User:LGreg/sandbox/Approaches to Knowledge (LG seminar)/Group 1/Truth/Laws & Physics
Truth in Law and Physics[edit | edit source]
Law[edit | edit source]
What is law?
The dictionary definition of law, according to the Collins Dictionary, is: The law is a system of rules that a society or government develops in order to deal with crime, business agreements, and social relationships.
It questions the kind of world we as a society want to live in, and debates the methods that should be used to best protect the values that society cherish the most. Law uses reason by looking at arguments, logic, facts as well as hard evidence in order to achieve its goals.
What are the truths in law?
Law stems from rule and order, and as such one might believe that it is a very objective thing — there is only one correct way to achieve this rule and order. Furthermore, in many court cases, especially in criminal cases, law is often seen as the only way to uncover the truth in these situations. However, law is in fact quite subjective. While lawyers do use evidence and facts, which are known as objective truths, they tend to choose the facts and evidence that work in their favour in order to convince the majority of the jury. There are many other factors that contribute to successes of lawyers in court, such as word choice, which do not depend on objective truths, and overall, can show that law is not as objective as it may seem. In addition, although evidence may seem like a very objective truth, many court cases use evidence in forms of witnesses and testimonies, which are based off personal views and can be argued to be subjective truths.
In order to combat the biases that may occur when ruling court cases, we have a system where the majority of the jury (10 out of 12) must rule the defendant guilty or not. However, even with this, one can argue that constructivism played a key role in the final decision of the trial. This is because the jury have all had their own prior experiences which could easily affect the way they think about the specific trial. Once the trial concludes, the final decision also becomes a constructivist truth, where the rest of society just accepts the decision as the truth based off the knowledge they gained from the trial.
Even the most common rights protected under the law that society as a whole universally accepts could be argued to be subjective truths. For example, the right to protection. One could easily argue that protection is not as important as other rights (for example food) and as such should not be considered a right that we need protect. Or one could believe that not everyone deserves equal protection because of other factors such as how much the individual contributes to society.
We as a society create a list of actions that are considered “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong” but there is no way to test or prove whether or not these are what they are considered. As such, it is hard to refer to the law as an objective truth, like that of science and physics, but should rather be seen as a subjective or constructivist truth.
Physics[edit | edit source]
What is physics and what are its truths?
Physics is a natural science based on experiments, measurements and mathematical analysis with the purpose of finding quantitative physical laws for everything in the world.[1] In physics, all the judgments or propositions must be mathematical or experimental provable, and the process of accepting judgments into truth is called ‘the process of verification’,[2] which suggests that most of the truth in physics is objective and empirical.
However, in physics, the truth can also be subjective, for example, quantum mechanics itself is as well tested as a theory can be, but there are still many specific and unexpected limits to its knowledge as there is no definite reality of the particles (for example the photon experiment), our observation affects reality and depending on the viewpoint different conclusions may be reached. Another example is the string theory, which predicts the existence of a potentially huge number of unique universes and only one that corresponded to our own version of reality and therefore the truth may vary depending on which reality it is referring to, making the truth in physics more complicated and add uncertainty and duality to its nature, which also suggests that there is no absolute truth in physics.[3]
Truth in physics can also be interpretive, lately, more physicists are interested in how the uncertainties of physics affect how our consciousness about how the world operates, because our inner mental life is hidden from external observation and does not follow the mathematical description, so a better understanding of the mind might be able to help us to discover some new theory of physics or new way of thinking.