Truth, Belief, and the Fragility of Knowing – Part 1

I recently reflected on this question in a forum on critical reasoning, and it stayed with me:

Is it a necessary condition of knowing something… that it be true?

Here’s what I wrote unedited:

I have always lived with this itchy tension, the need for truth and the haunting possibility that what we take as knowledge might in time turn out to be false.

I want to believe that I can know things, but I also feel how fragile that knowing can be. We say knowledge requires truth. I understand the claim that to know something it must actually be true. But what if the “truth” we hold today unravels tomorrow?

For centuries we knew things that later were proven false. And yet, at the time, they weren’t believed to be guesses, they were believed to be knowledge.

So I wonder: is “to know” just a temporary illusion that may never resolve itself?

Maybe things like 2+2=4 actually don’t equal 4 — maybe it equals something close to 4, but not exactly. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I believe we need to hold onto something, some truth (isn’t that human nature?), but we also have to recognize and accept our limitations.

It is tiring to live with this tension. Maybe that is a necessary condition for seriously asking whether it really “is a necessary condition of knowing something that that something is true?”

Follow-up question:

Is the truth of a belief a sufficient condition of knowledge? Or is something more needed?

I just mentioned the itchy tension, the need to hold onto truth, and the awareness that what we call knowledge often turns out to be wrong. So yes, maybe truth alone is not sufficient. Maybe knowledge also requires some kind of certainty, justification, or trust in how we came to believe it.

Now that I think about it, maybe the deeper itchy tension is not just between truth and belief but between truth and the confidence that gives us the right to say “we know.”

👉 In Part 2, I’ll explore how this tension plays out in leadership, and why staying open, grounded, and ethically clear matters more than being “right.”

#CriticalThinking #Philosophy #Leadership #Coaching #Truth #Belief #Uncertainty