Custom
Most people consciously or unknowingly employ custom as a criterion of truth, based on the assumption that doing what is customary will prevent error. It is particularly applied in the determination of moral truth and reflected in the statement "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". People stick closely to the principle of custom when they use common vernacular, wear common fashions and so forth; essentially, when they do what is popular. Custom is not considered a serious, or valid, test of truth. For example, public opinion polls do not determine truth.
Read more about this topic: Criteria Of Truth
Famous quotes containing the word custom:
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“She was custom built for the pictures—teeny tiny, one inch less than five foot, and a perfectly enormous head. Her face went right from one side of the screen to the other. Gloria Swanson was like that, as well. Joan Crawford, too. You need the big face, for the closeups.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl.... He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the Matrix.”
—William Gibson b. (1948)