Truth and faleshood may be valid logical constructs, but they are not viable constructs from the perspective of human understanding and knowledge. What we in our day to day life take for truth and falsehood are actually in reality belief and disbelief. I ventured down this line of thinking after watching the movie, 'The Invention of Lying' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1058017/). The premise of the movie is that there is a world where the concept of lying does not exist, and everyone speaks the truth. In this world, the protaganist suddenly finds that he is the only one able to lie, with quite profitable results, as you can imagine. But is such a world without lying even possible? What is a lie? It is stating something that you know is not true. So lying is defined in terms of truth. But then, what is the truth? Is it stating something you know to be, or exist, indisputably? Or is it stating something that you believe to be, or exist, indisputably? There is a difference between knowing the truth and believing something to be true. We can only believe something to be true, and can never know something to be true. In the movie, the characters take everything anyone says to be true, since apparently the concept of lying is unknown, I wonder how they dealt with ambiguous or uncertain situations? A person may state what he believes to be true, but his belief may be mistaken. Take a character from such a world whose watch is running slow, but he does not know this - if someone asks him for the time, he will state the time based on what his watch shows, and what he believes to be the true time. But a comparison with another watch will show that he was lying, albeit unknowingly. This brings out the difference between knowing and believing. He believes the time is 9:15 AM, but the true time is 9:20 AM. If he states his belief, he is liar, isn't he? And knowing that people can lie, even mistakenly, it logically follows that other people will be skeptical of what people claim to be the truth, and will want to double check the facts. Thus a real world with people and uncertainty, and without lying, is logically not possible.
Ten thousand years ago, ancient man used to believe in the truth of Gods and exotic beings that lived in the heavens among the stars, and influenced things we observed on our earth. Over the last one thousand years, owing to Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and a whole host of others, we 'discovered' classical mechanics, and started believing in forces such as gravity and electromagnetism that influenced things we observed on our earth and the observable universe. In the last century or so, thanks to quantum mechanics, we now believe that the forces may actually be strings or particles or waves or a combination of them, and we cannot know anything for sure, and can only give a probability estimate for any event we observe in the universe. So you can see that as we think our understanding of the universe has improved over the millenia, it is in fact one set of beliefs replacing another, with the only requirement that the new set of beliefs is able to explain a few things that the old set of beliefs could not successfully explain. Note that we are only dealing in beliefs that try to explain observations - however we do not know what the truth is, or in fact, if the concept of the truth even makes sense in this context. And if this was not enough, the latest set of beliefs (quantum electrodynamics) that we take for truth now seem to suggest that we will always have to deal in beliefs, and that there is no one truth.
So when we say something is true, we are merely stating our belief. This belief may be modified in time, as new facts emerge. This belief is a good enough substitute for the truth for most of us, as we go about our mundane lives. We do not need to distinguish between our beliefs and what might be an unknowable, and therefore useless, truth. Given this background, we now come back to our starting premise - that truth and falsehoods are not valid constructs in reality, and belief and disbelief are what we are left with. So, is the world protrayed in the movie even possible? I think not - since in reality, we do not have truth and untruth - the movie should have been called 'The Invention of Disbelief', since all the charatecters in the movie are credulous and believe whatever anyone else says, until our protaganist comes along.
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