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Convertibility of Virtues (Truth, Beauty, etc...)
According to classical metaphysics, truth is beauty is goodness etc... However, I can think of a counterexample to this.
That the Holocaust happened is a truth. However, there doesn't appear to be any beauty behind this fact. It's an ugly truth. So how can we know that the truth is, in fact, the same as beauty?
- DanielCC
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Re: Convertibility of Virtues (Truth, Beauty, etc...)
Thomas and others distinguished between epistemic and ontological truth, the former being their formulation of the Correspondence theory.
The second variety, that under consideration in discussions of the Transcendentals, means something more like 'genuineness' or 'veracity to type' (how accurately something instantiates a universal). The worry about this is not that it’s wrong but that it's tautologically equivalent to Goodness, and thus an unnecessary piece of conceptual apparatus. Truth predicated in this sense applies to entities and not propositions. It also admits of degrees unlike the propositional kind.
In the case of something like the Holocaust it would be a category mistake to apply that concept of truth or falsity to said proposition. Breaking the events down in terms of ontology one would say that a lot of the substances involved i.e. persons, were less ontologically true (feel away from the standard of the universal of which they were an instance).
Last edited by DanielCC (5/26/2016 4:45 am)