A statement is proved true or false based on assumptions.
All men have beards
Socrates has a beard
Socrates is a man.
If the first statement is true it lends credence to the second one. But nowhere does it say that ONLY men have beards, so the third statement doesn't follow.
If you can put assertions in the first two that cannot be changed you can prove something. But ANY assertion can be questioned (I am not saying all truths are false, but they can be speculated on AS false.)
So in a given model (not necessarily a real model) any assertion can be deemed false and any proof can be undermined. Sometimes unrealistic models change our view of the real life situation, because they point at some underlying idea which we hadn't considered.
So knowledge is assumptions based on current information. The world changes and ideas grow and develop.
Logic is a tool, not an anchor to reality.How can you prove that a statement is True or False?
for something to be true or false one has to have some initial thing or result to be able to base that on or there is no answer. I don't know that knowledge in this case is proof, or at least you didn't state how that knowledge was gained, it can't come from just opinion. Opinion is not proof. And just like in a courtroom thre can't be heresay. True or False questions are generally just conjecture. Of course in a classroom a teacher would first give out the information, a pat statement and then on a test ask if how the statement was worded matches what was said initially or not, so that's not a real true or false question. In a specialty like philosophy it would be different as you'd be searching for an answer and not just quoting a teacher so you'd need some method of testing to be able to come out first with a statement.
You can probably do that in certain settings. For instance in a logic course or academically in a certain field. But in the general flow of life there seems to be fewer and fewer accepted truths. It is as if truth (or falsehood) has been mixed and stirred together and smeared out into something of a bell curve. the extremes will be opposing views and in between all the combinations you can imagine. Sometimes I think this is getting worse with all the information now available to us on the internet but really it has always been like this. There is an old adage, ';Even truth creates opposites'; or something like that.
My approach is this. When I find something to be true or false I keep it to myself. If I try to convince others of my idea of something being true or false it will be attacked and then I will no longer know.
Wagner expressed this somewhat when he wrote:
';Whatever I thought seemed bad to others, whatever seemed wrong to me others approved of. I ran into feuds wherever I found myself, I met disfavor wherever I went. If I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery. So I had to be called ';Woeful';, woe is all I possess.';
So the moral of the story is, ';To avoid woe, keep your mouth shut.';
This is kind of a LOL but not really.
Either by demonstrating that it is necessarily true by virtue of its logical relationship with other more general statements known or believed to be true; or by showing how it is an acceptably accurate depiction of a state of affairs which is indisputably the case.
Nothing is true or false as there is no proof that the world around you is not a hallucination. Only one thing is certainly true (to me). I exist in some mental form. Why and how is unknown.
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