Truth/objective
About
Objective truth refers to that which appears to most accurately describe the nature of objective reality. (We'll use the terms "objective truth" and "objective reality" more or less interchangeably.)
The evidence accumulated over thousands of years of civilization suggests strongly that the nature of reality is immutable, but that our understanding of it is almost always imperfect and may in fact never be perfect. Even in mathematics, for example, it's been proved that we can never be sure we know everything that's true about mathematics.
The general tendency, where scientific methods are allowed to dominate over powermongery, has been for our understanding to approach objective truth ever more closely, in a form of successive approximation:
- flat Earth models...
- were replaced by geocentrism, which
- was replaced by heliocentrism
- (which was replaced by the understanding that we're at the edge of a galaxy which is not anywhere special in our local galactic cluster which is also not anywhere special with relation to the rest of the universe)
- and the epicyclic model of the solar system, which
- was replaced by Newtonian orbital mechanics, which
- was refined by Einsteinian relativity
- was replaced by Newtonian orbital mechanics, which
- was replaced by heliocentrism
- were replaced by geocentrism, which
(Numerous other examples will be added as they come to mind. -W.)