Dea Folks,
I'm thinking it might be helpful to try to distinguish between the notions
of real and true. One can contrast real with imaginary and true with false.
Some further preliminary thoughts below. As in maybe---
Peirce proposes that being comes in three modes -- the potential, the
actual and the tending toward. He calls all three modes real -- as opposed
to mere fictions, figments of the imagination, or as some might say
nominally real or real in name only. So then what is a fiction? Fictions,
in my view, are category mistakes. As when when we mistake one catergory of
reality for another. For example, when we miscategorize something that is
potentially real as something that is actually real.
Mistaking one form of reality for another is the sort of category mistake we
call a fiction. However if we examine the sort of error we can make within
each category of being we come upon the notion of truth vs falshood. For
example to mistake the impossible for the potential is a falsehood within
the potential mode of being. Likewise to mistake what has occured for what
has not occured is a falsehood within the actual/perceptual mode of being.
Finally to mistake the tending toward for what is not being tended toward is
a falsehood within the category of science.
The distinction between real and true, that arises from the above viewpoint,
becomes a matter or how both the real and the true are established. Real is
established by dtermining not whether something conforms to fact or reason
but whether or not it has been rightly classified as potential, actual or
tending toward. True, on the other hand, is a matter that depends upon
determining whether something conforms to observation and logic.
Put still another way -- Being is divided into three kinds of reality and
within each of these real modes of being (feeling, reactions, and thoughts)
truth can be established by appeals to observation and logic. To say
something is unreal is to say it has been miscatergorized. To say something
is untrue is to say it has been mistakenly observed or reasoned.
Maybe--
Cheers,
Jim Piat
And Ben -- I would still want to argue that all of these errors are at root
instances of the general rule that all error is a matter of mistaking the
whole for the part. Error lies not in misperception but in drawing a false
conclusion. And overgeneralizing from one's personal limited experience to
god's will is in my limited experience the universal error underlying all
errors. In this way all we experience is both true but not the whole truth.
No one is wrong -- but neither is any individual by his or herself entirely
correct. By its very nature of affording more than one POV the ultimately
truth of reality is a property of the whole and error of the part.
Perhaps.
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