Relation to truth· Truth, language and science

Coherence

Axis: Nature of truth — What makes a statement true?

A 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.

Who holds this position

Philosophers 2

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)

Foundations and implications

This is a root foundation — nothing grounds it further.

↓ What it implies

↑ What grounds it

This is a root foundation — nothing grounds it further.

↓ What it implies

Justification of belief

If a statement is true only by its non-contradictory place within an overall system, then a belief is justified only by its coherence with the entire web of the others. The coherence conception of truth supports coherentism: there is no ultimate foundation, but beliefs that support one another, from the Hegelian whole (Hegel) to Quine's "web".