Take for example the Sun. Everyone pretty much knows that the Sun is powered by nuclear fusion deep within its core. We got this idea by measuring the energy output, looking at the copmosition (through spectral analysis), the types of output, and how it changes. All these things agree with te claim that nuclear fusion is actually going on in the Sun, but that doesn't neccessarily mean that's what IS going on. Thousands of years ago, we thought it was fire (as in camp-fire, burning wood fire) and all the evidence at the time fit that conclusion, but we were wrong. The evidence wasn't wrong, the Sun is hot, and it does put out light, but the conclusion was wrong.

Logic is not infallable, when it is applied by humans, and, in fact, logic cannot get us anywhere without some base assumptions, and any assumption may be wrong. Faith is no more solid than this, but at least it admits it.

Ah, am I a man, or am I a butterfly dreaming I'm a man? I think that was Sun-Tsu, but I'm not sure. All our judgements on reality are based off of our perceptions of reality, our senses. These are (presumably) filters that connect our minds to the real world. We cannot, however, prove that this is in fact the case. This leads us to three possible conclusions, however:

1.)Our senses are totally wrong, and everything we percieve is effectively a hallucination. You can't trust anything and there is no real basis on which we can make judgements on reality. By this analysis this very arguement is pointless, as I may not actually be typing on a key-board or talking with another person. We'll call this trivial.

2.)Most of our senses are right, but some are wrong. This leads us to the question, if a sense is 'wrong', but still acts in logical concert with the other 'right' senses, is it really wrong? If I see the stool as red, because my eyes are 'wrong', but I've grown up this way and so call what others would see as red, 'blue' (because it is in fact blue, but my eyes see it as what others would call 'red'), is my sight truely 'wrong'? Indeed, how do we know this isn't the case? How do I know that when I see a color and call it 'blue', others aren't seeing other colors, which they have learned to call 'blue' and so we all agree that it is a blue stool? The other possibility on this is that the 'wrong' sense does not agree with the others: I can feel a stool there, I can hear people moving it, but I see a cat walking around. This is readily recognizable and is what we call a hallucination.

3.)All our senses are accurate (if not precise), and the universe is more or less how we percieve it to be. This is the most useful and, until I see some evidence that my senses are wrong (a logical near impossibility), I will continue to operate under this assumption.

Patterns that we can sense? No, at least not in a physical perspective. Actual patterns? Yes, though sensing them depends on the human mind. The pattern you may see on the wall next to you (if there is one) is there regardless of whether you sense it or not (assuming #3) and I would even say it is a pattern whether you sense it or not, but sensing it required interaction and dependence on your mind.

Wrong. 1.) Opinions cannot be correct or incorrect. 2.)Evidence doesn't make you correct, only more likely to be correct.

Very well put. I agree completely.

Actually, what he said is that being correct is agreeing with the majority, which means the majority cannot be wrong.

How much you trust something. Something is shown to be credible when it agrees with other evidence and 'proven' claims. Note that this means something can be credible and still be wrong. In fact, it could have been wrong all along, but if you believed it, it was credible to you.

No. In fact, the truth isn't dependant on you even considering the option. There was a time when people thought the Earth was flat. The Earth was still round, and you couldn't 'fall off the edge', despite the vast majority (at one time or another) claiming it was, in fact, flat.

Logic is rarely applied properly. It takes years and years (and many minds) of logical analysis of claims to sort out their entirety (as far as we can tell). Each mind misses many things, but together they capture most (if not all) of the logical possibilities.

Evidence is corrupted. Did you know that every time your brain accesses a memory, it changes it a tiny bit? After years of remembring a thing over and over again, you are no longer remembering the actual event, but a re-interpretation of a re-interpretation of a re-interpretation of the memory.

Again, not really, that is an opinion.

Different situation here. Either Jesus was the Son of God or He wasn't. Either there is a God or there isn't. One position must be wrong. Now there are more possabilities than that, but it doesn't matter on your opinion or mine.

I'd say yes. Limitations do not equate flaws. Insufficient evidence from the outside world does not equate a flaw in the mind, either. A perfect mind may still question whether or not its senses are working properly.

A wonderful analysis, and one that should illumnate the problems with this arguement.

But this is a flaw in his presentation, not his logic. He meant that the 'Spirit of God' answer wouldn't satisfy most people on this board, not anyone in the whole world.

I think he meant something like my Sun example. If someone claimed 3000 years ago, in faith, that the Sun is not actually a huge ball of burning pitch or wood or whatever, but is in fact something else (an unknown something that simply isn't fire), reason and evidence would show him wrong, but he would be right.

There are sources of credibility other than direct proof. If one source (say a book) claims many things, and some are proven right and none are proven wrong, that book and all it's claims have a certain credibility, as likely does any other book written by the same author, but there is no direct proof to any of the unproven claims.

Define incredible. Things that seemed impossible 500 years ago are commonplace today.

Irrationality suggests something that is totally opposed to rationality, rather than something that takes a different course. If you really get down to it and think, we all live our lives based off of non-rational conclusions. There just isn't enough evidence, nor is the human mind capable of assimilating that evidence in one lifetime, to prove everything you believe on a regular basis, even for the most sceptical of us.

A very good point, and remember that capacity for truth is not proven truth.

One can abandon the quest for truth without abandoning the ideal. I realize that, from a scientific perspective, absolute truth is impossible to prove, but a high degree of cridibility is great and achievable.

Belief in something does not require a total comprehension of it. To borrow a term from Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein), one does not have to grok God to believe in God. Also realize that one can comprehend something that is false. I can comprehend that a car is moving a 20 MPH relative to the ground, but it may actually be moving at 15 MPH.

Ah, the question I've been waiting for. While facts and truth are absolute and reflect the realities of the universe, knowledge and belief are not. Knowledge simply represents a markedly higher degree of certainty around the topic. I know that God is real, but plenty of other people know that He is not. We can't both be right, the fact of the matter is absolute, but we can both know opposing things because we are each very certain of it.

Another set of terms I think may be useful in this arguement (which many people get confused) is precision and accuracy. Accuracy is a measure of how close to the truth you are, while precision is a measure of how well defined your point is. For example, Pi may be assumed to be 3.14159. An accuracy difference would be between 3.14 and 3.15. One is closer to the truth than the other. A precision difference would be 3.14 and 3.141. They are both accurate, but one is more well defined (more decimal places).

To get back to the original question, though:

I know (believe to a high degree of certainty) that I am right (my claim reflects absolute reality) when I am convinced. The source of my claims and evidence has to be proven or highly credible. I assume my senses are correct, and any evidence they give me is therefore automatically credible. Other sources become credible by proving themselves through other claims, which can then be proven through other credible sources, or through my own observations. In the end, it all has to come down to my senses. I believe person X because he has repeatedly made claims that my own senses have verified. Person X claims that person Y is credible, so I trust person Y (unless I see something wrong with person Y or her claims, in which case it is counted against the credibility of person Y). All in all, this can involve some very complicated lines of trust and credibility, especially when talking about something as removed as my trust in the Bible.

There is another way to know I'm right, however. This is what Gnarff means by the Spirit, and I don't expect many of you to accept it as the proof I claim it is, but when God speaks directly to your spirit, He bypasses imprecise and questionable senses, and the flawed and questionable human mind, and speaks directly to the part of you that recognizes Him. This part, then, becomes the witness to prove the credibility of this Spirit that just spoke to you, without which I wouldn't trust it any more than a stranger, but this part of you is hard-wired to recognize God, and when He speaks to you, you know it is true, a more certain knowledge than anything else you could ever know.