It seems that there is truth. Certain logical certainties, like the curved shape of a circle or Aristotle's Theory of Non-Contradiction, simply cannot be denied. Any argument to the contrary signals a lack of education on the questioners' part.
Digression: But are there kinds of truth? Logical truths are true indeed, but what about fallible human-proposed truths? Like the example of cup throwing in my last post, when someone says they are going to do something, the truth of their statement rests in whether or not their claim is fulfilled. The confirmation of a statement of action relies on the future to be true, not on the present. End digression.
In the modern world in which I live (but really, I would refer to the time period I live in as "modern" no matter what year it was), I am getting to experience a great slew of ideas, both fashionable and otherwise. Inevitably, some of these theories deal with truth. Or specifically, the lack of truth.
Philosophies and the terms we use to describe them have an annoying tendency to convolute conversation due to the semantic issues surrounding many of them. For example, "nihilism," as defined by Dictonary.com, can be any of six different definitions, from the simple rejection of established institutions, to anarchy, to the specific credo of a group of 19th century Russian revolutionaries. In my limited experience, the conglomerative definite of nihilism that I have come to understand it to be is the idea that there is no possibility for the objective basis of truth. Humans cannot know ultimate truth, because there is nothing outside of our existence that causes truth to be true.
Firstly, this contradicts my previous conclusion that there is truth. I suppose nihilism would say that I couldn't decide upon the existence of truth because truth does not exist. But is that statement true? For that matter, wouldn't a nihilist inherently believe that the philosophy of nihilism is true? The contradiction is thus: in order to accept nihilism, one must believe that the statement, "there is no objective truth" is objectively true.
Likewise with postmodernism; it claims to reject the possibility of universal explanatory truth systems while at the same time being a truth system. It also seems to be blatantly untrue because of the contradiction necessary to make it true. And if the first semester of university taught me anything, it's that argumentative contradictions are bad. Yeah.
You see what I just said? I don't really like it. For the same reasons that Anselm's cosmological argument for the existence of God just doesn't seem to jive, the contradictions of nihilism and postmodernism don't jive. And just like Anselm's argument, I can't really think a refutation to what I just said. This is one of those times where I don't feel like I'm getting my ideas across adequately. Whatever.
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