I’d like to reverse the order of the concepts with which this post is concerned.
Let’s begin with Bias.
According to Wikipedia, bias is a term used to describe a tendency or preference towards a particular perspective, ideology or result, especially when the tendency interferes with the ability to be impartial, unprejudiced, or objective. The term biased is used to describe an action, judgment, or other outcome influenced by a prejudged perspective. It is also used to refer to a person or body of people whose actions or judgments exhibit bias. In this context, the term “biased” is often used as a pejorative.
We, people, are capable of being biased culturally, ethnically, sexually, geographically, politically, religiously, sociologically, scientifically or because of gender. This list goes on. The struggle to make decisions impartially, keeping fairness in mind, is one of the big challenges that we all face, in and out of our classrooms. The first step, it seems to me, is in admitting where are biases lie. Because, I think, we all have them. We can learn to discuss our biases openly and honestly–that’s the next step.
Now, let’s talk about Truth.
Stanford University has a website that publishes their Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here’s how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begins their discussion of truth:
“Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth. . . . It would be impossible to survey all there is to say about truth in any coherent way.”
O.K., with that caveat, I need to make another anecdotal one; throughout my undergraduate and graduate years (I have been accepted into and continue to do course work at Assumption University’s Graduate School of Philosophy) all of my professors have been quick to point out that there is a metaphysical (even the word metaphysical is controversial) issue when we discuss truth. Namely, does truth exist as such, qua truth? For the sake of this discussion, let’s just assume that truth does exist. How do we recognize it? I’ll mention just a couple of ways.
One very traditional way is the so-called Correspondence Theory. In brief, we say that something is true if it corresponds with the way things are—the facts.
The other is the so-called Coherence Theory. Again in brief, “. . . truth in its essential nature is that systematic coherence which is the character of a significant whole. When we say something is true we posit that what is true is the whole complete truth. Individual judgments or beliefs are certainly not the whole complete truth. . . . One aspect of this doctrine is a kind of holism about content, which holds that any individual belief or judgment gets its content only in virtue of being part of a system of judgments. But even these systems are only true to a degree, measuring the extent to which they express the content of the single ‘whole complete truth’. Any real judgment we might make will only be partially true.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/).
Then there is the old conundrum about the existence of truth. If we say, “There is no such thing as the truth,” that is, ironically, the truth.
So, how might we sum this up? The three ideas above don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Truth, it can be said, corresponds to the way things are and it possesses coherence: Truth happens.
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[...] one, called Truth Happens, was actually shared by one of our CoETaIL participants, Jim Fitzgerald. Although it’s an ad for Linux, the message is clear and definitely relevant for those of us [...]
[...] one, called Truth Happens, was actually shared by one of our CoETaIL participants, Jim Fitzgerald. Although it’s an ad for Linux, the message is clear and definitely relevant for those of us [...]
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