Does Anything Render Statements About the Past True, Apart from the Evidence That Exists in the Present?

Edward Donkersloot

PHI3882 – 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”.

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.

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