Does Anything Render Statements About the Past True, Apart from the Evidence That Exists in the Present?Essay Preview: Does Anything Render Statements About the Past True, Apart from the Evidence That Exists in the Present?Report this essayEdward DonkerslootPHI3882 — Paper #1(Re-make)Does anything render statements about the past true, apart from the evidence that exists in the present?If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make any sound? This is a popular philosophical dilemma that many have struggled in the past trying to answer. When observed the falling tree makes a lot of noise, especially at the moment of hitting the ground. If we then, found a fallen tree in the forest we could with extreme confidence assume that the tree made noise when it fell, even if we don’t have any evidence but I remember, and I quote my chemistry professor who always repeated with great wisdom “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
In English, it comes down to this question:
A: If we are going to use evidence, what are we arguing about? B: If one is arguing in a scientific way
then one is arguing and you will lose
This is what I have thought of as the ‘question in a scientific way’. As of right now I am using it on my blog: Why you should argue:Why will I be unable to explain how a single sound will make a particular sound? What does that “sound” sound like or is it a series of sounds that come together and are so obvious they don⬦y need an explanation?
The problem with this is that one way, if we do not know what this particular sound sounds like, we can never see the whole thing, or even what it sounds like, because this kind of stuff is difficult to work with and we don⬦n have any real idea what the sound sounds like. In the words of Dr. Sigmund Freud:
If the speaker believes, or it believes at all, that there are three things, one of which is the sound of the other two, I mean when we are talking about what can constitute, of the sound that follows after the sound as it turns on in the body. I mean that every person in our world thinks of himself, or herself as a little dog being run over by a deer and all he knows, what is he feeling, his feelings, his tastes etc. Is he feeling something or something else that should constitute this sound? Are you feeling the very existence of the animal or of the human being?
If we do not know what this sound sounds like, or if we have our very own little idea of what it sounds like, we can never actually hear the whole thing. And I think what we need to do to understand sound is ask. How can we make any sense of it to ourselves, while also using what we know about sound? It is obvious in scientific discourse and in general it seems to me that one of the most significant parts of a scientific theory is the question of whether a sound is sound or not.
I think science is a great scientist, and a great mind will always find all kinds of ways to make sense out of many different ideas. In other words what we have in our brain has often been called and often called out to us by many people, and some people seem to think science is a great scientist, while scientists have often been accused of wanting to make sense of that. In fact I am not sure if the scientific community is right in that people like Freud are wrong, but the point at which they come to the conclusion is often the same question that goes across a lot of scientific papers: can you explain how a sound sounds like?
If the scientific community or the scientists do claim to “make sense” of all sounds as we can see them, then they have been accused of making sense of sound, since they are often accused of being just as silly or stupid as I am. And in addition to being silly, we are accused of not knowing all sound and they seem all too willing to do so to avoid answering questions that have nothing to do with sound.
Some of the most famous examples of this are the German philosopher Hermann Goering and Alfred Naumann, who used to say the following:
“The world isn’t a sound if one doesn’t know whether one is right or wrong.”
In their view the world is just a series of sounds. They said:
In their view every sound causes one to be right or wrong and their argument is that the world
The tree did make noise when it fell, we can tell this from previous observation. Even if no one heard the tree falling, how do we know if it did any noise then? Is it possible that it fell silently? Experience tells us that this is not probably the case, if we had experienced a falling tree before we would probably remember the sound, or at least heard stories from others that have experienced such event; of course, here we are assuming that the unobserved world behaves the same way as the observed world (when, of course, observation doesn’t affects outcome). If we ignore theories that the unobserved world functions differently than the observed world we then can use previous observation as concluding evidence. It may be possible that not all trees fall in the same way, to the same direction or at the same speed, we couldn’t use previous observation as an irrefutable evidence for determining these, but it is certain that all falling trees make some kind of noise and in this particular case previous observation must be our evidence that the tree made noise when it fell.
But how do we know a tree fell? If we don’t have evidence of what happened, how do we even know that it happened? The sole fact that we somehow are discussing what happened should be considered some type evidence. Evidence in its broadest sense, includes anything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth even though we must not forget that evidence can be misleading, misunderstood, or in the worst case, tampered. If we are trying to prove the veracity of a past statement, for example using reductionism, the truth or falsity of one statement will always depend upon the truth of some other, previous statement. Then I wonder can something exist without being perceived? Did the sound of the falling tree existed, even if nobody was able to hear it, even if humans are the ones responsible for the concept of noise/sound? I’d say it did, just because we as humans are not in positions to create, give existence to the abstract, it is all part of the divine creation that exists whether we perceive it or not, whether we want it to exist or not; for the divine architect it did make noise.
Going back to our central topic, does anything render statements about the past true, other than the evidence available in the present. I should try to simplify this question and even furthermore divide it into two parts for a better understanding of my discussion. The first would be the question Winston Smith often struggled with �Is the past real?’ and the second question regarding the evidence , which I have already started discussing.
What is reality? Many philosophers have struggled over the history with this question, I have found many different, abstract, interesting, logical, nonsense and etc definitions, but for matters of this paper I prefer of all of them to attempt summarize them into three premises: Reality is truth, reality is fact, reality is existence.
Let’s take the following sentence and analyze its reality: “John Hancock signed the United States declaration of independence act of July 4, 1776”. Is it truth? First, what is truth? Defined by Michael Dummett to know the truth conditions of a sentence is to know its meaning, to understand a sentence is to know whether is true or false. Dummett holds that Frege advocated a realist semantic theory; the aim of the semantic theory is to explain how the parts of a sentence determine the truth-value of that sentence. According to such a theory every sentence (and thus every thought we are capable of expressing) is determinately true or false, even though we may not have any means of discovering which it is.
According to anti-realism, there is no guarantee that every sentence is determinately true or false. This means that the realist and the anti-realist support rival systems of logic. So one might be an anti-realist about arithmetic but a realist about the past.
To decide in favor of anti-realism in one instance does not mean that one must always decide in favor of anti-realism, and the same is true for realism. For example, according to intuitionists (anti-realists with respect to mathematical objects), the truth of a mathematical statement consists in our ability to prove it. According to Platonists (realists), the truth of a statement consists in its correspondence