truth is not truth?

Is Everything Relative, Including Truth?
Everything is relative, but some things are more relative than others???

I've gotten sick of people saying that "everything is relative." If someone says this to you, ask them "Is pain relative?" and then slap them. Pain is pretty freakin real. This is not a refutation of relativity, it is a refutation of what I call impoverished relativity -- the idea that all ideas, and all possible ways of looking at the world are equally true and valid

I'm also sick of people saying that while some things are relative, other things are absolute. This is pure wishful thinking. The use of absolutes, just as in blind belief, is a sign of mental

There are also some things that are close to being completely relative. Truth, (at the risk of getting recursive) is the best example. Whether something is "true" or not depends so much on the context, and so much on your needs and goals, that it comes very close to complete relativity. Even if I say "the sky is blue," the perspective of an astronaut migh change that. (Well, as you get closer to the "sky," it actually starts to get kind of black...) And a Zen master would tell me that it was not the sky that was blue, but my mind that was .....blue.illness. Relativity and Absoluteness are a scale, the perfect extremes of which are never achieved. And the scales nest inside of scales -- depending on your perpective on perspective, different things can be relative or absolute in different perspectives. Confused? Don't worry -- it's all relative.

People sometimes say "Einstein showed that everything is relative", and then - since the word "everything" obviously includes the notion of truth - conclude that Einstein showed that truth itself is relative.

In reality, Einstein neither showed, nor claimed to show, any such thing. And even it he had, his saying it wouldn't make it true.
Before asking whether truth is relative, an astute thinker will want to begin by asking what we mean by "truth".

But even this question poses difficulties. After all, one of the Bible stories tells us that when Pontius Pilate asked the question "What is truth?" even Jesus (the "Son of God") didn't venture an answer.

It is easy to get one's thinking about such abstract matters tangled up.
Socrates had a distinguished pupil by the name of Plato (427 - 347 BCE) who left us with many reports of his master's thinking. And Plato in turn had a distinguished pupil by the name Aristotle (384-322 BCE), the philosopher who for a time was teacher of Alexander the Great. It was to Aristotle that we owe a beautifully simple and sound definition of what it means to say that something is true:

To say of what is that it is or of what is not that it is not, is true . . .

And he went on to define what it means to say that something is false when he continued: . . . while to say of that which is that it is not, or of that which is not that it is, is false.

This, of course, is a strict translation of his words, so it sounds a bit foreign to modern ears. But we can convey his meaning even more simply by saying:
A statement is true if things are as it says they are; otherwise it is false.

Or, a bit more expansively:
A statement is true if things in reality are as the statement says they are; otherwise it is false.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY.
The moral of this little philosophical story, of course, is that one must beware of generalizations such as "Everything is relative", especially when they derive from a failure of comprehension. They can, and often do, lead to muddled thinking and even absurdity.

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