How is truth objectively known?
Truth known objectively is what most of us are accustomed to calling truth. This is a way of accessing truth pertaining to matters that all would agree upon were the matters to be thoroughly investigated and explicitly articulated. For example, the statement my car is in the driveway is either true or false, and anyone can agree on the truth or falsity of the statement simply by looking at the driveway to see if my car is in fact there. That seems simple enough. But what about the truth of matters that can't be decided on the basis of simple observations like this? For example, how do we determine with certainty an author's intent even when that author is dead and can't tell us? It can become difficult to decide what is true, yet we may remain convinced that there is a truth of the matter. Regardless, truth arrived at objectively will pertain to propositions, including beliefs or claims. Given a state of affairs, a proposition will capture something about that state of affairs that can be asserted explicitly, and it's the assertion that will either be true or false. The state of affairs, we might say, is just a complex set of facts. So, objectively, truth and falsity pertain to the agreement between beliefs or claims and the facts. A theory of objective truth will need to explain what this agreement consists in.
Again, it may be presumed that truth is commonly available by way of objectivity, and that all who investigate sufficiently into the matter will come to an agreement, and this approach to truth is most easily applied to the world of facts. The sun is on average approximately 93 million miles away from the earth is a claim all scientists will agree upon if they make the proper measurements. But what about value claims like, honesty is the best policy or education is generally more important than entertainment? Or what about claims like, I've been unjustly disrespected when the accused meant no disrespect yet the accuser believes the unjust behavior stems from negligence on the part of the accused? He should have known better. As we can see, matters of truth arrived at objectively rarely (if ever) come unmixed with other considerations.
The idea that truths arrived at objectively can come unmixed with other important considerations gives rise to an additional problem about the nature of objectivity. By objective, do we mean absolute or intersubjective? In either case, we might suppose, a matter will be agreed upon by all those who investigate sufficiently. But is that agreement certain? If certain, we're tempted to call the truth absolute—that the matter will be agreed upon necessarily by anyone at any time who investigates sufficiently. But absolute truths are pure and unmixed with matters relative to contexts. Does this ever nontrivially occur?
At any rate, we naturally care about objective truth as it's associated with the world of shared meanings which can be precisely articulated through language. Any of our coordinated activities rely upon agreements, and many of those activities require that the agreements be made explicit. Objective truths are shared truths that we can state explicitly.
