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Topic 3: There are no absolute distinctions between what is true and what is false. Discuss this claim.

I’d always believed that the truth was a rather simple idea. To me, it was something that was true or correct or existing in this world. But after all the discussions in TOK, with family and with friends, and after deep rumination on the subject, I’ve realized that’s it’s a much more broad, complex and often mind-boggling concept. However, now I see that there are essentially three main factors that lead us to accepting something as the truth: a strong emotional belief, our senses (particularly sight) and applied logic and reasoning. These are in fact three of the ways of knowing. Language is used to aid the acceptance …show more content…

The belief may have been cultivated by family, religion, culture or any other external factor but the fact remains that it is accepted as a truth mainly because of the strong emotions associated with it. However, these same emotions are incredibly varied between people because of the differences in family, religion, culture and other factors. Hence, there are also people (atheists) that have strong emotions against the existence of God. As this difference in beliefs between people exists and will most probably always exist because of the diversity of our world, emotional belief as a truth cannot be absolute. It is relative to the person believing the truth.
Applied logic and reasoning is fundamental to determining axioms, formulas and concepts in Math that are considered to be truths. In Math HL, we have a topic called induction whereby the goal is to prove a certain formula or equation. We can prove the formula, but on all occasions, it is only true within a certain domain, i.e. for a certain set of values. This shows that the formula is not an absolute truth but relative to the variables involved. But let’s also consider the simplest equation known to man: 1 + 1 = 2. Isn’t this an absolute truth? I used to believe so, until I discovered that a pile of sand + a

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