Does objective reality exist?

Tagged:

First let’s start with a definition of truth. After browsing the Wikipedia page on truth, I can distill it as such. Truth is when something is in accord with a set of laws / rules.

Ok, there are two competing dichotomies here. There’s absolute / relative, and there’s subjective / objective. Let’s get the easy case out of the way. There is no such thing as absolute truth, all truth is relative. What this means is that you cannot have truth without context. As an example, “the sky is blue” is only true during the day, and perhaps at night. During sunset / dawn, the sky is red.

Also, something that is true can stop being true when you change the rules / laws out from under it. Morality is relative and can only be relative, as animals have agency and even if you could distill universal human morals, animals would beg to differ on many points.

So that leaves subjective / objective. Objective things are based in sound reasoning, whereas subjective things are based on individual perspective. Both subjective and objective truth can obviously exist. When two people agree, not just on a truth, but on the rationale justifying the truth, then it becomes more objective.

When Aunt May says vaccines cause autism but can’t really provide a justification, that truth is subjective. You might argue that it’s not true, but that’s where the relative nature of truth trips you up. Just as there’s always some context where some true thing is actually false, so there is some context under which pretty much any proposition can be true, therefore any statement has some truth value to it.