And Nothing But The Truth Trivia Quiz

Answer: No

This is because, although it is a cat, and although it is sitting, it is not sitting on a mat. The correspondence theory of truth states that statements are only true if they agree completely with the actual state of things. The problem perhaps with this theory finding exact agreement between objective reality and expressing that reality in thoughts, language or visual form, is that language and thought and comprehension are very individualistic concepts, with the meaning attached to each specific to each person. We may understand instinctively what something means, but being able to describe it to someone else with exactly the same meaning in words is another matter.

Answer: Aristotle

Aside from the fact that you probably have a headache trying to figure that out, Aristotle lived from 384 until 322 BC. In essence, his views on truth fit in comfortably with correspondence theory. Aristotle was a philosopher and a polymath, skilled in an impressive number of subjects.

These included physics, metaphysicis, poetry and drama, logic, politics and many more. Wouldn't he be fascinating to listen to, at any rate - with a simple English interpreter? His life is way too detailed to discuss further in this simple quiz, but makes fascinating reading should you choose to follow up on it.

Answer: Hinduism

There are many statements relating to truth made by the great Hindu sages. Just a few of these include the saying that "truth alone wins", that "truth liberates", that truth is "the benevolent use of words and the mind for the welfare of others" and that truth is the "highest heaven". Hinduism is the major religion in India.

Its belief structure is a quiet, dignified one, based on morality, karma and the norms of society, and its beauty is that it incorporates many strands of intellectual and philosophical thinking, rather than touting the one as being the ideal.

It is a complicated, beautiful, but incredibly simple carpet of thought, dedicated to truth and striving for the perfection of soul.

Answer: Logic

This is a theory that is known as truth in logic. Logic does not state the ultimate truth for us, but it allows us to use objective reasoning to enable us to come to a definite conclusion about certain facts leading up to that answer that must be true no matter how those facts are examined.

This is known as a logical truth, or an analytic truth or a necessary truth. No matter how it is examined, the conclusion each time is that a certain proposition cannot be incorrect. This then enables us to move to the next step in the process, and eventually, to the truth itself.

Answer: T or 1

Boolean algebra is the brain child of one George Boole, who came up with the work in 1854 in his work "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought". George Boole (1815-1864) was an English mathematician, philosopher and logician. In this tome, the values of true or false, instead of being represented by rows of formula, are represented instead by the numbers 1 or 0 respectively.

These truth values were basic in the early stages of computer programming development. Just as T or 1 represent the arbitary constant of truth in Boole's model, F or 0, in turn, represents false.

Answer: "What corresponds in the mind to what is outside it"

The trick of course is in making the two categories agree. Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina, thankfully known by his much shorter latinised name of Avicenna, wrote an amazing 450 works on a wide array of topics. His two most well known are "The Book of Healing" which was an early encyclopedia of science and philosophy, and "The Canon of Medicine" which was a complete compilation of medical findings based on the work of Galen and Hippocrates.

He is rightly regarded as the shining light of the Islamic Golden Age, a period of time from the 8th century to the year 1256.

This amazing man also defined truth as "the property of the being of each thing which has been established in it". Avicenna's work on thought experiments that prove the truth and existence of self-awareness, even if all other sensory input is removed completely, is a very interesting proposition.

Answer: Society

The constructivist theory states that truth is a result of the processes of a society, built up historically over time and reflecting the cultural values of that society, so that it becomes accepted as fact. Both the philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx (1818-1883) were among the first adherents to this theory, and emphasised the additional influences of gender, sexual persuasion and race on the formation of acceptable truth as well. Marx himself didn't disregard the importance of objective facts, but believed that it was social power and beliefs that formed, or distorted, events that became seen as truth. Those with the most power controlled and guided what become blindly accepted as fact.

Answer: Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas is considered to be one of the most influential philosophers who ever drew breath. Though, obviously, many of his works centred around theology and the nature of God, he also had a brilliant and incisive mind when dealing with other subjects such as ethics, prudence, justice, natural law, man-made law, economics, early psychology, the mind versus the soul, reason and warfare. Of truth he would state that the intellect may be moved by God in some cases where a necessary truth is to be gleaned, but that man has the ability to come to a realisation of any truth by his own reasoning.

He believed that knowledge was acquired in this way firstly through sensory input, then through an understanding and reasoning of what is being experienced, before finally a judgement is reached, one way or another, on the subject. Truth, Aquinas stated, is the conformity of intellect to what is being experienced.

Answer: Kant

Kant (1724-1804) was born in Germany, as many of those great thinkers of the time were. He believed that how we view or perceive any entity is how we construct natural laws, and rather than adjusting our thinking to conform to the object, the object must conform to our thinking instead.

In short, that some sort of meeting point must be experienced between the external perception and the internal reasoning. He further stated that certain things come programmed into our brains since conception, such as the ability to perceive time, space, cause and effect, but that others are conveyed to us through our senses, and through experience, and we endeavour to bring these into rational and logical coherence. Only then do we experience the truth of a thing. You don't know me, except through the medium of this game. How do you know what I am saying is the truth, unless you investigate this for yourself and reach your own conclusions?

Answer: Driving force in humans to climb to the very top

Nietzsche (1844-1900) believed that the search for truth and perfection was the result of an inbuilt drive in the human psyche to reach the highest possible position in life. His rather cock-eyed version of truth, however, was that if it helped attain this will to power, even untruth was preferable to truth. Truth, as we know the term to be, appeared to him to be a malleable commodity in the fulfilment of that drive.

He elaborates up this much further in his famous, extremely fascinating - and extremely dangerous - 1886 work "Beyond Good and Evil".