Relation to truth· Truth, language and sciencedifficulty
Nature of truth
What makes a statement true?
Is something true because it corresponds to reality, because it fits with everything else we hold, or because it works? Depending on the answer, a belief can be useful yet false, or coherent yet wide of the real. To take a position is to say what exactly we are demanding when we ask "is it true?"
Correspondence
9A statement is true if it corresponds to the facts: to speak truly is to say of what is that it is. Truth is a relation between our statements and reality, independent of what we believe.
Explore this position →Show implicit positions (9)
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
Thomas gives its classic formula to the correspondence conception: truth is the adequation of thing and intellect, the agreement of thought with what is. But he grounds it theologically: things are true because they conform to the idea God has of them, and our knowledge is true when it is regulated by them. Truth is therefore first in the intellect, divine then human, and the correspondence between mind and the real itself has its origin in God.
Disputed Questions on Truth, q. 1, a. 1-2
Aristotelianismexplicit
The Aristotelian definition of truth is the paradigm of correspondence: thought is true when it accords with what is in the thing, a formula scholasticism would restate as the adequation of intellect and thing.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Γ (book IV), 7 · Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth, q. 1
Aristotleexplicit
Aristotle gives the classic formulation of correspondence: the truth of a statement lies in its agreement with what is the case.
Metaphysics, IV (Gamma).7 (1011b)
Descartesinferable
The criterion of truth is evidence: what I conceive through clear and distinct ideas is true, and this adequacy of the idea to its object is guaranteed by divine veracity. The Cartesian conception thus belongs to the correspondence theory, with an internal demand for coherence in the chaining of reasons.
Meditations on First Philosophy, III and IV · Principles of Philosophy, I, art. 45
Husserlinferable
For Husserl truth is no convention nor mere internal coherence: it is the full agreement of a signitive intention with its object given in person, the "fulfilment" by which what was only intended comes to intuition. The true is the identity of the intended and the given object, which keeps him on the side of correspondence, but a lived correspondence measured by intuitive evidence rather than by a copy of facts.
Logical Investigations, VI, §36-39
Platoinferable
Truth is the soul's correspondence with what really is, the Forms: true discourse "says of things that they are as they are", whereas the false says them otherwise than they are. This conception, close to correspondence with intelligible being, carries a coherentist component, true knowledge forming a dialectical system bound to the principle of the Good.
Sophist, 262e-263d · Cratylus, 385b-c
Empiricisminferable
Empiricism refers the truth of matters of fact to the agreement of our ideas with what experience presents: Locke defines knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, and the ultimate tribunal of any assertion about the world remains observation. This conception, dominated by correspondence to experience, stays typical beyond the divergences over the nature of the things perceived.
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, 1 and IV, 5 (of knowledge and of truth) · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section IV (relations of ideas and matters of fact)
Humeinferable
Hume distinguishes two objects of inquiry: relations of ideas (mathematical, certain and demonstrable) and matters of fact, whose truth lies in their conformity to what experience reveals of the real. Factual truth is thus a matter of correspondence with experience, while the truth of relations of ideas is a matter of internal coherence, hence the split weights.
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. IV, part I (relations of ideas and matters of fact)
Rationalisminferable
Truth is conceived as the adequacy of an idea to its object, but an adequacy secured from within by rational coherence: for Spinoza the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things, and the true is its own standard. The Cartesian criterion of the clear and distinct idea and the deductive chaining of reasons draw the school toward an ideal in which correspondence and coherence converge.
Spinoza, Ethics, II, proposition 7 and scholium to proposition 43 · Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, IV
Coherence
2A statement is true if it fits without contradiction into an overall system: the true is the whole. No isolated statement is true by itself; its place within the totality is what justifies it.
Explore this position →Hegelexplicit
Truth is not the agreement of an isolated proposition with a fact: it resides in the entire system that develops and mediates itself. A determination taken apart is always one-sided; it becomes true only in its place within the whole that engenders and surpasses it. This is not a mere internal consistency of statements: the true is the adequacy of a thing to its concept, reached when the whole has fully unfolded.
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
Leibnizexplicit
Leibniz distinguishes truths of reason, necessary, whose negation is contradictory, from truths of fact, contingent, grounded in the principle of sufficient reason. In every true proposition the predicate is contained in the subject (praedicatum inest subjecto): truth is an analytic coherence of notions, secured by the divine understanding. A correspondence share remains for truths of fact, yet the heart of the doctrine is the internal coherence of concepts.
Monadology, §31-36 (truths of reason and truths of fact) · Discourse on Metaphysics, §8 (the predicate is in the subject)
Pragmatism
5The true is what works: an idea is true if it effectively guides action and withstands the test of inquiry. Truth is not a fixed property but what rigorous investigation converges toward.
Explore this position →Nietzscheexplicit
Already in , truth is defined as a mobile army of forgotten metaphors, a useful error without which a species could not live. The value of a judgment is measured by its fruitfulness for life, not by its correspondence to reality: a pragmatist-leaning position.
On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense, §1 · Beyond Good and Evil, §4
Charles Sanders Peirceexplicit
Peirce defines the true by the ideal limit of inquiry, not by its immediate success: the true opinion is the one all who inquire are fated to come to agree upon in the end, and the object of that final opinion is the real. Truth is thus neither a frozen copy of things nor the mere coherence of a system, but the point of convergence toward which a tends in the long run, provided it carries the inquiry far enough. This definition, which makes him a figure of the pragmatist pole, nonetheless keeps a realist core that sets him apart from : the true is not « what works for me » nor what it is useful for me to believe, but what inquiry, constrained by a real independent of our desires, is fatally led to acknowledge. The individual's utility has no part in it.
How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) · The Fixation of Belief (1877)
Pragmatismexplicit
Asking whether an idea faithfully « copies » a given reality is, for James, a pseudo-problem: a copy we could never set beside its model makes no detectable difference. One workable criterion then remains: an idea is true if, put to the test, it guides us smoothly through experience, knits our beliefs together and keeps its promises. The true thereby becomes a process, what gets verified in the course of inquiry, and not a property already lodged in the statement. The thesis targets the correspondence realism shared by and classical alike: Peirce tempers it, though, by placing at the horizon of indefinitely pursued inquiry a final opinion on which investigators would converge, which reintroduces a regulative form of reality.
Peirce, 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878) · James, Pragmatism (1907), lectures II and VI
Nāgārjunaexplicit
The distinction answers a formidable objection: if everything is empty, then suffering, the path, and the Buddha's teaching are empty too, and emptiness seems to wreck everything. Nāgārjuna meets it by distinguishing two registers of truth, not two worlds: at the level, language and ordinary practices are fully valid; at the ultimate level, nothing has . Far from excluding each other, they are mutually conditioning: the ultimate can only be pointed to by means of the conventional, and whoever takes emptiness for an ultimate thesis about the real is lost, as one is by a wrongly grasped snake. Conventional truth thus holds by its coherence of usage and its efficacy on the path, not by a correspondence to essences.
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), XXIV, 8-10 (the two truths)
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Marxexplicit
The truth of a thought is proved in praxis, not in pure theory: in practice man must prove the reality and power of his thinking. Whether a thought attains reality is a practical question: a strongly pragmatist conception of truth, without renouncing the ambition to grasp the real.
Theses on Feuerbach, II · Theses on Feuerbach, VIII (social life is essentially practical)
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveThe post-truth age
The whole question of justification presupposes that there is a truth to reach. But when "alternative facts" and indifference to truth take hold, is it truth itself that wavers, or only our honesty in seeking it?
truth as the aimJustification of belief - DescriptiveAre there moral truths?
When I say "that is wrong", am I describing something real, a property of acts, or only my preferences? Nothing in the facts contains an "ought": where, then, would the truth of a moral judgment come from?
a moral factStatus of norms (metaethics)
In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking.Marx · Theses on Feuerbach, II
In every true affirmative proposition the predicate is contained in the subject: praedicatum inest subjecto.Leibniz · Discourse on Metaphysics, §8; Generales inquisitiones
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.Aristotle · Metaphysics, IV (Gamma).7 (1011b)
The Dharma taught by the buddhas rests on two truths: the conventional, worldly truth and the truth in the ultimate sense. Without relying on the conventional, the ultimate is not taught; without reaching the ultimate, nirvāṇa is not attained.Nāgārjuna · Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, XXIV, 8-10
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.Charles Sanders Peirce · How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)
Truth is the adequation of thing and intellect.Thomas Aquinas · Disputed Questions on Truth, q. 1, a. 1
The true is the whole.Hegel · Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.James · Pragmatism, lecture VI