Steve asked:
What do we want from answers?
Answer by Eric George
What is given to us by answers and to which what we as human beings desire from answers, is of course; truth. Herein however, lays before us an even deeper question – ‘But what is truth?’ Truth, it could be said, is what is ultimately correct and objective (and therefore by nature not subjective).
By objectivity (that which is ‘objective’) we mean a fact concerning something which is completely autonomous of personal opinion, in other words – something concerning given reality which is or would be true whether one person in the world or no one in the world believes it to be true or not. And of course this follows that by subjectivity (that which is ‘subjective’) we mean to be an opinion based belief, this belief being true or not has nothing necessarily to do with someone believing that particular belief.
For example, suppose there exists a room of ten people where nine of the ten people do not believe the existence of gravity to be true (despite them all not floating around in mid-air), the tenth person however does indeed believe in the existence of gravity to be real. Now, just because the majority of persons in the room hold a belief which denies the existence of gravity does not mean at all that they are correct – on the contrary, in this scenario, it is the minority of one person who holds the belief that gravity is objectively true, that is correct.
So answers naturally follow questions (or at least try to ‘catch’ questions upon following), and questions are formulated by human beings who wish to interpret or unveil reality for what it really is, to explain what essentially is. In that, logic and rationality were not invented subjectively, they were discovered objectively as the blueprints of explanation, discourse and understanding.
We ask questions about reality and all that it encompasses in order to ascertain truth by answers to these questions. Now, permit me to clarify something here, of course just like most things in life not everything is so ‘black & white’, especially when dealing with the very nature ‘answers’. That is, not all answers are true since an answer to a question or inquiry could very well be false, so opinionated answers although they could be true (an opinion based upon objective truth is merely an extension of the fact itself, rather than a deviation from it) are probably more often than not, simply untrue.
Because for all opinionated answers to be true, this would mean that every or any single opinion held by any person in the world could all be true at the same time, which would going back to our scenario, make all ten people correct despite the nine being objectively wrong. Truth therefore, by definition is exclusive – and answers which seek to fulfil corresponding questions must be objectively true, wholly apart from opinion and totally binding across all planes irrespective of cultural or social conditions.
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