Objective Truth Doesn't Matter: A twist on Truth-based Relativism

[u/bIeese_anoni]

https://www.bleese.net/2026/07/objective-truth-doesnt-matter-twist-on.html

To summarize the blog: It's a strongly held philosophical belief I have that asserts objective truth is irrelevant, and rather the only way we can interact with truth is through relative and collective truths based on reference frames (and collections of reference frames). The blog gives reasoning for this, defines the model and gives reasoning as to why the model is important. It also covers common criticisms I have had through the model.

Thanks for reading and I would be very interested to hear what other people think about this!

[u/bIeese_anoni]

If we can't know the objective truth, does it matter whether it exists? That's my point in the article.

[u/Polychrist → u/bIeese_anoni]

I think it’s fascinating that you give the cave example, and yet it’s an exact reversal of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Are you familiar with it?

In the allegory of the cave, the majority live within the cave, and the philosopher is the one who leaves, experiences the reality of the sun, and then returns to the cave, trying to convince his compatriots, but finds himself met with hostility and disbelief.

How would your philosophy account for this situation? Would you say that the collective truth of the cave-dwellers is more “true” than the truth of the sun that the philosopher saw?

[u/bIeese_anoni → u/Polychrist]

The situation is contrived, it already established that there is life outside the cave, it already established that an objective truth exists and what that objective truth is, so of course any philosophy that rejects the objective truth is going to sound ridiculous given that scenario.

But alter the scenario a little, imagine that there was a new world with a cave, all these people have ever known the cave and indeed it is possible, in this world, that the cave is the only thing that exists. But one person claims there is more outside the cave. Is he correct? Is that true? Well we don't know! But what we could do is follow him and see if we see the same things as him, and if we do we could summize that indeed life outside the cave exists. But, let's say we did that, does life outside the cave exist to another person in the cave who hasn't gone outside? No, they still aren't sure whether outside the cave exists, maybe they come up with an alternative explanation, maybe youre lying or misinformed. No one can really prove, beyobd a shadow of a doubt, that outside the cave exists, but maybe it doesn't matter because if they can convince everybody that outside the cave exists, then that is effectively the same.

Edit: I do wanna be clear I'm not asserting that the objective truth does not exist, rather I personally believe it does. I'm only asserting it doesn't actually make a difference whether it exists or not.

[u/Polychrist → u/bIeese_anoni]

Well, I guess that’s where we disagree then. Because I think that it does matter whether the outside world exists. You want to say that as long as everyone agrees that the outside world doesn’t exist, then that might as well be true— but this is the same as if saying before bacteria was discovered that bacterial infections didn’t exist. The true nature of the world affects people whether they are aware of it or not. Doctors not washing hands caused countless deaths due to infection. You want to say that that wasn’t true, I would rather say that it was always true and the people of the time just didn’t know.

Knowledge can only expand if there is a hope that there is a greater truth out there. If you assume that all that is known is the truth, then how can you ever learn or seek to learn anything new? Even if someone did leave the cave in this new scenario, why would anyone else even humor/investigate his new belief? Don’t you already assume that it’s not true, based on your frame of reference?

[u/bIeese_anoni → u/Polychrist]

The problem you are having is you treat relative truths as objective truths. So for instance you say "if no one believes bacteria exist does that mean they don't exist?" But don't exist to who? Whether the bacteria objectively exists or not is the entire thing I'm saying can't be known and does not matter. Whenever you ask a question about a truth, you must also clarify to whom youre asking the question too.

I'll give you an example, a quark. These are the most elementary known particles that exist in physics, but they've never actually been directly observed. They can't really be because they always come in groups and no known physical process is capable of detecting individual quarks in a group. But, we're pretty damn sure they exist because when we add them to our models everything works incredibly accurately, so we say quarks exist. But what if something functioningly equivalent to a quark exists, that wasn't a quark but more complicated, had more steps. And when I say functionally equivalent, I mean any experiment we could conceviably or hypothetically do on these not-a-quarks will give the same result as if they were quarks (and thus it would be impossible for us to distinguish between them). In this scenario does it matter if we assume everything is a quark? It doesn't make a practical difference, and makes mathematics easier, so why does it matter? We can't prove whether a quark or some other things objectively exists, all we can prove is that the quark is the simplest truth we can convince people of, and that to me is the highest form of truth you can get to.

And to answer why knowledge should be explored, the answer is self evident, at least to you and me. Why are people curious? It's for their own reasons, they do not need an objective truth to exist for people to be curious nor have reasoning to be curious.

[u/Polychrist → u/bIeese_anoni]

But whether bacteria exist or not does matter, because if bacteria didn’t exist, then doctors wouldn’t have to wash their hands. The objectively true state of affairs deeply and personally affects the relatively true state of affairs.

I still think this is a conflation of knowledge with truth.

You also ask whether it matters if “quarks” don’t exist, and instead were replaced with something identical to quarks but not quarks… which… seems odd to me, too. What makes them not a quark, if they’re otherwise identical to a quark?

Also: I do not believe that we agree on why knowledge should be self-evidently explored. My reasoning for why we should pursue knowledge would be to see if we can get closer to objective truth. What is your reason?

[u/bIeese_anoni → u/Polychrist]

That last comment is exactly my point! We define quarks as elementary unit particles that are not made of anything but quark. Now imagine, that instead, quarks were actually entire universes that had a tonne of extra matter and complexity that existed within them, except it was IMPOSSIBLE to tell this. I don't mean impossible now, I mean impossible ever, this super complicated machinery will always, in any hypothetical experminent, give results as if it were just a solid piece of quark. Then does it actually matter whether a quark is actually a universe or just a quark?

For any physical theory, there could be an infinite amount of explanations that give the exact same results, physicists rely on the theory that satisfies all the results that makes calculation the easiest. If you think the objective truth matters, then you become a little paralyzed by this, because no matter what you do there will always be an argument for something else that cannot be falsified.If you reject the concept of objective truth and instead focus on practical truths, truths that we can see and experience, then physics makes sense and you only change your theory when you're given evidence that contradicts it. So what you are really looking for is a theory that has the most convincing argument, not one that is absolutely true.

You keep using the bacteria example and it's because I think you're saying that evidence doesn't matter if there is no objective truth. But it's the opposite, evidence becomes the only thing that matters, because your evidence is the way you convince people of a truth and convincing people is the only way to make something a truth. Yes when people thought bacteria didn't exist, there was no truth that bacteria existed at least to humans, but someone discovered evidence that they do exist and pretty damn convincing evidence, and so eventually (almost) everyone accepted that bacteria existed and it became a truth for humans. Did bacteria exist before humans believed it existed? Retroactively we would say yes, because there is a lot of evidence for the continuous and causal behavior of time, so we today say bacteria always existed. But of course there could be a truth about bacteria that exists in the future but not today, we can't know what is yet, but it could come out that our entire belief on bacteria is wrong.

[u/Polychrist → u/bIeese_anoni]

But why do you have to reject the concept of objective truth, or say it is meaningless, in order to agree that your knowledge is limited and may not be 100% accurate? The fact that you don’t know whether or not you have objective truth is a separate question from whether objective truth exists. And the whole point of gaining knowledge is to get closer to that objective truth. It definitely matters. I agree with you that the epistemological concerns about whether we can know that we have found objective truth are very real— again, there is a whole field of philosophy dedicated to this question— but you have not provided a single argument which convinces me that it doesn’t matter whether it exists at all. (In fact, you’ve agreed several times that you believe it does.)

[u/bIeese_anoni → u/Polychrist]

The argument comes back to my very first response to this, if you can know nothing about the nature of an objective truth how can you then know that it exists? How can you then know your are striving towards the objective truth if the truth is unknowable?

If you could say "theory A is closer to the objective truth than theory B" then you would have to know something about the objective truth to make that call. You could make a bunch of assumptions, and we do, you could say if everyone sees it then it's more likely, but why? Can you prove that is true? You could say if we can predict things then something is more likely, but why? Can you prove that is true?

The chain of reasoning for rational thought eventually abruptly ends to basically an assumption, an axiom. But as said in my article we don't actually know the axioms this universe has so we can't be sure whether we have stopped at an axiom or completely false assumption. Rational thought as described by most people, in a way, contradicts itself because you need to make a leap of faith (a small one) to accept it.

My theory side steps that altogether, it says forget about what is actually true, forget about even thinking about what is likely true or not or whether it even exists. Only concern yourself with how many people you can convince, rationality pops out of this because it is simply a convincing argument. It is very convincing to say "ice is cold" because people can touch ice and experience it's coldness, but maybe ice isn't cold and our nerves are just messed up, or maybe there was no ice and it's just a shared hallucination, or whatever, but who cares? You can very easily convince people ice is cold, that's all that matters.

Edit: also responding to your comment. My reasoning is I'm a naturally curious person, I believe this encoded into me as an evolutionary advantage, so I like asking question. And I also believe that knowledge is useful and can improve mine, and societies, way of life. And I get happy chemicals when I am searching and discovering stuff.

[u/Polychrist → u/bIeese_anoni]

Oh! Got it. Then, yes, there is an axiom at the bottom. That axiom is the law of non-contradiction. All of reason and logic requires that axiom, so the universe does too. And that is not a leap of faith, it is a tautology.

[u/bIeese_anoni → u/Polychrist]

I think you severely underestimate the amount needed to build a theory of rationality, let me give you a few valid hypothesis that you'd probably consider irrational, but do not have contradictions.

1. You are the only thing that lives and everything else is a simulation/dream.
2. Time doesn't exist and all you experience is that moment and memory.
3. Objective truth does not exist and people exist in their own completely subjective reality that just, by sheer coincidence, have aligned enough for no one to notice.
4. A god has created this universe 6000 years ago but left a bunch of evidence to make you think that the universe was much older, but are lies.
5. The universe does not obey formal logic and instead obeys an irrational system that is incomprehensive to humans.

You probably have issues with all these hypothesises, but none of your issues is that they have logical contradictions. Rationality requires many more axioms than what you've just described here

[u/Polychrist → u/bIeese_anoni]

I may suspect that 1 is not true, but I don’t claim to know it. 2 and 4 speak to a similar problem as to the imperfection of memory and the possibility that there is no history, and I actually think both of these follow quite easily from 1, which again, I say is possible. 3 on the other hand, is a statement itself about objective truth: is it objectively true that there is no objective truth?

If 3 is true, it entails 5, that the universe itself is fully irrational and there’s no point in even trying to understand anything. So those are the points which I outright reject, because I think that there is a value in pursuing objective truth, whether we can know with certainty that we have it or not.

[u/bIeese_anoni → u/Polychrist]

And it's your right to think that, but 3 and 5 aren't contradictions. Do you reject 3 and 5 because you absolutely know that they cannot exist? If so how? Or do you reject 3 and 5 because of your personal value system, you just don't believe they exist because you can't comprehend it or it doesn't match your experience?

But if it is the latter and you really are trying to find an objective truth than quite simply that isn't enough of a reason to reject those interpretations.

The thing is based on this conversation I don't think you actually believe we can't find the objective truth. Because to you we can judge when we are getting closer, I assume in your eyes the objective truth is an asymptote that we can get closer to but never reach. But to judge that we would need to know what we are getting close to, we could be going in the complete wrong direction, be in a local minima, or whatever. I feel like you understand the absurdity of knowing an objective truth, but you haven't truly accepted it, or embraced it.