Well, your example can’t be more good as, yes, impressionism is to me the higher form of art. Of course I love the classics and The Virgin of the Rocks is still my favorite painting ever (talk about maths, huh? Leonardo discovered more science for his paintings than regular researchers today)… but I can’t stand Canaletto and his overly-detailed and perfect paintings.
I know words can’t be used at random (I’m rather the grammar nazi tbh) but I think this should not go too far. And I’m not saying that this thread is useless. I just can’t stand people correcting my grammar when I use something like a “cyanotic light”.
Of course, all of the above works only in Italian. I’m not that good at english to say anything about it.
When I read it, I assumed that there is a different cultural background in the fictional world that would make sense of it. I think of Voigt-Kampff or something else science-fictiony.
Uh, another thing that bugs me.
“Truth is that which is revealed” is a Yoda thing, to me.
Truth is truth. Then it can be conceived or revealed, buy it stays the truth.
Or are we talking about “If a tree falls in a deserted forest and no one is there to hear the sound of it hitting the ground, did the sound ever occur?”
Ok, in OUR world, truth is not EVEN that which is revealed, but what actually people believe. Or, rather, in a State of Rights, what a Judge decides. But this is really the annoying me.
Thank you for mudding the waters even more. Incidently, strange as it may sound, “Truth is that which is revealed” is correct and good to go, if you reduce “truth” to the value of “noun” - don’t look at it like it’s supposed to mean an idealised Truth, but rather like “The definition of the word “truth” is: that which is revealed”. Which, incidently, I don’t quite agree with, but I already stated that.
I understood “truth” to be something like a “fact” – If “the sun is a star” is true, then the statement is a truth, or a fact.
Now while obviously truths/facts can be revealed, I’m not sure what facts themselves are supposed to reveal – what could the statement “The sun is a star” possibly reveal, other than the statement itself?
And the facts don’t usually reveal themselves, but they are revealed to an observer by a third “agent”. So, in my understanding, John can reveal the truth, Mary can reveal something else, but the truth itself doesn’t reveal anything – this is what I meant with the yodaesque “Truth is that which is revealed.” (Or, more grammatically, “truth is the object of revelation”.)
Does this sound more comprehensible?
(Of course, it would be different if “truth” was understood as “truthfulness”, ie honesty – but was that the intent?)
Okay, for the phrase to be felicitous I think it’s pretty clear that the what and the truth are different things. Ie, the discovery of one truth reveals a second truth which the mind was concealing from itself.
One example would be that we had tricked ourselves into believing that the economy was trustworthy, but the financial crisis revealed that it was a sham and ready to collapse at any time.
Perfectly, and your point now seems very clear. The problem is that it doesn’t leave much room for more “idealised” notions of Truth(! Freedom! And a hard-boiled egg!*), which is what I suppose “truth” means to most people - usually in their minds, “the sun is a star” isn’t just true and the statemement isn’t just a truth; it’s the truth (though not maybe The Whole Truth - but let’s not go there!). They take the true statement to be synonimous with the concept of “truth”. Hence, though the mind may try to conceal something that is true, a series of events will lead to its uncovering - or possibly, what the mind may try to conceal, a series of events in themselves “true” (or, more idealised, working as agents of a Truth) will reveal.
*I gotta go through my Pratchett collection again. When I start quoting him like crazy it means I’m jonesing.
EDIT - Danii beat me to it, but his post is fortuitous. He says “the discovery of one truth reveals a second truth which the mind was concealing from itself.”, and as you see he takes “truth” to be synonimous with something that is true. Maybe that’s the root of all of this (interesting) discussion?..
EDIT 2 - In fact Danii’s example accomodates both readings, since it means that the “truth” in the original statement is a revelation.
Yes!
To be honest I was not talking about the matter you were explaining (being a truth cannot uncover anything*) but just the “definition of truth” which I can’t be in line with.
Ok, a (revealed) truth can reveal another truth. Like, when you understand that the Sun is a star, you then uncover the truth by which the Sun is hot, because another truth states that a star is hot.
But, yes, by itself a truth cannot uncover anything, just spoil some beliefs.
Usually. Unless the Church, I mean.
The Greek word for truth is aletheia (ἀλήθεια). This means literally something like “the state of not being hidden”, in other words, “the state of being revealed”. The truth, then, is by definition that which is revealed. (Here we make the Heideggerian assumption that the correct use of our philosophical words can be found in the Greek language in which he problems of Western philosophy were first posed.)
Of course, if we go that way, it no longer makes sense to say that truth reveals anything – it just is that which is revealed, as syzygy maintains. But even Heidegger admits that in our modern usage, we also use truth to speak about true propositions, which in turn reveal whatever it is that needs to be made unhidden. That usage does allow us to say that truth is that which is revealed. But, again, there’s something to be said for both sides. (Or, as we philosophers like to say, “that’s just semantics”. Don’t worry, I’m sure the semanticists say thing like “now you’re just getting philosophical”.)
Victor, I think that on at least some views “mind” and “truth” can contrast in the way you want, akin to the dualism of Mind and World. One might think that people’s minds distort the truth, and only the unvarnished truth itself reveals whatever we are interested in. Which of course raises the question of how we are to access the truth if not through our minds, but it might not be impossible to come up with a view on which there was a sensible answer to that. Certainly it will be controversial to say that “mind” and “truth” do not contrast because without the mind we cannot grasp any truths. Many consider the important truths to be mind-independent, and worry about how we can possibly grasp those truths using our minds (either because they think that we only have direct access to the contents of our own minds, or for other reasons).
In a more ordinary sense, you could also think of things as involving the mind more or less, and draw the contrast that way. For instance, you could think that the active powers of the mind (such as imagination and ratiocination) tend to distort the truth, and that we only can access the truth when we allow ourselves to passively receive it, through the sense or divine revelation or something like that. Then you could say “The mind conceals, the truth reveals.” I don’t hold any of these views myself, but I think they’re at least coherent enough to be turned into mottoes.
Well, a mind can very well conceal something from someone (you can try to hide your knowledge or feelings from others for instance) or your mind could conceivably hide things even from yourself (or your consciousness) (a point on which Freudians and cognitive scientists would agree, I suppose). And, in a mottoish manner of speaking, as soon as something is revealed, truth could be said to reveal it.
The opposition between mind and truth in the motto need not be taken to held between mind in general and truth in general, but between any particular mental attempt at hiding something (figuratively ” the mind”) and an inevitable public knowledge about that something (figuratively ”the truth”).
If that is the intended meaning of the motto, I suppose ”Mens obscurat, veritas revelat” is slightly off, since it certainly suggests an opposition between mind and truth in general. If so, perhaps that relative pronoun ("What mind conceals …”) should be put back in: “Quod tegat mens, detegat veritas”.
Agreed w/syzygy. “When the mind conceals [the truth], the truth reveals [the truth]” doesn’t work. Syzygy wasn’t being Yoda-like, he was trying to explain what a direct object is.
This truth didn’t reveal itself; James revealed it. Thanks, James.
The original English version of the motto was “What the mind conceals, the truth reveals”. There is no question about what the direct object is in that sentence: “The truth reveals what the mind conceals” – thus “what the mind conceals” explicitly is the direct object here.
Surely, things other than truths can be concealed and revealed – like hideous lies e.g.
Certainly true, though I don’t think it follows that the mind has to be doing the revealing. Compare: “What you conceal from yourself, the truth will reveal to yourself” – the revelation can’t take place without you, but you aren’t doing the revealing.
Of course it’s dubious that the truth itself is doing the revealing there. One can say something like “the truth smacked him in the face” when someone is confronted with an unpleasant reality. Or you can’t hide from the truth, because the truth is all there is, which would be a great motto; I will now annoy Emily by using Google Translate to transform it into a sequence of Latin words:
which according to Google Translate means “to hide the truth because the truth is not only a.”
You can’t reveal yourself (or truth or anything else) to a zombie then … Would that be a substantial thesis or just a remark about the semantics of “reveal”? (I’m talking philosophical zombies, of course.)
It strikes me that there’s an unexamined interpretation of “What the mind conceals, the truth reveals”, if we take ‘mind’ to be a passive object rather than active agent. If we treat the noun ‘mind’ like ‘nest’, then we get something like:
“What is concealed within the mind,”
From this we would get the motto of an enthusiastic psychologist or psychonaut.
In fact, there is a further (if unlikely) interpretation that involves a bit of licence with the grammar:
If we take “the truth reveals” to, poetically (i.e. dubiously grammatically) mean ‘the revealing of truths’ (or, because it is plural, perhaps ‘the revealings of truths’). In the same way that ‘egg laying’ means to lay eggs, not an egg lying around, and we might charitably convert ‘the egg lays’ to ‘the layings of eggs’.
Then, if we take ‘what’ in the sense of ‘that which [blah] is’:
“What is concealed within the nest, the layings of eggs”
or:
“What is concealed within the mind, the revealings of truths”
or like a cryptic crossword, turning the ‘reveals’ into a noun, and ‘truth’ as a noun modifier:
If a truth manifests in a forest and there’s no conscious mind to witness it, is it still revealed?
I admit that I had some doubts even when I first volunteered a translation. My concern was that a thing that is revealed (after having been concealed) is almost necessarily a “truth”: to conceal something is to deceive, and to reveal something is to produce the truth that counters the deception. In that sense, since the truth is the object, established as such by the first phrase (“the mind conceals”) it does not really make sense as the subject of the second phrase, “the truth reveals”. The truth might “reveal itself”, or it might “manifest in spite of the deception”, but the phrase “the truth reveals” implies that it reveals something else other than itself. Which seems odd.
Still, it might make sense in context. We don’t really know the context. I’m assuming this is supposed to be a motto of some sort.
Incidently, strange as it may sound, “Truth is that which is revealed” is correct and good to go, if you reduce “truth” to the value of “noun” - don’t look at it like it’s supposed to mean an idealised Truth, but rather like “The definition of the word “truth” is: that which is revealed”. Which, incidently, I don’t quite agree with, but I already stated that.