title: Truth

text: Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences.


title: Truth

text: Truth is usually held to be the opposite of falsehood. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, and science. Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself. Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth.


title: Truth

text: Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. There are many different questions about the nature of truth which are still the subject of contemporary debates, such as: the question of defining truth. If it is even possible to give an informative definition of truth. Identifying things are truth-bearers and are therefore capable of being true or false. If truth and falsehood are bivalent, or if there are other truth values. Identifying the criteria of truth that allow us to identify it and to distinguish it from falsehood. The role that truth plays in constituting knowledge. And if truth is always absolute, or if it can be relative to one's perspective.


title: Truth

text: The English word "truth" is derived from Old English "tríewþ, tréowþ, trýwþ", Middle English "trewþe", cognate to Old High German "triuwida", Old Norse "tryggð". Like "troth", it is a "-th" nominalisation of the adjective "true" (Old English "tréowe").


title: Truth

text: The English word "true" is from Old English (West Saxon) "(ge)tríewe, tréowe", cognate to Old Saxon "(gi)trûui", Old High German "(ga)triuwu" (Modern German "treu" "faithful"), Old Norse "tryggr", Gothic "triggws", all from a Proto-Germanic "*trewwj-" "having good faith", perhaps ultimately from PIE *dru- "tree", on the notion of "steadfast as an oak" (e.g., Sanskrit "dā́ru" "(piece of) wood").


title: Truth

text: Old Norse ', "faith, word of honour; religious faith, belief" (archaic English "troth" "loyalty, honesty, good faith", compare ').


title: Truth

text: Thus, "truth" involves both the quality of "faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity", and that of "agreement with fact or reality", in Anglo-Saxon expressed by "sōþ" (Modern English "sooth").


title: Truth

text: All Germanic languages besides English have introduced a terminological distinction between truth "fidelity" and truth "factuality". To express "factuality", North Germanic opted for nouns derived from "sanna" "to assert, affirm", while continental West Germanic (German and Dutch) opted for continuations of "wâra" "faith, trust, pact" (cognate to Slavic "věra" "(religious) faith", but influenced by Latin "verus"). Romance languages use terms following the Latin "veritas", while the Greek "aletheia", Russian "pravda", South Slavic "istina" and Sanskrit "sat" (related to English "sooth" and North Germanic "sanna") have separate etymological origins.


title: Truth

text: In some modern contexts, the word "truth" is used to refer to fidelity to an original or standard. It can also be used in the context of being "true to oneself" in the sense of acting with authenticity.


title: Truth

text: The question of what is a proper basis for deciding how words, symbols, ideas and beliefs may properly be considered true, whether by a single person or an entire society, is dealt with by the five most prevalent substantive theories of truth listed below. Each presents perspectives that are widely shared by published scholars.


title: Truth

text: Theories other than the most prevalent substantive theories are also discussed. More recently developed "deflationary" or "minimalist" theories of truth have emerged as possible alternatives to the most prevalent substantive theories. Minimalist reasoning centres around the notion that the application of a term like "true" to a statement does not assert anything significant about it, for instance, anything about its "nature". Minimalist reasoning realises "truth" as a label utilised in general discourse to express agreement, to stress claims, or to form general assumptions.


title: Truth

text: According to a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views which was carried out in November 2009 (taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students) 45% of respondents accept or lean towards correspondence theories, 21% accept or lean towards deflationary theories and 14% epistemic theories.


title: Truth

text: Correspondence theories emphasize that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs. This type of theory stresses a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a traditional model tracing its origins to ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined in principle entirely by how it relates to "things" by whether it accurately describes those "things". A classic example of correspondence theory is the statement by the thirteenth century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas: "Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus" ("Truth is the adequation of things and intellect"), which Aquinas attributed to the ninth century Neoplatonist Isaac Israeli. Aquinas also restated the theory as: "A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality".


title: Truth

text: Correspondence theory centres heavily around the assumption that truth is a matter of accurately copying what is known as "objective reality" and then representing it in thoughts, words and other symbols. Many modern theorists have stated that this ideal cannot be achieved without analysing additional factors. For example, language plays a role in that all languages have words to represent concepts that are virtually undefined in other languages. The German word "Zeitgeist" is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may "know" what it means, but any translation of the word apparently fails to accurately capture its full meaning (this is a problem with many abstract words, especially those derived in agglutinative languages). Thus, some words add an additional parameter to the construction of an accurate truth predicate. Among the philosophers who grappled with this problem is Alfred Tarski, whose semantic theory is summarized further on.


title: Truth

text: Proponents of several of the theories below have gone further to assert that there are yet other issues necessary to the analysis, such as interpersonal power struggles, community interactions, personal biases and other factors involved in deciding what is seen as truth.


title: Truth

text: For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within a whole system. Very often, though, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system. A pervasive tenet of coherence theories is the idea that truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence with the whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single absolute system.


title: Truth

text: Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to describe the essential and intrinsic properties of formal systems in logic and mathematics. However, formal reasoners are content to contemplate axiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side, for example, the various alternative geometries. On the whole, coherence theories have been rejected for lacking justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially with respect to assertions about the natural world, empirical data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and society, especially when used without support from the other major theories of truth.


title: Truth

text: Coherence theories distinguish the thought of rationalist philosophers, particularly of Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, along with the British philosopher F. H. Bradley. They have found a resurgence also among several proponents of logical positivism, notably Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel.


title: Truth

text: The three most influential forms of the "pragmatic theory of truth" were introduced around the turn of the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other proponents of pragmatic theory, they hold in common that truth is verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice.


title: Truth

text: Peirce defines truth as follows: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth." This statement stresses Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as "fallibilism" and "reference to the future", are essential to a proper conception of truth. Although Peirce uses words like "concordance" and "correspondence" to describe one aspect of the pragmatic sign relation, he is also quite explicit in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence are no more than "nominal" definitions, which he accords a lower status than "real" definitions.


title: Truth

text: William James's version of pragmatic theory, while complex, is often summarized by his statement that "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving." By this, James meant that truth is a "quality", the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to practice (thus, "pragmatic").


title: Truth

text: John Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is self-corrective over time "if" openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed truths.


title: Truth

text: Though not widely known, a new variation of the pragmatic theory was defined and wielded successfully from the 20th century forward. Defined and named by William Ernest Hocking, this variation is known as "negative pragmatism". Essentially, what works may or may not be true, but what fails cannot be true because the truth always works. Richard Feynman also ascribed to it: "We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong." This approach incorporates many of the ideas from Peirce, James, and Dewey. For Peirce, the idea of "... endless investigation would tend to bring about scientific belief ..." fits negative pragmatism in that a negative pragmatist would never stop testing. As Feynman noted, an idea or theory "... could never be proved right, because tomorrow's experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought was right." Similarly, James and Dewey's ideas also ascribe truth to repeated testing which is "self-corrective" over time.


title: Truth

text: Pragmatism and negative pragmatism are also closely aligned with the coherence theory of truth in that any testing should not be isolated but rather incorporate knowledge from all human endeavors and experience. The universe is a whole and integrated system, and testing should acknowledge and account for its diversity. As Feynman said, "... if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong."


title: Truth

text: Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community. Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed," because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold). Rather, perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender, are socially constructed.


title: Truth

text: Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made. Vico's epistemological orientation gathers the most diverse rays and unfolds in one axiom—"verum ipsum factum"—"truth itself is constructed". Hegel and Marx were among the other early proponents of the premise that truth is, or can be, socially constructed. Marx, like many critical theorists who followed, did not reject the existence of objective truth but rather distinguished between true knowledge and knowledge that has been distorted through power or ideology. For Marx, scientific and true knowledge is "in accordance with the dialectical understanding of history" and ideological knowledge is "an epiphenomenal expression of the relation of material forces in a given economic arrangement".


title: Truth

text: Consensus theory holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might come to be agreed upon, by some specified group. Such a group might include all human beings, or a subset thereof consisting of more than one person.


title: Truth

text: Among the current advocates of consensus theory as a useful accounting of the concept of "truth" is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation. Among the current strong critics of consensus theory is the philosopher Nicholas Rescher.


title: Truth

text: Modern developments in the field of philosophy have resulted in the rise of a new thesis: that the term "truth" does not denote a real property of sentences or propositions. This thesis is in part a response to the common use of "truth predicates" (e.g., that some particular thing "...is true") which was particularly prevalent in philosophical discourse on truth in the first half of the 20th century. From this point of view, to assert that "'2 + 2 = 4' is true" is logically equivalent to asserting that "2 + 2 = 4", and the phrase "is true" is completely dispensable in this and every other context. In common parlance, truth predicates are not commonly heard, and it would be interpreted as an unusual occurrence were someone to utilise a truth predicate in an everyday conversation when asserting that something is true. Newer perspectives that take this discrepancy into account and work with sentence structures that are actually employed in common discourse can be broadly described:


title: Truth

text: Whichever term is used, deflationary theories can be said to hold in common that "[t]he predicate 'true' is an expressive convenience, not the name of a property requiring deep analysis." Once we have identified the truth predicate's formal features and utility, deflationists argue, we have said all there is to be said about truth. Among the theoretical concerns of these views is to explain away those special cases where it "does" appear that the concept of truth has peculiar and interesting properties. (See, e.g., Semantic paradoxes, and below.)


title: Truth

text: In addition to highlighting such formal aspects of the predicate "is true", some deflationists point out that the concept enables us to express things that might otherwise require infinitely long sentences. For example, one cannot express confidence in Michael's accuracy by asserting the endless sentence:


title: Truth

text: Attributed to P. F. Strawson is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "'Snow is white' is true" is to perform the speech act of signaling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are more actions than communicative statements is not as odd as it may seem. For example, when a wedding couple says "I do" at the appropriate time in a wedding, they are performing the act of taking the other to be their lawful wedded spouse. They are not "describing" themselves as taking the other, but actually "doing" so (perhaps the most thorough analysis of such "illocutionary acts" is J. L. Austin, "How to Do Things With Words").


title: Truth

text: Strawson holds that a similar analysis is applicable to all speech acts, not just illocutionary ones: "To say a statement is true is not to make a statement about a statement, but rather to perform the act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement. When one says 'It's true that it's raining,' one asserts no more than 'It's raining.' The function of [the statement] 'It's true that...' is to agree with, accept, or endorse the statement that 'it's raining.'"


title: Truth

text: According to the redundancy theory of truth, asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to asserting the statement itself. For example, making the assertion that " 'Snow is white' is true" is equivalent to asserting "Snow is white". Redundancy theorists infer from this premise that truth is a redundant concept; that is, it is merely a word that is traditionally used in conversation or writing, generally for emphasis, but not a word that actually equates to anything in reality. This theory is commonly attributed to Frank P. Ramsey, who held that the use of words like "fact" and "truth" was nothing but a roundabout way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic muddle".


title: Truth

text: A variant of redundancy theory is the disquotational theory which uses a modified form of Tarski's schema: To say that '"P" is true' is to say that P. A version of this theory was defended by C. J. F. Williams in his book "What is Truth?" Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims. They argue that sentences like "That's true", when said in response to "It's raining", are prosentences, expressions that merely repeat the content of other expressions. In the same way that "it" means the same as "my dog" in the sentence "My dog was hungry, so I fed it", "That's true" is supposed to mean the same as "It's raining"—if one says the latter and another then says the former. These variations do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is "not" a property, but rather can be understood to say that, for instance, the assertion "P" may well involve a substantial truth, and the theorists in this case are minimizing only the redundancy or prosentence involved in the statement such as "that's true".


title: Truth

text: Deflationary principles do not apply to representations that are not analogous to sentences, and also do not apply to many other things that are commonly judged to be true or otherwise.


title: Truth

text: Philosophical skepticism is generally any questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more items of knowledge or belief which ascribe truth to their assertions and propositions. The primary target of philosophical skepticism is epistemology, but it can be applied to any domain, such as the supernatural, morality (moral skepticism), and religion (skepticism about the existence of God).


title: Truth

text: Philosophical skepticism comes in various forms. Radical forms of skepticism deny that knowledge or rational belief is possible and urge us to suspend judgment regarding ascription of truth on many or all controversial matters. More moderate forms of skepticism claim only that nothing can be known with certainty, or that we can know little or nothing about the "big questions" in life, such as whether God exists or whether there is an afterlife. Religious skepticism is "doubt concerning basic religious principles (such as immortality, providence, and revelation)". Scientific skepticism concerns testing beliefs for reliability, by subjecting them to systematic investigation using the scientific method, to discover empirical evidence for them.


title: Truth

text: Several of the major theories of truth hold that there is a particular property the having of which makes a belief or proposition true. Pluralist theories of truth assert that there may be more than one property that makes propositions true: ethical propositions might be true by virtue of coherence. Propositions about the physical world might be true by corresponding to the objects and properties they are about.


title: Truth

text: Some of the pragmatic theories, such as those by Charles Peirce and William James, included aspects of correspondence, coherence and constructivist theories. Crispin Wright argued in his 1992 book "Truth and Objectivity" that any predicate which satisfied certain platitudes about truth qualified as a truth predicate. In some discourses, Wright argued, the role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of superassertibility. Michael Lynch, in a 2009 book "Truth as One and Many", argued that we should see truth as a functional property capable of being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or coherence.


title: Truth

text: Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell if a proposition is true or not. Logicians use formal languages to express the truths which they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under some interpretation or truth within some logical system.


title: Truth

text: A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement which is true in all possible worlds or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to a "fact" (also called a "synthetic claim" or a "contingency") which is only true in this world as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as "If p and q, then p" is considered to be a logical truth because of the meaning of the symbols and words in it and not because of any fact of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue.


title: Truth

text: Degrees of truth in logic may be represented using two or more discrete values, as with bivalent logic (or binary logic), three-valued logic, and other forms of finite-valued logic. Truth in logic can be represented using numbers comprising a continuous range, typically between 0 and 1, as with fuzzy logic and other forms of infinite-valued logic. In general, the concept of representing truth using more than two values is known as many-valued logic.


title: Truth

text: There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are the "model theory of truth" and the "proof theory of truth".


title: Truth

text: Historically, with the nineteenth century development of Boolean algebra mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity" is also an arbitrary constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". In propositional logic, these symbols can be manipulated according to a set of axioms and rules of inference, often given in the form of truth tables.


title: Truth

text: In addition, from at least the time of Hilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century to the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the development of the Church–Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics were generally assumed to be those statements that are provable in a formal axiomatic system.


title: Truth

text: The works of Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system. Two examples of the latter can be found in Hilbert's problems. Work on Hilbert's 10th problem led in the late twentieth century to the construction of specific Diophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution, or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions. More fundamentally, Hilbert's first problem was on the continuum hypothesis. Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standard axioms of set theory. In the view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom.


title: Truth

text: Gödel thought that the ability to perceive the truth of a mathematical or logical proposition is a matter of intuition, an ability he admitted could be ultimately beyond the scope of a formal theory of logic or mathematics and perhaps best considered in the realm of human comprehension and communication, but commented:


title: Truth

text: Tarski's theory of truth (named after Alfred Tarski) was developed for formal languages, such as formal logic. Here he restricted it in this way: no language could contain its own truth predicate, that is, the expression "is true" could only apply to sentences in some other language. The latter he called an "object language", the language being talked about. (It may, in turn, have a truth predicate that can be applied to sentences in still another language.) The reason for his restriction was that languages that contain their own truth predicate will contain paradoxical sentences such as, "This sentence is not true". As a result, Tarski held that the semantic theory could not be applied to any natural language, such as English, because they contain their own truth predicates. Donald Davidson used it as the foundation of his truth-conditional semantics and linked it to radical interpretation in a form of coherentism.


title: Truth

text: Bertrand Russell is credited with noticing the existence of such paradoxes even in the best symbolic formations of mathematics in his day, in particular the paradox that came to be named after him, Russell's paradox. Russell and Whitehead attempted to solve these problems in "Principia Mathematica" by putting statements into a hierarchy of types, wherein a statement cannot refer to itself, but only to statements lower in the hierarchy. This in turn led to new orders of difficulty regarding the precise natures of types and the structures of conceptually possible type systems that have yet to be resolved to this day.


title: Truth

text: Kripke's theory of truth (named after Saul Kripke) contends that a natural language can in fact contain its own truth predicate without giving rise to contradiction. He showed how to construct one as follows:


title: Truth

text: Truth never gets defined for sentences like "This sentence is false", since it was not in the original subset and does not predicate truth of any sentence in the original or any subsequent set. In Kripke's terms, these are "ungrounded." Since these sentences are never assigned either truth or falsehood even if the process is carried out infinitely, Kripke's theory implies that some sentences are neither true nor false. This contradicts the principle of bivalence: every sentence must be either true or false. Since this principle is a key premise in deriving the liar paradox, the paradox is dissolved.


title: Truth

text: However, it has been shown by Gödel that self-reference cannot be avoided naively, since propositions about seemingly unrelated objects can have an informal self-referential meaning; in Gödel's work, these objects are integer numbers, and they have an informal meaning regarding propositions. In fact, this idea — manifested by the diagonal lemma—is the basis for Tarski's theorem that truth cannot be consistently defined.


title: Truth

text: It has thus been claimed that Kripke's system indeed leads to contradiction: while its truth predicate is only partial, it does give truth value (true/false) to propositions such as the one built in Tarski's proof, and is therefore inconsistent. While there is still a debate on whether Tarski's proof can be implemented to every similar partial truth system, none have been shown to be consistent by acceptable methods used in mathematical logic.


title: Truth

text: Kripke's semantics are related to the use of topoi and other concepts from category theory in the study of mathematical logic. They provide a choice of formal semantics for intuitionistic logic.


title: Truth

text: The truth predicate ""P" is true" has great practical value in human language, allowing "efficient" endorsement or impeaching of claims made by others, to emphasize the truth or falsity of a statement, or to enable various indirect (Gricean) conversational implications. Individuals or societies will sometime punish "false" statements to deter falsehoods; the oldest surviving law text, the Code of Ur-Nammu, lists penalties for false accusations of sorcery or adultery, as well as for committing perjury in court. Even four-year-old children can pass simple "false belief" tests and successfully assess that another individual's belief diverges from reality in a specific way; by adulthood there are strong implicit intuitions about "truth" that form a "folk theory" of truth. These intuitions include:


title: Truth

text: Like many folk theories, the folk theory of truth is useful in everyday life but, upon deep analysis, turns out to be technically self-contradictory; in particular, any formal system that fully obeys "capture and release" semantics for truth (also known as the "T-schema"), and that also respects classical logic, is provably inconsistent and succumbs to the liar paradox or to a similar contradiction.


title: Truth

text: Socrates', Plato's and Aristotle's ideas about truth are seen by some as consistent with correspondence theory. In his "Metaphysics", Aristotle stated: "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy proceeds to say of Aristotle:


title: Truth

text: [...] Aristotle sounds much more like a genuine correspondence theorist in the "Categories" (12b11, 14b14), where he talks of "underlying things" that make statements true and implies that these "things" (pragmata) are logically structured situations or facts (viz., his sitting, his not sitting). Most influential is his claim in "De Interpretatione" (16a3) that thoughts are "likenesses" (homoiosis) of things. Although he nowhere defines truth in terms of a thought's likeness to a thing or fact, it is clear that such a definition would fit well into his overall philosophy of mind. [...]


title: Truth

text: Some Greek philosophers maintained that truth was either not accessible to mortals, or of greatly limited accessibility, forming early philosophical skepticism. Among these were Xenophanes, Democritus, and Pyrrho, the founder of Pyrrhonism, who argued that there was no criterion of truth.


title: Truth

text: The Epicureans believed that all sense perceptions were true, and that errors arise in how we judge those perceptions.


title: Truth

text: In early Islamic philosophy, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) defined truth in his work Kitab Al-Shifa "The Book of Healing", Book I, Chapter 8, as:


title: Truth

text: However, this definition is merely a rendering of the medieval Latin translation of the work by Simone van Riet. A modern translation of the original Arabic text states:


title: Truth

text: Reevaluating Avicenna, and also Augustine and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas stated in his "Disputed Questions on Truth":


title: Truth

text: Thus, for Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth in things (ontological truth). Following this, he wrote an elegant re-statement of Aristotle's view in his Summa I.16.1:


title: Truth

text: Richard Firth Green examined the concept of truth in the later Middle Ages in his "A Crisis of Truth", and concludes that roughly during the reign of Richard II of England the very meaning of the concept changes. The idea of the oath, which was so much part and parcel of for instance Romance literature, changes from a subjective concept to a more objective one (in Derek Pearsall's summary). Whereas truth (the "trouthe" of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight") was first "an ethical truth in which truth is understood to reside in persons", in Ricardian England it "transforms...into a political truth in which truth is understood to reside in documents".


title: Truth

text: Immanuel Kant endorses a definition of truth along the lines of the correspondence theory of truth. Kant writes in the "Critique of Pure Reason": "The nominal definition of truth, namely that it is the agreement of cognition with its object, is here granted and presupposed". However, Kant denies that this correspondence definition of truth provides us with a test or criterion to establish which judgements are true. Kant states in his logic lectures:


title: Truth

text: [...] Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only "by cognizing it". Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object.


title: Truth

text: The ancients called such a circle in explanation a "diallelon". And actually the logicians were always reproached with this mistake by the sceptics, who observed that with this definition of truth it is just as when someone makes a statement before a court and in doing so appeals to a witness with whom no one is acquainted, but who wants to establish his credibility by maintaining that the one who called him as witness is an honest man. The accusation was grounded, too. Only the solution of the indicated problem is impossible without qualification and for every man. [...]


title: Truth

text: This passage makes use of his distinction between nominal and real definitions. A nominal definition explains the meaning of a linguistic expression. A real definition describes the essence of certain objects and enables us to determine whether any given item falls within the definition. Kant holds that the definition of truth is merely nominal and, therefore, we cannot employ it to establish which judgements are true. According to Kant, the ancient skeptics were critical of the logicians for holding that, by means of a merely nominal definition of truth, they can establish which judgements are true. They were trying to do something that is "impossible without qualification and for every man".


title: Truth

text: Georg Hegel distanced his philosophy from psychology by presenting truth as being an external self-moving object instead of being related to inner, subjective thoughts. Hegel's truth is analogous to the mechanics of a material body in motion under the influence of its own inner force. "Truth is its own self-movement within itself." Teleological truth moves itself in the three-step form of dialectical triplicity toward the final goal of perfect, final, absolute truth. According to Hegel, the progression of philosophical truth is a resolution of past oppositions into increasingly more accurate approximations of absolute truth. Chalybäus used the terms "thesis", "antithesis", and "synthesis" to describe Hegel's dialectical triplicity. The "thesis" consists of an incomplete historical movement. To resolve the incompletion, an "antithesis" occurs which opposes the "thesis." In turn, the "synthesis" appears when the "thesis" and "antithesis" become reconciled and a higher level of truth is obtained. This "synthesis" thereby becomes a "thesis," which will again necessitate an "antithesis," requiring a new "synthesis" until a final state is reached as the result of reason's historical movement. History is the Absolute Spirit moving toward a goal. This historical progression will finally conclude itself when the Absolute Spirit understands its own infinite self at the very end of history. Absolute Spirit will then be the complete expression of an infinite God.


title: Truth

text: For Arthur Schopenhauer, a judgment is a combination or separation of two or more concepts. If a judgment is to be an expression of knowledge, it must have a sufficient reason or ground by which the judgment could be called true. "Truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself which is its sufficient reason (ground)". Judgments can have material, formal, transcendental, or metalogical truth. A judgment has "material" truth if its concepts are based on intuitive perceptions that are generated from sensations. If a judgment has its reason (ground) in another judgment, its truth is called logical or "formal". If a judgment, of, for example, pure mathematics or pure science, is based on the forms (space, time, causality) of intuitive, empirical knowledge, then the judgment has "transcendental" truth.


title: Truth

text: When Søren Kierkegaard, as his character "Johannes Climacus", ends his writings: "My thesis was, subjectivity, heartfelt is the truth", he does not advocate for subjectivism in its extreme form (the theory that something is true simply because one believes it to be so), but rather that the objective approach to matters of personal truth cannot shed any light upon that which is most essential to a person's life. Objective truths are concerned with the facts of a person's being, while subjective truths are concerned with a person's way of being. Kierkegaard agrees that objective truths for the study of subjects like mathematics, science, and history are relevant and necessary, but argues that objective truths do not shed any light on a person's inner relationship to existence. At best, these truths can only provide a severely narrowed perspective that has little to do with one's actual experience of life.


title: Truth

text: While objective truths are final and static, subjective truths are continuing and dynamic. The truth of one's existence is a living, inward, and subjective experience that is always in the process of becoming. The values, morals, and spiritual approaches a person adopts, while not denying the existence of objective truths of those beliefs, can only become truly known when they have been inwardly appropriated through subjective experience. Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes all systematic philosophies which attempt to know life or the truth of existence via theories and objective knowledge about reality. As Kierkegaard claims, human truth is something that is continually occurring, and a human being cannot find truth separate from the subjective experience of one's own existing, defined by the values and fundamental essence that consist of one's way of life.


title: Truth

text: Friedrich Nietzsche believed the search for truth, or 'the will to truth', was a consequence of the "will to power" of philosophers. He thought that truth should be used as long as it promoted life and the "will to power", and he thought untruth was better than truth if it had this life enhancement as a consequence. As he wrote in "Beyond Good and Evil", "The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding..." (aphorism 4). He proposed the "will to power" as a truth only because, according to him, it was the most life-affirming and sincere perspective one could have.


title: Truth

text: [...] Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") as a keystone in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call "truth" is only "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." His view at this time is that arbitrariness completely prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the very artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images; "truth" is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for merely practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistence. [...]


title: Truth

text: Separately Nietzsche suggested that an ancient, metaphysical belief in the divinity of Truth lies at the heart of and has served as the foundation for the entire subsequent Western intellectual tradition: "But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take "our" fire too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is Truth; that Truth is 'Divine'..."


title: Truth

text: Other philosophers take this common meaning to be secondary and derivative. According to Martin Heidegger, the original meaning and essence of truth in Ancient Greece was unconcealment, or the revealing or bringing of what was previously hidden into the open, as indicated by the original Greek term for truth, "aletheia". On this view, the conception of truth as correctness is a later derivation from the concept's original essence, a development Heidegger traces to the Latin term "veritas".


title: Truth

text: Alfred North Whitehead, a British mathematician who became an American philosopher, said: "There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil".


title: Truth

text: The logical progression or connection of this line of thought is to conclude that truth can lie, since half-truths are deceptive and may lead to a false conclusion.


title: Truth

text: Pragmatists like C. S. Peirce take truth to have some manner of essential relation to human practices for inquiring into and discovering truth, with Peirce himself holding that truth is what human inquiry would find out on a matter, if our practice of inquiry were taken as far as it could profitably go: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth..."


title: Truth

text: According to Kitaro Nishida, "knowledge of things in the world begins with the differentiation of unitary consciousness into knower and known and ends with self and things becoming one again. Such unification takes form not only in knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs knowing, the willing that directs action, and the feeling or emotive reach that directs sensing."


title: Truth

text: Erich Fromm finds that trying to discuss truth as "absolute truth" is sterile and that emphasis ought to be placed on "optimal truth". He considers truth as stemming from the survival imperative of grasping one's environment physically and intellectually, whereby young children instinctively seek truth so as to orient themselves in "a strange and powerful world". The accuracy of their perceived approximation of the truth will therefore have direct consequences on their ability to deal with their environment. Fromm can be understood to define truth as a functional approximation of reality. His vision of optimal truth is described partly in "Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics" (1947), from which excerpts are included below.


title: Truth

text: Truth, says Michel Foucault, is problematic when any attempt is made to see truth as an "objective" quality. He prefers not to use the term truth itself but "Regimes of Truth". In his historical investigations he found truth to be something that was itself a part of, or embedded within, a given power structure. Thus Foucault's view shares much in common with the concepts of Nietzsche. Truth for Foucault is also something that shifts through various episteme throughout history.


title: Truth

text: Jean Baudrillard considered truth to be largely simulated, that is pretending to have something, as opposed to dissimulation, pretending to not have something. He took his cue from iconoclasts whom he claims knew that images of God demonstrated that God did not exist. Baudrillard wrote in "Precession of the Simulacra":


title: Truth

text: Some examples of simulacra that Baudrillard cited were: that prisons simulate the "truth" that society is free; scandals (e.g., Watergate) simulate that corruption is corrected; Disney simulates that the U.S. itself is an adult place. Though such examples seem extreme, such extremity is an important part of Baudrillard's theory. For a less extreme example, movies usually end with the bad being punished, humiliated, or otherwise failing, thus affirming for viewers the concept that the good end happily and the bad unhappily, a narrative which implies that the status quo and established power structures are largely legitimate.


title: Truth

text: Truthmaker theory is "the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists". It is different from substantive theories of truth in the sense that it doesn't aim at giving a definition of what truth is. Instead, it has the goal of "determining" how truth depends on being.


title: Truth

text: In Hinduism, truth is defined as "unchangeable", "that which has no distortion", "that which is beyond distinctions of time, space, and person", "that which pervades the universe in all its constancy". The human body, therefore, is not completely true as it changes with time, for example. There are many references, properties and explanations of truth by Hindu sages that explain varied facets of truth, such as the national motto of India: "Satyameva Jayate" (Truth alone wins), as well as "Satyam muktaye" (Truth liberates), "Satya' is 'Parahit'artham' va'unmanaso yatha'rthatvam' satyam" (Satya is the benevolent use of words and the mind for the welfare of others or in other words responsibilities is truth too), "When one is firmly established in speaking truth, the fruits of action become subservient to him (patanjali yogasutras, sutra number 2.36), "The face of truth is covered by a golden bowl. "Unveil it, O Pusan (Sun), so that I who have truth as my duty (satyadharma) may see it!"" (Brhadaranyaka V 15 1–4 and the brief IIsa Upanisad 15–18), Truth is superior to silence (Manusmriti), etc. Combined with other words, satya acts as a modifier, like "ultra" or "highest", or more literally "truest", connoting "purity and excellence". For example, satyaloka is the "highest heaven" and Satya Yuga is the "golden age" or best of the four cyclical cosmic ages in Hinduism, and so on.


title: Truth

text: In Buddhism, particularly in the Mahayana tradition, the notion of truth is often divided into the two truths doctrine, which consists of relative or conventional truth and ultimate truth. The former refers to truth that is based on common understanding among ordinary people and is accepted as a practical basis for communication of higher truths. Ultimate truth necessarily transcends logic in the sphere of ordinary experience, and recognizes such phenomena as illusory. Mādhyamaka philosophy asserts that any doctrine can be analyzed with both divisions of truth. Affirmation and negation belong to relative and absolute truth respectively. Political law is regarded as relative, while religious law is absolute.


title: Truth

text: Christianity has a soteriological view of truth. According to the Bible in , Jesus is quoted as having said "I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me".


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Smile is a 2022 American psychological horror film written and directed by Parker Finn in his feature directorial debut, based on his 2020 short film "Laura Hasn't Slept". It stars Sosie Bacon as a therapist named Rose Cotter, who, after witnessing the bizarre suicide of a patient, goes through increasingly disturbing and daunting experiences, leading her to believe what she is experiencing is supernatural. It also stars Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert, Kal Penn, and Rob Morgan, as well as Caitlin Stasey playing the same character she played in the short film.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: A feature adaptation of Finn's short was announced in June 2020, and the cast was added in October 2021. Filming began that month in New Jersey. Originally set for a streaming release through Paramount+, the studio opted to release the film theatrically after strong positive test screenings. It was made available for streaming through Paramount+ after its first 45 days in theaters. "Smile" had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 22, 2022, and was released in the United States on September 30, 2022, by Paramount Pictures.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: "Smile" received mostly positive reviews from critics, who praised the visuals, themes, cinematography and Bacon's performance, but criticized some of its jump scares and noticed some similarities to "It Follows" and "The Ring". It was a box office success, grossing $216 million worldwide against a $17 million budget.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: At a psychiatric ward, psychiatrist Dr. Rose Cotter meets with Laura Weaver, a PhD student who had several days earlier witnessed her art history professor die by suicide. Laura claims that an entity taking the form of smiling people is telling her that she is going to die. Soon thereafter, Laura stumbles to the floor and begins screaming. After Rose calls for help, she sees Laura standing up and grinning. With a shard of a broken vase, Laura commits suicide by slitting her throat. Rose later sees her manic patient Carl grinning and shouting that she's going to die. Rose calls for nurses to restrain him, only to see he was asleep the whole time. Concerned for Rose's mental well-being, her supervisor Dr. Morgan Desai gives her a week off.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: In the following days, the hallucinations continue, making Rose seem unhinged and dangerous to people around her, including her fiancé Trevor and sister Holly. At her nephew's birthday party, Rose's gift has been replaced by her dead cat, horrifying the children. She sees a party attendant grinning at her and falls onto a glass table, ending the party in chaos. She visits her former therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott, who suggests that her problems stem from her abusive and mentally ill mother, whose death from an overdose she witnessed as a child. Rose begins to suspect she has been cursed by some sort of supernatural entity but is unable to get Trevor to believe her.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Upon learning Laura's professor was grinning at her before his death, Rose visits his widow Victoria and learns he became increasingly unstable after witnessing a woman die by suicide several days prior to his death. Rose asks her ex-boyfriend Joel, a police detective, to go through police records. They find several cases where someone witnessed a suicide, then a few days later died by suicide in front of someone else, who continued the pattern.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Rose visits Holly, attempting to explain the situation, but only further strains their relationship in a heated argument, comparing Rose's behaviour to their deceased mom. The hallucinations continue to escalate in intensity. Joel calls her, revealing that he discovered all the witnesses died by suicide within a week. The exception was Robert Talley, who instead murdered someone else. Rose and Joel visit Robert in jail, where the latter claims the entity feeds on trauma, and the only way to escape it is to kill someone in front of a witness in a brutal enough fashion to cause major psychological trauma, passing the entity to them. Rose angrily rejects the option and leaves.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: She is confronted at home by the entity in Madeline's form, where it gleefully warns her she's running out of time. Rose impulsively drives to her hospital with a knife and hallucinates murdering Carl in front of Morgan to pass the entity to him. She snaps out of it and hastily drives away, though not before Morgan spots the knife and alerts the police.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Rose drives to her abandoned family home, convinced that she can't pass on the entity if she remains alone. Rose confronts the entity in the form of her dead mother, revealing Rose witnessed her mother's death throes and ignored her pleas for help. The entity attacks Rose, but she manages to set it on fire destroying the entity and flee the burning house. Then she drives to Joel's apartment, where he comforts her. When Joel starts smiling, Rose realizes everything that happened from the moment she entered the old house was a hallucination. The entity confronts the now despairing Rose, reveals itself as a giant skinless creature with multiple mouths nested within its mouth, paralyzing her with its visage before forcing itself inside her body through her mouth.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Joel, having tracked Rose's phone, enters the house and sees a smiling Rose set herself on fire, with the entity passing onto him.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: "Smile" explores several themes and devices common to the horror genre, such as trauma, grief, and guilt. As the audience follows through the lens of protagonist Dr. Rose Cotter, she becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator, further blurring lines between delusions and reality, an area upon which she should, in theory, have a firm grasp as a clinical psychologist. The concept and effects of trauma is explored at various levels. On a clinical level, Rose may be seen as experiencing vicarious trauma (wherein therapists experience trauma as a result of treating their patients’ trauma) as she treats patients. On a more metaphorical level, the cyclical nature of trauma is seen through the antagonist monster’s process of causing one victim to spread their trauma to other victims. The deeper extent of personal trauma is shown through the multiple endings experienced by Rose as she confronts her more fully revealed past trauma, only to be forced to relive it.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Critics point out that the concept of being consumed by one’s trauma to the point that trauma manifests as an identity is observably common within the genre. As such, "Smile" has been thematically compared to other horror movies such as "The Babadook" and "It Follows", among others.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: As Katie Rife from New York Magazine’s Vulture explains, “"Smile" is both an extension and a repudiation of the trauma plot, incorporating its traits and tropes while denying viewers the familiar catharsis of conquering the monster.” Indeed, writer-director Parker Finn chose to include multiple endings to the film as an attempt to subvert savvy viewers’ predictions related to the typical trauma-plot.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: In June 2020, Parker Finn was tapped by Paramount Pictures to write and direct a feature adaptation of his own short film "Laura Hasn't Slept", which saw a young woman seeking the help of her therapist desperate to rid herself of a recurring nightmare. Earlier in March that year, the short film won the Special Jury Recognition Prize for SXSW's Midnight Short category.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: In September 2021, the film was announced under the title "Something's Wrong with Rose" with Sosie Bacon cast as the titular character. Paramount Players and Temple Hill Entertainment had boarded the film to co-produce. The following month, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Rob Morgan, Kal Penn, Judy Reyes, Gillian Zinser and Caitlin Stasey joined the cast.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Principal photography began on October 11, 2021, in New Jersey, including in the city of Hoboken, and finished on November 24, 2021.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Editing and post-production started on December 3, 2021, and lasted through the end of May 2022, visual effects was done by the-Artery and was supervised by Yuval Levy and Vico Sharabani, when the film was simply retitled "Smile". The film's score was composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer. For practical effects, Finn recruited Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. of Amalgamated Dynamics, who he described as a major influence in wanting to be a horror filmmaker for their work in films such as "Aliens".


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Promotional materials that were released included an eight-second teaser on May 26, a 40-second teaser trailer shown at screenings of "" and "Crimes of the Future" in early June 2022, and a two-minute trailer and poster on June 22. Brad Miska of "Bloody Disgusting" described the footage as "pretty generic", but said it stood out due to its similarities to "Ringu" and "The Ring". Shania Russell at "/Film" compared the film to "The Ring", "It Follows" and "Truth or Dare" and wrote, "It's all very familiar and probably not too hard to imagine how the movie will progress, but the scares will make or break the experience, and based on the trailer, "Smile" is more than promising."


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: During several Major League Baseball games the weekend before the film's release, an apparent viral marketing stunt occurred, as the studio or marketing firm purchased seats behind home plate, with actors smiling maniacally into the camera for the pitcher-batter shot for extended periods of time. Some of the actors wore shirts with the name and logo of the film on the front.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: A tie-in with the Craiyon text-to-image generator involved AI generation of images of nightmarish smiles.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: "Smile" had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 22, 2022, followed by screenings at Beyond Fest on September 27. It was released in the United States on September 30, 2022, by Paramount Pictures. Paramount Pictures President and CEO Brian Robbins said that "Smile" was originally slated for a streaming-only release on Paramount+, but the studio eventually decided to release the film theatrically because of strong results from test screenings.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: The film was released for VOD platforms including Paramount+ on November 15, 2022, with a Blu-ray, DVD and 4K UHD release set for December 13, 2022.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: , "Smile" has grossed $105.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $110.2 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $216.1 million.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: In the United States and Canada, "Smile" was released alongside "Bros", and was projected to gross $16–20 million from 3,645 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $8.2 million on its first day, including $2 million from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $22.6 million, topping the box office and slightly overperforming its projections, while being the biggest debut of September 2022. The film made $18.4 million in its sophomore weekend, remaining atop the box office. The 18% second weekend drop was the second-smallest ever for a horror film behind "Get Out"s 15% in February 2017, and marked the best non-holiday hold of the pandemic era. Although it was dethroned by newcomer "Halloween Ends" in its third weekend the film continued to hold well, making $12.6 million. On November 9, 2022, it became only the third R-rated film released in the pandemic era to gross $100 million domestically, as well as becoming the highest-grossing R-rated horror film worldwide during the pandemic.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 80% based on 181 reviews, and an average rating of 6.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Deeply creepy visuals and a standout Sosie Bacon further elevate "Smile"s unsettling exploration of trauma, adding up to the rare feature that satisfyingly expands on a short." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B–" on an A+ to F scale, while those at PostTrak gave the film a 69% overall positive score, with 53% saying they would definitely recommend it.


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Marisa Mirabal of "IndieWire" gave the film a grade of B−, noting its plot's similarities to films such as "It Follows", "The Ring", "Oculus" and "Final Destination". She wrote: ""Smile" navigates unhealed trauma through a supernatural lens and mischievous juxtaposition, despite feeling like a shadow of other stories", and added that it "delivers a captivating and claustrophobic mental hellscape that will cause one to both grimace and grin." Tasha Robinson of "Polygon" wrote: ""Smile" is often a gimmicky, even corny horror movie, packed with so many jump-scares that the sheer pile-on borders on laughable... But no matter how excessively the legitimate scares pile up, they're startling and convincing. The editing and music are impressively tuned for maximum impact whenever the slow-burning tension resolves with an abrupt, ugly surprise. All of which makes "Smile" an efficient ride, if an unusually unrelenting one."


title: Smile (2022 film)

text: Katie Rife of RogerEbert.com gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, writing: "In padding out the concept from an 11-minute short into a nearly two-hour movie, "Smile" leans too heavily not only on formulaic mystery plotting, but also on horror themes and imagery lifted from popular hits like "The Ring" and "It Follows"." Kevin Maher of "The Times" wrote: "There are some nice jump scares and Bacon is charismatic but it's achingly derivative and dull", and gave the film 2 out of 5 stars. Jeffrey M. Anderson of Common Sense Media also gave the film 2 out of 5 stars, writing: "The image of a creepy, sinister smile is so primal and so chilling that it might have inspired something truly penetrating, but, sadly, this horror movie is content to fall back on noisy jump scares."


title: Yuga Cycle

text: A Yuga" Cycle ( chatur yuga, maha yuga", etc.) is a cyclic age (epoch) in Hindu cosmology. Each cycle lasts for 4,320,000 years (12,000 divine years) and repeats four "yugas" (world ages): "Krita (Satya) Yuga", "Treta Yuga", "Dvapara Yuga", and "Kali Yuga".


title: Yuga Cycle

text: As a "Yuga" Cycle progresses through the four "yugas", each "yuga's" length and humanity's general moral and physical state within each "yuga" decrease by one-fourth. "Kali Yuga", which lasts for 432,000 years, is believed to have started in 3102 BCE. Near the end of "Kali Yuga", when virtues are at their worst, a cataclysm and a re-establishment of "dharma" occur to usher in the next cycle's "Satya Yuga", prophesied to occur by Kalki.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: There are 71 "Yuga" Cycles in a "manvantara" (age of Manu) and 1,000 "Yuga" Cycles in a "kalpa" (day of Brahma).


title: Yuga Cycle

text: It is theorized that the concept of the four "yugas" originated some time after the compilation of the four Vedas, but prior to the rest of the Hindu texts, based on the concept's absence in the former writings. It is believed that the four "yugas"—"Krita" ("Satya"), "Treta", "Dvapara", and "Kali"—are named after throws of an Indian game of long dice, marked with 4-3-2-1 respectively. A dice game is described in the "Rigveda", "Atharvaveda", Upanishads, "Ramayana", "Mahabharata", and Puranas, while the four "yugas" are described after the four Vedas with no mention of a correlation to dice. A complete description of the four "yugas" and their characteristics are in the "Vishnu Smriti" (ch. 20), "Mahabharata" (e.g. Vanaparva 149, 183), "Manusmriti" (I.81–86), and Puranas (e.g. "Brahma", ch. 122–123; "Matsya", ch. 142–143; "Naradiya", Purvardha, ch. 41). The four "yugas" are also described in the "Bhagavata Purana" (3.11.18–20).


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Hindu texts describe four "yugas" (world ages) in a "Yuga" Cycle—"Krita (Satya) Yuga", "Treta Yuga", "Dvapara Yuga", and "Kali Yuga"—where, starting in order from the first age, each "yuga's" length decreases by one-fourth (25%), giving proportions of 4:3:2:1. Each "yuga" is described as having a main period ( "yuga" proper) preceded by its (dawn) and followed by its (dusk), where each twilight (dawn/dusk) lasts for one-tenth (10%) of its main period. Lengths are given in divine years (years of the gods), each lasting for 360 solar (human) years.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Each "Yuga" Cycle lasts for 4,320,000 years (12,000 divine years) with its four "yugas" and their parts occurring in the following order:


title: Yuga Cycle

text: The current cycle's four "yugas" have the following dates based on Kali Yuga, the fourth and present age, starting in 3102 BCE:


title: Yuga Cycle

text: There are 71 "Yuga" Cycles (306,720,000 years) in a "manvantara", a period ruled by Manu, who is the progenitor of mankind. There are 1,000 "Yuga" Cycles (4,320,000,000 years) in a "kalpa", a period that is a day (12-hour day proper) of Brahma, who is the creator of the planets and first living entities. There are 14 "manvantaras" (4,294,080,000 years) in a "kalpa" with a remainder of 25,920,000 years assigned to 15 "manvantara-sandhyas" (junctures), each the length of a "Satya Yuga" (1,728,000 years). A "kalpa" is followed by a "pralaya" (night or partial dissolution) of equal length forming a full day (24-hour day). A "maha-kalpa" (life of Brahma) lasts for 100 360-day years of Brahma, which lasts for 72,000,000 "Yuga" Cycles (311.04 trillion years) and is followed by a "maha-pralaya" (full dissolution) of equal length.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: "Yuga" dates are used in an "ashloka", which is read out at the beginning of Hindu rites to specify the elapsed time in Brahma's life:


title: Yuga Cycle

text: The Puranas describe Vishnu avatars that come during specific "yugas", but may not occur in every "Yuga" Cycle.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Vamana appears at the beginning of "Treta Yuga". According to "Vayu Purana", Vamana's 3rd appearance was in the 7th "Treta Yuga".


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Rama appears at the end of "Treta Yuga". According to "Vayu Purana" and "Matsya Purana", Rama appeared in the 24th "Yuga" Cycle. According to "Padma Purana", Rama also appeared in the 27th "Yuga" Cycle of the 6th (previous) "manvantara".


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Vyasa is attributed as the compiler of the four Vedas, "Mahabharata", and Puranas. According to the "Vishnu Purana", "Kurma Purana", and "Shiva Purana", a different Vyasa comes at the end of each "Dvapara Yuga" to write down "veda" (knowledge) to guide humans in the degraded age of "Kali Yuga".


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Breaking from the long duration of a "Yuga" Cycle, new theories have emerged regarding the length, number, and order of the "yugas".


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) proposed a "Yuga" Cycle of 24,000 years in the introduction of his book "The Holy Science" (1894).


title: Yuga Cycle

text: He claimed the understanding that "Kali Yuga" lasts for 432,000 years was a mistake, which he traced back to Raja Parikshit, just after the descending "Dvapara Yuga" ended ( 3101BCE) and all the wise men of his court retired to the Himalaya Mountains. With no one left to correctly calculate the ages, "Kali Yuga" never officially started. After 499CE, in ascending "Dvapara Yuga", when the intellect of men began to develop, but not fully, they noticed mistakes and attempted to correct them by converting what they thought to be divine years to human years (1:360 ratio). Yukteswar's "yuga" lengths for "Satya", "Treta", "Dvapara", and "Kali" are respectively 4,800, 3,600, 2,400, and 1,200 "human" years (12,000 years total).


title: Yuga Cycle

text: He accepted the four "yugas" and their 4:3:2:1 length and "dharma" proportions, but his "Yuga" Cycle contained eight "yugas", the original descending set of the four "yugas" followed by an ascending (reversed) set, where he called each set a ""Daiva Yuga"" or "Electric Couple". His "Yuga" Cycle lasts for 24,000 years, which he believed equals one precession of the equinoxes (traditionally 25,920 years; 1,920 years ignored). He states that the world entered the Pisces-Virgo Age in 499CE ("cycle bottom"), and that the current age of ascending "Dvapara Yuga" started in 1699CE around the time of scientific discoveries and advancements such as electricity.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: He explained that in a 24,000-year "Yuga" Cycle, our Sun completes one orbit around some dual star, becoming nearer and farther to a galactic center, which the pair orbit in a longer period. He called this galactic center "Vishnunabhi" (Vishnu's Navel), where Brahma regulates "dharma" or, as Yukteswar defined it, mental virtue. "Dharma" is lowest when farthest from Brahma at the descending-ascending intersection ("cycle-bottom"), where the opposite occurs at the "cycle-top" when nearest. At "dharma's" lowest (499CE), human intellect cannot comprehend anything beyond the gross material world.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Joscelyn Godwin states that Yukteswar believed the traditional chronology of the "yugas" wrong and rigged for political reasons, but that Yukteswar may have had political reasons of his own, evident in a police report printed in "Atlantis and the Cycles of Time", which links Yukteswar to a secret anti-colonial movement called Yugantar, meaning "new age" or "transition of an epoch".


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Godwin claims the Jain time cycle and the European myth of progress influenced Yukteswar, whose theory only recently became prominent outside India. Humanity in an upward cycle is contrary to traditional ideas. Godwin points out many philosophies and religions that started during a time when "man could not see beyond the gross material world" (701BCE1699CE). Only materialists and atheists would welcome the post-1700 age as an improvement.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: John Major Jenkins, who adjusted ascending "Kali Yuga" from 499CE to 2012 in his version, criticizes Yukteswar as wanting the "cycle-bottom" to correspond to his education, beliefs, and historical understanding. Technology has thrust us deeper into material dependency and spiritual darkness.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: René Guénon (1886–1951) proposed a "Yuga" Cycle of 64,800 years in his 1931 French article, which was later translated in the book "Traditional Forms & Cosmic Cycles" (2001).


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Guénon accepted the doctrine of the four "yugas", the 4:3:2:1 "yuga" length proportions, and "Kali Yuga" as the present age. He couldn't accept the extremely large lengths and felt they were encoded with additional zeros to mislead those who might use it to predict the future. He reduced a "Yuga" Cycle from 4,320,000 to 4,320 years (1,728 + 1,296 + 864 + 432), but he felt this was too short for humanity's history.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: In looking for a multiplier, he worked backwards from the precession of the equinoxes (traditionally 25,920 years; 360 72-year degrees). Using 25,920 and 72, he calculated the sub-multiplier to be 4,320 years (72 x 60 = 4,320; 4,320 x 6 = 25,920). In noticing the "great year" of the Persians (~12,000) and Greeks (~13,000) as almost half the precession, he concluded a "great year" must be 12,960 years (4,320 x 3). In trying to find the whole number of "great years" in a "manvantara" or reign of Vaivasvata Manu, he found the reign of Xisuthros of the Chaldeans to be set to 64,800 years (12,960 x 5), someone he thought to be the same Manu. Guénon felt 64,800 years was a more plausible length that may line up with humanity's history. He calculated a 64,800 "manvantara" divided into a 4,320 "encoded" "Yuga" Cycle gave a multiplier of 15 (5 "great years"). Using 15 as the multiplier, he "decoded" a 5-"great year" "Yuga" Cycle as having the following "yuga" lengths:


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Guénon did not give a start date for "Kali Yuga", but instead left clues in his description of the cataclysmic destruction of the Atlantean civilization. His commentator, Jean Robin, in an early 1980s publication, claimed to have decoded this description and calculated that "Kali Yuga" lasted from 4481BCE to 1999CE (2000CE excluding year 0). In "Les Quatre Âges de L’Humanité" ("The Four Ages of Humanity"), a book written in 1949 by Gaston Georgel, this same end date of 1999 CE was calculated; although, in his 1983 book titled "Le Cycle Judéo-Chrétien" ("The Judeo-Christian Cycle"), he later argued to shift the cycle forward by 31 years to end in 2030 CE.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Alain Daniélou (1907–1994) proposed a "Yuga" Cycle of 60,487 years in his book "While the Gods Play: Shaiva Oracles and Predictions on the Cycles of History and the Destiny of Mankind" (1985).


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Daniélou and René Guénon had some correspondence where they both couldn't accept the extremely large lengths found in the Puranas. Daniélou mostly cited "Linga Purana" and his calculations are based on a 4,320,000-year "Yuga" Cycle containing (his calculation of 1000 ÷ 14) 71.42 "manvantaras", each containing 4 "yugas" [4:3:2:1 proportions]. He pegged 3102BCE as the start of "Kali Yuga" and placed it after the dawn ("yuga-sandhya"). He claimed his dates are accurate to within 50 years, and that the "Yuga" Cycle started with a great flood and appearance of Cro-Magnon man, and will end with a catastrophe wiping out mankind.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Joscelyn Godwin found that Daniélou's misunderstanding rests solely on a bad translation of "Linga Purana" 1.4.7.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: In the early texts of Hindu astronomy such as "Surya Siddhanta", the length of a "yuga" cycle is used to specify the orbital period of heavenly bodies. Instead of specifying the period of a single orbit of a heavenly body around the Earth, the number of orbits of a heavenly body in a "yuga" cycle is specified.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: The orbital period of heavenly bodies can be derived from the above numbers provided the starting point of a "yuga" cycle is known. According to Burgess, the "Surya Siddhanta" fixes the starting point of "Kali Yuga" as:


title: Yuga Cycle

text: According to Robert Bolton, there is a universal belief in many traditions that the world started in a perfect state, when nature and the supernatural were still in harmony with all things in their fullest degree of perfection possible, which was followed by an unpreventable constant deterioration of the world through the ages.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: In the "Works and Days" (lines 109–201; 700BCE), considered the earliest European writing about human ages, the Greek poet Hesiod describes five ages (Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Ages), where the Heroic Age was added, according to Godwin, as a compromise with Greek history when the Trojan War and its heroes loomed so large. Bolton explains that the men of the Golden Age lived like gods without sorrow, toil, grief, and old age, while the men of the Iron Age ("the race of iron") never rest from labor and sorrow, are degenerated without shame, morality, and righteous indignation, and have short lives with frequent deaths at night, where even a new-born baby shows signs of old age, only to end when Zeus destroys it all.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: In the "Statesman" (), the Athenian philosopher Plato describes time as an indefinite cycle of two 36,000-year halves: (1) the world's unmaking descent into chaos and destruction; (2) the world's remaking by its creator into a renewed state. In the "Cratylus" (397e), Plato recounts the golden race of men who came first, who were noble and good daemons (godlike guides) upon the earth.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: In the "Metamorphoses" (I, 89–150; 8BCE), the Roman poet Ovid describes four ages (Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages), excluding Hesiod's Heroic Age, as a downward curve with the present time as the nadir of misery and immorality, according to Godwin, affecting both human life and the after-death state, where deaths in the first two ages became immortal, watchful spirits that benefited the human race, deaths in the third age went to Hades (Greek god of the underworld), and deaths in the fourth age had an unknown fate.


title: Yuga Cycle

text: Joscelyn Godwin posits that it is probably from Hindu tradition that knowledge of the ages reached the Greeks and other Indo-European peoples. Godwin adds that the number 432,000 ("Kali Yuga's" duration) occurring in four widely separated cultures (Hindu, Chaldean, Chinese, and Icelandic) has long been noticed.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Sanfilippo syndrome, also known as mucopolysaccharidosis type III (MPS III), is a rare autosomal recessive lysosomal storage disease that primarily affects the brain and spinal cord. It is caused by a buildup of large sugar molecules called glycosaminoglycans (AKA GAGs, or mucopolysaccharides) in the body's lysosomes.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Affected children generally do not show any signs or symptoms at birth, although some early indicators can be respiratory issues at birth, large head size, and umbilical hernia. In early childhood, they begin to develop developmental disability and loss of previously learned skills. In later stages of the disorder, they may develop seizures and movement disorders. Patients with Sanfilippo syndrome usually live into adolescence or early adulthood.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: The disease manifests in young children. Symptoms usually begin to appear between two and six years of age. Affected infants appear normal, although some mild facial dysmorphism may be noticeable. Of all of the MPS diseases, Sanfilippo syndrome produces the fewest physical abnormalities.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: After an initial symptom-free interval, patients usually present with a slowing of development and/or behavioral problems, followed by progressive intellectual decline resulting in severe dementia and progressive motor disease. Acquisition of speech is often slow and incomplete.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: The disease progresses to increasing behavioral disturbance including temper tantrums, hyperactivity, destructiveness, aggressive behavior, pica, difficulties with toilet training, and sleep disturbance. As affected children initially have normal muscle strength and mobility, the behavioral disturbances may be difficult to manage. The disordered sleep in particular presents a significant problem to care providers.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: In the final phase of the illness, children become increasingly immobile and unresponsive, often require wheelchairs, and develop swallowing difficulties and seizures. The life-span of an affected child does not usually extend beyond late teens to early twenties.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Individuals with MPS type III tend to have mild skeletal abnormalities; osteonecrosis of the femoral head may be present in patients with the severe form. Optic nerve atrophy, deafness, and otitis can be seen in moderate to severe individuals. Other characteristics include coarse facial features, thick lips, synophrys, and stiff joints.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: It is difficult to clinically distinguish differences among the four types of Sanfilippo syndrome. However, type A is usually the most severe subtype, characterized by earliest onset, rapid clinical progression with severe symptoms, and short survival. The median age of death for children afflicted with type A is 15.4 ± 4.1 years.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: It is important that simple and treatable conditions such as ear infections and toothaches not be overlooked because of behavior problems that make examination difficult. Children with MPS type III often have an increased tolerance to pain. Bumps, bruises, or ear infections that would be painful for other children often go unnoticed in children with MPS type III. Some children with MPS type III may have a blood-clotting problem during and after surgery.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Mutations in four different genes can lead to Sanfilippo syndrome. This disorder is inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern. People with two working copies of the gene are unaffected. People with one working copy are genetic carriers of Sanfilippo syndrome. They have no symptoms but may pass down the defective gene to their children. People with two defective copies will suffer from Sanfilippo syndrome.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are chains of sugar molecules. They are found in the extracellular matrix and the cell membrane, or stored in the secretory granules. GAGs are stored in the cell lysosome, and are degraded by enzymes such as glycosidases, sulfatases, and acetyltransferases. Deficiency in these enzymes lead to the four subtypes of MPS III.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Sanfilippo syndrome types A, B, C, and D are considered to be clinically indistinguishable, although mutations in different genes are responsible for each disease. The following discussion is therefore applicable to all four conditions.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: A urinalysis can show elevated levels of heparan sulfate in the urine. All four types of Sanfilippo syndrome show increased levels of GAGs in the urine; however, this is less true of Sanfilippo syndrome than other MPS disorders. Additionally, urinary GAG levels are higher in infants and toddlers than in older children. In order to avoid a false negative urine test due to dilution, it is important that a urine sample be taken first thing in the morning.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: The diagnosis may be confirmed by enzyme assay of skin fibroblasts and white blood cells. The enzyme assay is considered to be the most credible diagnostic tool because it detects whether or not the enzymes that are normally present in the cellular pathway that is responsible for breaking down heparan sulfate are present or not, thereby providing a definitive answer. This test is also ideal for younger patients in which collecting a viable urine sample is difficult or impossible. Another diagnostic tool can be gene sequencing. However, if the genetic mutation they carry has never been seen or recorded, the patient would receive a false negative.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Treatment remains largely supportive. The behavioral disturbances of MPS-III respond poorly to medication. If an early diagnosis is made, bone marrow replacement may be beneficial. Although the missing enzyme can be manufactured and given intravenously, it cannot penetrate the blood–brain barrier and therefore cannot treat the neurological manifestations of the disease. Along with many other lysosomal storage diseases, MPS-III exists as a model of a monogenetic disease involving the central nervous system.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Several promising therapies are in development. The French company Lysogene is conducting a phase II/III clinical trial of a gene therapy-based treatment. Other potential therapies include chemical modification of deficient enzymes to allow them to penetrate the blood–brain barrier, stabilisation of abnormal but active enzyme to prevent its degradation, and implantation of stem cells strongly expressing the missing enzyme. For any future treatment to be successful, it must be administered as early as possible. Currently MPS-III is mainly diagnosed clinically, by which stage it is probably too late for any treatment to be very effective. Neonatal screening programs would provide the earliest possible diagnosis.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: The flavonoid genistein decreases the accumulation of GAGs. "In vitro", animal studies and clinical experiments suggest that the symptoms of the disease may be alleviated by an adequate dose of genistein. Despite its reported beneficial properties, genistein also has toxic side effects.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Several support and research groups have been established to speed the development of new treatments for Sanfilippo syndrome.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Participants in the first-ever "Caregiver Preference Study for Sanfilippo Syndrome" advocated for clinical trials that shift focus from primary cognitive outcomes to other multisystem endpoints, and perceptions of non-curative therapies revealed a preference for treatment options that stop or slow the disorder progression to maintain the child’s current function to ensure quality of life; thus, parents express high risk tolerance and a desire for broader inclusion criteria for trials.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: According to a study of patients with Sanfilippo syndrome, the median life expectancy varies depending on the subtype. In Sanfilippo syndrome type A, the mean age at death (± standard deviation) was 15.22 ± 4.22 years. For type B, it was 18.91 ± 7.33 years, and for type C it was 23.43 ± 9.47 years. The mean life expectancy for type A has increased since the 1970s.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Incidence of Sanfilippo syndrome varies geographically, with approximately 1 case per 280,000 live births in Northern Ireland, 1 per 66,000 in Australia, and 1 per 50,000 in the Netherlands.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: The condition is named after Sylvester Sanfilippo, the pediatrician who first described the disease in 1963.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Caregivers for children with Sanfilippo syndrome face a unique set of challenges because of the disease's complex nature. There is little understanding among clinicians of the family experience of caring for patients with Sanfilippo and how a caregiver's experiences change and evolve as patients age. The burden and impact on caregivers' quality of life is poorly defined and best-practice guidance for clinicians is lacking.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: A best-practice guidance to help clinicians understand the challenges caregivers face was published July 2019 in the "Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases" by a group of international clinical advisors with expertise in the care of pediatric patients with Sanfilippo, lysosomal storage disorders, and life as a caregiver to a child with Sanfilippo.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: The group reviewed key aspects of caregiver burden associated with Sanfilippo B by identifying and quantifying the nature and impact of the disease on patients and caregivers. Recommendations were based on findings from qualitative and quantitative research.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: The article's authors reported, "Providing care for patients with Sanfilippo B impinges on all aspects of family life, evolving as the patient ages and the disease progresses. Important factors contributing toward caregiver burden include sleep disturbances, impulsive and hyperactive behavior, and communication difficulties ... Caregiver burden remained high throughout the life of the patient and, coupled with the physical burden of daily care, had a cumulative impact that generated significant psychological stress."


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: Additionally, the authors call for changing the narrative associated with Sanfilippo: "The panel agreed that the perceived aggressive behavior of the child may be better described as 'physical impulsiveness' and is often misunderstood by the general public. Importantly, the lack of intentionality of the child’s behavior is recognized and shared by parents and panel members ... Parents may seek to protect their child from public scrutiny and avoid situations that may engender criticism of their parenting skills."


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: The community of Sanfilippo families, foundations, scientists and researchers, and industry partners and collaborators around the world have dedicated November 16 as World Sanfilippo Awareness Day.


title: Sanfilippo syndrome

text: World Sanfilippo Awareness Day is about spreading awareness and sparking conversations globally about Sanfilippo syndrome. This day of awareness is in honor of the children around the world living with Sanfilippo syndrome today, and those who have died. It also honors the families of the children with Sanfilippo syndrome. November 16, 2019, was the first year observing World Sanfilippo Awareness Day.


title: Baron

text: Baron is a rank of nobility or title of honour, often hereditary, in various European countries, either current or historical. The female equivalent is baroness. Typically, the title denotes an aristocrat who ranks higher than a lord or knight, but lower than a viscount or count. Often, barons hold their fief – their lands and income – directly from the monarch. Barons are less often the vassals of other nobles. In many kingdoms, they were entitled to wear a smaller form of a crown called a "coronet".


title: Baron

text: The term originates from the Latin term , via Old French. The use of the title "baron" came to England via the Norman Conquest of 1066, then the Normans brought the title to Scotland and Italy. It later spread to Scandinavia and Slavic lands.


title: Baron

text: The word "baron" comes from the Old French , from a Late Latin "man; servant, soldier, mercenary" (so used in Salic law; Alemannic law has in the same sense). The scholar Isidore of Seville in the 7th century thought the word was from Greek "heavy" (because of the "heavy work" done by mercenaries), but the word is presumably of Old Frankish origin, cognate with Old English meaning "warrior, nobleman". Cornutus in the first century already reports a word which he took to be of Gaulish origin. He glosses it as meaning and explains it as meaning "stupid", by reference to classical Latin "simpleton, dunce"; because of this early reference, the word has also been suggested to derive from an otherwise unknown Celtic , but the "Oxford English Dictionary" takes this to be "a figment".


title: Baron

text: In the Peerage of England, the Peerage of Great Britain, the Peerage of Ireland and the Peerage of the United Kingdom (but not in the Peerage of Scotland), barons form the lowest rank, placed immediately below viscounts. A woman of baronial rank has the title baroness. In the Kingdom of England, the medieval Latin word "" (genitive singular "barōnis") was used originally to denote a tenant-in-chief of the early Norman kings who held his lands by the feudal tenure of "barony" (in Latin "per barōniam"), and who was entitled to attend the Great Council (Magnum Concilium) which by the 13th century had developed into the Parliament of England.


title: Baron

text: Feudal baronies (or "baronies by tenure") are now obsolete in England and without any legal force, but any such historical titles are held "in gross", that is to say are deemed to be enveloped within a more modern extant peerage title also held by the holder, sometimes along with vestigial manorial rights and tenures by grand serjeanty.


title: Baron

text: After the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman dynasty introduced an adaptation of the French feudal system to the Kingdom of England. Initially, the term "baron" on its own was not a title or rank, but the "barons of the King" were the men of the king. Previously, in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England, the king's companions held the title of earl and in Scotland, the title of thane. All who held their feudal barony "in-chief of the king", that is with the king as his immediate overlord, became alike "barones regis" ("barons of the king"), bound to perform a stipulated annual military service and obliged to attend his council. The greatest of the nobles, especially those in the Marches, such as the Earls of Chester and the Bishops of Durham, whose territories were often deemed palatine, that is to say "worthy of a prince", might refer to their own tenants as "barons", where lesser magnates spoke simply of their "men" ("homines") and lords of the manor might reference "bondmen".


title: Baron

text: Initially those who held land directly from the king by military service, from earls downwards, all bore alike the title of baron, which was thus the factor uniting all members of the ancient baronage as peers one of another. Under King Henry II, the "Dialogus de Scaccario" already distinguished between greater barons, who held "per baroniam" by knight's service, and lesser barons, who held manors. Thus in this historical sense, Lords of Manors are barons, or freemen; however they are not entitled to be styled as such. John Selden writes in "Titles of Honour", "The word "Baro" (Latin for Baron) hath been also so much communicated, that not only all Lords of Mannors have been from ancient time, and are at this day called sometimes Barons (as in the stile of their Court Barons, which is "Curia Baronis, &c". And I have read "hors de son Barony" in a barr to an Avowry for "hors de son fee") But also the Judges of the Exchequer have it from antient time fixed on them." Within a century of the Norman Conquest of 1066, as in the case of Thomas Becket in 1164, there arose the practice of sending to each greater baron a personal summons demanding his attendance at the King's Council, which evolved into the Parliament and later into the House of Lords, while as was stipulated in Magna Carta of 1215, the lesser barons of each county would receive a single summons as a group through the sheriff, and representatives only from their number would be elected to attend on behalf of the group. These representatives developed into the Knights of the Shire, elected by the County Court presided over by the sheriff, who themselves formed the precursor of the House of Commons. Thus appeared a definite distinction, which eventually had the effect of restricting to the greater barons alone the privileges and duties of peerage.


title: Baron

text: Later, the king started to create new baronies in one of two ways: by a writ of summons directing a chosen man to attend Parliament, and in an even later development by letters patent. Writs of summons became the normal method in medieval times, displacing the method of feudal barony, but creation of baronies by letters patent is the sole method adopted in modern times.


title: Baron

text: Since the adoption of summons by writ, baronies thus no longer relate directly to land-holding, and thus no more feudal baronies needed to be created from then on. Following the "Modus Tenendi Parliamenta" of 1419, the Tenures Abolition Act 1660, the Feudal Tenure Act (1662), and the Fines and Recoveries Act of 1834, titles of feudal barony became obsolete and without legal force. The Abolition Act 1660 specifically states: baronies by tenure were converted into baronies by writ. The rest ceased to exist as feudal baronies by tenure, becoming baronies in free socage, that is to say under a "free" (hereditable) contract requiring payment of monetary rents.


title: Baron

text: In the 20th century, Britain introduced the concept of non-hereditary life peers. All appointees to this distinction have (thus far) been at the rank of baron. In accordance with the tradition applied to hereditary peers, they too are formally addressed in parliament by their peers as "The Noble Lord".


title: Baron

text: In addition, baronies are often used by their holders as subsidiary titles, for example as courtesy titles for the son and heir of an Earl or higher-ranked peer. The Scottish baronial title tends to be used when a landed family is not in possession of any United Kingdom peerage title of higher rank, subsequently granted, or has been created a knight of the realm.


title: Baron

text: Several members of the royal family with the style of "Royal Highness" are also titled Barons. For example, William, Prince of Wales is also The Baron of Renfrew and The Baron Carrickfergus.


title: Baron

text: Some non-royal Barons are somehow related to the royal family; for example, Maurice Roche, 6th Baron Fermoy is William's first cousin once removed, through William's late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who was the 4th Baron Fermoy's granddaughter.


title: Baron

text: The title of baron () was created in the Peerage of Ireland shortly after the Norman invasion of Ireland (1169). Ireland's first baronies included Baron Athenry (1172), Baron Offaly (c. 1193), Baron Kerry (1223), Baron Dunboyne (1324), Baron Gormanston (1365–70), Baron Slane (1370), Baron of Dunsany (1439), Baron Louth (c. 1458) and Baron Trimlestown (1461).


title: Baron

text: A person holding a peerage in the rank of baron is entitled to a coronet bearing six silver balls (called pearls) around the rim, equally spaced and all of equal size and height. The rim itself is neither jeweled nor "chased" (which is the case for the coronets of peers of higher degree).


title: Baron

text: The actual coronet is worn only for the coronation of a new monarch, but a baron can bear his coronet of rank on his coat of arms above the shield. In heraldry, the baron's coronet is shown with four of the balls visible.


title: Baron

text: Formally, barons are styled "The Right Honourable The Lord [Barony]" and barons’ wives are styled "The Right Honourable The Lady [Barony]". Baronesses in their own right, whether hereditary or for life, are either styled "The Right Honourable The Baroness [Barony]" or "The Right Honourable The Lady [Barony]", mainly based on personal preference (e.g. Lady Thatcher and Baroness Warsi, both life baronesses in their own right). Less formally, one refers to or addresses a baron as "Lord [Barony]" and his wife as "Lady [Barony]", and baronesses in their own right as "Baroness [X]" or "Lady [X]". In direct address, barons and baronesses can also be referred to as "My Lord", "Your Lordship", or "Your Ladyship or My Lady". The husband of a baroness in her own right gains no title or style from his wife.


title: Baron

text: "The" "Right Honourable" is frequently abbreviated to "The Rt Hon." or "Rt Hon." When referred to by the Sovereign in public instruments, "The Right Honourable" is changed to "Our right trusty and well-beloved", with "Counsellor" attached if they are a Privy Counsellor.