Generally, I agree with what you are saying about essays and stating that "they should be useful." But I was surprised by your comments about truth: > There i

Generally, I agree with what you are saying about essays and stating that "they should be useful." But I was surprised by your comments about truth: > There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest. Could you expand on what you mean by "an absolute truth?" I may be misunderstanding you, but I suspect you mean that we can never know anything with absolute certainty. For example, it may _seem_ that I typing on a keyboard, but in actual fact, I am dreaming. In this example, there _is_ an absolute truth. I am typing on my keyboard, or I am not. But that truth is not knowable without any doubt. If we use "truth" as high as knowing without any possible doubt, then nothing is "true." Thus, the word true is useless during everyday communication. For this reason I don't think it is appropriate to qualify everything we say with, "we don't know with absolute certainty this is true, but here is my best guess." Rather, we just say it is true.