One of the things I'm hearing from this guy that I don't like is this notion that truth only exissts and is true when it's discovered. He appears to axiomatically reject the idea of absolute truth, despite the fact that it's at the core of science, engineering, art, music, all philosophical and intellectual pursuits really.

Here's the question: Is a thing true whether or not we know, and can relate to, the truth of the thing? Plato sure as hell thought so. This guy is muddying these waters in a way I find borderline dishonest. Knowledge and truth are two UTTERLY different things and he's conflating the two rather badly.

This conflation is a problem because he's mixing up the theory of truth and the theory of knowledge. Knowledge is not known until it is known, that's an axiom, but one of the axioms of truth is that truth is true whether it's known nor not.

Knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of a truth does not alter the truth in any way. Looking at the fridge will not put butter there, or take it away it was either already there or it already wasn't, the only thing that changed is our knowledge of the truth about fridge butter. His argument, insofar as I can follow it (no genius here) is fudging that boundary in an unpleasant way.

The only thing that can alter the truth is action. If I take all the butter out of the fridge, it renders the entire earlier question a matter of historic truth rather than existential truth. It invalidates no part of past fridge butter. Present truth is what it is, there is no butter. Historical truth is what it is, there was butter.. Again, this is something this fellow is playing fast and loose with in an unpleasant way.

If the goal of the pursuit of knowledge is to obtain the truth, which I believe it is, then we need to separate the theory of truth from the theory of knowledge, which this dude appears not to be doing.

In fact, I believe "the truth is what exists, or existed in a given timeframe, regardless of whether it is known" is pretty much axiomatic, and blows this guy's sophistries out of the water.