Truth

From a philosophical perspective, truth is generally understood to be the condition of the real, genuine, authentic, or factual. Since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophical investigations into truth have usually distinguished themselves from the claims for it made by faith or religion and from the derivation of formal mathematical truths. Although the spirit of inquiry and desire for knowledge are equally valid and compelling in all these instances, it is generally within the fields of metaphysics and the philosophy of language—where scrutiny operates within technically accepted parameters—that theories concerning the nature of truth are taken to be most productively discussed. From antiquity until the twenty-first century, there has arguably been no philosophical pursuit of greater significance. The quest for agreement on what separates truth from falsehood has always been at the heart of humankind's highest intellectual endeavors. Truth is of enduring, universal, and central importance.

Background

In ancient Greece, truth was denoted by the word aletheia, usually translated as "bringing to light" or "disclosure." The writings of Plato(c. 428 BCE–c. 347 BCE) and Metaphysics of Aristotle (c. 384 BCE–c. 322 BCE), were the first to propose descriptions of truth, understood that way, relying on a presumed degree of correspondence between ideas and statements on one hand, and things on the other. This view, later called correspondence theory, was refined and adopted by the Christian scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), whose works also incorporated the thinking of Persian metaphysician Avicenna (980–1037), at a time when theology and philosophy had not yet begun to diverge significantly.

That rift became marked during the Age of Enlightenment, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when tenets of faith were increasingly subjected to forensic philosophical scrutiny. British philosophers John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–76) were empiricists, maintaining that truth must be shown to exist in relation to sense data. Not all Enlightenment thought, however, rested on the idea of correspondence. Coherence theory (as it was subsequently named) is a rationalist conception in which truth is, instead, evidenced by the mutual agreement or reference between given elements—such as words or propositions—within a unifying system or framework. For example, René Descartes (1596–1650) understood the human mind as functioning reciprocally with, and within, the mind of God; Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) argued that God was a deterministic "system," bestowing truth on all its constituent parts, and G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) theorised a cosmos attuned to a divinely preestablished harmony that was the deepest expression of truth. Immanuel Kant sought to bring these empiricist and rationalist approaches together in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), although with a measure of success that has been continuously debated. The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) proposed a radically different interpretation: truth is no more than what is collectively built, over time, via the mediation of society, culture, currents of thought, and human interaction. This definition—retrospectively labelled constructivism—was at the heart of much post-Enlightenment thinking, and significantly impacted the ongoing debate about the nature of truth through the following centuries.

Overview

The dialectical materialism of Karl Marx (1818–83), in which a socially freighted thesis confronts an antithesis before the synthesis of both into a truth, represented a constructivist concept with major sociopolitical repercussions for the twentieth century. It was objected, however, that the constructivist link between truth and human activity produced conclusions having little to do with what truth may really be. In this context the early twentieth century saw a renewed attempt to define actual, rather than wished-for, truth on the basis of the value of likely outcomes of propositions. American philosophers C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952) were all, accordingly, architects of the pragmatic theory. In this interpretation, truth may not always be fully graspable, but it can be hypothesized as the logical endpoint to which a process of rational inquiry, employing experiment and deduction, would lead.

The correspondence theory first seen in Plato and Aristotle retained its force, although in a weaker form than previously. Correspondence problematically requires an elusive, objective, exterior reality against which to measure truth -claims. In response to this difficulty, the semantic theory of truth was elaborated by Alfred Tarski (1902–83) as a development of correspondence theory. It identifies truth using sentences employing two conditionals, for example: "The proposition 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white." The outer phrase (relating to the proposition) and the inner phrase (relating to snow) together conditionally demonstrate the truth of the original proposition itself.

The twentieth century also saw the emergence of "deflationary" (or minimalist) theories. These collectively deny that truth can ever be ascertained in terms of a distinct property, such as correspondence or utility. Redundancy theory and performative theory are the two main deflationary approaches. The first claims that the statement "It is true that X exists" is identical to the statement "X exists," making the idea of "true" functionally redundant. The second claims that the statement "It is true that X exists" merely endorses the speaker's agreement that X exists, regardless of whether or not it actually does. Pluralist theorists, such as G. E. Moore (1873–1958), similarly doubt that truth must have a unitary quality: it may have many, or be perceived in many, ways. Pluralists have sought common ground with Eastern belief systems, mediating between philosophy and religion or embracing a holistic vision. Truths need not compete: they may complement. These numerous theories highlight the continuing urgency of the question. Confronted with them, some scholars have proposed a consensus theory, which takes a majority view of specific truth judgments. Its challenge is to identify which subset of humanity, if not the whole of it, is appealed to for the consensus. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) believes that in an ideal speech situation—with honest, rational commitment to answering the question—consensus is probably the most workable approach. Thinkers have continued to debate whether truth is likely to reside in any of these principal theories, or in the accommodation of more than one of them.

Bibliography

Achourioti, Theodora, et al., editors. Unifying the Philosophy of Truth. Springer, 2015.

Allen, Barry. Truth in Philosophy. Harvard UP, 1995.

Brassington, Iain. Truth and Normativity: An Inquiry into the Basis of Everyday Moral Claims. Routledge, 2016.

Burgess, Alexis G., and John P. Burgess, editors. Truth. New ed., Princeton UP, 2014.

Byrne, Darragh, and Max Kölbel, editors. Arguing About Language. Routledge, 2010.

Kirkham, Richard L. Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction. New ed., Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1995.

Mosteller, Timothy M. Theories of Truth: An Introduction. Bloomsbury, 2014.

“The Pragmatic Theory of Truth.” Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 21 Mar. 2019, plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/. Accessed 28 Dec. 2024.

Wrenn, Chase. Truth. Polity Press, 2015.