Correct ≠ True
“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” -Neils Bohr
To me, this statement captures something that we can intuit, yet cannot easily express: that truth is layered and that correct does not equal true and that the opposite of truth is not a falsehood because, I think ultimately, profound truths are never merely propositional.
The terms correct and false tend to refer to statements utilized within a representational framework in which our statement either corresponds or fails to correspond to a reality outside of ourselves. In a practical setting of our day-to-day living, this is fine and sensible. However, on a different layer of living as a way of being and trying to make and interpret meaning, I do not think the mere terms of correct and false apply. Because what we are dealing with now, is not a statement but a life, that is, a cloud of meanings and experiences and ways of being in the world. Profound truths emerge from this– and as Bohr writes, their opposite is not false because we are now dealing with something beyond the reach of correct or false. It is a different beast altogether.
Insofar as we ponder that correct ≠ true, the implications of this reach far and wide.
I would concur that correct does not necessarily equate to true, because somethings may be correct so far as they express something yet be so inadequate that they do not approach truth. However, sometimes correct is true; and what is true is also always correct – whether people want to, or are able to, see it or not.
On the other hand what is false does apply to daily life. Some things are simply false. No matter how much one believes them otherwise, no matter how naive one is to its veracity, nothing changes a falsehood into anything but a falsehood. Now if we build our lives upon falsehoods our experience may be our “reality” but it is not Truth. Just as “two wrongs don’t make right”, no combination of Falsehoods can ever become Truth.