Meminjam Pemikiran Bertrand Russell

 🔴Whatever we are acquainted with must be something: we may draw wrong inferences from our acquaintance, but the acquaintance itself cannot be deceptive. Thus there is no dualism as regards acquaintance. But as regards knowledge of truths, there is a dualism. We may believe what is false as well as what is true. We know that on very many subjects different people hold different and incompatible opinions: hence some beliefs must be erroneous. Since erroneous beliefs are often held just as strongly as true beliefs, it becomes a difficult question how they are to be distinguished from true beliefs. How are we to know, in a given case, that our belief is not erroneous? This is a question of the very greatest difficulty, to which no completely satisfactory answer is possible. There is, however, a preliminary question which is rather less difficult, and that is: What do we mean by truth and falsehood?

Terjemahan Bebas:

Apapun yang kita kenal, sebut saja A, kita mungkin bisa mengambil kesimpulan salah tentang A. Tapi A itu sendiri, tidak berubah. Yang berubah adalah persepsi kita terhadap A. Itu saja. Dengan demikian tidak ada dualisme pada diri A ini. Tapi, kaitannya dengan bagaimana kita mengetahui A, itulah yang memilki dualisme. 

Kita mungkin percaya apa yang salah dan apa yang benar. Kita tau bahwa setiap orang memiliki pendapat yang berbeda dan kadang bertentangan. Salah satunya pasti salah. Karena keyakinan yang salah sering dipegang sama kuatnya dengan keyakinan yang benar. Hal ini menjadi sangat sulit membedakan yang benar. Bagaimana kita tau bahwa kepercayaan kita tidak salah?

🔴Truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact. It is, however, by no means an easy matter to discover a form of correspondence to which there are no irrefutable objections. By this partly and partly by the feeling that, if truth consists in a correspondence of thought with something outside thought, thought can never know when truth has been attained

Many philosophers have been led to try to find some definition of truth which shall not consist in relation to something wholly outside belief. The most important attempt at a definition of this sort is the theory that truth consists in coherence. It is said that the mark of falsehood is failure to cohere in the body of our beliefs, and that it is the essence of a truth to form part of the completely rounded system which is The Truth.

Terjemahan bebas:

Kebenaran terdiri dari persesuaian antara kepercayaan dan fakta. Bagaimanapun sangat sulit menemukan persesuaian yang tidak dibantah dengan bantahan yang kuat. 

Selain itu, jika kebenaran terdiri dari persesuaian antara pikiran (kepercayaan) dan sesuatu di luar pikiran (fakta) maka pikiran tidak akan tau mana yang merupakan kebenaran. Karena ia akan bergantung pada keberadaan di luar pikiran tersebut.

Lalu benarkah pernyataan di atas bahwa kebenaran terdiri dari persesuaian antara kepercayaan dan fakta?

Banyak filsuf mencoba merumuskan definisi kebenaran yang tidak bergantung pada sesuatu di luar pikiran. Definisi yang paling penting adalah bahwa kebenaran terdiri dari koherensi (hubungan). Dalam teori ini disebutkan bahwa kesalahan adalah kegagalan kepercayaan kita berkoherensi terhadap kenyataan. Itulah esensi kebenaran.

🔴The first serious irruption of science was the publication of the Copernican theory in 1543; but this theory did not become influential until it was taken up and improved by Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth century. Then began the long fight between science and dogma, in which traditionalists fought a losing battle against new knowledge.

13/07/23