Why Everything is True Or False...And Nothing Else!

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The basic idea that things are either true or false should possibly take a rest. The basic laws of thought clearly confirms this.

First, in formal language, either a proposition is true or false and there is nothing in between.

And let it sink that "completely true" is the same as true and "not completely true" is false. Anything contradictory is always false. Hence it's false to say "nothing is completely true" is true.

Consider the following logical deductions:

If “Nothing is completely true” is true, then nothing is completely true.

If nothing is completely true, then everything is false.

If everything is false, then “Nothing is completely true” is false.

So if “Nothing is completely true” is true, then, “Nothing is completely true”is false. (This is contradictory, and thus always false). Fact!

As a lover of science, I might be speaking out of turn—but like all lovers I generally think about my beloved a lot. So I want her to be free and productive, and not misunderstood.

Personally, the trouble with truth is that not only is the notion of eternal, universal truth highly questionable, but simple, local truths are subject to refinement as well. For example, up is up and down is down, of course. Safe for under special circumstances only. Is the North pointer up and the South one down? Is a building standing at one of the poles right-side up or upside-down? These ones depends on your perspective.

I have always studied how to think in and out of school which teaches me that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be true at the same time and in the same respect. That latter part, "in the same respect," says a lot. Whenever you change the frame of reference, you've changed the truthiness of a once an immutable fact.   

Death is one thing that seems pretty definite. Our body is just a lump. Life is gone. And if you step back a bit, you will realize the body is actually in a transitional phase while it slowly turns into compost—capable of living in another way.  

This does not mean that nothing is true or that everything is possible—just that it might not be so helpful for things to be known as true for all time, without a disclaimer. For now, the way it's presented to us, astrology is highly unlikely to be true. if it turns out, one day, that organic stuff once bounced off Mars and hit earth with a dose of life, we might have to revise some statements that the solar systems do not influence our lives here on earth at all.

I was wondering, and this is just a modest proposal, if scientific truth should be identified in a way that acknowledges that it's something we know and understand for now and understand in a particular way.

A major way the public comes to mistrust science is when they feel that scientists can't make up their minds. For instance, one says red wine is good for you, and another says even in small amounts it can be harmful. Hence, some people think science is just another belief system.

Usually science writers make a real effort to deal with this all the time. The common day-to-day phrase, "Current research suggests…" warns us that it's not a fact yet. However, from time to time the full blown factualness of something is declared, even though further work could place it within a new frame of reference. And then we ,the public, might wonder if the scientists are just arguing for their pet ideas and derivatives of opinions.

According to me, facts are workable units, useful in a given frame or context. Facts should be as exact and irrefutable as possible, tested by experiment to the fullest extent. Whenever the frame changes, they don't need to be discarded as untrue, but respected as still useful within their domain.  I believe most people who work with facts accept this, but I don't think the public fully gets it.

This is why I hope for more wariness about implying we know something to be true or false for all time and for everywhere in the cosmos.

On the contrary, I am not very sure about “right” or “wrong”. I suppose people mean “right” as in morally right (moral) and “wrong” as in morally wrong (immoral). For some people think that there are things that are absolutely wrong like killing and things that are absolutely right like saving lives, some people think that morality is subjective to each human culture. Therefore, some cultures might find certain things moral, but other cultures may find the same things immoral. In such a case, it can be argued that nothing is universally right or wrong. Point driven home I hope. You get the picture

Yet again, there are many people who think that morality doesn’t exist, and thus nothing is ever right or wrong. What will you say to them? And how can you convince them it does?

There has always been quite a variety of views on the matter of “right” and “wrong”, and no real consensus. On the hand, it looks that everyone agrees with the law of excluded middle and the law of non-contradiction, and that everything is either true or false, and that there really are things that are true and things that are false. And this are the most basic foundations of logic.