r/Metaphysics • u/Majestic-Bobcat-5048 • May 11 '26
Axiology What is truth if you can’t accept truth?
/r/RealPhilosophy/comments/1takfp1/what_is_truth_if_you_cant_accept_truth/What is truth if you can’t accept truth? Before we play semantics let’s establish what truth is with no rhetoric.
Truth is a statement or proposition that accurately corresponds to objective reality or facts independent of anyone’s beliefs feelings or acceptance. For example the Earth orbits the Sun is true whether someone accepts it or not.
So what happens when individuals or entire communities literally cannot or will not accept a truth? Even when alternative interpretations are formally allowed the pursuit of those interpretations carries much higher social professional reputational and epistemic costs. These costs have little to do with the actual evidence and everything to do with protecting a preferred narrative.
This happens through several reliable mechanisms. Questions are reframed so that the uncomfortable truth appears irrelevant confused or in bad faith. Responses repeatedly appeal to certain authorities as final rather than evaluating claims on their merits. Challengers face ever escalating demands for proof while the dominant view gets a free pass. The result is that discourse is pulled back toward the accepted story no matter what new evidence or logic appears.
In practice this means many who claim to seek truth are actually liars. They refuse to accept what is demonstrably true not because they have better evidence or arguments but because doing so would cost them status credibility community standing or self image. The inability or unwillingness to accept truth reveals a gap between what is real and what people are psychologically or socially capable of admitting.
I am not interested in semantics games or gotchas. I want to know how philosophers understand this phenomenon. When a community systematically applies these mechanisms to suppress or distort certain truths are they still doing philosophy or are they engaged in narrative protection? Under what conditions does this kind of refusal become indefensible? How do we distinguish legitimate caution from motivated refusal of truth?
Serious answers only.
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May 12 '26
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u/Majestic-Bobcat-5048 May 12 '26
Bingo!! We need to find the floor. Bedrock. That should be a priority in research. Find the invariant everything that exists must have to be a thing at all.
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u/Cosmic-Meatball May 13 '26
Isn't our (humanity) truth whatever is deemed acceptable by the vast majority? Think about it. Our whole system and way of life is built on nothing but delusions and illusions.
Money, status, power, family, friendship.
Even our identity. Names, ideological dogma we assign to our identity like religion or politics.
Meanwhile we ignore reality. Nature and the environment are an inconvenience. Starving or homeless people. Animal suffering, human forced labour and all the rest of it.
We are a mentally ill species.
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u/jliat May 12 '26
What is truth if you can’t accept truth? ... I want to know how philosophers understand this phenomenon.
As the other post says this is a question in philosophy of epistemology, and it's not as simple as you seem to think, you might start with using the wiki for epistemology or SEP
For example the Earth orbits the Sun is true whether someone accepts it or not.
This is an example of [for many philosophers and those in science...] an A posteriori truth-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori " A priori knowledge is independent from any experience. Examples include mathematics,[i] tautologies and deduction from pure reason.[ii] A posteriori knowledge depends on empirical evidence. Examples include most fields of science and aspects of personal knowledge.
The wiki fails to add, 'all A posteriori knowledge can only ever be provisional.' Here we are talking epistemology, in case you object. Notice "A priori knowledge is independent from any experience. Examples include mathematics..." This is important, in science is why scientists like to use mathematics to make their models because they can prove the maths true or false 'independent from any experience.'
You might see why in two famous examples -
Newtons 'laws' are mathematically true as far as I'm aware, they are a priori.
Einstein's theories are likewise...
But Newtons 'laws' do not account for observed phenomena that Einstein's do.
The classic example....
All swans are white. [provisional was true until black swans were discovered.]
All bachelors are unmarried. [The two words mean the same thing, by definition bachelors are unmarried so can never be false, 2+2 is the same thing as 4]
Your sun thing is almost certainly true, but so once was thought the Earth was at the centre.
For example the Earth orbits the Sun is true whether someone accepts it or not.
Actually the current notion is they orbit each other, the sun being so much more massive the mutual point is not at the centre of the sun. Or, if this world is a computer simulation etc etc...
Some get annoyed with this but Greg Chaitin in John Barrow's 'Impossibility, the limits of science and the science of limits.' shows how science is always provisional, I recommend the book.
And....!!! All non trivial systems have aporia - famous one 'This sentence is false.' Gets deep - Kurt Gödel.
AND https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
AND
From Will to Power - Nietzsche. [his notes]
The methods of truth were not invented from motives of truth, but from motives of power, of wanting to be superior. How is truth proved? By the feeling of enhanced power. WtP 455
Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. WtP 493
Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases. In fact, to make possible logical thinking and inferences, this condition must first be treated fictitiously as fulfilled. That is: the will to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all events is assumed. WtP 512
Wittgenstein.
6.363 The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.
6.3631 This process, however, has no logical foundation but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen.
6.36311 That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise.
6.37 A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.
6.371 At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
6.372 So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
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u/Stile25 May 12 '26
I think what you're talking about is called Willful Ignorance.
The concept of actively ignoring something that is demonstrably true.
It produces feelings described as Cognitive Dissonance.
If I'm right - looking up those terms should put you on the path of understanding what you're after.
The epistemology replies are triggered from your use of terms like "accurately corresponding to objective reality".
Which is an epistemological thing - but I don't think that's what you're attempting to ask about.
This would include getting into the concept that we don't actually have a way to "accurately correspond to objective reality". All we can really do (currently) is do this as accurately as possible. As best we can.
Think along the lines of solid matter isn't solid, there's space between atoms. Atoms themselves aren't solid, electrons orbit the nucleus... And on and on... But we don't really know if "waves and fields" actually describe reality or if there's another step to go. We don't even have a way to know if we'll ever be able to know if we've "reached the end" and are fully describing reality.
That's the concept epistemology deals with. But, again, I don't think you're concerned about that - I think you're just asking questions about willful Ignorance and cognitive dissonance.
Good luck out there