Three Tests Of Truth Essays - Theories Of Truth, Philosophical Logic

Three Tests Of Truth In a court of law expert witnesses are required to demonstrate the truth "beyond reasonable doubt". This is difficult for a 'knower', such as a historian, to be able to assert this at the witness stand. Let's say that a young couple has just been married. The young couple stays together for a couple of months before they break up. When the two individually write reports on why the divorce is necessary, the judge is confused about the disparity between them. Thus, he calls upon a historian who specializes in the history of certain marriages and divorces to act as an expert witness for this court case. The historian is given information on the case both first-hand by the husband and the wife as well as from some secondary sources. This historian's job is to use his expertise to determine the truth of what really happened that caused the divorce of the couple. First and foremost, the historian knows that he must try to get as close to the objective truth as possible; he has to select a single set of data from groups of different information to construct a single truth, or'what really happened'. Since he is dealing with a modern case, as opposed to his usual account of a past divorce case, the historian is tempted to list all the data from the primary sources. Fortunately, he remembers that listing all the different points of view is not more objective, simply because they may contradict. Regardless of the varying points of view, the past event only could have occurred in one way-that is the truth. Therefore, to say that the event transpired in many different ways that are all equally valid is no longer a search for single truth. As von Ranke said, "the historian's task is to find out how it really was." Consequently, the historian tries to 'lift' himself from the data. He also must remove his biases from the sources of the information. For instance, he cannot be biased against the husband's brother who backed into his brand-new convertible just a week ago. He must give the brother's information the same treatment because it may be valuable. After achieving this, the historian can move on to the actual selection of the data. The historian's next step is to use the correspondence test of truth by trying to find the certain data that is pretty well constant amongst all the information. This correspondence theory is the same one that is used in science, where scientists do different experiments; if their data is constant, then a scientific theory can be made about the data. For example, when scientists did experiments on the reaction between iron and oxygen, they kept on producing the same rusty coloured substance: iron oxide. Thus, they are able to conclude that iron + oxygen = iron oxide is a truth. Like chemistry, history uses correspondence between data. Presuppose that all reports of the separated couple indicate that the husband did not remember his wife's birthday and that she did not want children. What gives this data extra durability is that it was found in both the husband's and the wife's account, as well as in the secondary sources' information. Moreover, it makes indicative statements about why the divorce could have occurred. Therefore, it is possible to conclude with a measure of confidence that the statements are true beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, the historian questions his judgement and begins to think, 'Does correspondence necessarily mean that the data is true?' He immediately remembers his high school history class where he studied documents about the American Revolution written by people from the American and British sides. Although the data differed in many ways, there was a lot of consistency between the two sides. When considering the battle at Lexington Green, both sides contained consistent information: that there was a first shot, that the British shot at the Americans, and that the British killed a number of people. However, in historical information from different sources, some data may be contradictory. In this case, there may have been a multitude of American sources which said that the first shot was British while there may have been only a few British sources available, all of which stated the opposite. One could say that because there is a larger degree of correspondence that the British shot first, that is must be true. But, that may not be correct in all instances. Hence, there must be other methods of deciding what is the