When you speak 'truth', know what kind of truth you are speaking. Also know the effect that it will have both in the short and long term. While a convenient truth may win the day, it may not win the war.
Indeed, convenient truths can become inconvenient when later you are accused of lying. Quotes Guest articles Analysis Books Help. More Kindle book s: And the big paperback book. Look inside. Please help and share:. More Kindle book s:. Home Top Menu Quick Links. We can define two types of truth: empirical truth and convenient truth.
Empirical Truth Empirical truth is hard to establish and can be inconvenient when it does not serve an immediate need. In doing so, we will leave the history, and present a somewhat more modern reconstruction of a correspondence theory. For more on facts and proposition in this period, see Sullivan and Johnston The correspondence theory of truth is at its core an ontological thesis: a belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity — a fact — to which it corresponds.
If there is no such entity, the belief is false. Facts, for the neo-classical correspondence theory, are entities in their own right. Facts are generally taken to be composed of particulars and properties and relations or universals, at least.
The neo-classical correspondence theory thus only makes sense within the setting of a metaphysics that includes such facts. Hence, it is no accident that as Moore and Russell turn away from the identity theory of truth, the metaphysics of facts takes on a much more significant role in their views. This perhaps becomes most vivid in the later Russell , p.
For more recent extensive discussions of facts, see Armstrong and Neale Consider, for example, the belief that Ramey sings. Let us grant that this belief is true. In what does its truth consist, according to the correspondence theory? It consists in there being a fact in the world, built from the individual Ramey, and the property of singing. This fact exists. What is the relation of correspondence? One of the standing objections to the classical correspondence theory is that a fully adequate explanation of correspondence proves elusive.
So far, we have very much the kind of view that Moore and Russell would have found congenial. But the modern form of the correspondence theory seeks to round out the explanation of correspondence by appeal to propositions. Indeed, it is common to base a correspondence theory of truth upon the notion of a structured proposition.
Propositions are again cast as the contents of beliefs and assertions, and propositions have structure which at least roughly corresponds to the structure of sentences. At least, for simple beliefs like that Ramey sings, the proposition has the same subject predicate structure as the sentence. With facts and structured propositions in hand, an attempt may be made to explain the relation of correspondence.
Correspondence holds between a proposition and a fact when the proposition and fact have the same structure, and the same constituents at each structural position.
When they correspond, the proposition and fact thus mirror each-other. In our simple example, we might have:. Propositions, though structured like facts, can be true or false.
In a false case, like the proposition that Ramey dances, we would find no fact at the bottom of the corresponding diagram. Beliefs are true or false depending on whether the propositions which are believed are. We have sketched this view for simple propositions like the proposition that Ramey sings. How to extend it to more complex cases, like general propositions or negative propositions, is an issue we will not delve into here. It requires deciding whether there are complex facts, such as general facts or negative facts, or whether there is a more complex relation of correspondence between complex propositions and simple facts.
The issue of whether there are such complex facts marks a break between Russell and Wittgenstein and the earlier views which Moore and Russell sketch. According to the correspondence theory as sketched here, what is key to truth is a relation between propositions and the world, which obtains when the world contains a fact that is structurally similar to the proposition.
Though this is not the theory Moore and Russell held, it weaves together ideas of theirs with a more modern take on structured propositions. We will thus dub it the neo-classical correspondence theory.
This theory offers us a paradigm example of a correspondence theory of truth. The leading idea of the correspondence theory is familiar. It is a form of the older idea that true beliefs show the right kind of resemblance to what is believed. In this theory, it is the way the world provides us with appropriately structured entities that explains truth.
Our metaphysics thus explains the nature of truth, by providing the entities needed to enter into correspondence relations. For more on the correspondence theory, see David , and the entry on the correspondance theory of truth.
Though initially the correspondence theory was seen by its developers as a competitor to the identity theory of truth, it was also understood as opposed to the coherence theory of truth. We will be much briefer with the historical origins of the coherence theory than we were with the correspondence theory. Like the correspondence theory, versions of the coherence theory can be seen throughout the history of philosophy.
See, for instance, Walker for a discussion of its early modern lineage. Like the correspondence theory, it was important in the early 20th century British origins of analytic philosophy. Particularly, the coherence theory of truth is associated with the British idealists to whom Moore and Russell were reacting. Many idealists at that time did indeed hold coherence theories.
Let us take as an example Joachim This is the theory that Russell a attacks. Joachim says that:. But a few remarks about his theory will help to give substance to the quoted passage. This is not merely a turn of phrase, but a reflection of his monistic idealism.
Individual judgments or beliefs are certainly not the whole complete truth. Such judgments are, according to Joachim, only true to a degree. One aspect of this doctrine is a kind of holism about content, which holds that any individual belief or judgment gets its content only in virtue of being part of a system of judgments.
Any real judgment we might make will only be partially true. We will not attempt that, as it leads us to some of the more formidable aspects of his view, e. As with the correspondence theory, it will be useful to recast the coherence theory in a more modern form, which will abstract away from some of the difficult features of British idealism. As with the correspondence theory, it can be put in a slogan:. To further the contrast with the neo-classical correspondence theory, we may add that a proposition is true if it is the content of a belief in the system, or entailed by a belief in the system.
We may assume, with Joachim, that the condition of coherence will be stronger than consistency. With the idealists generally, we might suppose that features of the believing subject will come into play. This theory is offered as an analysis of the nature of truth, and not simply a test or criterion for truth. It is the way the coherence theory is given in Walker , for instance.
See also Young for a recent defense of a coherence theory. Let us take this as our neo-classical version of the coherence theory. The contrast with the correspondence theory of truth is clear. Far from being a matter of whether the world provides a suitable object to mirror a proposition, truth is a matter of how beliefs are related to each-other. The coherence theory of truth enjoys two sorts of motivations. One is primarily epistemological. Most coherence theorists also hold a coherence theory of knowledge; more specifically, a coherence theory of justification.
According to this theory, to be justified is to be part of a coherent system of beliefs. An argument for this is often based on the claim that only another belief could stand in a justification relation to a belief, allowing nothing but properties of systems of belief, including coherence, to be conditions for justification. Combining this with the thesis that a fully justified belief is true forms an argument for the coherence theory of truth.
The steps in this argument may be questioned by a number of contemporary epistemological views. But the coherence theory also goes hand-in-hand with its own metaphysics as well. The coherence theory is typically associated with idealism. As we have already discussed, forms of it were held by British idealists such as Joachim, and later by Blanshard in America.
An idealist should see the last step in the justification argument as quite natural. More generally, an idealist will see little if any room between a system of beliefs and the world it is about, leaving the coherence theory of truth as an extremely natural option. It is possible to be an idealist without adopting a coherence theory. For instance, many scholars read Bradley as holding a version of the identity theory of truth.
See Baldwin for some discussion. However, it is hard to see much of a way to hold the coherence theory of truth without maintaining some form of idealism. Walker argues that every coherence theorist must be an idealist, but not vice-versa. The neo-classical correspondence theory seeks to capture the intuition that truth is a content-to-world relation.
It captures this in the most straightforward way, by asking for an object in the world to pair up with a true proposition. The neo-classical coherence theory, in contrast, insists that truth is not a content-to-world relation at all; rather, it is a content-to-content, or belief-to-belief, relation. The coherence theory requires some metaphysics which can make the world somehow reflect this, and idealism appears to be it.
A distant descendant of the neo-classical coherence theory that does not require idealism will be discussed in section 6. For more on the coherence theory, see Walker and the entry on the coherence theory of truth. A different perspective on truth was offered by the American pragmatists. As with the neo-classical correspondence and coherence theories, the pragmatist theories go with some typical slogans.
For example, Peirce is usually understood as holding the view that:. See, for instance Hartshorne et al. Both Peirce and James are associated with the slogan that:. James e. True beliefs are guaranteed not to conflict with subsequent experience. See Misak for an extended discussion.
This marks an important difference between the pragmatist theories and the coherence theory we just considered. Even so, pragmatist theories also have an affinity with coherence theories, insofar as we expect the end of inquiry to be a coherent system of beliefs. As Haack also notes, James maintains an important verificationist idea: truth is what is verifiable. We will see this idea re-appear in section 4. For more on pragmatist theories of truth, see Misak Modern forms of the classical theories survive.
Many of these modern theories, notably correspondence theories, draw on ideas developed by Tarski. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that his seminal work on truth is very much of a piece with other works in mathematical logic, such as his , and as much as anything this work lays the ground-work for the modern subject of model theory — a branch of mathematical logic, not the metaphysics of truth.
In the classical debate on truth at the beginning of the 20th century we considered in section 1, the issue of truth-bearers was of great significance. Many theories we reviewed took beliefs to be the bearers of truth. In contrast, Tarski and much of the subsequent work on truth takes sentences to be the primary bearers of truth.
But whereas much of the classical debate takes the issue of the primary bearers of truth to be a substantial and important metaphysical one, Tarski is quite casual about it. His primary reason for taking sentences as truth-bearers is convenience, and he explicitly distances himself from any commitment about the philosophically contentious issues surrounding other candidate truth-bearers e.
We will return to the issue of the primary bearers of truth in section 6. But it should be stressed that for this discussion, sentences are fully interpreted sentences, having meanings. We will also assume that the sentences in question do not change their content across occasions of use, i. In some places e. This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. In light of this, Convention T guarantees that the truth predicate given by the theory will be extensionally correct , i.
Tarski does not merely propose a condition of adequacy for theories of truth, he also shows how to meet it. But truth can be defined for all of them by recursion. This may look trivial, but in defining an extensionally correct truth predicate for an infinite language with four clauses, we have made a modest application of a very powerful technique.
They do not stop with atomic sentences. Tarski notes that truth for each atomic sentence can be defined in terms of two closely related notions: reference and satisfaction. Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. This was especially important to Tarski, who was concerned the Liar paradox would make theories in languages containing a truth predicate inconsistent. The correspondence theory of truth expresses the very natural idea that truth is a content-to-world or word-to-world relation: what we say or think is true or false in virtue of the way the world turns out to be.
We suggested that, against a background like the metaphysics of facts, it does so in a straightforward way. But the idea of correspondence is certainly not specific to this framework. Indeed, it is controversial whether a correspondence theory should rely on any particular metaphysics at all. Yet without the metaphysics of facts, the notion of correspondence as discussed in section 1.
This has led to two distinct strands in contemporary thinking about the correspondence theory. One strand seeks to recast the correspondence theory in a way that does not rely on any particular ontology. Another seeks to find an appropriate ontology for correspondence, either in terms of facts or other entities.
We will consider each in turn. Tarski himself sometimes suggested that his theory was a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Whether his own theory is a correspondence theory, and even whether it provides any substantial philosophical account of truth at all, is a matter of controversy.
One rather drastic negative assessment from Putnam —86, p. As it is normally understood, reference is the preeminent word-to-world relation. Satisfaction is naturally understood as a word-to-world relation as well, which relates a predicate to the things in the world that bear it.
The Tarskian recursive definition shows how truth is determined by reference and satisfaction, and so is in effect determined by the things in the world we refer to and the properties they bear. This, one might propose, is all the correspondence we need. It is not correspondence of sentences or propositions to facts; rather, it is correspondence of our expressions to objects and the properties they bear, and then ways of working out the truth of claims in terms of this.
This is certainly not the neo-classical idea of correspondence. In not positing facts, it does not posit any single object to which a true proposition or sentence might correspond. Rather, it shows how truth might be worked out from basic word-to-world relations. As we will discuss more fully in section 4. Rather, it offers a number of disquotation clauses , such as:. These clauses have an air of triviality though whether they are to be understood as trivial principles or statements of non-trivial semantic facts has been a matter of some debate.
With Field, we might propose to supplement clauses like these with an account of reference and satisfaction. In , Field was envisaging a physicalist account, along the lines of the causal theory of reference. They are inclined to believe that the proposition that protons are composed of three quarks is true or false depending on whether or not it accurately describes an objective reality.
They are disinclined to believe that the truth of such a proposition arises out of the pronouncements of eminent physical scientists. In short, physical scientists do not believe that prestige and social influence trump reality. A Pragmatic Theory of Truth holds roughly that a proposition is true if it is useful to believe.
Peirce and James were its principal advocates. Utility is the essential mark of truth. The problems with Pragmatic accounts of truth are counterparts to the problems seen above with Coherence Theories of truth.
First, it may be useful for someone to believe a proposition but also useful for someone else to disbelieve it. For example, Freud said that many people, in order to avoid despair, need to believe there is a god who keeps a watchful eye on everyone. According to one version of the Pragmatic Theory, that proposition is true. However, it may not be useful for other persons to believe that same proposition. They would be crushed if they believed that there is a god who keeps a watchful eye on everyone.
Thus, by symmetry of argument, that proposition is false. In this way, the Pragmatic theory leads to a violation of the law of non-contradiction, say its critics. Second, certain beliefs are undeniably useful, even though — on other criteria — they are judged to be objectively false.
For example, it can be useful for some persons to believe that they live in a world surrounded by people who love or care for them. According to this criticism, the Pragmatic Theory of Truth overestimates the strength of the connection between truth and usefulness.
Truth is what an ideally rational inquirer would in the long run come to believe, say some pragmatists. Truth is the ideal outcome of rational inquiry. What all the theories of truth discussed so far have in common is the assumption that a proposition is true just in case the proposition has some property or other — correspondence with the facts, satisfaction, coherence, utility, etc.
Deflationary theories deny this assumption. Frege expressed the idea this way:. Frege, Where the concept of truth really pays off is when we do not, or can not, assert a proposition explicitly, but have to deal with an indirect reference to it. Advocates of the Redundancy Theory respond that their theory recognizes the essential point about needing the concept of truth for indirect reference.
The theory says that this is all that the concept of truth is needed for, and that otherwise its use is redundant. The Performative Theory is a deflationary theory that is not a redundancy theory. The Performative Theory of Truth argues that ascribing truth to a proposition is not really characterizing the proposition itself, nor is it saying something redundant. The speaker — through his or her agreeing with it, endorsing it, praising it, accepting it, or perhaps conceding it — is licensing our adoption of the belief in the proposition.
The case may be likened somewhat to that of promising. Critics of the Performative Theory charge that it requires too radical a revision in our logic. Advocates of the Correspondence Theory and the Semantic Theory have argued that a proposition need not be known in order to be true. Truth, they say, arises out of a relationship between a proposition and the way the world is. No one need know that that relationship holds, nor — for that matter — need there even be any conscious or language-using creatures for that relationship to obtain.
In short, truth is an objective feature of a proposition, not a subjective one. For a true proposition to be known, it must at the very least be a justified belief.
Justification, unlike truth itself, requires a special relationship among propositions. For a proposition to be justified it must, at the very least, cohere with other propositions that one has adopted. On this account, coherence among propositions plays a critical role in the theory of knowledge.
Nevertheless it plays no role in a theory of truth, according to advocates of the Correspondence and Semantic Theories of Truth. Finally, should coherence — which plays such a central role in theories of knowledge — be regarded as an objective relationship or as a subjective one? Not surprisingly, theorists have answered this latter question in divergent ways. But the pursuit of that issue takes one beyond the theories of truth.
However, it would be fascinating if we could discover a way to tell, for any proposition, whether it is true. Perhaps some machine could do this, philosophers have speculated. For any formal language, we know in principle how to generate all the sentences of that language.
If we were to build a machine that produces one by one all the many sentences, then eventually all those that express truths would be produced. Unfortunately, along with them, we would also generate all those that express false propositions. We also know how to build a machine that will generate only sentences that express truths. However, to generate all and only those sentences that express truths is quite another matter. Leibniz dreamed of achieving this goal.
By mechanizing deductive reasoning he hoped to build a machine that would generate all and only truths. Some progress on the general problem of capturing all and only those sentences which express true propositions can be made by limiting the focus to a specific domain. For instance, perhaps we can find some procedure that will produce all and only the truths of arithmetic, or of chemistry, or of Egyptian political history. If we know the universal and probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics, then some philosophers have argued we thereby indirectly are in a position to know the more specific scientific laws about chemical bonding.
Significant progress was made in the early twentieth century on the problem of axiomatizing arithmetic and other areas of mathematics. In the s, David Hilbert hoped to represent the sentences of arithmetic very precisely in a formal language, then to generate all and only the theorems of arithmetic from uncontroversial axioms, and thereby to show that all true propositions of arithmetic can in principle be proved as theorems.
This would put the concept of truth in arithmetic on a very solid basis. Thus the concept of truth transcends the concept of proof in classical formal languages. This is a remarkable, precise insight into the nature of truth.
A very great many linguistic devices count as definitions. These devices include providing a synonym, offering examples, pointing at objects that satisfy the term being defined, using the term in sentences, contrasting it with opposites, and contrasting it with terms with which it is often confused.
For further reading, see Definitions, Dictionaries, and Meanings. However, modern theories about definition have not been especially recognized, let alone adopted, outside of certain academic and specialist circles. Many persons persist with the earlier, naive, view that the role of a definition is only to offer a synonym for the term to be defined.
The definition would allow for a line of reasoning that produced the Liar Paradox recall above and thus would lead us into self contradiction. That result shows that we do not have a coherent concept of truth for a language within that language.
Some of our beliefs about truth, and about related concepts that are used in the argument to the contradiction, must be rejected, even though they might seem to be intuitively acceptable.
There is no reason to believe that paradox is to be avoided by rejecting formal languages in favor of natural languages. The Liar Paradox first appeared in natural languages. That is, they try to remove vagueness and be precise about the ramifications of their solutions, usually by showing how they work in a formal language that has the essential features of our natural language.
The principal solutions agree that — to resolve a paradox — we must go back and systematically reform or clarify some of our original beliefs. However, to be acceptable, the solution must be presented systematically and be backed up by an argument about the general character of our language. In short, there must be both systematic evasion and systematic explanation.
The later Wittgenstein did not agree. He rejected the systematic approach and elevated the need to preserve ordinary language, and our intuitions about it, over the need to create a coherent and consistent semantical theory. Except in special cases, most scientific researchers would agree that their results are only approximately true. Similarly, scientific theories are designed to fit the world. Scientists should not aim to create true theories; they should aim to construct theories whose models are representations of the world.
Bradley Dowden Email: dowden csus. Norman Swartz Email: swartz sfu. Truth Philosophers are interested in a constellation of issues involving the concept of truth. I might even create a model, an analogy of the workings of the real world, to explain it - in this case that of particles and fields.
This then allows me to predict what future events might occur or to draw implications and create technologies, such as developing an electric motor. And so I inductively scaffold my knowledge, using information I rely upon as a resource for further enquiry. At no stage do I arrive at deductive certainty, but I do enjoy greater degrees of confidence. Now, there are some philosophical hairs to split here, but my point is not to define exactly what truth is, but rather to say there are differences in how the word can be used, and that ignoring or conflating these uses leads to a misunderstanding of what science is and how it works.
For instance, the lady that said to me it was true for her that ghosts exist was conflating a subjective truth with a truth about the external world. At first she was resistant, but when I asked her if it could be true for her that gravity is repulsive, she was obliging enough to accept my suggestion.
Attacking the truth claim is then, if you accept this deceit, equivalent to questioning the genuine subject experience. It has been a long and painful struggle for science to rise from this cognitive quagmire, separating out subjective experience from inductive methodology.
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