Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, François Lemoyne, 1737
Truth, holding a mirror and a serpent (1896). Olin Levi Warner, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.
Truth is most often used to mean being in accord with fact or reality, or fidelity to an original or standard. Truth is also sometimes defined in modern contexts as an idea of "truth to self", or authenticity.
Truth is usually held to be opposite to falsehood, which, correspondingly, can also suggest a logical, factual, or ethical meaning. The concept of truth is discussed and debated
in several contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, and science.
Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a
concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these
include most of the sciences, law, journalism,
and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as
basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily
understood than the concept of truth itself. To some, truth is viewed as
the correspondence of language or thought to an independent reality, in what is sometimes called the correspondence theory of truth.
Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. Language is a means by which humans convey information to one another. The method used to determine whether something is a truth is termed a criterion of truth. There are varying stances on such questions as what constitutes truth: what things are truthbearers
capable of being true or false; how to define, identify, and
distinguish truth; what roles do faith and empirical knowledge play; and
whether truth can be subjective or is objective: relative truth versus absolute truth.
Definition and etymology
An angel carrying the banner of "Truth", Roslin, Midlothian
The English word truth is derived from Old English tríewþ, tréowþ, trýwþ, Middle English trewþe, cognate to Old High German triuwida, Old Norse tryggð. Like troth, it is a -th nominalization of the adjective true (Old English tréowe).
The English word true is from Old English (West Saxon) (ge)tríewe, tréowe, cognate to Old Saxon (gi)trûui, Old High German (ga)triuwu (Modern German treu "faithful"), Old Norse tryggr, Gothic triggws, all from a Proto-Germanic *trewwj- "having good faith", perhaps ultimately from PIE *dru- "tree", on the notion of "steadfast as an oak" (e.g., Sanskrit "taru" tree).
Old Norse trú, "faith, word of honour; religious faith, belief" (archaic English troth "loyalty, honesty, good faith", compare Ásatrú).
Thus, 'truth' involves both the quality of "faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity", and that of "agreement with fact or reality", in Anglo-Saxon expressed by sōþ (Modern English sooth).
All Germanic languages besides English have introduced a
terminological distinction between truth "fidelity" and truth
"factuality". To express "factuality", North Germanic opted for nouns derived from sanna "to assert, affirm", while continental West Germanic (German and Dutch) opted for continuations of wâra "faith, trust, pact" (cognate to Slavic věra "(religious) faith", but influenced by Latin verus). Romance languages use terms following the Latin veritas, while the Greek aletheia, Russian pravda and South Slavic istina have separate etymological origins.
Major theories
The
question of what is a proper basis for deciding how words, symbols,
ideas and beliefs may properly be considered true, whether by a single
person or an entire society, is dealt with by the five most prevalent
substantive theories of truth listed below. Each presents perspectives
that are widely shared by published scholars.
Theories other than the most prevalent substantive theories are also discussed. More recently developed "deflationary"
or "minimalist" theories of truth have emerged as possible alternatives
to the most prevalent substantive theories. Minimalist reasoning
centers around the notion that the application of a term like true to a statement does not assert anything significant about it, for instance, anything about its nature. Minimalist reasoning realizes truth as a label utilized in general discourse to express agreement, to stress claims, or to form general assumptions.
Substantive theories
Correspondence theory
Correspondence theories emphasize that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs.
This type of theory stresses a relationship between thoughts or
statements on one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a
traditional model tracing its origins to ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a
representation is determined in principle entirely by how it relates to
"things", by whether it accurately describes those "things." A classic
example of correspondence theory is the statement by the thirteenth
century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas: "Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus" ("Truth is the adequation of things and intellect"), which Aquinas attributed to the ninth century Neoplatonist Isaac Israeli. Aquinas also restated the theory as: "A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality".
Correspondence theory centres heavily around the assumption that truth is a matter of accurately copying what is known as "objective reality" and then representing it in thoughts, words and other symbols. Many modern theorists have stated that this ideal cannot be achieved without analysing additional factors.
For example, language plays a role in that all languages have words to
represent concepts that are virtually undefined in other languages. The German word Zeitgeist
is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may
"know" what it means, but any translation of the word apparently fails
to accurately capture its full meaning (this is a problem with many
abstract words, especially those derived in agglutinative languages). Thus, some words add an additional parameter to the construction of an accurate truth predicate. Among the philosophers who grappled with this problem is Alfred Tarski, whose semantic theory is summarized further below in this article.
Proponents of several of the theories below have gone further to
assert that there are yet other issues necessary to the analysis, such
as interpersonal power struggles, community interactions, personal
biases and other factors involved in deciding what is seen as truth.
Coherence theory
Walter Seymour Allward's Veritas (Truth) outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario Canada
For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of
elements within a whole system. Very often, though, coherence is taken
to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a
demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual
inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and
comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical
factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system.
A pervasive tenet of coherence theories is the idea that truth is
primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be
ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence
with the whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded
as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether
coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single
absolute system.
Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to describe the essential and intrinsic properties of formal systems in logic and mathematics. However, formal reasoners are content to contemplate axiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side, for example, the various alternative geometries.
On the whole, coherence theories have been rejected for lacking
justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially
with respect to assertions about the natural world, empirical
data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and
society, especially when used without support from the other major
theories of truth.
Coherence theories distinguish the thought of rationalist philosophers, particularly of Spinoza, Leibniz, and G.W.F. Hegel, along with the British philosopher F.H. Bradley. They have found a resurgence also among several proponents of logical positivism, notably Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel.
Constructivist theory
Social constructivism
holds that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically
and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power
struggles within a community. Constructivism views all of our knowledge
as "constructed," because it does not reflect any external
"transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold).
Rather, perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention,
human perception, and social experience. It is believed by
constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality,
including race, sexuality, and gender, are socially constructed.
Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made. Vico's epistemological orientation gathers the most diverse rays and unfolds in one axiom—verum ipsum factum—"truth itself is constructed". Hegel and Marx
were among the other early proponents of the premise that truth is, or
can be, socially constructed. Marx, like many critical theorists who
followed, did not reject the existence of objective truth but rather
distinguished between true knowledge and knowledge that has been
distorted through power or ideology. For Marx, scientific and true
knowledge is "in accordance with the dialectical understanding of
history" and ideological knowledge is "an epiphenomenal expression of
the relation of material forces in a given economic arrangement".
Consensus theory
Consensus theory
holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might
come to be agreed upon, by some specified group. Such a group might
include all human beings, or a subset thereof consisting of more than one person.
Among the current advocates of consensus theory as a useful accounting of the concept of "truth" is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation. Among the current strong critics of consensus theory is the philosopher Nicholas Rescher.
In the Islamic tradition, this principle is exemplified by the hadith in which Muhammad states, "My community will never agree upon an error"
Pragmatic theory
The three most influential forms of the pragmatic theory of truth were introduced around the turn of the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other
proponents of pragmatic theory, they hold in common that truth is
verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into
practice.
Peirce
defines truth as follows: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract
statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would
tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract
statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and
one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth."
This statement stresses Peirce's view that ideas of approximation,
incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as fallibilism and "reference to the future", are essential to a proper conception of truth. Although Peirce uses words like concordance and correspondence to describe one aspect of the pragmatic sign relation, he is also quite explicit in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence are no more than nominal definitions, which he accords a lower status than real definitions.
William James's
version of pragmatic theory, while complex, is often summarized by his
statement that "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking,
just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving." By this, James meant that truth is a quality, the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to practice (thus, "pragmatic").
John Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is self-corrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed truths.
Though not widely known, a new variation of the pragmatic theory
was defined and wielded successfully from the 20th century forward.
Defined and named by William Ernest Hocking,
this variation is known as "negative pragmatism". Essentially, what
works may or may not be true, but what fails cannot be true because the
truth always works. Richard Feynman also ascribed to it: "We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong."
This approach incorporates many of the ideas from Peirce, James, and
Dewey. For Peirce, the idea of "... endless investigation would tend to
bring about scientific belief ..." fits negative pragmatism in that a
negative pragmatist would never stop testing. As Feynman noted, an idea
or theory "... could never be proved right, because tomorrow's
experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought was right." Similarly, James and Dewey's ideas also ascribe truth to repeated testing which is "self-corrective" over time.
Pragmatism and negative pragmatism are also closely aligned with the coherence theory of truth
in that any testing should not be isolated but rather incorporate
knowledge from all human endeavors and experience. The universe is a
whole and integrated system, and testing should acknowledge and account
for its diversity. As Feynman said, "... if it disagrees with
experiment, it is wrong."
Minimalist (deflationary) theories
Modern developments in the field of philosophy, starting with the
relatively modern notion that a theory being old does not necessarily
imply that it is completely flawless, have resulted in the rise of a new
thesis: that the term truth does not denote a real property of sentences or propositions. This thesis is in part a response to the common use of truth predicates
(e.g., that some particular thing "...is true") which was particularly
prevalent in philosophical discourse on truth in the first half of the
20th century. From this point of view, to assert that "'2 + 2 = 4' is
true" is logically equivalent to asserting that "2 + 2 = 4", and the
phrase "is true" is completely dispensable in this and every other
context. In common parlance, truth predicates are not commonly heard,
and it would be interpreted as an unusual occurrence were someone to
utilize a truth predicate in an everyday conversation when asserting
that something is true. Newer perspectives that take this discrepancy
into account and work with sentence structures that are actually
employed in common discourse can be broadly described:
- as deflationary theories of truth, since they attempt to deflate the presumed importance of the words "true" or truth,
- as disquotational theories, to draw attention to the disappearance of the quotation marks in cases like the above example, or
- as minimalist theories of truth.
Whichever term is used, deflationary theories can be said to hold in
common that "[t]he predicate 'true' is an expressive convenience, not
the name of a property requiring deep analysis."
Once we have identified the truth predicate's formal features and
utility, deflationists argue, we have said all there is to be said about
truth. Among the theoretical concerns of these views is to explain away
those special cases where it does appear that the concept of truth has peculiar and interesting properties.
In addition to highlighting such formal aspects of the predicate
"is true", some deflationists point out that the concept enables us to
express things that might otherwise require infinitely long sentences.
For example, one cannot express confidence in Michael's accuracy by
asserting the endless sentence:
- Michael says, 'snow is white' and snow is white, or he says 'roses are red' and roses are red or he says ... etc.
This assertion can also be succinctly expressed by saying: What Michael says is true.
Performative theory of truth
Attributed to P. F. Strawson is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "'Snow is white' is true" is to perform the speech act
of signaling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much
like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are
more actions than communicative statements is not as odd as it may
seem. Consider, for example, that when the wedding couple say "I do" at
the appropriate time in a wedding, they are performing the act of taking
the other to be their lawful wedded spouse. They are not describing themselves as taking the other, but actually doing so (perhaps the most thorough analysis of such "illocutionary acts" is J. L. Austin, "How to Do Things With Words").
Strawson holds that a similar analysis is applicable to all
speech acts, not just illocutionary ones: "To say a statement is true is
not to make a statement about a statement, but rather to perform the
act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement. When one
says 'It's true that it's raining,' one asserts no more than 'It's
raining.' The function of [the statement] 'It's true that...' is to
agree with, accept, or endorse the statement that 'it's raining.'"
According to the redundancy theory of truth,
asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to
asserting the statement itself. For example, making the assertion that
" 'Snow is white' is true" is equivalent to asserting "Snow is white".
Redundancy theorists infer from this premise that truth is a redundant
concept; that is, it is merely a word that is traditionally used in
conversation or writing, generally for emphasis, but not a word that
actually equates to anything in reality. This theory is commonly
attributed to Frank P. Ramsey, who held that the use of words like fact and truth was nothing but a roundabout
way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as
separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic
muddle".
A variant of redundancy theory is the disquotational theory which uses a modified form of Tarski's schema: To say that '"P" is true' is to say that P. A version of this theory was defended by C. J. F. Williams in his book What is Truth?.
Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of
truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap
as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims. They argue that sentences like
"That's true", when said in response to "It's raining", are prosentences, expressions that merely repeat the content of other expressions. In the same way that it means the same as my dog in the sentence My dog was hungry, so I fed it, That's true is supposed to mean the same as It's raining—if you say the latter and I then say the former. These variations do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is not
a property, but rather can be understood to say that, for instance, the
assertion "P" may well involve a substantial truth, and the theorists
in this case are minimizing only the redundancy or prosentence involved
in the statement such as "that's true."
Deflationary principles do not apply to representations that are
not analogous to sentences, and also do not apply to many other things
that are commonly judged to be true or otherwise. Consider the analogy
between the sentence "Snow is white" and the character named Snow White,
both of which can be true in some sense. To a minimalist, saying "Snow
is white is true" is the same as saying "Snow is white," but to say
"Snow White is true" is not the same as saying "Snow White."
Philosophical skepticism
Philosophical skepticism is generally any questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more items of knowledge or belief which ascribe truth to their assertions and propositions. It is often directed at domains, such as the supernatural, morality (moral skepticism),
religion (skepticism about the existence of God), or knowledge
(skepticism about the possibility of knowledge, or of certainty). Formally, skepticism as a topic occurs in the context of philosophy, particularly epistemology, although it can be applied to any topic such as politics, religion, and pseudoscience.
Philosophical skepticism comes in various forms. Radical forms of
skepticism deny that knowledge or rational belief is possible and urge
us to suspend judgment regarding ascription of truth on many or all
controversial matters. More moderate forms of skepticism claim only that
nothing can be known with certainty, or that we can know little or
nothing about the "big questions" in life, such as whether God exists or
whether there is an afterlife. Religious skepticism is "doubt concerning basic religious principles (such as immortality, providence, and revelation)". Scientific skepticism concerns testing beliefs for reliability, by subjecting them to systematic investigation using the scientific method, to discover empirical evidence for them.
Pluralist theories
Several of the major theories of truth hold that there is a
particular property the having of which makes a belief or proposition
true. Pluralist theories of truth assert that there may be more than one
property that makes propositions true: ethical propositions might be
true by virtue of coherence. Propositions about the physical world might
be true by corresponding to the objects and properties they are about.
Some of the pragmatic theories, such as those by Charles Peirce and William James, included aspects of correspondence, coherence and constructivist theories. Crispin Wright argued in his 1992 book Truth and Objectivity
that any predicate which satisfied certain platitudes about truth
qualified as a truth predicate. In some discourses, Wright argued, the
role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of
superassertibility. Michael Lynch, in a 2009 book Truth as One and Many,
argued that we should see truth as a functional property capable of
being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or
coherence.
Most believed theories
According
to a survey of professional philosophers and others on their
philosophical views which was carried out in November 2009 (taken by
3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs
and 829 philosophy graduate students) 45% of respondents accept or lean
towards correspondence theories, 21% accept or lean towards deflationary
theories and 14% epistemic theories.
Formal theories
Truth in logic
Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell us if a proposition is true or not. However, logic does not deal with truth in the absolute sense, as for instance a metaphysician does. Logicians use formal languages to express the truths which they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under some interpretation or truth within some logical system.
A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement which is true in all possible worlds or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to a fact (also called a synthetic claim or a contingency) which is only true in this world
as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as "If p and q,
then p" is considered to be a logical truth because of the meaning of
the symbols and words in it and not because of any fact of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue.
Degrees of truth in logic may be represented using two or more discrete values, as with bivalent logic (or binary logic), three-valued logic, and other forms of finite-valued logic. Truth in logic can be represented using numbers comprising a continuous range, typically between 0 and 1, as with fuzzy logic and other forms of infinite-valued logic. In general, the concept of representing truth using more than two values is known as many-valued logic.
Truth in mathematics
There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are the model theory of truth and the proof theory of truth.
Historically, with the nineteenth century development of Boolean algebra
mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented
as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity" is also an arbitrary
constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". In propositional logic, these symbols can be manipulated according to a set of axioms and rules of inference, often given in the form of truth tables.
In addition, from at least the time of Hilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century to the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the development of the Church–Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics were generally assumed to be those statements that are provable in a formal axiomatic system.
The works of Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system. Two examples of the latter can be found in Hilbert's problems. Work on Hilbert's 10th problem led in the late twentieth century to the construction of specific Diophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution, or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions. More fundamentally, Hilbert's first problem was on the continuum hypothesis. Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standard axioms of set theory. In the view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom.
Reconsidered assumptions about the essence of truth arose in the wake of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Martin Heidegger pointed out that truth may be essentially a matter of letting beings (entities of any kind, which can include logical propositions) be free to reveal themselves as they are, and stated:
“Truth” is not a feature of correct propositions which are asserted of an “object” by a human “subject” and then are “valid” somewhere, in what sphere we know not. Rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds [west].
Gödel agreed that the ability to perceive the truth of a mathematical or logical proposition is a matter of intuition, an ability he admitted could be ultimately beyond the scope of a formal theory of logic or mathematics and perhaps best considered in the realm of human comprehension and communication, but commented:
The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all. (DJS -- I understand exactly what he means.)
Tarski's semantic theory of truth
The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language:
- 'P' is true if and only if P
where 'P' refers to the sentence (the sentence's name), and P is just the sentence itself.
Tarski's theory of truth (named after Alfred Tarski) was developed for formal languages, such as formal logic. Here he restricted it in this way: no language could contain its own truth predicate, that is, the expression is true could only apply to sentences in some other language. The latter he called an object language,
the language being talked about. (It may, in turn, have a truth
predicate that can be applied to sentences in still another language.)
The reason for his restriction was that languages that contain their own
truth predicate will contain paradoxical
sentences such as, "This sentence is not true". As a result, Tarski
held that the semantic theory could not be applied to any natural
language, such as English, because they contain their own truth
predicates. Donald Davidson used it as the foundation of his truth-conditional semantics and linked it to radical interpretation in a form of coherentism.
Bertrand Russell
is credited with noticing the existence of such paradoxes even in the
best symbolic formations of mathematics in his day, in particular the
paradox that came to be named after him, Russell's paradox. Russell and Whitehead attempted to solve these problems in Principia Mathematica by putting statements into a hierarchy of types,
wherein a statement cannot refer to itself, but only to statements
lower in the hierarchy. This in turn led to new orders of difficulty
regarding the precise natures of types and the structures of
conceptually possible type systems that have yet to be resolved to this day.
Kripke's semantic theory of truth
Kripke's theory of truth (named after Saul Kripke)
contends that a natural language can in fact contain its own truth
predicate without giving rise to contradiction. He showed how to
construct one as follows:
- Begin with a subset of sentences of a natural language that contains no occurrences of the expression "is true" (or "is false"). So The barn is big is included in the subset, but not " The barn is big is true", nor problematic sentences such as "This sentence is false".
- Define truth just for the sentences in that subset.
- Then extend the definition of truth to include sentences that predicate truth or falsity of one of the original subset of sentences. So "The barn is big is true" is now included, but not either "This sentence is false" nor "'The barn is big is true' is true".
- Next, define truth for all sentences that predicate truth or falsity of a member of the second set. Imagine this process repeated infinitely, so that truth is defined for The barn is big; then for "The barn is big is true"; then for "'The barn is big is true' is true", and so on.
Notice that truth never gets defined for sentences like This sentence is false,
since it was not in the original subset and does not predicate truth of
any sentence in the original or any subsequent set. In Kripke's terms,
these are "ungrounded." Since these sentences are never assigned either
truth or falsehood even if the process is carried out infinitely,
Kripke's theory implies that some sentences are neither true nor false.
This contradicts the Principle of bivalence: every sentence must be either true or false. Since this principle is a key premise in deriving the Liar paradox, the paradox is dissolved.
However, it has been shown by Gödel
that self-reference cannot be avoided naively, since propositions about
seemingly unrelated objects can have an informal self-referential
meaning; in Gödel's work, these objects are integer numbers, and they
have an informal meaning regarding propositions. In fact, this
idea—manifested by the diagonal lemma—is the basis for Tarski's theorem that truth cannot be consistently defined.
It has thus been claimed
that Kripke's system indeed leads to contradiction: while its truth
predicate is only partial, it does give truth value (true/false) to
propositions such as the one built in Tarski's proof, and is therefore
inconsistent. While there is still a debate on whether Tarski's proof
can be implemented to every similar partial truth system, none have been
shown to be consistent by acceptable methods used in mathematical logic.
Revision theory of truth
The revision theory of truth, as developed by Anil Gupta and Nuel
Belnap, takes truth to be a circular concept whose definition is the set
of biconditionals of the form
- 'A' is true if and only if A.
Unlike Kripke's theory of truth, revision theory can be used with classical logic and can maintain the principle of bivalence.
Folk beliefs about truth
The truth predicate "P is true" has great practical value in human language, allowing us to efficiently endorse or impeach claims made by others, to emphasize the truth or falsity of a statement, or to enable various indirect (Gricean) conversational implications. Individuals or societies will sometime punish "false" statements to deter falsehoods; the oldest surviving law text, the Code of Ur-Nammu,
lists penalties for false accusations of sorcery or adultery, as well
as for committing perjury in court. Even four-year-old children can pass
simple "false belief" tests and successfully assess that another individual's belief diverges from reality in a specific way; by adulthood we have strong implicit intuitions about "truth" that form a "folk theory" of truth. These intuitions include:
- Capture (T-in): If P, then P is true
- Release (T-out): If P is true, then P
- Noncontradiction: A statement can't be both true and false
- Normativity: It is usually good to believe what is true
- False beliefs: The notion that believing a statement doesn't necessarily make it true
Like many folk theories, our folk theory of truth is useful in
everyday life but, upon deep analysis, turns out to be technically
self-contradictory; in particular, any formal system that fully obeys Capture and Release semantics for truth (also known as the T-schema), and that also respects classical logic, is provably inconsistent and succumbs to the liar paradox or to a similar contradiction.
Notable views
La Vérité "Truth" by Jules Joseph Lefebvre
Ancient history
The ancient Greek
origins of the words "true" and "truth" have some consistent
definitions throughout great spans of history that were often associated
with topics of logic, geometry, mathematics, deduction, induction, and natural philosophy.
Socrates', Plato's and Aristotle's ideas about truth are seen by some as consistent with correspondence theory. In his Metaphysics,
Aristotle stated: "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not
that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what
is not that it is not, is true". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy proceeds to say of Aristotle:
Aristotle sounds much more like a genuine correspondence theorist in the Categories (12b11, 14b14), where he talks of "underlying things" that make statements true and implies that these "things" (pragmata) are logically structured situations or facts (viz., his sitting, his not sitting). Most influential is his claim in De Interpretatione (16a3) that thoughts are "likenesses" (homoiosis) of things. Although he nowhere defines truth in terms of a thought's likeness to a thing or fact, it is clear that such a definition would fit well into his overall philosophy of mind.
Very similar statements can also be found in Plato (Cratylus 385b2, Sophist 263b).
In Hinduism,
Truth is defined as "unchangeable", "that which has no distortion",
"that which is beyond distinctions of time, space, and person", "that
which pervades the universe in all its constancy". The human body,
therefore is not completely true as it changes with time, for example.
There are many references, properties and explanations of truth by Hindu
sages that explain varied facets of truth, such as the national motto
of India: "Satyameva Jayate"
(Truth alone wins), as well as "Satyam muktaye" (Truth liberates),
"Satya' is 'Parahit'artham' va'unmanaso yatha'rthatvam' satyam" (Satya
is the benevolent use of words and the mind for the welfare of others or
in other words responsibilities is truth too), "When one is firmly
established in speaking truth, the fruits of action become subservient
to him ( patanjali yogasutras, sutra number 2.36 ), "The face of truth
is covered by a golden bowl. Unveil it, O Pusan (Sun), so that I who have truth as my duty (satyadharma) may see it!" (Brhadaranyaka V 15 1–4 and the brief IIsa Upanisad 15–18), Truth is superior to silence (Manusmriti), etc. Combined with other words, satya acts as modifier, like "ultra" or "highest," or more literally "truest," connoting purity and excellence.
For example, satyaloka is the "highest heaven' and Satya Yuga is the
"golden age" or best of the four cyclical cosmic ages in Hinduism, and
so on.
Middle Ages
Avicenna (980–1037)
In early Islamic philosophy, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) defined truth in his work Kitab Al-Shifa The Book of Healing, Book I, Chapter 8, as:
What corresponds in the mind to what is outside it.
Avicenna elaborated on his definition of truth later in Book VIII, Chapter 6:
The truth of a thing is the property of the being of each thing which has been established in it.
However, this definition is merely a rendering of the medieval Latin translation of the work by Simone van Riet. A modern translation of the original Arabic text states:
Truth is also said of the veridical belief in the existence [of something].
Aquinas (1225–1274)
Reevaluating Avicenna, and also Augustine and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas stated in his Disputed Questions on Truth:
A natural thing, being placed between two intellects, is called true insofar as it conforms to either. It is said to be true with respect to its conformity with the divine intellect insofar as it fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect... With respect to its conformity with a human intellect, a thing is said to be true insofar as it is such as to cause a true estimate about itself.
Thus, for Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth in things (ontological truth). Following this, he wrote an elegant re-statement of Aristotle's view in his Summa I.16.1:
Veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei.
(Truth is the conformity of the intellect and things.)
Aquinas also said that real things participate in the act of being of the Creator God
who is Subsistent Being, Intelligence, and Truth. Thus, these beings
possess the light of intelligibility and are knowable. These things
(beings; reality) are the foundation of the truth that is found in the human mind, when it acquires knowledge of things, first through the senses, then through the understanding and the judgement done by reason. For Aquinas, human intelligence ("intus", within and "legere", to read) has the capability to reach the essence and existence of things because it has a non-material, spiritual element, although some moral, educational, and other elements might interfere with its capability.
Changing concepts of truth in the Middle Ages
Richard Firth Green examined the concept of truth in the later Middle Ages in his A Crisis of Truth, and concludes that roughly during the reign of Richard II of England the very meaning of the concept changes. The idea of the oath, which was so much part and parcel of for instance Romance literature, changes from a subjective concept to a more objective one (in Derek Pearsall's summary). Whereas truth (the "trouthe" of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) was first "an ethical truth in which truth is understood to reside in persons", in Ricardian England it "transforms...into a political truth in which truth is understood to reside in documents".
Modern age
Kant (1724–1804)
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Immanuel Kant endorses a definition of truth along the lines of the correspondence theory of truth. Kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason:
"The nominal definition of truth, namely that it is the agreement of
cognition with its object, is here granted and presupposed".
However, Kant denies that this correspondence definition of truth
provides us with a test or criterion to establish which judgements are
true. Kant states in his logic lectures:
Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object. The ancients called such a circle in explanation a diallelon. And actually the logicians were always reproached with this mistake by the skeptics, who observed that with this definition of truth it is just as when someone makes a statement before a court and in doing so appeals to a witness with whom no one is acquainted, but who wants to establish his credibility by maintaining that the one who called him as witness is an honest man. The accusation was grounded, too. Only the solution of the indicated problem is impossible without qualification and for every man.
This passage makes use of his distinction between nominal and real
definitions. A nominal definition explains the meaning of a linguistic
expression. A real definition describes the essence of certain objects and enables us to determine whether any given item falls within the definition.
Kant holds that the definition of truth is merely nominal and,
therefore, we cannot employ it to establish which judgements are true.
According to Kant, the ancient skeptics were critical of the logicians
for holding that, by means of a merely nominal definition of truth, they
can establish which judgements are true. They were trying to do
something that is "impossible without qualification and for every man".
Hegel (1770–1831)
Georg Hegel
distanced his philosophy from psychology by presenting truth as being
an external self-moving object instead of being related to inner,
subjective thoughts. Hegel's truth is analogous to the mechanics of a material body in motion under the influence of its own inner force. "Truth is its own self-movement within itself." Teleological truth moves itself in the three-step form of dialectical triplicity
toward the final goal of perfect, final, absolute truth. According to
Hegel, the progression of philosophical truth is a resolution of past
oppositions into increasingly more accurate approximations of absolute
truth. Chalybäus used the terms "thesis", "antithesis", and "synthesis"
to describe Hegel's dialectical triplicity. The "thesis" consists of
an incomplete historical movement. To resolve the incompletion, an
"antithesis" occurs which opposes the "thesis." In turn, the "synthesis"
appears when the "thesis" and "antithesis" become reconciled
and a higher level of truth is obtained. This "synthesis" thereby
becomes a "thesis," which will again necessitate an "antithesis,"
requiring a new "synthesis" until a final state is reached as the result
of reason's historical movement. History is the Absolute Spirit
moving toward a goal. This historical progression will finally conclude
itself when the Absolute Spirit understands its own infinite self at
the very end of history. Absolute Spirit will then be the complete
expression of an infinite God.
Schopenhauer (1788–1860)
For Arthur Schopenhauer, a judgment is a combination or separation of two or more concepts. If a judgment is to be an expression of knowledge, it must have a sufficient reason or ground by which the judgment could be called true. Truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself which is its sufficient reason (ground). Judgments can have material, formal, transcendental, or metalogical truth. A judgment has material
truth if its concepts are based on intuitive perceptions that are
generated from sensations. If a judgment has its reason (ground) in
another judgment, its truth is called logical or formal. If a
judgment, of, for example, pure mathematics or pure science, is based on
the forms (space, time, causality) of intuitive, empirical knowledge,
then the judgment has transcendental truth.
Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
When Søren Kierkegaard, as his character Johannes Climacus, ends his writings: My thesis was, subjectivity, heartfelt is the truth, he does not advocate for subjectivism
in its extreme form (the theory that something is true simply because
one believes it to be so), but rather that the objective approach to
matters of personal truth cannot shed any light upon that which is most
essential to a person's life. Objective truths are concerned with the
facts of a person's being, while subjective truths are concerned with a
person's way of being. Kierkegaard agrees that objective truths for the
study of subjects like mathematics, science, and history are relevant
and necessary, but argues that objective truths do not shed any light on
a person's inner relationship to existence. At best, these truths can
only provide a severely narrowed perspective that has little to do with
one's actual experience of life.
While objective truths are final and static, subjective truths
are continuing and dynamic. The truth of one's existence is a living,
inward, and subjective experience that is always in the process of
becoming. The values, morals, and spiritual approaches a person adopts,
while not denying the existence of objective truths of those beliefs,
can only become truly known when they have been inwardly appropriated
through subjective experience. Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes all
systematic philosophies which attempt to know life or the truth of
existence via theories and objective knowledge about reality. As
Kierkegaard claims, human truth is something that is continually
occurring, and a human being cannot find truth separate from the
subjective experience of one's own existing, defined by the values and
fundamental essence that consist of one's way of life.
Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Friedrich Nietzsche believed the search for truth, or 'the will to truth', was a consequence of the will to power of philosophers. He thought that truth should be used as long as it promoted life and the will to power, and he thought untruth was better than truth if it had this life enhancement as a consequence. As he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil,
"The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a
judgment... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing,
life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding..."
(aphorism 4). He proposed the will to power as a truth only because, according to him, it was the most life-affirming and sincere perspective one could have.
Robert Wicks discusses Nietzsche's basic view of truth as follows:
Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") as a keystone in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call "truth" is only "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." His view at this time is that arbitrariness completely prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the very artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images; "truth" is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for merely practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistence.
Separately Nietzsche suggested that an ancient, metaphysical belief
in the divinity of Truth lies at the heart of and has served as the
foundation for the entire subsequent Western intellectual tradition:
"But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is
still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests—that even
we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our
fire too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the
Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is Truth; that
Truth is 'Divine'..."
Heidegger (1889–1976)
Other philosophers take this common meaning to be secondary and derivative. According to Martin Heidegger, the original meaning and essence of truth in Ancient Greece
was unconcealment, or the revealing or bringing of what was previously
hidden into the open, as indicated by the original Greek term for truth,
aletheia.
On this view, the conception of truth as correctness is a later
derivation from the concept's original essence, a development Heidegger
traces to the Latin term veritas.
Whitehead (1861–1947)
Alfred North Whitehead,
a British mathematician who became an American philosopher, said:
"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to
treat them as whole truths that plays the devil".
The logical progression or connection of this line of thought is to conclude that truth can lie, since half-truths are deceptive and may lead to a false conclusion.
Peirce (1839–1914)
Pragmatists like C. S. Peirce take truth to have some manner of essential relation to human practices for inquiring into and discovering truth, with Peirce himself holding that truth is what human inquiry
would find out on a matter, if our practice of inquiry were taken as
far as it could profitably go: "The opinion which is fated to be
ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the
truth..."
Nishida (1870–1945)
According to Kitaro Nishida,
"knowledge of things in the world begins with the differentiation of
unitary consciousness into knower and known and ends with self and
things becoming one again. Such unification takes form not only in
knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs knowing, the willing
that directs action, and the feeling or emotive reach that directs
sensing."
Fromm (1900–1980)
Erich Fromm
finds that trying to discuss truth as "absolute truth" is sterile and
that emphasis ought to be placed on "optimal truth". He considers truth
as stemming from the survival imperative of grasping one's environment
physically and intellectually, whereby young children instinctively seek
truth so as to orient themselves in "a strange and powerful world". The
accuracy of their perceived approximation of the truth will therefore
have direct consequences on their ability to deal with their
environment. Fromm can be understood to define truth as a functional
approximation of reality. His vision of optimal truth is described
partly in "Man from Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics"
(1947), from which excerpts are included below.
...the dichotomy between 'absolute = perfect' and 'relative = imperfect' has been superseded in all fields of scientific thought, where "it is generally recognized that there is no absolute truth but nevertheless that there are objectively valid laws and principles".
In that respect, "a scientifically or rationally valid statement means that the power of reason is applied to all the available data of observation without any of them being suppressed or falsified for the sake of a desired result". The history of science is "a history of inadequate and incomplete statements, and every new insight makes possible the recognition of the inadequacies of previous propositions and offers a springboard for creating a more adequate formulation."
As a result "the history of thought is the history of an ever-increasing approximation to the truth. Scientific knowledge is not absolute but optimal; it contains the optimum of truth attainable in a given historical period." Fromm furthermore notes that "different cultures have emphasized various aspects of the truth" and that increasing interaction between cultures allows for these aspects to reconcile and integrate, increasing further the approximation to the truth.
Foucault (1926–1984)
Quid Est Veritas? Christ and Pilate, by Nikolai Ge.
Truth, says Michel Foucault,
is problematic when any attempt is made to see truth as an "objective"
quality. He prefers not to use the term truth itself but "Regimes of
Truth". In his historical investigations he found truth to be something
that was itself a part of, or embedded within, a given power structure.
Thus Foucault's view shares much in common with the concepts of Nietzsche. Truth for Foucault is also something that shifts through various episteme throughout history.
Baudrillard (1929–2007)
Jean Baudrillard
considered truth to be largely simulated, that is pretending to have
something, as opposed to dissimulation, pretending to not have
something. He took his cue from iconoclasts who he claims knew that images of God demonstrated that God did not exist. Baudrillard wrote in "Precession of the Simulacra":
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.—Ecclesiastes
Some examples of simulacra that Baudrillard cited were: that prisons simulate the "truth" that society is free; scandals (e.g., Watergate)
simulate that corruption is corrected; Disney simulates that the U.S.
itself is an adult place. One must remember that though such examples
seem extreme, such extremity is an important part of Baudrillard's
theory. For a less extreme example, consider how movies usually end with
the bad being punished, humiliated, or otherwise failing, thus
affirming for viewers the concept that the good end happily and the bad
unhappily, a narrative which implies that the status quo and established
power structures are largely legitimate.
In medicine and psychiatry
There is controversy as to the truth value of a proposition made in bad faith self-deception, such as when a hypochondriac has a complaint with no physical symptom.
