TOK Sample Essay-truth

“Truth is that which the community ultimately settles down” Charles Pierce. Analyse and evaluate this claim. To understand what truth is, we must know what not truth is. Hypothesis, theories and prophecies are not truth because they are only one person or group’s idea or claim which has not been empirically proved yet. So if truth does not comprise of these, the question arises that what does truth comprise of? This shall be discussed in this essay.
There are three main stages of finding truth. The first is people’s opinions. Truth is discovered only when people think about a possibility and experimentally verify it. Thus we see that if people did not opinionate and think of possibilities, truth could never be discovered. The second stage is experiments. Experiments are derived from either curiosity or disbelief. When people are curious about the unknown, they think of possible explanations or hypothesis. They also hypothesize when they do not believe a previously existing fact. These hypotheses are then experimentally verified to either give a back-up to the existing claim or disprove an existing claim, thereby creating new “truth”. The third stage is a change in the communities’ way of thinking. Once a hypothesis has been proved or disproved, it is important that others know about and believe it. If a fact has been disproved and nobody knows about it, it is futile as people will continue to believe the previous fact. Therefore, only when the community s aware and believes in a discovery can it be termed as truth. These three stages can be seen in any experiment. First a claim is made on the basis of observation and personal opinion. This is then verified experimentally and proved or disproved. Then a report on the experiment is written and published to let others know of the discovery. Only then is the discovery considered true.
To evaluate the statement made by Charles Peirce, let us break up the statement into four integral components. The first component is the word community. As seen earlier, the community is constantly trying to prove and disprove claims and existing beliefs, this being a result of their curiosity and skepticism. Therefore, the community itself is never fully satisfied with truth or facts. They continuously revise and confirm their knowledge, thereby showing that they can never know all truth. Yet, at any given point of time, it is the community that plays the key role in defining truth because it is the community that believes in that truth later on. When discussing the question of truth, we see that people are the deciding factor in defining truth. When there is doubt, it is the community that dispels it and formulates “new truth”. In this way, we can confirm that community does have the ruling hand in choosing truth.
The second component is the word “ultimately”. This word introduces the perplexity of time. It is an undisputed fact that time is never-ending. When a word such as “ultimately” is used, it gives us an idea that there is an ultimate time or an end to time, a contradiction to popular belief. Therefore, we can understand two very different opinions from this word. The first understanding is that Peirce believed in an end to time. The word ‘ultimately’ shows an ultimatum or an end to time. Yet, if time has an end, it would show that life too has an end, a highly debatable topic. The second understanding is that truth can never be settled because there is no ultimate time because it has no end. From this opinion, we see that truth is always transforming to fit the current belief system and scientific discoveries. This can be seen as true because through time, we have seen one fact after the other being transformed. For example, till the introduction of evolution, people believed in creationism as a reason for our existence. But, when the newer generation of people needed a more precise and definite reason and once fossils started to be discovered, the theory of evolution replaced creationism as the latest truth. From this, we see that time plays an important role in defining truth. We can also see that truth is ever-changing, and will be settled only when time comes to an end or at the time of the ultimatum.
The third component is the phrase “settles down”. It can be observed over time that people are never satisfied with what they know. They are constantly trying to find new strategies in business, mathematical laws or new facts in history. This shows that one is never satisfied with all the existing facts. There is a thirst for more knowledge that is never quenched. There is always scope for doubt and scepticism. Therefore, at no point in time do people settle down and believe one fact. They are always trying to know more. For example, up until recently, everyone believed that Neil Armstrong actually did land on the moon. When people started observing the footage more closely and examining it, they realised flaws such as the flag waving even though thee is no wind in outer space or the shadows of the astronauts facing the wrong direction. This kind of example shows that people are not so innocent as to believe everything that is told to them. Inquisitiveness forces the human kind to think beyond the realm of our understanding to explore new genres of knowledge and unearth more mysteries of life. Yet, if we see, at any point in time, truth is what everyone unanimously believes because there is none who can provide objective knowledge that contradicts the truth claim. If this is understood, we can see that at a given point in time, truth is a collectively believed piece of knowledge.
The last component is the ever debatable concept of truth. It must be understood that truth can never be doubted, but, because of our inquisitiveness there is no knowledge that is not doubted. Therefore, can it be assumed that there is no truth? From common understanding, we know that such a thing as truth does exist because it is a commonly used word. A common man may define truth as something that has been proven. But, there have been many cases where something that has been proven has been tested and found to be wrong. For example, the atomic structure was explained through the plum pie model. This was considered true till the atom was compared to the solar system in structure, which was a more appropriate example. Here we see the metamorphosis of truth over time. Therefore, we can understand that truth changes over time, and therefore is never permanent.
The statement made discusses the key factors that determine whether any belief is truth or not. From the previous paragraphs, we see how the community, time, and people’s curiosity play a key role in determining truth. With time, truth evolves and changes. Curiosity challenges and support truth. Community decided what they want to and do not want to believe and therefore decide truth. This is very clearly brought out in the statement made by Charles Peirce. Yet, I feel this definition of truth only applies to truth at any point in time. This is because there are many paradigm shifts that have taken place and continue to take place in different arenas of knowledge. If what we believe is truth right now is defined, then Charles Peirce’s statement would be an accurate explanation as it takes into consideration the changes that occur in facts through time. Therefore, i agree with the statement made by Charles Peirce that truth is that which the community ultimately settles down to.

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