[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 4, 2012, at 1:31 PM, James A Stroble <stroble at hawaii.edu> wrote:

> And
> usually this is called the "correspondence theory of truth".

As I understand it, it got this name back in the days when philosophers wrote a lot of letters to one another. 

For those of you who are not professional or amateur epistemologists, the correspondence theory of truth is the only theory that makes any sense. It says a proposition is true if and only if its content corresponds with reality. Unfortunately, the correspondence theory is untenable and indefensible. As a result, the very idea of truth is laughably naive, and you'll find no tenured philosophers being caught dead speaking about truth except when scolding their children about telling lies. 

Incidentally, Buddhists discarded the idea of truth about two thousand years ago. Nāgārjuna realized it was a completely bankrupt idea and pointed out that those who speak in terms of truth speak with a forked tongue. Unfortunately, people completely misunderstood him and thought he was saying there are two truths, each spoken with a different fork of the tongue. Ever since the two-truth theory emerged as part of Buddhist dogma, it has been extremely difficult to take Buddhism seriously. 

Richard