Is “proof” a synonym for “true”?

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Epistemology works like this. There are things that are true and things that are false. Similarly, there are things that are believed in and things that are not believed in. Things that are true, and believed in, however, cannot be the foundation of knowledge. In order to have a foundation to build on, there must also be justification of why the thing that is believed in is true.

Proof is a form of justification. It is not the only form of justification, but it is the most rigorous. Most laypeople think of all forms of justification as proof. So from hereforth on, I will just say justification and you can read it as what you’re thinking of when you say proof.

Justification cannot be a synonym for truth. Without belief, then it’s just words. What belief brings to the table is effect, when things are believed in, then other people want to continue building academic knowledge onto it.

One lay example I can point to is the philosophical idea of solipsism, which holds that only one person’s mind exists and everybody else is just a figment of that person’s imagination. Nobody seriously believes that so it doesn’t matter how much justification one can come up for it. The annals of academia are littered with ideas that nobody could be bothered to believe in, so they were relegated to the dustbin of history.

Truth itself is less important when it comes to this dynamic, because the nature of truth is such that if you have evidence of something important to people, meaning they believe in it, is false, then you also have evidence of a truth, that being the reverse of the false thing being justified. However here further justification is needed that the false statement the inverse truth is really and truly analogous.

It’s important to note that the Justified True Belief standard of epistemic knowledge, relied on as the very foundation of academia, was thrown into disarray by one Edmund Gettier, who demonstrated several simple cases in which one should not consider a justified true belief to be knowledge, with these cases now termed “Gettier problems.” Most responses to this challenge has been to basically work in “no Gettier problems” into the standards for justification.

Gettier problems represent holes in human perception that sometimes large monsters can hide in. Gettier analysis is particularly useful in the field of sociology, where trying to analyze human behavior is particularly susceptible to all kinds of errors in judgment. Gettier shows how even with justification, belief, and apparent truth we cannot be reliant on full truth.