Truth is not an absolute thing, given and fixed for all time.
There is one objective truth, the state of the objective world at a given point in time.
But we can only ever approach this truth. The the final test for how true something is: Can we utilize something for our own intentions? Then we truly know its properties, its nature or truth is (from a certain perspective, for a certain aim).
Put more eloquently:
“Each step in the development of science adds new grains to the sum of absolute truth, but the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, now expanding, now shrinking with the growth of knowledge.” This recognition of the relative nature of our scientific models, however, does not mean that Marxists are ‘relativists’, denying the existence of an objective, knowable reality, as postmodernists do. As Lenin emphasises: “The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels certainly does contain relativism, but is not reducible to relativism, that is, it recognises the relativity of all our knowledge, not in the sense of denying objective truth, but in the sense that the limits of approximation of our knowledge to this truth are historically conditional.” Every ‘truth’ discovered by science, in other words, will always contain a level of error. Theories and models will only ever remain valid up to a point. Eventually they will break down, and will need to be deepened; further refined and enriched, ad infinitum … This progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge is not linear, however. Periods of stagnation and even decline, leaps and revolutions, are just as much a part of scientific development as they are of social development.
Link to originalCreate abstractions from the concrete, to the degree they are useful for the task at hand.
Truth is a process that Goethe took up in his epic master-piece Faust, which Josh Holroyd explores in idom 48 - marxism and science.