Contrast Two Philosophies

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Contrast this:

"Truth is one, paths are many"

With this:

"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. "For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it. (Matthew 7:13-14 NASB)

The second statement is a part of the myth of shared morality.


The first statement is just truth.

Neither statement seems that meaningful without a context.

I mean, "truth is one" doesn't seem that meaningful to me. If truth is just the relationship of a proposition to reality, in as much as the proposition denotes something that is actual, then what does it mean to say "truth is one"? It would seem to me under such a schema, that truth is non-numerical. If truth is instead something else, like a belief that one finds useful/meaningful, then truth is certainly not one as there are multiple things that can be regarded as true.

And then again, "the paths are many" is also meaningless. I mean, do we know how many paths "many" refers to? After all, if 10 paths that only vary very very slightly constitute many paths, then the statement is relatively meaningless, as who cares about the exact specifics so long as one follows PEMDAS(the mnemonic for doing algebra problems)? I mean, solving the first parentheses first or solving the second first doesn't matter so long as the basic framework of the problem is left in tact. And if many paths means all paths, then that changes the situation.

As for the second statement, it tells us very little as well. Because there are a *LOT* of narrow gates, but we cannot suppose that they all lead to truth. Heck, one could even read the two statements as potentially compatible. Just have the many paths all be unpopular paths. The issue is that both statement ultimately say very little without providing additional context to them.

The Bible verses illustrate just two paths, the wide path which would be the easiest and most attractive (the evil path) versus the small path which would be the hardest and less appealing (the good path), being why just a few would go through it.


well, if there are just two paths, one would be true and the other false, so in that regard, truth is one and paths are two, unless there are several paths that are divisions that come and lead to a single mother path, which would be the widest and the easiest one, that would be one interpretation of the issue, seems to be more related to a christian conservative perspective.

I believe there is a problem here when it comes to opossing to different philosophies, we have a particular religious interpretation to the issue at least, but we don't know about the opposite side to contrast this.

Gateposts topic

Truth is one of those double hinged gates.

nice revealing illuminating posts

Instead of the archaic terms true and false which have many undefined and frankly weird connotations I find it far more useful to characterize insight as functional and non-functional and get on with my life.

"True" is an adjective which applies to propositions that assert facts. Fact is that which is. Fact is the state of the world. A statement is true if and only if it asserts a fact and is a meaningful statement. An utterance which is neither true nor not true is a meaningless utterance. For example: Green squares sleep furiously. This is a grammatical utterance in English and it is meaningless nonsense. So it is neither true nor false.

The correspondence theory of truth goes all the way back to Aristotle.

ruveyn

And mysteriously those same facts very frequently dissolve into conjecture.

The first statement of truth is one, is intended to imply that there is only a single truth. And that there are numerous paths. Again, implying that one of the paths is the path of truth. The remaining paths, would be by default, false. There can be an infinite number of falses to one truth.

There are problems in this, wherein there are situations where there is actually more than one truth. Yet, even still, there is always an infinite ways in which there can be a false.

Well... they're hardly philosophies. More... "sayings" or, "quotes."

Facts are world states. They don't dissolve. They simply are.

Facts are not utterances or verbal expressions. They are the literal state of the world.

ruveyn

In other words.....the right way is too narrow and hard to find. So don't enter the gate period....

Sort of like Eve who ate the forbidden fruit or Pandora who opened up the box of chaos. Then again....those were women.

Damn women....

Nobody knows what the literal state of the world is. It's all guesses and some work and some don't. You yourself pointed out that Aristotle had his head where the sun don't shine most of the time.

Did you know where you were when you typed what you typed? Aha! It is not ALL guesses. Somethings can be known for sure. Others, not.

If our knowledge of the world were all speculative, our technology would not be as good as it is. At this juncture the closest thing to sure fire knowledge is quantum electrodynamics. Good to twelve places in accuracy. That is more than close enough for government work.

ruveyn

Lemme see now. When I typed I sat in front of a computer that was on a spinning part of the world which itself was spinning around a local star which is most surely revolving around the galactic center and, the galaxy is, of course, moving away from all other galaxies. I'm thinking...where was I...hmmm.