Uke 47
Sannheten er relativ
Ifølge Richard Rorty kan sannhet kun refereres til utsagn (setninger):
"Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
Sannhet er altså knyttet til utsagn om verden…
Setninger er laget av ord. Ord har ingen betydning i seg selv, kun i relasjon til andre ord. Alle ord og alle setninger har derfor flere betydninger beroende på hvilke sammenhengen de inngår i.
Slik sett finnes det ingen absolutt sannhet, kun relative sannheter; sannhet for hvem? sannhet om hva?
"There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
“The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know.
That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.”
- Marvin Minsky (1927-2016)
"The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true."