O idei prawdy
About the idea of truth

Author(s): Dobrosław Bagiński
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Language studies, Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: social communication; language; truth; meaning
Summary/Abstract: Communication between people is based mainly on symbols. This is speech, gestic-ulation and artificial visual systems. Symbols transmit factual past and future states as well as views and entire narratives, filling people's minds with an equivalent reality. For a symbolic system to work, its users must share knowledge of the code or lan-guage with others. The second necessary condition is mutually sharing the belief that symbols do not lie and do not confuse but convey the truth. While the first condition belongs to the order of knowledge, the second belongs to the order of faith. Truth is the idea sine qua non of symbolic communication, because symbolic expressions appear as if in the name of hard facts or judgments and statements of other people. But truth is more than an idea. It is a useful myth that stabilizes and at the same time corrects and develops humanity. Living in the myth of truth that we carry within us makes us able to give meaning to all verbal and picture messages we exchange with each other, and it is this myth that tells us what is true and what is not. This text will be about how people use the idea of truth and how this idea has become a tool for multiplying knowledge or deception in human communities. In other words - the idea of truth as a regulator of relations and communication processes, and more generally - of social processes.But there will be nothing here about what truth itself is. Because the truth is the truth.

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