Thomism is such a framework, however, that does allow for truth to reveal itself anywhere that truth decides to do so. Thomism is named after its primary theologian Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas adhered to the correspondence theory of truth which says that something is true "when it conforms to the external reality." Meaning that truth is validated not by its internal biases but its consistency with what has already been determined to be true. There is actually quite a bit to Thomism and its relation to Ancient Greek philosophy that is radically outdated, but there are a few elements that have remained consistently useful. Primarily, Aquinas identified empiricism, his epistemological theory, as necessary in discovering truth. Aquinas held that there were two parts to being: Act and Potency. This included the idea that there is one God, unique and simple, but that all other things participate in that being. Everything is restricted to some degree in its ability to be like God, but that all things participate in the being of God. Slightly more confusing is his belief that a spiritual creature is wholly simple in its essence, but that it has two parts: the essence of being and the substance with accident. This means that humanity is what it is as well as how it relates to the world. Empiricism argues that pure reason is insufficient and requires the additional work of testing things against our sensations. This is still very Greek, but in the study of epistemology, useful.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. The idea of justified belief is central to epistemology and relates to what we consider to be true. There are a couple of terms related to truth that you probably have heard. Absolute truth is an inflexible reality. Relativism is the belief that because there is no absolute morality or reality there is no need for absolute truth. Relativism is not so much arguing that there is no absolute truth, but that there is no need for it. There are a couple of more you might not be as familiar with. Evidentialism is the notion that truth is determined by the evidence one has to determine if the belief can be justified. Obviously no one believes anything unless they have some basis for believing it, but evidentialism is concerned with experiences that justify the belief. For example, an epistemologist who subscribes to evidentialism would argue that because he believes that he has hands based on how his senses have previously understood his experiences with his hands, than he has a justified knowledge that he, in fact, has hands. Reliabilism is the notion that evidentialism is insufficient. For reliabilists it is more important that the experiences are rooted in the reliability of the senses. So, for an epistemologist who subscribes to reliabilism, he can only know that he, in fact, has hands if he can be confident in the reliability of his previous experiences which causes him to believe he has hands. The reliabilist would argue that even though the evidentialist may in fact be correct about having hands, because his basis for believing he has hands was rooted in unreliable evidence, his belief is not justified and therefore has no knowledge about having hands.
What does this mean? Knowledge is not about right or wrong, but about how we come to believe what is right or wrong. This does not have to negate absolute truth, but it does put a higher standard on understanding it. People come to believe what they believe for a number of reasons, but it is often rooted in experiences that meet a personal or psychological need. They can be driven by desires, emotional needs, prejudices, and social learning. Even if the truths that people hold as absolute are in fact true, they cannot be justified as true unless we can hold those experiences to the test of reliability. This would mean that the goal of knowing absolute truth is less about deciding who is right based on the evidence, but about deconstructing how we come to believe that the evidence is reliable. When we hold truth to this type of deconstruction we realize that what we can hold to be true is much narrower than we realize and that simply believing the right thing doesn’t justify the belief. Why is evidence not a sufficient argument for establishing truth? Because in a true search for truth we must acknowledge that everything is positioned in a social and historical context including science and philosophy. This does not mean that evidentiary truths are not valid. All beliefs are justified and therefore true to some extent. This is because when you take two people who have come to believe what they believe based on experiences alone without exploring the reliability of the experiences both individuals have met the same standard of knowledge even if one is obviously right and one is obviously wrong. Both have experiences that are valid and worthy of discussion and deconstruction.
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