At its highest level, yes. How often does that occur? Surely it does, but few would say it occurs often enough. As boop remarked just barely the other day, "No one can possibly know absolutely everything that is relevant to even a single simple problem." This is not an understanding unique to her, nor would she ever claim that it was. Boop was simply reminding us that truth is difficult to know even absent attempts to erect a barricade or to assert a monopoly. Your point, I think, is that knowing truth, even in the imperfect state we know it, demands a good will and a collaborative effort.
Necessarily so, I think . . . at its highest level. {8^)
LOL!!! Your interpretation of "boop" (you can call me "boopster" if you prefer) is right on the money, YHAOS!
But the problem of Truth goes much deeper than that. In an age of moral relativism -- and to me Truth has fundamental moral implications that cannot be evaded with impunity -- people cannot even agree what Truth "is."
This would be my own view FWIW:
"Truth is not a body of propositions about a world-immanent object; it is the world-transcendent summum bonum experienced as an orienting force in the soul, about which we can speak only in analogical symbols." [Eric Voegelin, in Order and History Vol. III]You can instantly see the problem: With the denial of the soul, Truth loses its connection to reality. In our age, both God and soul are strenuously denied among the more fashionable intelligentsia: They insist God is a superstition held by primitive, ignorant, "unenlightened" people; and soul is a similar superstition, a "ghost in the machine," or an epiphenomenon of the neural activity of the physical brain.
The problem is you cannot get the two sides of this issue "together" in rational discourse because they do not share the same world view at all. What you end up with is people just "talking past each other," as we see so often here at FR: In the end, it's a battle between "first reality" and "second realities."
But of course the problem surfaces in far more devastating ways, socially and culturally speaking. Because people will not agree about what Truth "is," our society is divided and increasingly more disordered, with the result (for example) that in wartime, some significant fraction of the American people works for the benefit of an enemy that would destroy us in an instant, if they could but get the chance. Still, these self-same folks would take great umbrage if you were to suggest they were acting "unpatriotically," let alone treasonously....
The "common ground of human existence" is destroyed when we can no longer agree what Truth is.... This, to me, is the single most horrific problem of our time. FWIW.
In short, Truth is the source of the "good order" of the soul, and by extension of society -- and also of the universe itself: Ultimately, Truth is One. To say that it is merely an "opinion," and that one opinion is just as good as another, is to deny the fundamental structure of all reality.
Thank you so much, dear YHAOS, for your reply!