In the epistemology of sciences, there is nothing remotely related to "truth" in a religious or ideological sense. Scientific research goes through a process of validation -- not an essentialist religious truth -- build-up by scientific methods, scientific criticism, and scientific proofs. In sciences, there are researchers from diverse religious faiths, ideologies, cultures, and the most different cultural practices that are able to understand that science is a type of knowledge completely different from belief. Re-introducing nowadays the old "truth" debate is nothing more than an ideological device to undermine sciences, something that we are witnessing with the political-ideological movements of negationism of the COVID19 pandemic with the utmost dramatic consequences.

Thank you Ivo Carneiro de Sousa for this funded reply. I do know this, even not at this level of formal accuracy. My aim was, that actually by leaving the maxim of "truth to be reached" we unconsciously change our approach towards the scientific discussion. I know, it can be a matter of discussion (exactly this is it here :-) ). I am surely not a covid denier, but, strangely, I have a lots of experiences, where the debate actually goes in selective manner, causing, that we on one hand do use scientific methods of discussion, on the other, we prevent certain facts or interpretation posibilities already at the beginning, which actually is against the presumed method, but nobody is willing to see it (or tell it).

So, simply, my point was, if we are not losing our exactness in favour of some prejudices taken as "correct" and thereby not researchable anymore. I do not aim at any particularity, because there are dozens if fixed "correct" opinions. The question could probably also go, if you really think there is no ideological preasuming in the very scientific debates of today...

As this has been posed, medical practices and medicine occupy a distinct use of methods and public persuasion from most other sciences and indeed reaches truths based on the authority of medicine and its propagators. Covid denial can be fixed upon evidence concerns denied by those pressing its truths, certainly in relation to political and social factors. The growth and intrusion of medicine itself into the social sphere, witnessed for at least 100 years, has increased under covid.

There is nothing wrong with disbelief. The sciences nevertheless are only one aspect of the humanities referenced here and really scepticism is valid for all things.

Honest skepticism about any claim of truth is a good thing. All such claims should be investigated to the satisfaction of the individual, but the key word is "investigated". Far too often we casually accept something based simply on its source or how it resonates with our desired belief.

But having said this, we must also acknowledge that all knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is based on assumptions. We assume that the currently generally accepted scientific MODEL of reality is reasonably valid, or that our model based on the humanities is. Reality, and therefore truth itself, is far bigger than any of our models for it and will reign supreme and smash our models whenever there is a direct conflict

Now I do not advocate giving up on a search for the truth, indeed I feel we should be ever engaged in a search for a closer approximation of the truth, but I also recognize that we will never fully engage it.

Yes, under certain conditions.

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Comte's positivism has led us to believe that only the experimental is true.However, natural truth can be reached by our mental faculties. The experimental sciences have contaminated this truth.

Truth is a combination of the natural sciences and the humanities, with the latter putting forward hypotheses and the former verifying them.

I was recently reading a book that touches on this issue. In the "hard sciences" people tend to rely on controlled experimentation and as precise as possible measurements in order to achieve as accurate results as possible. In the humanities, which include the soft sciences, much more weight is assigned to anecdotal accounts and this is deemed less reliable.

However, this attitude raises the question of, do parachutes save lives of people falling or jumping out of airplanes from a great eight? There have been no carefully conducted and controlled experiments of this point, all the evidence we have is anecdotal. Yet who doubts that parachutes save lives? How many people would be willing to participate in a properly conducted double blind experiment on this?

A proper double blind experiment would involve people being trained in how to use a parachute, then being randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group would be issued functioning parachutes, while the other would be issued something that looked and felt like a functioning parachute but in fact was not. Both groups would then be taken up to the same altitude in a plane and over the same tereain several thousand feet below, be expelled from the plane, so that survival rates of these two groups could be compared. And of course a single experiment would not be sufficient, so several such experiments would need to be conducted.

Doe anyone so doubt the validity of using anecdotal evidence in finding the truth that they would volunteer to be part of a proper, double scientific experiment as to whether or not parachutes save lives of people jumping or falling from airplanes? Yet if we accept anecdotal evidence as valid, then the humanities can clearly provide access to truth.

if the firm truth is not available or is better to be unavailable, how we can based our social and political critiques upon? are logical or factual or utilitarian approaches enough for this?

'Truth' has a variety of meanings, but the most common definitions refer to the state of being in accordance with facts or reality

Agree with the views of M.K. Tripathi

Dear Jan Obrtlík, thanks for sharing a significant philosophical question. Somehow, I do agree Fausto Presutti. However, I would like to say we can reach the truth to a certain level and it is a truth until it will be falsified or a new truth will be outbroken.

I think, to reach the truth, we have to educate people about humanity and other aspects, since the level of their thoughts can be , in fact, unpredictable... In some cases, the idea of humanity and truth may be imposed by the politicians for political and economic reasons. Therefore, what can be a truth? Everyone has their own truth and faith, based on the personal experience, culture, education and etc.

Defining a “Fact”

A fact is understood here to be a verifiable literal description of a real phenomenon as an ideal element of a universal systemic whole. In this context, phenomena are products of individual consciousness. A fact, therefore, is a literal claim to universal status for the ideal meaning an individual has attached to a real phenomenon present to their consciousness.

All theory that aspires to the ontological status of “scientific” is made up of facts, and the relationships between facts, in the sense used here. Clearly, systems of facts and the ideal structures in which they are embedded compete, on a collective and literal level, with other similarly described systems for this prime ontological status. They compete precisely because no such literal description of a system can ever completely and consistently describe all real human phenomenal data.

These systems, which are propositions about the real phenomenal data, address only those facts that are relevant to a particular ideal structure, leaving perpetually open the possibility that any such system will ever ultimately describe all the data. As a result of our understanding of a “fact,” we also understand the necessity of a distinction, on the one hand, between the real and ideal for an individual person and, on the other hand, between the literal and universal for a collective of people.

Maintaining this distinction is further complicated by our tendency, in constructing systemic wholes, to interpolate and extrapolate from experienced phenomena, the realm of empirical inquiry, to phenomena that are only implied in completion of the whole, the realm of interpretive inquiry and philosophy. A significant example of extrapolation, one essential to phenomenology, is the inferred existence of other consciousnesses, which can never be experienced as real phenomena.

(PDF) Wholeness and the Rational Structure of Inquiring Systems: A Dissertation https://www.amazon.com/Wholeness-Rational-Structure-Inquiring-Systems-ebook/dp/B00KMA1SPO/. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351884945_Wholeness_and_the_Rational_Structure_of_Inquiring_Systems_A_Dissertation_httpswwwamazoncomWholeness-Rational-Structure-Inquiring-Systems-ebookdpB00KMA1SPO [accessed Aug 04 2021].

Haven't conceptions of truth always been derived from "a mere consensus in [a] particular group" or some established orthodoxy? Even naturalism and deterministic approaches of centuries ago were determined by people in power to be part of academia's official canon and rely on agreed-upon methods of obtaining objectivity that arguably have their own inherent subjectivities. I would go as far as to argue that it was worse before because those who went against the grain risked being condemned as radicals or heretics. Given the limits of epistemology in that we cannot determine truth for certain, academia largely seems to be an elaborate art of trying to convince people to believe in a particular viewpoint. The deliberation through which this convincing takes place is framed within the context of power relations.

This relationalism of the truth comes from a political understanding of postmodernism and is dangerous. If there is no truth, than there are no universal morals. But this cannot be true, because all societies share common morals such as "You shall not kill" or "You shall not steal". Without the belief in one truth, everything is likewise acceptable - the good and the bad.

I agree, that truth is always the most exact image of the world as we know it, with the help of the means of recognition we have - in earlier times religion, now science.

My theory is, that there is an interplay of hard facts (exact science) and narratives (humanities) to come closer to the understanding of an ever changing world. They both construct concepts, that are different but intermingled. Hard facts present formalised, causal truth, whereas narratives represent psychological or humanistic truth ( rhetoric, dramaturgy, leitmotifs, subtexts). Together they build a discourse.

Narratives create a coherent imagery that opens up a holistic field of meaning and often conflicts with event-oriented factual truth. Narratives do not exist in an empty space, but form a community that shares common values. They offer identification and orientation. Narratives, as self-fulfilling prophesies, construct a tendentious image of reality that guides the present as a projection of a desirable future.

Narratives gain importance when a critical mass assigns a shared meaning to an issue that goes beyond the factual level. Narratives take up symbolisms that are present in collective memory and reshape them. They adapt them to the changed circumstances and sensitivities of the present.

In this process, swarm intelligence points to subliminal problems in the construction of factual reality, but this is no guarantee that it will correct factual reality toward greater truthfulness. Narratives can also function as deception, misdirection, cover-up or suppression of unwelcome truths by preventing or delaying the publicization or reappraisal of facts.

Still, narratives can give a direction for formal truth to evolve further and there might be found new facts or new symmetries of facts that form a new theory, that confirm a narrative's elements which before seemed scientifically "untrue" (because unapproved).

Simone Belko is quite right, if there is no truth then there are no universal morals. I am fascinated by the performative contradiction of 'There is no such thing as the truth' which itself is a truth-claim! Truth is a transcendental precondition of all human inquiry and is best understood as a formal, regulative norm.