why is truth important essay

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What Is Truth and Why Does it Matter?

• June 10, 2004

The Old and New Testament terms for truth are, respectively, emet and alethia . The meaning of these terms and, more generally, a biblical conception of truth are broad and multifaceted: fidelity, moral rectitude, being real, being genuine, faithfulness, having veracity, being complete. Two aspects of the biblical conception of truth appear to be primary: faithfulness and conformity to fact. The latter appears to involve a correspondence theory of truth (see below). Arguably, the former may presuppose a correspondence theory. Thus, faithfulness may be understood as a person’s actions corresponding to the person’s assertions or promises, and a similar point could be made about genuineness, moral rectitude and so forth.

There are hundreds of passages that explicitly ascribe truth to propositions in a correspondence sense. Thus, God says “I, the Lord, speak the truth; I declare what is right” (Isaiah 45:19). Also, there are numerous passages that explicitly contrast true propositions with falsehoods. Repeatedly, the Old Testament warns against false prophets whose words do not correspond to reality (for example Deuteronomy 18:22: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken”), and the ninth commandment warns against bearing false testimony, that is, testimony that fails to correspond to what actually happened (Exodus 20:16).

What is the correspondence theory of truth?

In its simplest form, the correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition is true just in case it corresponds to reality, when what it asserts to be the case is the case. More generally, truth obtains when a truth bearer stands in an appropriate correspondence relation to a truth maker:

truth bearer => correspondence relation => truth maker

First, what is a truth bearer? What kind of thing can bear truth? The thing that is either true or false is not a sentence, but a proposition. A proposition is the content of a sentence. For example, “It is raining” and “Es regnet” are two different sentences that express the same proposition. A sentence is a sense perceptible string of markings (such as the consonants and vowels on this page) or sounds (such as those made speaking, in normal conversation) formed according to a set of syntactical rules; it is a grammatically well-formed string of spoken or written sounds or marks. A sentence can rightfully be called true only if its content is true, only if it expresses a true proposition.

What about truth makers? What is it that makes a proposition true? The best answer is: facts. A fact is some real state of affairs in the world, a way the world actually is. For example, grass’s being green, an electron’s having a negative charge and God’s being all-loving are all facts. Consider the proposition Mark has black hair . This proposition is true just in case a specific fact (namely, Mark’s having black hair) actually obtains in the real world. A state of affairs “makes” the propositional content of a statement true only if that state of affairs actually is the way the proposition represents it to be. If a proposition represents Mark’s having black hair, then Mark’s actually having black hair makes that proposition true. If, however, a proposition represents Marks’s having blonde or blue hair, then Mark’s actually having black hair makes that proposition false . Suppose Sally says, “Mark has black hair.” It’s important to note that Mark’s having black hair makes the content of Sally’s statement true even if Sally is blind and cannot tell whether or not it is true . In fact, Mark’s having black hair makes it true even if Sally does not believe it, even if she thinks she was lying when she said that Mark’s hair was black. Reality makes propositions true or false. A proposition is not made true by someone’s thinking or expressing it, and it is not made true by our ability to determine that it is true. Put differently, evidence allows us tell if a proposition is true or false, but reality (the way the world is) is what makes a proposition true or false.

Our study of truth bearers has already taken us into the topic of the correspondence relation. Correspondence is a two-placed relation between a proposition and a relevant fact (see the diagram above). A two-placed relation is one that requires two things before it can hold. For example, “larger than” is a two-placed relation. If we have a desk and a book, and if the desk is bigger than, larger than, the book, the “larger than” relation holds between the desk and the book. “Next to” is also a two-placed relation; if we have a car and a house, and the car is to the side of, next to, the house, the “next to” relation holds between the car and the house. Similarly, the correspondence relation holds between two things — a proposition and a relevant fact — just in case the proposition matches, conforms to, corresponds with the fact. If we have the proposition Mark has black hair, then, if Mark’s hair is actually black, the correspondence relation holds between the proposition and Mark’s having black hair.

Why believe the correspondence theory?

What reasons can be given for accepting the correspondence theory of truth? Two main arguments have been advanced for the correspondence theory, one descriptive and one dialectical.

The descriptive argument focuses on a careful description and presentation of specific cases to see what can be learned from them about truth. As an example, consider the case of Joe and Frank. While in his office, Joe receives a call from the university bookstore saying that a specific book he had ordered — Richard Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul — has arrived and is waiting for him. At this point, a new mental state occurs in Joe’s mind — namely, the though that Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore.

Now Joe, being aware of the content of the thought, becomes aware of two things closely related to it: the nature of the thought’s object (Swinburne’s book being in the bookstore) and certain steps that would help him determine the truth of the thought. For example, Joe knows that swimming in the Pacific Ocean would not help him determine the truth of the thought. Rather, he knows that he must take a series of steps that will bring him to a specific building and look in certain places for Swinburne’s book in the university bookstore.

So Joe starts out for the bookstore, all the while being guided by the proposition Swinburne’s book on the soul is in the bookstore . Along the way, his friend Frank joins him, though Joe does not tell Frank where he is going or why. They arrive at the store and both see Swinburne’s book there. At that moment, Joe and Frank simultaneously have the same experience — the experience of seeing Swinburne’s book The Evolution of the Soul . But Joe has a second experience not possessed by Frank. Joe experiences that the thought he had in his office matched, corresponded with, an actual state of affairs. He is able to compare his thought with its object and “see,” be directly aware, that the thought was true. In this case, Joe actually experiences the correspondence relation itself and truth itself becomes an object of his awareness.

As in this scenario, the descriptive argument for the correspondence theory of truth makes its case ostensively, by pointing to instances of the correspondence relationship in our everyday lives.

The dialectical argument asserts that those who advance alternative theories of truth or who simply reject the correspondence theory actually presuppose it in their own assertions, especially when they present arguments for their views or defend them against critics. Sometimes this argument is stated in the form of a dilemma: Those who reject the correspondence theory either take their own utterances to be true in the correspondence sense or they do not. If they take their utterances to be true in the correspondence sense, then those utterances are self-defeating — they run into the same problems as the English sentence “I can’t say anything in English.” If, on the other hand, they don’t take their utterances to be true, then there is no reason to accept them, because to accept them is, after all, to accept them as true .

The dialectical argument shows that those who reject the correspondence theory of truth (either directly or indirectly) rely on the correspondence relationship to do so.

Why does this matter?

We have looked at what the correspondence theory of truth. Truth is when things really are the way one thinks them to be. We have also examined two reasons for accepting the correspondence theory of truth. But does any of this discussion really matter? You bet it does. According to the correspondence theory, truth is what puts us in contact with reality — not just physical, material aspects of reality, but spiritual and moral as well. And reality can be a pretty brutal thing. One philosopher said that reality is what you bump up against when your beliefs are false!

Why, then, does truth matter? Because ideas have consequences, and false ideas generally have bad consequences. Truth should be the rails on which we all live our lives. Because truth puts us in touch with reality, it removes us from a self-serving, destructive fantasy world of our own creation, and it leads to a life of well-being and flourishing.

Truth, in other words, is prerequisite both to accountability and success. Sometimes the truth hurts, but in the end, it is the only way to navigate reality.

Copyright 2004 J.P. Moreland. All rights reserved.

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About the author.

J.P. Moreland is distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and director of Eidos Christian Center. He has contributed to over 40 books, including Love Your God With All Your Mind and over 60 journal articles. Dr. Moreland also co-authored The Lost Virtue of Happiness: Discovering the Disciplines of the Good Life .

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We've  been very, very busy  here at Philosophy Talk.  I'd like to say that that explains the slowdown in both my and John’s blogging.  It does – sort of.   We’ve just gotten back from a hecticbut exhilerating road trip.  We recorded two shows up in Portland – one in front of an audience of professional philosophers at the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the  American Philosophical Association.   That was a blast and I think it will make good radio. 

But that was just a warm-up for a superblast.   We made a combined TV/Radio special or pilot or something with the good folks at Oregon Public Broadcasting – who have been our partners from the beginning. I’m not sure when it will air on TV, but we’ll let you know when the folks at OPB decide.   This may be the beginning of a new undertaking for  the Philosophy Talk Crew.   I can envision us doing, say, 6-9 TV specials per year.

It  was  a  great pleasure working with the OPB folks and meeting some of the folks in Portland listen to our show.  Thank you all for coming and being a part of a really special events.

I would also like to welcome all you philosophically mind folks up in Seattle to Philosophy Talk.  We  had our debut on  KUOW2   --  KUOW’s  HD radio channel --  Saturday April 1st at 4pm.   If you don’t have an HD radio,  you can still check us out via the web, I’m told, via KUOW’s live stream.

But to the topic at hand.   Today’s show is about “The Value of Truth.”  Our guest will be  Simon Blackburn . I’m predicting Simon will be a fantastic guest.  He’s a very fine philosopher and a great conversationalist.    Unfortunately,  for you outside the Bay Area, since this is a special “pledge week” show, with a funny structure to allow for pitch breaks  (in which John and I will join in)  stations other than KALW probably won’t play this episode. But we’ll put it up on the web, for sure,  and you can listen at your leisure.

Let me say a few things about the value of truth to get today’s conversation started.   First,  it seems to me that truth is a very good thing.   We think science is grand because it reveals deeper and deeper truths about nature.  We typically would much prefer to know and be told the truth than to be told a lie.  We hardly ever say to ourselves,  “I know that false, but I choose to believe it anyway.”   To believe something is to believe it’s true.   Moreover, if your beliefs are true and you act on them, then you are likely to get what you want.  I want a beer.  I believe that there is a beer in the fridge.  I believe that I can get to the fridge by getting up and walking toward it.   Because what  I believe about the beer and the means available to me are both true,  then if I act on those beliefs I am very likely to end up getting just what I want.  On the other hand, if I had false beliefs about the beer and its whereabouts,  acting on them would be very unlikely to eventuate in my getting a beer – except perhaps by sheer accident.

This all makes it seem right to say that in some sense we aim at truth in much of our cognizing.  Truth is what we seek to discover in science. It’s what we seek to believe for the purposes of acting in the world.   Moreover,  truth seems to have both instrumental value – witness the instrumental value of having true beliefs about the whereabouts of things that you seek – and intrinsic value – witness the intrinsic value of knowledge of the world.

On the other hand,  it has to be noticed that not all truths are created equal.  Some truths may be not worth knowing.  We have finite minds, finite resources, and a finite amount of time.  We could,  I suppose, spend all of our time and resources seeking to know every possible truth, but that does not seem like the path of wisdom.  What we want to know are truths that matter, truths that are relevant to our practical projects and concerns,  truths that will be serviceable for action or explanation, or merely to day to day existence.  Some truths are clearly more serviceable than others.  And by serviceable I don’t mean anything crude or shallow necessarily.   In science,  we seek to uncover truths that richly explanatory and profusely predictive.  Truths like that are bound to be the opposite of shallow.

But a still small voice objects.  Wait!  Wait!.  Haven't you given up the ghost of truth, here?  You've just  granted, after all,  that its not truth per se that matters but serviceability.  Perhaps there are serviceable falsehood.  Sometimes we should believe what's true.  And sometimes we should believe what's false.   But we should always believe what it is serviceable to believe.   We should never prefer to believe the  unserviceable truth over the serviceable falsehood.

But  what could a  serviceable falsehood possibly be?   Well, think of approximations as one sort of serviceable falsehood.   Newtonian mechanics is false.  But when we’re talking about middle-sized dry goods, moving relatively slowly, it’s good enough.

Fair enough, the defender of truth might say, but that example doesn't make the point you are  after.   The serviceability of Newtonian mechanics has to do with the fact that it’s an approximation of  -- drum roll please --- the truth .  So if not truth than at least truth-relatedness still does matter, even granting your argument.     Sometimes it's alright to believe what is merely approximately true  -- but only if you can't do better or don't need to do better given your purposes.

Well, let's  try another example, the still small voice says.   Imagine a person whose psychology is such that in order to get anything done, she has to vastly overestimate her own abilities.  Suppose if she were to have a realistic assessment of her own abilities,  she would simply be paralyzed.   On the other hand,  if she vastly overestimates her abilities she would at least make the effort.  And though she might not do all that she sets out to do,  she at least accomplishes something.  Her overestimation doesn't even approximate the truth.  It's just flat out false.  But if overestimating her own abilities helps her get on with her life and accomplish things she otherwise wouldn't,  more power to her, the defender of mere serviceability now says.

We can  easily multiply examples of this sort of thing.  Much of what we believe about ourselves is false and not true.   Human have some tendency to  believe comforting falsehoods and to disbelieve discomforting truths.  And you can give something of  a  practical justification for that tendency.  Believing the comforting falsehood can help to get you through the day, can help to sustain practical projects.  Believing discomforting truths, on the other hand,  could be a recipe for falling into paralysis and despair.   Why do that?   

Here's a dictum:  when it would be more useful or serviceable for the purposes of ordinary life  to believe the comforting falsehood, do so.   Of course, you can't really consciously set out to follow that dictum -- that's partly because believing something is a form of taking it to be true.  You cannot both commit yourself to believing something and simultaneously explicitly acknowledge the falsity of what you commit yourselve to believe --  even if it is something it would be in your practical interest to believe. 

But one of the wonderful things about the workings of the human mind is that its workings are often hidden from our own conscious scrutiny.  Perhaps nature arranged it that way just so that we would have the wherewithal to believe the false, when doing  so would be  in our best practical interest.    Wonderful thing that nature!

I can hear the stalwart  defender of always believing the true arguing that we just shouldn’t have such messed up psychologies.   We should have an insatiable psychological appetite for truth.  Discomforting truths should spur us into action rather than paralyze us.   Perhaps.   But if 'should' implies 'can' and 'can' depends on what we are really and truly  like, then I’m not so sure that we always have what it takes, psychologically speaking,   to live up to the consequences of  discomforting truth.  And I’m not sure that those who try to rub our noses in discomforting truths that we would rather not believe are always doing us a favor.

These are just some preliminary pre-show thoughts.  I’m sure I will spurred on to deeper reflection by the combined philosophical wisdom of John and Simon.   I’m sure you will be too.  So have a listen.

The Value of Truth

Related shows, if truth is so valuable, why is there so much bs, truth and other fictions, is intuition a guide to truth, is postmodernism really to blame for post-truth, blog archive, comments (28).

Monday, April 3, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

our whole problem today is the fact we believe what is not true, and the truth matters over all things, it really is bliss and will set you free

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Ken has introduced the concept of a serviceable falsehood. He offers the dictum, "When it would be more useful or serviceable for the purposes of ordinary life to believe the comforting falsehood, do so." Notice that Ken says, "serviceable for the purposes of ordinary life." Serviceability always exists in relation to some end, goal or purpose, in relation to which something may or may not be serviceable. There is no serviceability tout court, in all possible circumstances, independent of ends or purposes. Ought ordinary life to be the criterion of serviceability? Are not there ends that are extraordinary, in relation to which beliefs could be quite serviceable, even though they may not be serviceable "for the purposes of ordinary life"? Many spiritual paths evaluate the serviceability of beliefs not by appealing to ordinary life, but by appealing to ends, purposes and goals that fall outside the domain of ordinary life. When a Hindu or Buddhist believes in rebirth, for example, she believes that our existence stretches far beyond our ordinary life, to encompass countless prior births, and potentially limitless future births. The same goes for political activism. In the 1970s movie Soylent Green, Charlton Heston's character discovers the truth that the food soylent green is really made out of humans, not the vegetable matter which the government claimed. This belief was in many ways disastrous for the purposes of ordinary life, as Heston's character's demise at the end of the movie attests. But this belief was also important, and for Heston's character it was worth risking all to find out if it was true. When we turn our attention to science, we find practices which aim at acquiring true beliefs, even though these beliefs might be contrary to or subversive of "the purposes of ordinary life." For example, knowledge that the Earth is round might be indifferent or contrary to the purposes of ordinary life, but for a geologist or astronomer it is still useful to believe such things, and a good astronomer or geologist will believe it. To me, this discussion cannot take place without talking about autonomy. There is a connection between autonomy and false belief. When we act on the basis of false belief, we give up our autonomy. If we value autonomy unconditionally, then we will want to have true beliefs even though they may be unserviceable in certain circumstances or respects. If we do not value autonomy unconditionally, then we will accept false beliefs if they are serviceable for this or that particular end. So the question becomes, how do we value autonomy? Are we indifferent to it? Do we allow exceptions to it? Are there circumstances in which we prefer less autonomy?

Are approximations false? Ken suggests that truth is not an all-or-nothing affair. Approximately true beliefs are, strictly speaking, false. And yet many approximately true beliefs turn out to be quite useful. Many geometry problems come to a useful resolution by assuming that pi = 3.14, even though, strictly speaking, this is false. Ken describes this kind of belief as a "serviceable falsehood" that exhibits "truth by approximation," and I think his point can be summed up by saying that truth comes in degrees. It's more true to say that pi = 3.14 than to say that it equals 3.15, even though both claims are, strictly speaking, false. On this view, there aren't just two truth values, true and false, but more than two, with the addition of various degrees of "approximately true." I hate to say it, but I find this view of things unconvincing. Let me explain why. To me, the simplest theory of truth that is powerful enough to account for our truth-talk holds that every proposition is either true or false, and that no proposition is both true and false. There is no third possibility, partially true or partially false, or what have you. So, is the sentence 'pi = 3.14' true or false? Well, that depends.... It depends on how the sentence 'pi = 3.14' is being used. If it is being used to express approximation, then the sentence is true. If it is not being used to express approximation, then 'pi = 3.14' is false. These are the only possibilities so far as truth is concerned. There is no "false but aproximately true" option. Instead, what we require is an account of meaning that is sufficiently complex to distinguish between the strict meaning of a sentence, on one hand, and the approximate meaning of a sentence, on the other hand. 'pi = 3.14' is true when the sentence has approximate meaning; false when it does not have approximate meaning. If what I'm saying is correct, then approximation has to do with meaning, not truth. A belief may approximate the truth without being false, if the content of the belief is itself approximate. A sentence may be approximately true without being false, if its meaning is approximate. In short, when we say that 'pi = 3.14' is approximately true, we're not saying that there is a third truth value, approximately true. Rather, we're saying that the meaning of 'pi = 3.14' is such that, when it is approximate, it is true. Otherwise, we multiply truth values unnecessarily.

Sunday, April 9, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

I agree that "serviceable falsehoods " are really truths. I agree that approximations are truths. I disagree however that every proposition is either true or false. That view, at least if unqualified, leads to confusion and problems. How so? Here's how I like to sort matters out. At least to a point. Truth is ultimately a utilitarian concept. Utility is defined by desires. Whether a given proposition is true or not depends on the attending desires. Desires are variable from person to person and also, with respect to a particular individual, from time to time. Thus in the collective sense (among multiple persons) a given proposition can be true and false at the same time; and true on one occasion but false on another. As just one example, no measurement of the length of any physical object can ever be known to be or not be the "true" length of the object being measured because of the inherent imprecision of such affairs and/or as a consequence of the mind/matter dichotomy. A proposition can be "either only true or only false" only in the context of a single person and at a single time. Truth is ultimately subjective. Truth exists only in a context -- the context of the consciousness of the individual and his/her desires -- (and that, in the context of the material world) -- and cannot be known to exist absolutely. Because of solipsism (one's desires not ultimately being known by another) also, truth is subjective and nonuniversal. Does truth matter? Yes because desires matter " by definition". (What about logical truths? Is it not absolute truth that x = x ? But there may be persons or beings who can comprehend otherwise so I would say even these are subjective. The only way human beings can understand things is in terms of their desires so for human beings everything is subjective. Even if god handed me an absolute truth I could not know it as such because the only terms in which I can comprehend it is through my desires. Well then if I am convinced that I see that something is absolute truth is it then absolute truth? I suppose so for me who sees that but not for others who don't. And then we're right back to our same old philosophic problems.) What is desire? It is a manifestation of consciousness. But consciousness itself is unexplained. Explaining consciousness would seem to offer the hope of resolving the problem of solipsism, the mind/matter dichotomy and would allow for universal and absolute truth.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

Truth: serviceability or correspondence? The claim that truth be defined as serviceability in relation to individual desire, in my opinion fails to handle -- indeed cannot handle -- the concept of truth. Take, for example, persons A and B who disagree about whether Jones is good. A says Jones is good; B says Jones isn't good. Now, if Jones is serving the interests of A's desire, but not serving the interests of B's desire, then there is no disagreement. A and B are both right; their claims are both "true." Thus we are presented with an aporia: A and B make contrary claims (both can not be true), and yet their claims do not disagree (both can be true). Indeed, one wonders how there could be any genuine disagreement at all. I say it tastes great; you say no, it's less filling. So long as each truth serves our respective desires, we would not really be disagreeing. That seems absurd. We live in a world in which disagreement over good and bad, right and wrong, are important features of life, features that it would be foolish to drop simply because we've decided at long last to define truth as serviceability for subjective desire. I believe it's wrong to invade Iraq; the president believes it's right. Great! No disagreement here. Winston in the book 1984 believes that 2 + 2 = 4; his torturer claims it equals five. Awesome! No disagreement here. Consider what happens to our concept of meaning if truth gets defined as serviceability for individual desire, not correspondence with reality. Usually we take language, beliefs, maps,. etc., to be about something. This about-ness, meaning or intentionality, possessed by beliefs and the like, is one of the facts being explained by a correspondence theory of truth. It's because the content of a belief somehow fits the world that we say it is true. We call this fit correspondence. Not because we're trying to denounce personal preference, but because we're trying to account for the fact of meaning. And, consider what happens to our concept of cause. Typically we think that reality causes a true belief to be true. If the sentence 'The cat is on the mat.' is true, it's because the cat really is on the mat. But if we try to define truth as serviceability for desire, not correspondence with reality, then this causal feature of truth gets lost. It's my desires alone which cause a belief to be true, not the way the world is. Once this causal connection with reality has been severed, any attempt at connecting our knowledge up again with reality becomes problematic at best. When is a claim true? When it conforms with our desire. How do we know whether it conforms with our desire? We can't. We're stuck in an endless regress of conformity with desire. We can't even know what does and doesn't conform with our desire because we can't ever get to the bottom of things. If we balk at this and say that in the case of knowledge truth is different, then we have multiplied the meaning of the word 'truth' into a general sense (function of desire) and a special sense (knowledge-truth, not a function of desire). At this point things start smelling very fishy. Finally, regarding assumptions, I actually agree that here serviceability does play a significant role. For example, the most important work in mathematics in the 20th century involved the assumption that the equation '0 = 1' is false. This amounts to assuming that mathematics is consistent. We can't prove that math is consistent. But we can assume it. And, it turns out to be quite a useful assumption. Even so, if an assumption really is true, it's true not because it conforms with our desires, but because it corresponds with reality. So even in the case of assumptions, correspondence is still the arbiter of truth. In conclusion, a correspondence theory of truth matches our beliefs about how knowledge and meaning work, and about how reality causes true beliefs to be true. Serviceability does not. If serviceability does play a role for truth, it's in helping us decide which assumptions to make. When we must decide whether a claim is true, we may consider serviceability; but as to whether the claim itself really is true or not, correspondence is the final arbiter.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

One area in which serviceable falsehoods reign is in the area of politics. For instance, we are lead to believe that the death penalty make us safer because it is a deterent. Of course, that is false. But it is widely believed and used as a argument in favor of the death penalty. We tell people their vote counts, to bolster the idea of our democracy. Yet, a single vote by an average citizen has little effect. Think electorial collge..... This idea of the servicable falsehoods may be offensive to some, but it is quite true in many areas. Politics is just one where there happens to be allot of examples.

Correspondence is an unworkable proposition because there is nothing known or experienced beyond one's experiences to which correspondence can be made. That which human beings experience consists of experiences and comprises neither causes of experiences nor independently existing objects. There exists no evidence whatsoever of the existence of anything except one's own experiences. There exists no evidence whatsoever of the existence of causes of experiences or independently existing objects having the same evidential quality as one's own experiences. Within the context of experience, moreover, both existence and meaning are functions of desire. I cannot be aware of anything which does not affect my state of desire in at least some way. Nothing can be said to exist that does not affect my state of desire in at least some way. I cannot verify, report upon, communicate about or do anything with respect to anything about which I have no desires at all. Desire defines meaning, existence and truth. Understanding existence, meaning and truth as functions of desire does nothing deleterious to the concepts of correspondence, aboutness or causality. The concerns cited in the previous essay are inherent and have been there all along. They are the classic philosophic problems of solipsism, mind-matter dysjunction and that of supposed-but-never-proven independent existence. They count among the most fundamental reasons for which this philosophy forum exists. They are the very same problems about which we keep trying to achieve satisfactory states of understanding. As for disagreement, one person desiring to do one thing in a given context while another wishes to do something else constitutes disagreement by anyone's measure. To talk about truth here is superfluous. Truth is a derivative concept which need not even be introduced when one speaks on fundamental terms. I do what I want. You do what you want. No only that, but in fact I will do what I have sufficient desire to do and you will do what you have sufficient desire to do and neither of us will do what we don't have sufficient desire to do the truth be damned. How so? Because truth is a derivative concept secondary to desire. Desire is more fundamental than truth. Desire defines truth. Truth outside of the context of desire is meaningless and worthless. Like currency without value. It's pointless.

Thursday, April 13, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

What do you think of the "Gospel of Judas." How much more ancient wisdom is still hidden?

Saturday, April 15, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

Truth does matter. However, truth is of relative importance and should be considered so. There are truths and truths. It may be true that your neighbor is a veteran who lost a leg in Iraq. But this truth is of importance to only a few people. That many nations are at war and killing others is another truth. This is of slightly greater importance than the previous example. However, I have concluded after long years of study and serious contemplation of what I have learned both from books and the world around me, that the answers to the things which have perplexed mankind throughout his history and today have simple answers if we take the obvious path of commonsense and do not allow ourselves to be sidetracked by issues of little or no importance. There are fundamental truths which come first in importance, after which we should can consider the lesser truths.

Reply: Correspondence vs. Serviceability for Desire Are there criteria we can apply to decide which is best among alternative theories of truth? I think there are at least three. First, there is a descriptive criterion: does a theory of truth describe all (and only) instances of truth? Second, there is a normative criterion: does a theory of truth express what is right and wrong, good and bad, obligatory and forbidden, with regard to truth? Third, there is a prescriptive criterion: does a theory of truth provide instructions for how to find the truth? Let's consider the descriptive criterion first. Does a theory of truth describe the world? Consider Mr. A, who learns that he will most likely die very soon, perhaps from some disease, or by the order of some judge. The correspondence theory of truth handles this by identifying a sentence, 'Mr. A will soon die.', and asserting that this sentence corresponds with reality. The serviceability-for-desire theory of truth, however, has difficulty identifying the sentence 'Mr. A will soon die.' as true. Is it true for Mr. A? Only if he desires to believe that he will soon die. Perhaps he does desire this in some cases; but we'll agree that in the vast majority of cases Mr. A desires not to believe that his death is imminent. So for the serviceability theory, in the vast majority of cases the sentence 'Mr. A will soon die.' is false for Mr. A, even though it's true ex hypothesi. The serviceability-for-desire theory fails to correctly sort between true and false sentences, and thus fails the first criterion test. Now let's consider the normative criterion. Does a theory of truth express what is right and wrong, good and bad, obligatory and forbidden, with regard to truth? The correspondence theory holds that Mr. A can rightly be said to have knowledge only if his belief corresponds with reality. Mr. A can rightly be said to know the sentence 'Mr. A will soon die.' is true only if it really is the case that he will soon die. The serviceability-for-desire theory, however, holds that Mr. A can rightly be said to know only if the truth of the sentence 'Mr. A will soon die.' is serviceable with respect to Mr. A's desire. Again, in the vast majority of cases Mr. A will desire to believe that he will not die soon. But according to the serviceability theory, he can rightly be said to know that he will soon die only if he desires to believe that he will soon die. If Mr. A desires to believe that he will not die soon, then according to the serviceability theory he can't rightly be said to know that he will soon die! So the serviceability-for-desire theory of truth fails this second test. Finally, let's consider the prescriptive criterion. Does a theory of truth provide instructions for how to find the truth? The correspondence theory holds that in order to find the truth -- in order for Mr. A to decide whether or not to believe he will die soon -- one must examine reality. The serviceability-for-desire theory, however, claims that in order to find the truth, one must examine one's desire. In order for Mr. A to decide whether to believe he will die soon, he must figure out whether he desires to believe it. Again, we agreed that in the vast majority of cases, Mr. A desires to believe that he will not die soon, in which case the serviceability theory instructs him to reject 'Mr. A will soon die.' as false. But now, a serviceability-for-desire theorist might claim that if Mr. A desires to stay alive, he must believe the truth when he is sick or facing execution, in order to take action and maximize his chance of survival. Unfortunately, the utility theorist can't do this. For in order to take this path, in order for Mr. A to believe that he is to die soon even when he desires to believe that he will not die soon, the serviceability theorist must become a correspondence theorist! The serviceability theorist must grant that there is a reality with which at least some true sentences correspond, and in relation to which serviceability for desire is ultimately determined. This is the only way I see by which a serviceability theorist can explain why Mr. A would find it useful to believe that he will soon die, even when he desires to believe that he will NOT soon die. So, in all three cases, serviceability-for-desire fails to pass muster. Is there more to be said about truth? You bet! However, if the serviceability theory of truth can not meet these three criteria (descriptive, normative, and prescriptive), then in my opinion it's a non-starter for serious consideration. I would ask serviceability-for-desire advocates to examine these three problems, and to offer viable solutions to them, before I write more on this topic.

Monday, April 17, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

With respect to the descriptive criterion test presented above, one must consider the entire context of desires and not simply a single desire in isolation. Suppose for example Mr. A has a strong desire to not die. Someone tells him he is going to die. If the source is not credible (i.e. has failed to fuflill his desires in the past) then it will probably be more fulfilling of his desires on balance to ignore the source and he will then believe he is not going to die. If the source is credible however he will find himself discontent in trying to ignore the source and he probably will go around believing he is going to die even though he wishes to not die. (Both of these scenarios describe how Mr. A will probably comport himself regardless of what actually eventually happens as regards his dying. A source that is not credible may turn out to be correct and a credible source may be lying.) In this case the desire to believe one is not going to die fails to overpower the dissatisfaction in believing the credible source is in error. One cannot say a priori what desire will predominate in a given individual. There are of course cases where one's desire to believe one is not going to die overwhelms all other desires and the individual rejects the view of all authorities. Such persons are said to be in denial. And here let me also say that if someone really and totally believes something then that constitutes reality and "truth" for that person and if I could experience their experiences then I suppose it would be truth for me as well. Thus if an individual who appears to me to be dying insists they are prerfectly fine even though I see their body deteriorating well if I could experience what they are experiencing maybe I would see things in a completely different manner. Maybe such persons never experience death. In the final analysis it is what they (one) experience that counts for them (one's self). "I am not dying. I am fine. You just think I'm dying." Well maybe if I could experience their universe it would be a whole different place. It all goes back to "Reality and truth are what one experiences, not what "is" independently of one's experience, which "independent being" cannot be known. I do not have time now to look at the other two tests. I will try to get back later, although I have a three day driving trip to Albuquerque this week!

I agree with Paul Hollander that the bit about approximations was unfortunate in that Ken appeared to be using a true approximation to illustrate the two other quite different concepts of approximate truth and serviceable falsehood. But in fact the issue of whether a proposition must be either true or false is really just a matter of how we define "proposition". If (as some do) we define a proposition as a statement which is either true or false then indeed a proposition must be either true or false. But then with that "strong" definition of proposition, "Truth Matters" is not a proposition. Perhaps "Truth matters to me at this time" is closer to being a proposition in the strong sense, but despite my own strong sense of a unitary identity I am aware of research which shows that sense to be an illusion, so I may actually be of several minds simultaneously on the matter of whether truth matters. But I do believe it does (at least approximately).

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

In advocating the serviceability-for-desire theory of truth, ses uses such phrases as "what actually eventually happens," "someone really and totally believes something," etc. Such appeals to reality indicate that the serviceability theorist has turned into a correspondence theorist! Which is exactly my point: the serviceability-for-desire theorist is parasitic off the correspondence theorist, sneaking in hidden assumptions about what reality is really like, while at the same time claiming that truth is purely a matter of serviceability. This is simply inconsistent. If the truth-as-serviceability-for-desire advocate desires to be consistent, then he/she ought to abandon truth-as-serviceability-for-desire. I don't deny that psychology affects belief. But truth and belief are two different things. I think the serviceability theorist is motivated by a sincere desire to acknowledge the important role that desire plays relative to belief. This is great. But I think things get confused with the additional claim that truth, and not just belief, is a function of desire. Protagoras's words come to mind: "Of all things the measure is people: of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not." This is trivially true so long as it is taken to refer to belief. However, when it is taken to refer to truth, it becomes absurd. Rather than argue the point myself, I would refer the interested reader to two philosophical classics: Plato's Theaetetus, and Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Gamma. In the Theaetetus Socrates at one point confronts the ghost of Protagoras (actually, his imagined revivified head sticking up out of the ground) over the very claim I quote above. Aristotle picks up where Plato leaves off, identifying principles such as the so-called Law of Excluded Middle (that no proposition/sentence/statement/belief is both true and false) as necessary conditions for meaningful communication. PS: Alan Cooper -- 'Truth matters.' is a grammatical English sentence which states that truth matters. So why do you deny that 'Truth matters.' expresses a proposition?

(Replying to Paul) I did not deny that "Truth matters" expresses a proposition - only that it satisfies a particular possible definition of "proposition". If any "grammatical English sentence" qualifies as a proposition, then "Truth matters" is indeed a proposition, but then it is not true that a proposition must be either True or False. On the other hand if a proposition must be either true or false, then I do submit that "Truth matters" is not a proposition since its truth value depends on context and interpretation. "Flatulence transcends verbiage" is also a grammatical English sentence whose truth value depends on the context. In a certain kind of boring lecture and with an appropriate interpretation of the word "transcends" it may well be true, but in other contexts it might be false. Most people would probably agree that this is an example which shows that "truth always matters" is false, but to an innocent on death row it is probably obvious that "truth sometimes matters" is true. Without the modifier, the simple sentence "Truth matters" is grammatical but ambiguous - so not a proposition in the "strict" sense. -Alan

Thursday, April 20, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

I think there are three different questions to answer: (1) Does the sentence 'Truth matters.' express a proposition? (2) Which proposition does 'Truth matters.' express? (3) What is the content of a "complete" proposition? We can answer (1) without answering (2) or (3). Does 'Truth matters.' express a proposition? Yes. Why? Because it is a grammatical English sentence. We can answer (2) without answering (3). Which proposition does 'Truth matters.' express? The proposition that truth matters. This is simply a matter of disquotation: for any sentence S, the meaning of 'S' (in single quotes, mentioning the sentence) is that S (not in single quotes, using the sentence with a 'that'-clause). Some prefer to use double quotes instead: the meaning of 'S' is "S," where "S" is a proposition. In either case, the matter is dispensed with by means of a kind of circularity (which isn't really circular, as it hinges on the distinction between object language and metalanguage). So far as (3) goes, I find reasonable the view that the proposition "Truth matters" already is complete. Again, one reason for this is that 'Truth matters.' is a grammatical sentence. Another reason is that it seems to portray a way the world could be, without need for further elaboration. What is the sentence about? Truth. What does it affirm of truth? That it matters. Is this a way the world could be? Yes, of course: the proposition is true if and only if it is the case that truth matters. Now, one might argue that the proposition "Truth matters" does not really portray a way the world could be, because it never is the case that truth matters simpliciter. Truth matters only for this or that person, at this or that time, etc. Perhaps. But at this point the quibble is not over whether "Truth matters" is a complete proposition, but rather over whether "Truth matters" is true! Obviously, if we're at the point of debating whether it is true, then we've already accepted that we're dealing with a complete proposition! Again, I think mistakes get made when problems for meaning are erroneously regarded as problems for truth. So far as whether there are only two truth values, or more than two, I would repeat what I wrote earlier, that the simplest theory capable of accounting for our truth-talk is a theory positing just two truth values, true and false. This is not the only theory of truth; just the simplest. Of course, Occam's razor asks us to go for the simplest complete explanation, so there you go, IMHO....

Sorry Paul, I must be a bit dense. I can't help reading what you say as asserting both that every grammatically correct sentence is a proposition and that every proposition must be true or false. But the sentence "This sentence is false" does seem to me to be grammatically correct. What am I missing?

Friday, April 21, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

Great point!!!! The sentence 'This sentence is false.' seems to be grammatically correct, but if we take it as expressing a proposition, we run into problems because if 'This sentence is false.' is true, then it is false, and if it is false, then (given only two truth values) it must be true. A paradox! We have two options. We can either bite the bullet and admit that 'This sentence is false.' expresses a proposition, with all the problems which that entails. Or we can reject 'This sentence is false.' as not grammatically correct, and so not expressing a proposition. But this also entails problems because it leads to the question, on what basis do we reject it? On a syntactic basis? But it's syntactically correct. On a semantic basis? But if we're going to introduce semantic distinctions here, why can't we do the same with the sentence 'Truth matters.'? Or other sentences as well? The solution I find most plausible is that we reject 'This sentence is false.' as being grammatically incorrect. What distinguishes this sentence from 'Truth matters.' is that, if we admit 'This sentence is false.' as a grammatical sentence, we violate the Law of Excluded Middle, which holds that no proposition is both true and false. We do not violate Excluded Middle if we admit 'Truth matters.' as grammatically correct. This is no trivial matter. I, for one, am quite willing to consider possibilities that do not violate Excluded Middle, but I'm not willing to do this regarding possibilities that do violate Excluded Middle. So I can accept 'Truth matters.' as meaningful, but not 'This sentence is false.'. I suspect most people are in the same boat. Notice that similar problems arise when we consider other kinds of sentences. 'I'm male.' is true only when spoken by about half the population. So how can 'I'm male.' express a proposition? 'I'm laughing now.' is true sometimes when I use it, false other times. Such issues take us into the domain of philosophy of language, which can get very complicated. In general, we use sentences to make statements which assert propositions. We talk in shorthand about sentences expressing propositions, but that's a standard assumption when dealing with the formal properties of language, in which case we typically assume that there are no ambiguous sentences. (This assumption is not a problem as it can be set aside at any time.) Propositions themselves are intentional objects, which means we do not have direct perceptual access to them. We only get at the structure of a proposition by symbolically representing it. We can make maps of propositions in the form of sentences, but we can never see, hear, touch, taste or smell propositions themselves. And yet we know propositions exist because we cogitate in terms of them. This state of affairs means we are stuck using language in order to examine the structure of the proposition, with all the difficulties that entails.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

Well then, to me, I guess "Truth matters" is not a "complete proposition", but we may be taking this discussion off topic with our focus on whether the excluded middle is or is not a "grammatical" rule. Getting back closer (I hope) to the point of what I think Ken was saying in his original posting, I would suggest that his emphasis was more on the need (or not) for avoiding untruth, rather than on finding value in every true statement. Sometimes the truth of a matter really does NOT matter or is best not known, but perhaps there is a stronger case for the thesis that "UNtruth matters". ie that it is almost always wrong to believe or assert that which is demonstrably false. (And perhaps the specific theory of truth being applied is less relevant if we restrict to the "demonstrable" situation where correspondence and convention coincide.) So the question becomes under what circumstances may a falsehood not be a bad thing. The finding of value in a "serviceable falsehood" of the kind exemplified by "Saddam had WMD", (as used to motivate soldiers into having a sense of purpose which may have enhanced their effectiveness), is however not related to any particular property of truth or falsehood. It is rather just another example of an "ends vs. means" issue, perhaps analogous to the argument of net utility that may be used by some in the familiar moral exercise of deciding whether or not to push someone off a bridge in order to block a train which would otherwise run over several people standing on the track. To some, doing wrong to produce an eventual good result can never be justified, but many others accept the net utility argument. For example many of us who would not push the fat guy off the bridge to block the train from running over the kids will regularly and willingly support minor injustices for some on the basis of serving the greater good (eg a not entirely equitable tax law for which the fairer alternative would be more expensive to administer). But even those would probably agree the small injustice is wrong "in and of itself", and should be avoided if the same general gain could be achieved in some other way. Similarly, the possible net value of a "serviceable falsehood" does not contradict the fact that promoting the falsehood is ("morally") wrong in and of itself. But anyhow, as I said at the beginiing of this paragraph, this aspect of the issue has nothing to do with the particular issue of Truth per se. So my question is: Is there more to the idea of "serviceable falsehood" than this? Scientific theories are often described as serviceable falsehoods which we accept for lack of a better alternative. This is what I believe Ken was getting at, although his reference to "approximate truth" may have led some of us astray. One view of a scientific theory is as something which claims only to compactly "predict" the results of all past observations (at least to within the accuracy range with which those observations were made). As such, if successful, the theory is true so long as its predictions all fall within the error bounds of the corresponding observed measurements. But when the theory is used to predict future observations, then it runs the risk of being falsified - as all theories will be (at least for so long as science continues to be worth doing). But "falsification" of a theory doesn't always make it false. Often, as in the case of Newtonian mechanics, it just puts restrictions on that theory's domain of validity. An important distinction here (which appears to escape the compehension of many non-scientists) is between two entirely different notions of scientific 'theory'. One, like Newtonian mechanics or its various relativistic and quantum sequels, is a set of rules (generally expressed in mathematical formulae) relating various observed values, and the other is an explanation of some phenomenon in terms of a higher-level theory of the first kind. The statistical mechanical explanation of thermodynamics is an example of the latter, as is also just about every theory of astronomical or biological evolution. It is in the latter case (of "theories" which purport to explain some observation) where, to a scientist, "truth" is actually at issue and "matters" (no matter whether anyone else actually gives a damn). There really is only one true answer to the question of how our solar system originated, and most scientists expect that eventually we will find sufficient evidence to confirm one such theory. The same applies to various questions about how certain steps in the evolution of current species occuurred, but although one would have to be a complete idiot to suggest that there is no possibility of finding a purely mechanical path from non-life to the current situation, there are certainly cases where we do not yet know which "theory" is correct. And, yes, to those of us who care, it does matter a lot. (I don't know if Alexander Keith's Pale Ale is advertised in the US, but the tag-line is "Those who like it like it a lot" and perhaps the situation is similar.) However a wrong theory of planetary or biological evolution is not a "serviceable falsehood". It is just plain wrong as a history of events, and it will eventually be found to conflict substantially with some observed fact to an extent not within the bounds of experimental error (and probably not even within any limited bounds that corresponded to the measurement capabilities of science at the time the theory was proposed). Another kind of "serviceable falsehood" is promoted by some "enlightened" religious leaders. The thesis seems to be that the literal truth (or more probably untruth) of their scriptures does not matter because of some "deeper" meaning that belief in them is deemed to facilitate. This is of course, like every other religious doctrine in human history, a total pile of unholy evil crap. (I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this blog comment is unfortunately too brief to contain.)

Friday, April 28, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

I think the significant question is, can we get the benefit of knowledge without actually possessing knowledge? Or is there some benefit we get from knowledge, that we can only get from knowledge? This I think is the gist of the problem Ken posed. For, if we can get the benefit of knowledge without actually possessing knowledge, then perhaps our belief about the value of knowledge is mistaken. I believe there is value that we get from knowledge, and that we can only get from knowledge. If we know a proposition is true, then we have good reason to believe any proposition entailed by that proposition -- and it will also be true. If I know that the cat is on the mat and that all cats are animals, then I have good reason to believe that an animal is on the mat -- and furthermore it will be true that an animal is on the mat. No other kind of belief does this. Belief that is merely true gives no good reason to believe anything; while belief for which we have good reason, but that isn't true, might give good reason to believe something, but without any guarantee that this something is actually true. It's only when we have both good reason and truth that we have the unique benefit conferred by genuine knowledge. Those who disagree are in the position of having to find some counterexample, some belief that does not constitute knowledge, but that nonetheless does give good reason for believing any logical consequence of the belief -- and guarantees that it will be true. I don't think this is possible. I'd like to hear of any examples that anyone comes up with. I don't think they exist. I hereby throw down the gauntlet and set the challenge for someone to come up with a counterexample!

Saturday, April 29, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

I made it to Albuquerque and have found some time to return to this discussion. Paul Hollander above offers the criticism that my phrases "what actually happens" and "someone really believes something" are inconsistent with the position that truth is defined by desire. There is no inconsistency. The identity of "what actually happens" is determined by one's experiences and that is all that is known. "Someone really believes something" says just what it says and nothing more. One believes what one believes. That one believes or knows something does not mean one knows anything about anything else. (Relative to his criticism he suggests I abandon my position "in the interest of consistency". I'm sure abandonment would please him in any eventuality but I'm hardly going to throw out a beautiful baby in pristine water just so he can populate the earth with his own flawed progeny.) (Paul I can't even say your effort was credible. In the interest of morality however I will grant to you that "what actually happens" is a misleading use of words, nevertheless, not fundamentally a matter inconsistent with my position. There may, or may not, exist independent entities. One has this impression they exist for various reasons. But they may not exist. If they do exist one has no verification of their existence independent of one's experiences. Even if they do exist they do not matter except in the capacity of their being experienced.) Going back to the last two "tests" he proposes above which I did not have time to address earlier, both the "normative" and "prescriptive" considerations are readily dismissed in that desire understood as the foundation of truth obviously and easily accounts not only for what one views as good/bad and right/wrong but also true/false. We're right back where we started. One experiences that which one experiences and has no other knowledge of independent or objective entites or causes of experiences. Within the context of experience, states of desire determine what is considered true or false. No one has said anything having any substantiality to incline one otherwise.

One more point. In the above post I talk about the relation between truth and knowledge. Knowledge entails truth. But not the other way around: truth does not entail knowledge. Some might claim that if we don't or can't know that a proposition is true, then that proposition is not, in fact, true. This is what happens when truth gets defined as "warranted assertability" or some such thing. Is 'God exists.' true? No. Is 'God exists.' false? No. 'God exists.' acquires a third value, neither true nor false, because we are never warranted in asserting either that God exists or that God does not exist. This presents difficulty. Consider a legal system in which not only the plaintiff must prove she knows the charge to be true, but also the defendant must prove she knows the charge to be false, in order to win the case. If neither side can do this, then the case never gets resolved. Plaintiffs have the advantage because the mere leveling of a charge -- especially one that can't possibly be resolved -- can place a defendant in legal limbo literally forever. This might sound to some like an accurate description of our situation. But think about it. Our president makes outrageous claims. If there really were three truth values, and if a proposition really were true only if we knew it was true, then we would be at a severe disadvantage when disputing the president's outrageous claims. Just like the hapless defendant in the above example, we would have to prove we knew that the president's outrageous claims were false, in order to resolve the issue. Maybe we can't do that. Maybe at best all we can do is cast doubt on the verity of the president's outrageous claims, without proving we know them to be false. If so, then we are stuck. The president could make outrageous claim after outrageous claim, and in each case we would have to prove we knew the outrageous claim was false in order to resolve things. Obviously, those who make the outrageous claims have the advantage, while those casting doubt on the outrageous claims of others are at a clear disadvantage. Is this the kind of world we want? Not me. It places the vast majority of us at the mercy of a powerful few, ensuring that the strong, who can shout the loudest and have the most to gain from outrageous claims, will do what they can and the weak, the rest of us, will suffer what we must. For myself, I prefer a more equitable conception of truth. The only way to get that is for truth to be independent of knowledge. There are truths that we don't and can't ever know. They exist. If they did not exist, we should be in a very grave situation indeed.

ses: I'm not sure you understand my criticism. The claim that truth is a consequence of subjective desire has been criticized for erroneously relativizing truth: what's true is only ever true for me, or true for you, or true for whomever; there is no truth independent of being true for someone. As I have already pointed out, this eliminates the possibility of genuine disagreement. We can't ever disagree without truth that applies equally to you and to me. You deny that genuine disagreement exists because you claim truth is relative to each person. This places you in the onerous position of having to convince us that disagreement is merely illusory. At this point, who looks more ridiculous, you or me? You're the one denying that disagreement (or agreement, for that matter) is real! You also deny that you're contradicting yourself when you are caught red-handed. You claim that truth is relative and subjective, and yet at certain key points you claim that truth is not relative, not subjective, because you wish to talk about reality, and about what really happens. Well, which is it? Is truth relative and subjective, or isn't it? So not only do you deny something that this very discussion proves is true -- that disagreement is real -- but you blatantly contradict yourself while you are doing it, and then deny that as well! As if this weren't enough, ses, you also prevaricate about the nature of your claim. Sometimes you talk about what's true; other times you talk about what is considered to be true. When you wish to capitalize on the objective nature of truth, you talk about what's true. But when you wish to emphasize the alleged subjective nature of truth, you talk about what's considered to be true. Well, which is it? Are we talking about what's true, or are we talking about what's considered to be true? These are not the same thing. Again, it's not clear to me that writing more on this myself is helpful. I refer you to the Theaetetus and to Metaphysics Book Gamma. Perhaps Plato and Aristotle will provide you with a more entertaining opponent. Of course, all this can be settled in an instant by asking just one key question: does ses speak the truth? Think about it....

I'm pressed for time again. I hope the following is clear. It will have to suffice for the moment. Paul it seems to me it's all very simple. People believe things when they have sufficient conviction and act when they have sufficient desire. Things do get done -- and that's how they get done. One doesn't conceptually need absolute truth for it to happen. I do consider that the reality is that nothing can be absolutely proven and everything is an apparent power struggle. An interplay of desires on an intra- and inter-personal level (if any other conscious beings really exist. And having at one's disposition "absolute truth" gets one nowhere because then the other side just claims it has absolute truth. And the fact is --and this is important and supports my whole position -- if I really believe or feel that what I believe is absolute truth then it functions as such for me no matter what "reality" is. We just don't really know what's going on as far as I'm concerned. "I think therefore I am" = "From my standpoint what I am experiencing constitutes reality. This is as real as I know it. I have no experience or knowledge of any other existence or reality"-- along with the subjective assessment "and/but this is overall a qualitatively very unsatisfactory situation"! We do agree the "President" makes outrageous decisions. Things are in a really sorry state and we may be headed for very dark days owing to really national incompetence. Not that I blame anyone. I don't "believe" in blame as such.

Paul my last post does not address your last post it was written beforehand. I'm out of time for today. I already addressed the issue of disagreement above read it again. Truth is a function of what matters to the conscious entity in question. What matters to the entity in question depends on the desires of that entity.

Sunday, April 30, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

I get the feeling that, because I hold a desire-independent view of truth, somehow I'm getting accused of being a dogmatic absolutist. Which is more democratic? To believe that we can always appeal to a concept of truth independent of values, interests, desire, power, and the like? Or to deny that belief? We who advocate independent truth are in favor of the right to question anything, free of restraints about what's in anybody's interest, what conforms with anybody's desire, what serves anybody's values, etc. This seems to me to be a basic human right. Certainly Socrates would have approved! It would be a shame if the Truth Police confiscated it. Unfortunately, whether they realize it or not, the peddlers of truth-as-a-consequence-of-_____ (fill in the blank -- desire, values, whatever) are opposed to this fundamental right, because for them there is no independent truth, only truth relative to _____. On their account, we are never free to consider truth independently of _____, and it's just plain wrong to believe we can. Again I ask, which is more democratic? Our basic human right to question without restraint? Or parading forth _____ as the final determinant of all truth, regardless of what anybody else says? You be the judge. But hurry, before the Truth Police take away your right to decide free of _____!

Saturday, May 6, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

If you're questioning everything you're not asserting the existence of independent truth. If you're asserting the existence of independent truth you're not questioning everything. To assert the existence of absolute truth obviously is as much an imposition as to assert that what is called truth can be understood as derivative. And the company kept relative to the former assertion inspires considerably less confidence. To assert what actually is the absolute truth obviously is to question nothing. It is to accord no right to anyone else. To assert the existence of absolute truth that is totally inaccessible is pointless. The Thought Police have arrived but they're not making any sense.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

ses, your error, other than trying to use elaborate grammar to try to give your assertion weight, is that you ignore or are unaware that the purpose of LIFE is to LIVE. (Supersets trump subsets in this, thus the individual's purpose is to propel the organism, whose purpose is to propel life itself (not all life).) Paul is correct in that the de facto rulers, of the empire we reside in, know that if they trick us to think that truth is relative, always based upon some variable, then they can control the truth. They only have to choose variables that they believe they can control and have no chance for us to effect (ie: ""terrorism"").

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 -- 4:00 PM

Why do we need to know truth? I?ve heard it many times that ?truth will set us free? and that sounds biblical.

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Be thinking

What is truth (on the nature and importance of truth today).

Have you ever been told that truth is relative? That it's all based on language and context? That it's only what a culture believes to be real? Douglas Groothuis tackles these issues and more as he examines the question, "What is truth?".

Truth is so obscured nowadays, and lies so well established, that unless we love the truth, we shall never recognize it . Blaise Pascal

Staring Truth in the Face

"Everyone on the side of truth listens to me." Jesus Christ made this statement after Pontius Pilate had interrogated him prior to the crucifixion (John 18:37, NIV). Pilate then famously replied, "What is truth?" and left the scene.

As philosopher Francis Bacon wrote in his essay 'On Truth':

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer .

Although Jesus made no reply to Pilate, Christians affirm that Pilate was staring truth in the face, for Jesus had earlier said to his disciple Thomas, "I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6).

This historic exchange raises the perennial question of the very nature of truth itself. What does it mean for a statement to be true? Or, to put it another way: What does it take for a statement to achieve truthfulness?

This has been a subject of much debate in postmodernist circles, where the traditional view of truth as objective and knowable is no longer accepted. Many even outside of academic discussions may be as cynical about truth as Pilate. "What is truth?" they smirk, without waiting for an answer. Postmodernist philosopher Richard Rorty claimed that truth is what his colleagues let him get away with. [1] Unless we are clear about the notion of truth, any claim to truth – religious or otherwise – will perplex more than enlighten.

Before attempting to determine which claims are true, we need to understand the nature of truth itself. I will briefly argue for the correspondence view of truth and then pit it against two of its main rivals, relativism and pragmatism.

Truth and Correspondence

The correspondence view of truth, held by the vast majority of philosophers and theologians throughout history, holds that any declarative statement is true if and only if it corresponds to or agrees with factual reality, with the way things are. The statement, "The desk in my study is brown" , is true only if there is, in fact, a brown desk in my study. If indeed there is a brown desk in my study, then the statement, "there is no brown desk in my study" , is false because it fails to correspond to any objective state of affairs.

Minds may recognize this truth, but minds do not create this truth

The titanic statement, "Jesus is Lord of the universe" , is either true or false. It is not both true and false; it is not neither true nor false. This statement either honors reality or it does not; it mirrors the facts or it does not. The Christian claims that this statement is true apart from anyone's opinion (see Romans 3:4). In other words, it has a mind-independent reality. Minds may recognize this truth, but minds do not create this truth. This is because truth is a quality of some statements and not of others. It is not a matter of subjective feeling, majority vote or cultural fashion. The statement, "The world is spherical" , was true even when the vast majority of earthlings took their habitat to be flat.

The correspondence view of truth entails that declarative statements are subject to various kinds of verification and falsification. This concerns the area of epistemology, or the study of how we acquire and defend knowledge claims. [2] A statement can be proven false if it can be shown to disagree with objective reality. The photographs from outer space depicting the earth as a blue orb (along with prior evidence) falsified flat-earth claims. Certainly, not all falsification is as straightforward as this; but if statements are true or false by virtue of their relationship to what they attempt to describe, this makes possible the marshaling of evidence for their veracity or falsity. [3]

Therefore, Christians – who historically have affirmed the correspondence view of truth – hold that there are good historical reasons to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead in space-time history, thus vindicating His divine authority (see Romans 1:4; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11). [4] The Apostle Paul adamantly affirms this view:

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. (1 Corinthians 15:14-15)

Without the correspondence view of truth, these resounding affirmations ring hollow. Christianity cannot live and thrive without it.

Postmodernism: Truth in Doubt

Today this view of truth is being brought into doubt. Postmodernist philosophers claim that the quest for objective truth asserted through language is part of the discredited project of modernism, an over-confident approach to knowledge stemming from enlightenment rationalism. [5] Therefore, statements about scientific facts, religious claims or moral principles cannot refer to objective states of affairs. On the contrary, language is constructed through communities, and it cannot move beyond its own context and refer to realities outside itself.

A thorough analysis of the postmodernist assault on truth would take us beyond the limits of this article, [6] but a basic critique of this notion of truth is that this view is self-refuting. If all language fails to describe objective conditions, due to its immersion in various cultures, then any language used to describe this universal immersion would be subject to the limitations of its context. And that would mean that any and all language fails to describe the universal limitations of all languages. This kind of statement, therefore, discredits itself. For all its protests about the illegitimacies of "metanarratives" (worldviews), postmodernism offers a metanarrative of its own – one that cannot be true given its own precepts. [7]

Moreover, the notion that objective truth is unknowable entails that a relativistic and/or pragmatic view of truth be put in the place of a correspondence view. I contend that both of these views – that is, relativism and pragmatism – are logically defective and unworthy of belief.

Relativism: Who's to Say?

Relativism comes in various shapes and sizes, but its salient claim is that the truth of a statement depends on the views of persons or cultures, not on whether statements correspond to objective reality. To say a statement is true is simply to say that a person or culture believes it to be true. Hence the popular refrain, "Well, that's true for you."

According to this view, one person can say "Jesus is Lord" and another can say "Allah is Lord" , and both statements will be true, if they accurately express the sentiments of the speakers. This view seems to advance tolerance and civility, but it does so at the expense of logic, meaning and truth. That price is too high.

If I say "Jesus is Lord" and you say "Allah is Lord" , both statements cannot be objectively true because they describe mutually exclusive realities. Jesus is known by Christians as God made flesh (John 1:14), while Muslims deny that Allah incarnates. [8] So, if "Lord" means a position of unrivaled metaphysical and spiritual supremacy, then Jesus and Allah cannot both be Lord because "Jesus" and "Allah" are not two words that mean the same thing.

If we mean to say that I believe in Jesus and you believe in Allah, there is no logical contradiction, since subjective beliefs cannot contradict each other; that is, it may be true that I subjectively believe X and you subjectively believe non-X. However, X and non-X themselves cannot both be objectively true. When dealing with divergent claims to objective truth, contradictions emerge frequently. [9] A 2002 survey by Barna Research found that 44 percent of Americans contend that "the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon are all different expressions of the same spiritual truths." This reveals an untrue view of truth.

Applied to medicine or science, this sort of relativistic attitude would be deemed ridiculous. Medical doctors have good reason not to bleed their patients, as was commonly done for centuries. This is because we objectively know that bleeding does not help patients, whatever the social consensus may have been at an earlier time.

Truth is what corresponds to reality

Unlike the correspondence view of truth, which seeks objective support for the truth or falsity of statements (whenever possible), relativism offers no means of verifying or falsifying any belief apart from discerning whether one holds the belief or whether a particular culture tends to affirm certain things.

The Weakness of Pragmatism

A pragmatic view of truth also rejects the objectivity of truth. This view holds that a belief is true only if it works for a particular person. Therefore, Christianity may be "true for me" if it helps me, but false for another if it doesn't seem to help her. But this view confuses usefulness with verity.

Think of a person who chronically mismanages his money and is very unsuccessful. A few hundred dollars are stolen from him without his knowledge. Yet he thinks he has misplaced the money and says to himself, "That's the last straw. I've got to get my life in order!" After this, he becomes successful through hard work and diligence. Yet his belief that he lost the money, however beneficial, was not true because it did not conform to the reality that the money was stolen. This shows that the truth-value of a belief is different from its use-value. [10]

Truth Defined

So, "What is truth?" Truth is what corresponds to reality. When this is established, we can move on to considering which particular statements are true and reasonable and which are not. Unlike Pilate, we can stay and listen to what Jesus has to say to us. He alone has the words of eternal life (John 6:68).

[1] This is a paraphrase, but represents his views truly. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New York: Princeton University Press, 1979), p.176.

[2] For a superb introduction to epistemology in relation to postmodernism, see R. Douglas Geivett, 'Is God a Story? Postmodernity and the Task of Theology', in Myron Penner, ed., Christianity and the Postmodern Turn (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), pp.37-52.

[3] For an introduction to the role of logic in the testing of worldviews, see Ronald Nash, World-Views in Conflict: Choosing Christianity in a World of Ideas (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), especially pp.54-106.

[4] See J.P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City (Grand Rapids, Baker Books, 1987), Chapter 6; N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003).

[5] See Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), Chapter 2.

[6] See Groothuis, Truth Decay .

[7] See James Sire, The Universe Next Door, 4th ed . (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p.237.

[8] See Abduhl Saleeb and Norman Geisler, Answering Islam, 2nd ed . (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002).

[9] On this see the booklet by Douglas Groothuis, Are All Religions One? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), and Ajith Fernando, Sharing the Truth in Love: How to Relate to People of Other Faiths (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House, 2001).

[10] See Winfried Corduan, No Doubt About It (Nashville, TN: Broadman, Holman, 1997), pp.60-61.

© 2007 Douglas Groothuis This article is an updated, edited and revised version of the essay, "What is Truth?" which originally appeared on LeaderU.com.

Douglas Groothuis

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Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth.

It would be impossible to survey all there is to say about truth in any coherent way. Instead, this essay will concentrate on the main themes in the study of truth in the contemporary philosophical literature. It will attempt to survey the key problems and theories of current interest, and show how they relate to one-another. A number of other entries investigate many of these topics in greater depth. Generally, discussion of the principal arguments is left to them. The goal of this essay is only to provide an overview of the current theories.

The problem of truth is in a way easy to state: what truths are, and what (if anything) makes them true. But this simple statement masks a great deal of controversy. Whether there is a metaphysical problem of truth at all, and if there is, what kind of theory might address it, are all standing issues in the theory of truth. We will see a number of distinct ways of answering these questions.

1.1 The correspondence theory

1.1.1 the origins of the correspondence theory, 1.1.2 the neo-classical correspondence theory, 1.2 the coherence theory, 1.3 pragmatist theories, 2.1 sentences as truth-bearers, 2.2 convention t, 2.3 recursive definition of truth, 2.4 reference and satisfaction, 3.1 correspondence without facts, 3.2 facts again, 3.3. truthmakers, 4.1 realism and truth, 4.2 anti-realism and truth, 4.3 anti-realism and pragmatism, 5.1 the redundancy theory, 5.2 minimalist theories, 5.3 other aspects of deflationism, 6.1 truth-bearers, 6.2 truth and truth conditions, 6.3 truth conditions and deflationism, 6.4 truth and the theory of meaning, 6.5 the coherence theory and meaning, 6.6 truth and assertion, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the neo-classical theories of truth.

Much of the contemporary literature on truth takes as its starting point some ideas which were prominent in the early part of the 20th century. There were a number of views of truth under discussion at that time, the most significant for the contemporary literature being the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth.

These theories all attempt to directly answer the nature question : what is the nature of truth? They take this question at face value: there are truths, and the question to be answered concerns their nature. In answering this question, each theory makes the notion of truth part of a more thoroughgoing metaphysics or epistemology. Explaining the nature of truth becomes an application of some metaphysical system, and truth inherits significant metaphysical presuppositions along the way.

The goal of this section is to characterize the ideas of the correspondence, coherence and pragmatist theories which animate the contemporary debate. In some cases, the received forms of these theories depart from the views that were actually defended in the early 20th century. We thus dub them the ‘neo-classical theories’. Where appropriate, we pause to indicate how the neo-classical theories emerge from their ‘classical’ roots in the early 20th century.

Perhaps the most important of the neo-classical theories for the contemporary literature is the correspondence theory. In spite of its importance, it is strikingly difficult to find an accurate citation in the early 20th century for the received neo-classical view. Furthermore, the way the correspondence theory actually emerged will provide some valuable reference points for contemporary debate. For these reasons, we dwell on the origins of the correspondence theory at greater length than those of the other neo-classical views, before turning to its contemporary neo-classical form.

The basic idea of the correspondence theory is that what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are—to the facts. This idea can be seen in various forms throughout the history of philosophy. Its modern history starts with the beginnings of analytic philosophy at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the work of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.

Let us pick up the thread of this story in the years between 1898 and about 1910. These years are marked by Moore and Russell's rejection of idealism. Yet at this point, they do not hold a correspondence theory of truth. Indeed Moore (1899) sees the correspondence theory as a source of idealism, and rejects it. Russell follows Moore in this regard. (For discussion of Moore's early critique of idealism, where he rejects the correspondence theory of truth, see Baldwin (1991). Hylton (1990) provides an extensive discussion of Russell in the context of British idealism.)

In this period, Moore and Russell hold a version of the identity theory of truth . They say comparatively little about it, but it is stated briefly in Moore (1902); Moore (1899) and Russell (1904). According to the identity theory, a true proposition is identical to a fact. Specifically, in Moore and Russell's hands, the theory begins with propositions, understood as the objects of beliefs and other propositional attitudes. Propositions are what are believed, and give the contents of beliefs. They are also, according to this theory, the primary bearers of truth. When a proposition is true, it is identical to a fact, and a belief in that proposition is correct.

The identity theory Moore and Russell espoused takes truth to be a property of propositions. Furthermore, taking up an idea familiar to readers of Moore, the property of truth is a simple unanalyzable property. Facts are understood as simply those propositions which are true. There are true propositions and false ones, and facts just are true propositions. There is thus no “difference between truth and the reality to which it is supposed to correspond” (Moore, 1902, p. 21). (For further discussion of the identity theory of truth, see Baldwin (1991), Cartwright (1987), and the entry on the identity theory of truth .)

Moore and Russell came to reject the identity theory of truth in favor of a correspondence theory, sometime around 1910 (as we see in Moore, 1953, which reports lectures he gave in 1910-1911, and Russell, 1910b). They do so because they came to reject the existence of propositions. Why? Among reasons, they came to doubt that there could be any such things as false propositions, and then concluded that there are no such things as propositions at all.

Why did Moore and Russell find false propositions problematic? A full answer to this question is a point of scholarship that would take us too far afield. (Moore himself lamented that he could not “put the objection in a clear and convincing way” (1953, p. 263), but see Cartwright (1987) for a careful and clear exploration of the arguments.) But very roughly, the identification of facts with true propositions left them unable to see what a false proposition could be other than something which is just like a fact, though false. If such things existed, we would have fact-like things in the world, which Moore and Russell now see as enough to make false propositions count as true. Hence, they cannot exist, and so there are no false propositions. As Russell (1956, p. 223) later says, propositions seem to be at best “curious shadowy things” in addition to facts.

As Cartwright (1987) reminds us, it is useful to think of this argument in the context of Russell's slightly earlier views about propositions. As we see clearly in Russell (1903), for instance, he takes propositions to have constituents. But they are not mere collections of constituents, but a ‘unity’ which brings the constituents together. (We thus confront the ‘problem of the unity of the proposition’.) But what, we might ask, would be the ‘unity’ of a proposition that (Samuel) Ramey sings—with constituents Ramey and singing—except Ramey bearing the property of singing? If that is what the unity consists in, then we seem to have nothing other than the fact that Ramey sings. But then we could not have genuine false propositions without having false facts.

As Cartwright also reminds us, there is some reason to doubt the cogency of this sort of argument. But let us put the assessment of the arguments aside, and continue the story. From the rejection of propositions a correspondence theory emerges. The primary bearers of truth are no longer propositions, but beliefs themselves. In a slogan:

A belief is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact .

Views like this are held by Moore (1953) and Russell (1910b); Russell (1912). Of course, to understand such a theory, we need to understand the crucial relation of correspondence, as well as the notion of a fact to which a belief corresponds. We now turn to these questions. In doing so, we will leave the history, and present a somewhat more modern reconstruction of a correspondence theory.

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 (1956, p. 182), where the existence of facts is the “first truism.” (The influence of Wittgenstein's ideas to appear in the Tractatus (1922) on Russell in this period was strong.)

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. Let us denote this < Ramey , Singing >. This fact exists. In contrast, the world (we presume) contains no fact < Ramey , Dancing >. The belief that Ramey sings stands in the relation of correspondence to the fact < Ramey , Singing >, and so the belief is true.

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. But for a simple belief, like that Ramey sings, we can observe that the structure of the fact < Ramey , Singing > matches the subject-predicate form of the that -clause which reports the belief, and may well match the structure of the belief itself.

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 at 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. (Proponents of structured propositions, such as Kaplan (1989), often look to Russell (1903) for inspiration, and find unconvincing Russell's reasons for rejecting them.)

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:

proposition that Ramey sings ↓ ↓ fact < Ramey , Singing >

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 (1956) and Wittgenstein (1922) and the earlier views which Moore (1953) and Russell (1912) 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 contrast to earlier empiricist theories, the thesis is not that one's ideas per se resemble what they are about. Rather, the propositions which give the contents of one's true beliefs mirror reality, in virtue of entering into correspondence relations to the right pieces of it.

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 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 (1989) 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 (1906). (This is the theory that Russell (1910a) attacks.) Joachim says that:

Truth in its essential nature is that systematic coherence which is the character of a significant whole (p. 76).

We will not attempt a full exposition of Joachim's view, which would take us well beyond the discussion of truth into the details of British idealism. But a few remarks about his theory will help to give substance to the quoted passage.

Perhaps most importantly, Joachim talks of ‘truth’ in the singular. This is not merely a turn of phrase, but a reflection of his monistic idealism. Joachim insists that what is true is the “whole complete truth” (p. 90). 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. But even these systems are only true to a degree, measuring the extent to which they express the content of the single ‘whole complete truth’. Any real judgment we might make will only be partially true.

To flesh out Joachim's theory, we would have to explain what a significant whole is. We will not attempt that, as it leads us to some of the more formidable aspects of his view, e.g., that it is a “process of self-fulfillment” (p. 77). But it is clear that Joachim takes ‘systematic coherence’ to be stronger than consistency. In keeping with his holism about content, he rejects the idea that coherence is a relation between independently identified contents, and so finds it necessary to appeal to ‘significant wholes’.

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:

A belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent system of beliefs.

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. Put as such, it is clearly not Joachim's theory (it lacks his monism, and he rejects propositions), but it is a standard take on coherence in the contemporary literature. (It is the way the coherence theory is given in Walker (1989), for instance.) 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. (An argument along these lines is found in Blanshard (1939), who holds a form of the coherence theory closely related to Joachim's.)

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 (1991) 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. If there is nothing to truth beyond what is to be found in an appropriate system of beliefs, then it would seem one's beliefs constitute the world in a way that amounts to idealism. (Walker (1989) 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 6.5 below.)

For more on the coherence theory, see 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:

Truth is the end of inquiry.

(See, for instance Hartshorne et al., 1931-58, §3.432.) Both Peirce and James are associated with the slogan that:

Truth is satisfactory to believe.

James (e.g., 1907) understands this principle as telling us what practical value truth has. True beliefs are guaranteed not to conflict with subsequent experience. Likewise, Peirce's slogan tells us that true beliefs will remain settled at the end of prolonged inquiry. Peirce's slogan is perhaps most typically associated with pragmatist views of truth, so we might take it to be our canonical neo-classical theory. However, the contemporary literature does not seem to have firmly settled upon a received ‘neo-classical’ pragmatist theory.

In her reconstruction (upon which we have relied heavily), Haack (1976) notes that the pragmatists' views on truth also make room for the idea that truth involves a kind of correspondence, insofar as the scientific method of inquiry is answerable to some independent world. Peirce, for instance, does not reject a correspondence theory outright; rather, he complains that it provides merely a ‘nominal’ or ‘transcendental’ definition of truth (e.g Hartshorne et al., 1931-58, §5.553, 5.572), which is cut off from practical matters of experience, belief, and doubt (§5.416). (See Misak (1991) 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.

James' views are discussed further in the entry on William James . Peirce's views are discussed further in the entry on Charles Sanders Peirce .

2. Tarski's theory of truth

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 (1935) is very much of a piece with other works in mathematical logic, such as his (1931), 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 this respect, Tarski's work provides a set of highly useful tools that may be employed in a wide range of philosophical projects.

Tarski's work has a number of components, which we will consider in turn.

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. For instance, Moore and Russell's turn to the correspondence theory was driven by their views on whether there are propositions to be the bearers of truth. 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. This is not an entirely novel development: Russell (1956) also takes truth to apply to sentence (which he calls ‘propositions’ in that text). 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.g., Tarski, 1944). (Russell (1956) makes a similar suggestion that sentences are the appropriate truth-bearers “for the purposes of logic” (p. 184), though he still takes the classical metaphysical issues to be important.)

We will return to the issue of the primary bearers of truth in section 6.1. For the moment, it will be useful to simply follow Tarski's lead. 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.e., that they display no context-dependence. We are taking sentences to be what Quine (1960) calls ‘eternal sentences’.

In some places (e.g., Tarski, 1944), Tarski refers to his view as the ‘semantic conception of truth’. It is not entirely clear just what Tarski had in mind by this, but it is clear enough that Tarski's theory defines truth for sentences in terms of concepts like reference and satisfaction, which are intimately related to the basic semantic functions of names and predicates (according to many approaches to semantics).

Let us suppose we have a fixed language L whose sentences are fully interpreted. The basic question Tarski poses is what an adequate theory of truth for L would be. Tarski's answer is embodied in what he calls Convention T :

An adequate theory of truth for L must imply, for each sentence φ of L

⌈ φ ⌉  is true if and only if φ .

(We have simplified Tarski's presentation somewhat.) This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. Given the assumption that L is fully interpreted, we may assume that each sentence φ in fact has a truth value. In light of this, Convention T guarantees that the truth predicate given by the theory will be extensionally correct , i.e., have as its extension all and only the true sentences of L .

Convention T draws our attention to the biconditionals of the form

⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ ,

which are usually called the Tarski biconditionals for a language L .

Tarski does not merely propose a condition of adequacy for theories of truth, he also shows how to meet it. One of his insights is that if the language L displays the right structure, then truth for L can be defined recursively. For instance, let us suppose that L is a simple formal language, containing two atomic sentences ‘snow is white’ and ‘grass is green’, and the sentential connectives ∨ and ¬.

In spite of its simplicity, L contains infinitely many distinct sentences. But truth can be defined for all of them by recursion.

• ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.
• ‘Grass is green’ is true if and only if grass is green.
• ⌈ φ ∨ ψ ⌉ is true if and only if ⌈ φ ⌉ is true or ⌈ ψ ⌉ is true.
• ⌈ ¬φ ⌉ is true if and only if it is not the case that ⌈ φ ⌉ is true.

This theory satisfies Convention T.

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.

Tarski's techniques go further, however. 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 . Let us consider a language L ′ , just like L except that instead of simply having two atomic sentences, L ′ breaks atomic sentences into terms and predicates. L ′ contains terms ‘snow’ and ‘grass’ (let us engage in the idealization that these are simply singular terms), and predicates ‘is white’ and ‘is green’. So L ′ is like L , but also contains the sentences ‘Snow is green’ and ‘Grass is white’.)

We can define truth for atomic sentences of L ′ in the following way.

• ‘Snow’ refers to snow.
• ‘Grass’ refers to grass.
• a satisfies ‘is white’ if and only if a is white.
• a satisfies ‘is green’ if and only if a is green.
• For any atomic sentence ⌈ t is P ⌉ : ⌈ t is P ⌉ is true if and only if the referent of ⌈ t ⌉ satisfies ⌈ P ⌉ .

One of Tarski's key insights is that the apparatus of satisfaction allows for a recursive definition of truth for sentences with quantifiers , though we will not examine that here. We could repeat the recursion clauses for L to produce a full theory of truth for L ′.

Let us say that a Tarskian theory of truth is a recursive theory, built up in ways similar to the theory of truth for L ′. Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. A Tarskian theory of truth for a language L can be used to show that theories in L are consistent. This was especially important to Tarski, who was concerned the Liar paradox would make theories in languages containing a truth predicate inconsistent.

For more, see the entry on Tarski's truth definitions .

3. Correspondence revisited

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. The basic idea of correspondence, as Tarski (1944) and others have suggested, is captured in the slogan from Aristotle's Metaphysics Γ 7.27, “to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true” (Ross, 1928). ‘What is’, it is natural enough to say, is a fact, but this natural turn of phrase may well not require a full-blown metaphysics of facts.

Yet without the metaphysics of facts, the notion of correspondence as discussed in section 1.1 loses substance. 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 (1985-86, p. 333) is that “As a philosophical account of truth, Tarski's theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.”) But a number of philosophers (e.g., Davidson, 1969; Field, 1972) have seen Tarski's theory as providing at least the core of a correspondence theory of truth which dispenses with the metaphysics of facts.

Tarski's theory shows how truth for a sentence is determined by certain properties of its constituents; in particular, by properties of reference and satisfaction (as well as by the logical constants). 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. However, a number of authors have noted that Tarski's theory cannot by itself provide us with such an account of truth. As we will discuss more fully in section 4.2, Tarski's apparatus is in fact compatible with theories of truth that are certainly not correspondence theories.

Field (1972), in an influential discussion and diagnosis of what is lacking in Tarski's account, in effect points out that whether we really have something worthy of the name ‘correspondence’ depends on our having notions of reference and satisfaction which genuinely establish word-to-world relations. (Field does not use the term ‘correspondence’, but does talk about e.g., the “connection between words and things” (p. 373).) By itself, Field notes, Tarski's theory does not offer an account of reference and satisfaction at all. 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. Such a theory should tell us what makes it the case that the word ‘snow’ refer to snow. (In 1972, Field was envisaging a physicalist account, along the lines of the causal theory of reference.) This should inter alia guarantee that truth is really determined by word-to-world relations, so in conjunction with the Tarskian recursive definition, it could provide a correspondence theory of truth.

Such a theory clearly does not rely on a metaphysics of facts. Indeed, it is in many ways metaphysically neutral, as it does not take a stand on the nature of particulars, or of the properties or universals that underwrite facts about satisfaction. However, it may not be entirely devoid of metaphysical implications, as we will discuss further in section 4.1.

There have been a number of correspondence theories that do make use of facts. Some are notably different from the neo-classical theory sketched in section 1.1. For instance, Austin (1950) proposes a view in which each statement (understood roughly as an utterance event) corresponds to both a fact or situation, and a type of situation. It is true if the former is of the latter type. This theory (which has been developed by situation theory (e.g., Barwise and Perry, 1986) rejects the idea that correspondence is a kind of mirroring between a fact and a proposition. Rather, correspondence relations to Austin are entirely conventional. As an ordinary language philosopher, Austin grounds his notion of fact more in linguistic usage than in an articulated metaphysics, but he defends his use of fact-talk in Austin (1961b).

In a somewhat more Tarskian spirit, formal theories of facts or states of affairs have also been developed. For instance, Taylor (1976) provides a recursive definition of a collection of ‘states of affairs’ for a given language. Taylor's states of affairs seem to reflect the notion of fact at work in the neo-classical theory, though as an exercise in logic, they are officially n -tuples of objects and intensions .

There are more metaphysically robust notions of fact in the current literature. For instance, Armstrong (1997) defends a metaphysics in which facts (under the name ‘states of affairs’) are metaphysically fundamental. The view has much in common with the neo-classical one. Like the neo-classical view, Armstrong endorses a version of the correspondence theory. States of affairs are truthmakers for propositions, though Armstrong argues that there may be many such truthmakers for a given proposition, and vice versa. (Armstrong also envisages a naturalistic account of propositions as classes of equivalent belief-tokens.)

Armstrong's primary argument is what he calls the ‘truthmaker argument’. It begins by advancing a truthmaker principle , which holds that for any given truth, there must be a truthmaker—a “something in the world which makes it the case, that serves as an ontological ground, for this truth” (p. 115). It is then argued that facts are the appropriate truthmakers.

In contrast to the approach to correspondence discussed in section 3.1, which offered correspondence with minimal ontological implications, this view returns to the ontological basis of correspondence that was characteristic of the neo-classical theory.

The truthmaker principle is often put as the schema:

If φ , then there is an x such that necessarily, if x exists, then φ .

(Fox (1987) proposed putting the principle this way, rather than explicitly in terms of truth.)

The truthmaker principle expresses the ontological aspect of the neo-classical correspondence theory. Not merely must truth obtain in virtue of word-to-world relations, but there must be a thing that makes each truth true.

The neo-classical correspondence theory, and Armstrong, cast facts as the appropriate truthmakers. However, it is a non-trivial step from the truthmaker principle to the existence of facts. There are a number of proposals in the literature for how other sorts of objects could be truthmakers; for instance, tropes (called ‘moments’, in Mulligan et al., 1984). Parsons (1999) argues that the truthmaker principle (presented in a somewhat different form) is compatible with there being only concrete particulars.

As we saw in discussing the neo-classical correspondence theory, truthmaker theories, and fact theories in particular, raise a number of issues. One which has been discussed at length, for instance, is whether there are negative facts . Negative facts would be the truthmakers for negated sentences. Russell (1956) notoriously expresses ambivalence about whether there are negative facts. Armstrong (1997) rejects them, while Beall (2000) defends them.

4. Realism and anti-realism

The neo-classical theories we surveyed in section 1 made the theory of truth an application of their background metaphysics (and in some cases epistemology). In section 2 and especially in section 3, we returned to the issue of what sorts of ontological commitments might go with the theory of truth. There we saw a range of options, from relatively ontologically non-committal theories, to theories requiring highly specific ontologies.

There is another way in which truth relates to metaphysics. Many ideas about realism and anti-realism are closely related to ideas about truth. Indeed, many approaches to questions about realism and anti-realism simply make them questions about truth.

In discussing the approach to correspondence of section 3.1, we noted that it has few ontological requirements. It relies on there being objects of reference, and something about the world which makes for determinate satisfaction relations; but beyond that, it is ontologically neutral. But as we mentioned there, this is not to say that it has no metaphysical implications. A correspondence theory of truth, of any kind, is often taken to embody a form of realism .

The key features of realism, as we will take it, are that:

• The world exists objectively, independently of the ways we think about it or describe it.
• Our thoughts and claims are about that world.

(Wright (1992) offers a nice statement of this way of thinking about realism.) These theses imply that our claims are objectively true or false, depending on how the world they are about is. The world that we represent in our thoughts or language is an objective world. (Realism may be restricted to some subject-matter, or range of discourse, but for simplicity, we will talk about only its global form.)

It is often argued that these theses require some form of the correspondence theory of truth. (Putnam (1978, p. 18) notes, “Whatever else realists say, they typically say that they believe in a ‘correspondence theory of truth’.”) At least, they are supported by the kind of correspondence theory without facts discussed in section 3.1, such as Field's proposal. Such a theory will provide an account of objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and show how these determine the truth or falsehood of what we say about the world. Field's own approach (1972) to this problem seeks a physicalist explanation of reference. But realism is a more general idea than physicalism. Any theory that provides objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and builds up a theory of truth from them, would give a form of realism. (Making the objectivity of reference the key to realism is characteristic of work of Putnam, e.g., 1978.)

Another important mark of realism expressed in terms of truth is the property of bivalence . As Dummett has stressed (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1983; 1991), a realist should see there being a fact of the matter one way or the other about whether any given claim is correct. Hence, one important mark of realism is that it goes together with the principle of bivalence : every truth-bearer (sentence or proposition) is true or false. In much of his work, Dummett has made this the characteristic mark of realism, and often identifies realism about some subject-matter with accepting bivalence for discourse about that subject-matter. At the very least, it captures a great deal of what is more loosely put in the statement of realism above.

Either the approach makes the theory of truth—or truth-and-reference—the primary vehicle for an account of realism. A theory of truth which substantiates bivalence, or a determinate reference relation, does most of the work of giving a realistic metaphysics. It might even simply be a realistic metaphysics.

We have thus turned on its head the relation of truth to metaphysics we saw in our discussion of the neo-classical correspondence theory in section 1.1. There, a correspondence theory of truth was built upon a substantial metaphysics. Here, we have seen how articulating a theory that captures the idea of correspondence can be crucial to providing a realist metaphysics. (For another perspective on realism and truth, see Alston (1996). Devitt (1984) offers an opposing view to the kind we have sketched here, which rejects any characterization of realism in terms of truth or other semantic concepts.)

In light of our discussion in section 1.1.1, we should pause to note that the connection between realism and the correspondence theory of truth is not absolute. When Moore and Russell held the identity theory of truth, they were most certainly realists. The right kind of metaphysics of propositions can support a realist view, as can a metaphysics of facts. The modern form of realism we have been discussing here seeks to avoid basing itself on such particular ontological commitments, and so prefers to rely on the kind of correspondence-without-facts approach discussed in section 3.1. This is not to say that realism will be devoid of ontological commitments, but the commitments will flow from whichever specific claims about some subject-matter are taken to be true.

For more on realism and truth, see the entry on realism .

It should come as no surprise that the relation between truth and metaphysics seen by modern realists can also be exploited by anti-realists. Many modern anti-realists see the theory of truth as the key to formulating and defending their views. With Dummett (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1991), we might expect the characteristic mark of anti-realism to be the rejection of bivalence.

Indeed, many contemporary forms of anti-realism may be formulated as theories of truth, and they do typically deny bivalence. Anti-realism comes in many forms, but let us take as an example a (somewhat crude) form of verificationism. Such a theory holds that a claim is correct just insofar as it is in principle verifiable , i.e., there is a verification procedure we could in principle carry out which would yield the answer that the claim in question was verified.

So understood, verificationism is a theory of truth. The claim is not that verification is the most important epistemic notion, but that truth just is verifiability. As with the kind of realism we considered in section 4.1, this view expresses its metaphysical commitments in its explanation of the nature of truth. Truth is not, to this view, a fully objective matter, independent of us or our thoughts. Instead, truth is constrained by our abilities to verify, and is thus constrained by our epistemic situation. Truth is to a significant degree an epistemic matter, which is typical of many anti-realist positions.

As Dummett says, the verificationist notion of truth does not appear to support bivalence. Any statement that reaches beyond what we can in principle verify or refute (verify its negation) will be a counter-example to bivalence. Take, for instance, the claim that there is some substance, say uranium, present in some region of the universe too distant to be inspected by us within the expected lifespan of the universe. Insofar as this really would be in principle unverifiable, we have no reason to maintain it is true or false according to the verificationist theory of truth.

Verificationism of this sort is one of a family of anti-realist views. Another example is the view that identifies truth with warranted assertibility. Assertibility, as well as verifiability, has been important in Dummett's work. (See also works of McDowell, e.g., 1976 and Wright, e.g., 1976; 1982; 1992.)

Anti-realism of the Dummettian sort is not a descendant of the coherence theory of truth per se . But in some ways, as Dummett himself has noted, it might be construed as a descendant—perhaps very distant—of idealism. If idealism is the most drastic form of rejection of the independence of mind and world, Dummettian anti-realism is a more modest form, which sees epistemology imprinted in the world, rather than the wholesale embedding of world into mind. At the same time, the idea of truth as warranted assertibility or verifiability reiterates a theme from the pragmatist views of truth we surveyed in section 1.3.

Anti-realist theories of truth, like the realist ones we discussed in section 4.1, can generally make use of the Tarskian apparatus. Convention T, in particular, does not discriminate between realist and anti-realist notions of truth. Likewise, the base clauses of a Tarskian recursive theory are given as disquotation principles, which are neutral between realist and anti-realist understandings of notions like reference. As we saw with the correspondence theory, giving a full account of the nature of truth will generally require more than the Tarskian apparatus itself. How an anti-realist is to explain the basic concepts that go into a Tarskian theory is a delicate matter. As Dummett and Wright have investigated in great detail, it appears that the background logic in which the theory is developed will have to be non-classical.

For more on anti-realism and truth, see the entry on realism .

Many commentators see a close connection between Dummett's anti-realism and the pragmatists' views of truth, in that both put great weight on ideas of verifiability or assertibility. Dummett himself stressed parallels between anti-realism and intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics.

Another view on truth which returns to pragmatist themes is the ‘internal realism’ of Putnam (1981). There Putnam glosses truth as what would be justified under ideal epistemic conditions. With the pragmatists, Putnam sees the ideal conditions as something which can be approximated, echoing the idea of truth as the end of inquiry.

Putnam is cautious about calling his view ant-realism, preferring the label ‘internal realism’. But he is clear that he sees his view as opposed to realism (‘metaphysical realism’, as he calls it).

5. Deflationism

We began in section 1 with the neo-classical theories, which explained the nature of truth within wider metaphysical systems. We then considered some alternatives in sections 2 and 3, some of which had more modest ontological implications. But we still saw in section 4 that substantial theories of truth tend to imply metaphysical theses, or even embody metaphysical positions.

One long-standing trend in the discussion of truth is to insist that truth really does not carry metaphysical significance at all. It does not, as it has no significance on its own. A number of different ideas have been advanced along these lines, under the general heading of deflationism .

Deflationist ideas appear quite early on, including a well-known argument against correspondence in Frege (1918-19). However, many deflationists take their cue from an idea of Ramsey (1927), often called the equivalence thesis :

⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true ⌉ has the same meaning as φ.

(Ramsey himself takes truth-bearers to be propositions rather than sentences. Glanzberg (2003b) questions whether Ramsey's account of propositions really makes him a deflationist.)

This can be taken as the core of a theory of truth, often called the redundancy theory . The redundancy theory holds that there is no property of truth at all, and appearances of the expression ‘true’ in our sentences are redundant, having no effect on what we express.

The equivalence thesis can also be understood in terms of speech acts rather than meaning:

To assert that ⌈ φ ⌉ is true is just to assert that φ.

This view was advanced by Strawson (1949); Strawson (1950), though Strawson also argues that there are other important aspects of speech acts involving ‘true’ beyond what is asserted. For instance, they may be acts of confirming or granting what someone else said. (Strawson would also object to my making sentences the bearers of truth.)

In either its speech act or meaning form, the redundancy theory argues there is no property of truth. It is commonly noted that the equivalence thesis itself is not enough to sustain the redundancy theory. It merely holds that when truth occurs in the outermost position in a sentence, and the full sentence to which truth is predicated is quoted, then truth is eliminable. What happens in other environments is left to be seen. Modern developments of the redundancy theory include Grover et al. (1975).

The equivalence principle looks familiar: it has something like the form of the Tarski biconditionals discussed in section 2.2. However, it is a stronger principle, which identifies the two sides of the biconditional—either their meanings or the speech acts performed with them. The Tarski biconditionals themselves are simply material biconditionals.

A number of deflationary theories look to the Tarski biconditionals rather than the full equivalence principle. Their key idea is that even if we do not insist on redundancy, we may still hold the following theses:

• For a given language L and every φ in L , the biconditionals ⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ hold by definition (or analytically, or trivially, or by stipulation …).
• This is all there is to say about the concept of truth.

We will refer to views which adopt these as minimalist . Officially, this is the name of the view of Horwich (1990), but we will apply it somewhat more widely. (Horwich's view differs in some specific respects from what is presented here, such as predicating truth of propositions, but we believe it is close enough to what is sketched here to justify the name.)

The second thesis, that the Tarski biconditionals are all there is to say about truth, captures something similar to the redundancy theory's view. It comes near to saying that truth is not a property at all; to the extent that truth is a property, there is no more to it than the disquotational pattern of the Tarski biconditionals. As Horwich puts it, there is no substantial underlying metaphysics to truth. And as Soames (1984) stresses, certainly nothing that could ground as far-reaching a view as realism or anti-realism.

If there is no property of truth, or no substantial property of truth, what role does our term ‘true’ play? Deflationists typically note that the truth predicate provides us with a convenient device of disquotation . Such a device allows us to make some useful claims which we could not formulate otherwise, such as the blind ascription ‘The next thing that Bill says will be true’. (For more on blind ascriptions and their relation to deflationism, see Azzouni, 2001.) A predicate obeying the Tarski biconditionals can also be used to express what would otherwise be (potentially) infinite conjunctions or disjunctions, such as the notorious statement of Papal infallibility put ‘Everything the Pope says is true’. (Suggestions like this are found in Leeds, 1978 and Quine, 1970.)

Recognizing these uses for a truth predicate, we might simply think of it as introduced into a language by stipulation . The Tarski biconditionals themselves might be stipulated, as the minimalists envisage. One could also construe the clauses of a recursive Tarskian theory as stipulated. (There are some significant logical differences between these two options. See Halbach (1999) and Ketland (1999) for discussion.) Other deflationists, such as Beall (forthcoming) or Field (1994), might prefer to focus here on rules of inference or rules of use, rather than the Tarski biconditionals themselves.

There are also important connections between deflationist ideas about truth and certain ideas about meaning. These are fundamental to the deflationism of Field (1986); Field (1994), which will be discussed in section 6.3. For an insightful critique of deflationism, see Gupta (1993).

For more on deflationism, see the entry on the deflationary theory of truth .

6. Truth and language

One of the important themes in the literature on truth is its connection to meaning, or more generally, to language. This has proved an important application of ideas about truth, and an important issue in the study of truth itself. This section will consider a number of issues relating truth and language.

There have been many debates in the literature over what the primary bearers of truth are. Candidates typically include beliefs, propositions, sentences, and utterances. We have already seen in section 1 that the classical debates on truth took this issue very seriously, and what sort of theory of truth was viable was often seen to depend on what the bearers of truth are.

In spite of the number of options under discussion, and the significance that has sometimes been placed on the choice, there is an important similarity between candidate truth-bearers. Consider the role of truth-bearers in the correspondence theory, for instance. We have seen versions of it which take beliefs, propositions, or interpreted sentences to be the primary bearers of truth. But all of them rely upon the idea that their truth-bearers represent the world. It is in virtue of representing the world that truth-bearers are able to enter into correspondence relations. Truth-bearers are things which represent, and are true or false depending on whether they correctly represent the facts in the world.

Exactly the same point can be made for the anti-realist theories of truth we saw in section 4.2, though with different accounts of how truth-bearers represent, and what the world contributes. Though it is somewhat more delicate, something similar can be said for coherence theories, which usually take beliefs, or whole systems of beliefs, as the primary truth-bearers. Though a coherence theory will hardly talk of beliefs representing the facts, it is crucial to the coherence theory that beliefs are contentful beliefs of agents, and that they can enter into coherence relations. Noting the complications in interpreting the genuine classical coherence theories, it appears fair to note that this requires truth-bearers to be representations, however the background metaphysics (presumably idealism) understands representation.

Though Tarski works with sentences, the same can be said of his theory. The sentences to which Tarski's theory applies are fully interpreted, and so also are representations. They characterize the world as being some way or another, and this in turn determines whether they are true or false. Indeed, Tarski needs there to be a fact of the matter about whether each sentence is true or false (abstracting away from context dependence), to ensure that the Tarski biconditionals do their job of fixing the extension of ‘is true’. (But note that just what this fact of the matter consists in is left open by the Tarskian apparatus.)

We thus find the usual candidate truth-bearers linked in a tight circle: interpreted sentences, the propositions they express, the belief speakers might hold towards them, and the acts of assertion they might perform with them are all connected by providing representations. This makes them reasonable bearers of truth. For this reason, it seems, contemporary debates on truth have been much less concerned with the issue of truth-bearers than were the classical ones. Some issues remain, of course. Different metaphysical assumptions may place primary weight on some particular node in the circle, and some metaphysical views still challenge the existence of some of the nodes. Perhaps more importantly, different views on the nature of representation itself might cast doubt on the coherence of some of the nodes. Notoriously for instance, Quineans (e.g., Quine, 1960) deny the existence of intensional entities, including propositions. Even so, it increasingly appears doubtful that attention to truth per se will bias us towards one particular primary bearer of truth.

There is a related, but somewhat different point, which is important to understanding the theories we have canvassed.

The neo-classical theories of truth start with truth-bearers which are already understood to be representational, and explain how they get their truth values. But along the way, they often do something more. Take the neo-classical correspondence theory, for instance. This theory, in effect, starts with a view of how propositions represent the world. They do so by having constituents in the world, which are brought together in the right way. There are many complications about the nature of representation, but at a minimum, this tells us what the truth conditions associated with a proposition are. The theory then explains how such truth conditions can lead to the truth value true , by the right fact existing .

Many theories of truth are like the neo-classical correspondence theory in being as much theories of how truth-bearers represent as of how their truth values are fixed. Again, abstracting from some complications about representation, this makes them theories both of truth conditions and truth values . The Tarskian theory of truth can be construed this way too. This can be seen both in the way the Tarski biconditionals are understood, and how a recursive theory of truth is understood. As we explained Convention T in section 2.2, the primary role of a Tarski biconditional of the form ⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ is to fix whether φ is in the extension of ‘is true’ or not. But it can also be seen as stating the truth conditions of φ. Both rely on the fact that the unquoted occurrence of φ is an occurrence of an interpreted sentence, which has a truth value, but also provides its truth conditions upon occasions of use.

Likewise, the base clauses of the recursive definition of truth, those for reference and satisfaction, are taken to state the relevant semantic properties of constituents of an interpreted sentence. In discussing Tarski's theory of truth in section 2, we focused on how these determine the truth value of a sentence. But they also show us the truth conditions of a sentence are determined by these semantic properties. For instance, for a simple sentence like ‘Snow is white’, the theory tells us that the sentence is true if the referent of ‘Snow’ satisfies ‘white’. This can be understood as telling us that the truth conditions of ‘Snow is white’ are those conditions in which the referent of ‘Snow’ satisfies the predicate ‘is white’.

As we saw in sections 3 and 4, the Tarskian apparatus is often seen as needing some kind of supplementation to provide a full theory of truth. A full theory of truth conditions will likewise rest on how the Tarskian apparatus is put to use. In particular, just what kinds of conditions those in which the referent of ‘snow’ satisfies the predicate ‘is white’ are will depend on whether we opt for realist or anti-realist theories. The realist option will simply look for the conditions under which the stuff snow bears the property of whiteness; the anti-realist option will look to the conditions under which it can be verified, or asserted with warrant, that snow is white.

There is a broad family of theories of truth which are theories of truth conditions as well as truth values. This family includes the correspondence theory in all its forms—classical and modern. Yet this family is much wider than the correspondence theory, and wider than realist theories of truth more generally. Indeed, virtually all the theories of truth that make contributions to the realism/anti-realism debate are theories of truth conditions. In a slogan, for many approaches to truth, a theory of truth is a theory of truth conditions.

Any theory that provides a substantial account of truth conditions can offer a simple account of truth values: a truth-bearer provides truth conditions, and it is true if and only if the actual way things are is among them. Because of this, any such theory will imply a strong, but very particular, biconditional, close in form to the Tarski biconditionals. It can be made most vivid if we think of propositions as sets of truth conditions. Let p be a proposition, i.e., a set of truth conditions, and let a be the ‘actual world’, the condition that actually obtains. Then we can almost trivially see:

p  is true if and only if  a ∈ p .

This is presumably necessary. But it is important to observe that it is in one respect crucially different from the genuine Tarski biconditionals. It makes no use of a non-quoted sentence, or in fact any sentence at all. It does not have the disquotational character of the Tarski biconditionals.

Though this may look like a principle that deflationists should applaud, it is not. Rather, it shows that deflationists cannot really hold a truth-conditional view of content at all. If they do, then they inter alia have a non-deflationary theory of truth, simply by linking truth value to truth conditions through the above biconditional. It is typical of thoroughgoing deflationist theories to present a non-truth-conditional theory of the contents of sentences: a non-truth-conditional account of what makes truth-bearers representational. We take it this is what is offered, for instance, by the use theory of propositions in Horwich (1990). It is certainly one of the leading ideas of Field (1986); Field (1994), which explore how a conceptual role account of content would ground a deflationist view of truth. Once one has a non-truth-conditional account of content, it is then possible to add a deflationist truth predicate, and use this to give purely deflationist statements of truth conditions. But the starting point must be a non-truth-conditional view of what makes truth-bearers representational.

Both deflationists and anti-realists start with something other than correspondence truth conditions. But whereas an anti-realist will propose a different theory of truth conditions, a deflationists will start with an account of content which is not a theory of truth conditions at all. The deflationist will then propose that the truth predicate, given by the Tarski biconditionals, is an additional device, not for understanding content, but for disquotation. It is a useful device, as we discussed in section 5.3, but it has nothing to do with content. To a deflationist, the representational properties of truth-bearers have nothing to do with truth.

It has been an influential idea, since the seminal work of Davidson (e.g., 1967), to see a Tarskian theory of truth as a theory of meaning. At least, as we have seen, a Tarskian theory can be seen as showing how the truth conditions of a sentence are determined by the semantic properties of its parts. More generally, as we see in much of the work of Davidson and of Dummett (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1983; 1991), giving a theory of truth conditions can be understood as a crucial part of giving a theory of meaning. Thus, any theory of truth that falls into the broad category of those which are theories of truth conditions can be seen as part of a theory of meaning.

A number of commentators on Tarski (e.g., Etchemendy, 1988; Soames, 1984) have observed that the Tarskian apparatus needs to be understood in a particular way to make it suitable for giving a theory of meaning. Tarski's work is often taken to show how to define a truth predicate. If it is so used, then whether or not a sentence is true becomes, in essence, a truth of mathematics. Presumably what truth conditions sentences of a natural language have is a contingent matter, so a truth predicate defined in this way cannot be used to give a theory of meaning for them. But the Tarskian apparatus need not be used just to explicitly define truth. The recursive characterization of truth can be used to state the semantic properties of sentences and their constituents, as a theory of meaning should. In such an application, truth is not taken to be explicitly defined, but rather the truth conditions of sentences are taken to be described. (See Heck, 1997 for more discussion.)

Inspired by Quine (e.g., 1960), Davidson himself is well known for taking a different approach to using a theory of truth as a theory of meaning than is implicit in Field (1972). Whereas a Field-inspired approach is based on a causal account of reference, Davidson (e.g., 1973) proposes a process of radical interpretation in which an interpreter builds a Tarskian theory to interpret a speaker as holding beliefs which are consistent, coherent, and largely true.

This led Davidson (1986) to argue that most of our beliefs are true—a conclusion that squares well with the coherence theory of truth. This is a weaker claim than the neo-classical coherence theory would make. It does not insist that all the members of any coherent set of beliefs are true, or that truth simply consists in being a member of such a coherent set. But all the same, the conclusion that most of our beliefs are true, because their contents are to be understood through a process of radical interpretation which will make them a coherent and rational system, has a clear affinity with the neo-classical coherence theory.

At the same time, Davidson insists that this observation is compatible with a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Indeed, insofar as the Tarskian theory of truth provides a correspondence theory, radical interpretation builds a correspondence theory of truth into its account of content. As we have seen, whether or not this really amounts to a correspondence theory is disputed. As we saw in section 3.1, the Tarskian theory by itself is weaker than the kind of theory proposed by Field (1972); as we saw in section 4.2, it is compatible with anti-realist views of truth. Nonetheless, the Tarskian clauses themselves state more of about the relation of word-to-world than the neo-classical coherence theory anticipated, which leads Davidson to the conclusion that coherence results in correspondence.

For more on Davidson, see the entry on Donald Davidson .

The relation between truth and meaning is not the only place where truth and language relate closely. Another is the idea, also much-stressed in the writings of Dummett (e.g., 1959), of the relation between truth and assertion. Again, it fits into a platitude:

Truth is the aim of assertion.

A person making an assertion, the platitude holds, aims to say something true.

It is easy to cast this platitude in a way that appears false. Surely, many speakers do not aim to say something true. Any speaker who lies does not. Any speaker whose aim is to flatter, or to deceive, aims at something other than truth.

The motivation for the truth-assertion platitude is rather different. It looks at assertion as a practice, in which certain rules are constitutive . As is often noted, the natural parallel here is with games, like chess or baseball, which are defined by certain rules. The platitude holds that it is constitutive of the practice of making assertions that assertions aim at truth. An assertion by its nature presents what it is saying as true, and any assertion which fails to be true is ipso facto liable to criticism, whether or not the person making the assertion themself wished to have said something true or to have lied.

Dummett's original discussion of this idea was partially a criticism of deflationism (in particular, of views of Strawson, 1950). The idea that we fully explain the concept of truth by way of the Tarski biconditionals is challenged by the claim that the truth-assertion platitude is fundamental to truth. As Dummett there put it, what is left out by the Tarski biconditionals, and captured by the truth-assertion platitude, is the point of the concept of truth, or what the concept is used for. (For further discussion, see Glanzberg, 2003a and Wright, 1992.)

Whether or not assertion has such constitutive rules is, of course, controversial. But among those who accept that it does, the place of truth in the constitutive rules is itself controversial. The leading alternative, defended by Williamson (1996), is that knowledge, not truth, is fundamental to the constitutive rules of assertion. Williamson defends an account of assertion based on the rule that one must assert only what one knows.

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Truth Essay Guide - Importance of a Truth Today

Any topic expressing a particular view of truth is a good idea as it's an all-time relevant issue. While working on a truth essay, you should combine examples from real-life, widely-accepted definitions, and personal experience to identify this phenomenon as accurately as possible.

If this writing guide, we will explain how to write an essay about truth, explore the matter in terms of prompts and topics, and provide you with some simple examples and tips.

What to Write in Your Truth Essay?

An essay on such a specific topic isn't a separate type of academic paper - it's just writing with a different subject matter. Defining it is not that easy. Our beliefs and perception of truth may vary depending on subjective experience and even life values. That is why one of the simplest strategies would be to come up with a definition of truth. There, you don't have to argue that lying is evil, and we should be honest with each other. You can just provide a trustworthy definition to the phenomena and analyze the way the world translates its importance. The main sources one can use for this paper are reliable websites and dictionaries.

And what if you're writing a philosophy essay? This is what is preferred the most amongst the college students because Philosophy offers more self-expression. Here, every opinion may be considered relevant if you provide the reader with reliable evidence and reasonable statements. But don't forget about the coherence. While being immersed in your thoughts, you may forget about the essay structure and start beating around the bush. To avoid that, pay attention to the structure of your truth essay and don't neglect to outline your assignment. Here is an example of how you can start this writing:

"I think that truth is one's perception of beliefs and decisions. The contrasting points of view predetermine the way each of us understands this phenomenon and answer the question, 'What is true or false?'. There is only one thing that unites all possible definitions of truth and makes people agree on it. That is something believed to be accurate while the opposite is wrong."

So, a philosophy essay on this topic is based more on the author's opinion than an official definition from the dictionary.

Master Absolute Truth Essay Writing

We've gone through two most popular assignment types that the students of different schools frequently deal with. But there are truth essays with other purposes that we must consider. Look through the following list with short explanations.

• Descriptive. Involving touch, smell, hear, sight, taste, try to describe what a true is by these means.
• Narrative. Create a narration in which the frankness will be a core idea.
• Compare-contrast. Analyze why people express the same or completely different opinions on truth.
• Cause-effect (problem-solution). Consider the consequences the world actually is facing because of the lie.
• Argumentative. Formulate an idea related to the topic and provide arguments showing your statement is true and valid.
• Persuasive. Convince the reader that a certain statement is/is not the truth.
• Reflective. The way you reflect on being honest or telling lies.

So, when you are assigned to write an essay on truth, you may focus on the purpose that interests you the most (unless the type is assigned)

10 Great Truth Essay Topics

There are many students thinking that truth essays are all about "grass is green" and "the moon has craters" issues. The joke is it's not true - there are many great ideas to write about. It depends on which aspect you wish to focus as well as the type of academic paper you have to turn in. Here are some questions to consider:

• The issue of true words through the history of mankind.
• Locke's theories of truth correspondence.
• The link between truth and honesty.
• The challenges of being sincere.
• The consequences of pretending to be someone else.
• The idea of honesty in "Dear Evan Hansen."
• Lies VS Truth: A never-never-ending battle.
• Importance of being honest as a postmodern thought.
• Situations in which lies could be justified.
• Lying to dear people. How do they know about you being dishonest?
• The correspondence theory of truth in everyday life.
• How lying can distort our sense of reality.

The range of possible topic options is far wider - just decide a knowledge of what life aspect, science, or course you can successfully apply in your assignment.

Essay Thesis Statement

Each paper of this type should have a frankness-related thesis statement. That is the main idea of the entire writing that should appear in the opening paragraph (introduction). In your conclusion, you may paraphrase the thesis from the first paragraph to remind people of what you plan to talk about. However, we advise you to make conclusions more valuable than that and come up with thought-provoking ideas.

Essay about Honesty

Now, we're going to provide several examples, and the first one is an essay about truth and honesty. These two terms are interrelated, and one can barely exist without another. You may start with something like this:

"How is telling accurate things related to honesty? Honesty is one of the best human traits as it refers to always being open, no matter how bitter or sweet it is. Honesty is what makes human beings brave and robust, and that is why it is one of the most significant traits of candidates to become a president and other ruling authorities. It can lead to certain problems, but people tend to sympathize with those who are honest. It's an integral part of morality, which is the best policy in relationships; it's a significant building block."

Essay about Lies

Is life worth lying? In an essay about lies, you may compare and contrast two opposites. It is okay if you think that telling lies is more beneficial than being frank in specific cases. Share some examples and try to prove your position by providing relevant evidence. Here's an example that can inspire you:

"Is there a single person in the world who has never told a lie throughout life? Excluding Jesus Christ and some other saints from the Bible, everyone has experienced lies from both sides - telling and being told. A completely honest person is a myth. It's not because all people are bad and insincere. In my essay, I'm going to prove that telling lies in some situations may save one's life."

Importance of Being Frank in Our Life

Here, you should provide enough arguments against lying. You may recall some episodes from your favorite movies or just depict real-life examples when telling lies ended up dramatically for both sides. One of the good examples could be Evan Hansen from the "Dear Evan Hansen" musical. There, the socially anxious boy pretended to be the friend of his classmate who committed suicide to make friends with his family. Then, he becomes a hero in the eyes of other people. It all resulted in a big confusion, and the boy was left with nothing.

Truth Essays for Kids

Such an essay for kids should explain what the matter of truth is from a childish perspective. Avoid using difficult, complex terms from philosophy or other science as your target audience won't understand the text. Try to explain what each complex term means.

"In human frankness, there is essential and biggest virtue. Sincerity refers to speaking exactly what you think and feel, and an honest man never tells a lie. We should start telling only the true things since our early days, and here, a lot depends on our parents. You might have had these conversations with them already. Lying to parents is the biggest sin, so practice being honest with them and people around. You may tell lies only in sporadic cases, ensuring that no one will suffer from it, but benefit."

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Society, especially Western society, places a high value on truth.

Truth is the foundation for a fair and just society. In court, we require witnesses to swear to tell ‘ the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth ’, because only that way can justice be delivered.

Most modern religions also have something to say on the matter, and it is clear that they place a high value on the principle of truthfulness.

But is truthfulness an outdated principle in modern times, or does it still have value?

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life

- Jesus Christ

Two Types of Truth

There are two aspects of truthfulness: being true to yourself, and being true to others.

The two are not quite the same thing, although they are closely linked. Shakespeare, for example, suggested that someone who was true to themselves was unlikely to be false to others.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as night the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man.

- William Shakespeare

Truthful people will:

Understand themselves , and know their own strengths and weaknesses. They will not delude themselves about their successes or failures;

Present themselves in a way that shows who they really are. Their reputation will be founded on what they are and, whether in public or private, they will be the same;

Meet any commitments or promises that they make;

Be accurate in their descriptions of themselves or others , so that they do not mislead others.

The Importance of Truth

Truth matters, both to us as individuals and to society as a whole.

As individuals , being truthful means that we can grow and mature, learning from our mistakes.

For society , truthfulness makes social bonds, and lying and hypocrisy break them.

If you doubt this, consider what happens when you find out that someone has lied to you. You feel less inclined to trust them next time, and also less inclined to trust other people more generally.

Is it Ever Right not to Tell the Truth?

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people — including me — would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson

There are two possible ways not to tell the truth: not to provide any information, and to provide false information.

First, you do not need to tell everyone everything. Excessive sharing of personal information is not welcome, even if it is the truth. Context is all-important, and you have to consider whether people need and/or want to know.

Sometimes it is better not to say something.

You also need to be able to remain silent if someone has confided in you and asked you not to share the information further.

Under these circumstances, it is therefore appropriate not to tell all the truth.

However, is it right to provide false information or lie?

Is the ‘ right ’ answer to the question ‘ Does my bum look big in this? ’ ever ‘ yes ’?

Well, maybe, in the changing room, before ‘ this ’ is bought. But maybe not. The truthful person will think very carefully about the right answer to that question.

Truthfulness is important, but so is not hurting others. Truthfulness and tact must go hand in hand, because otherwise the truth may be unacceptable to those who hear it.

And consider a government agent. They may need to lie, or pretend to be something that they are not, for the sake of the greater good. But they may still be true to themselves if they believe in the importance of the greater good. At what point does the truth become more important?

That is a matter of personal conscience.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde

So there are some circumstances in which lying may be acceptable or necessary.

It is, however, never acceptable to lie in order to make yourself look better, or to avoid trouble that you have brought on yourself.

If you lie about yourself, or to avoid trouble, and people find out, they are unlikely to trust you again.

Finding the Balance

As with many other qualities, you need to find the balance in truthfulness: neither overplaying nor underplaying either your virtues or your weaknesses.

It is as bad to pretend that you are less good at something than you are, as to exaggerate about your abilities.

Teaching Children About Truthfulness

Teaching children about truthfulness is hard.

You want them to understand that it is important to tell the truth. But if they tell you that they drew on the wall, you are going to be quite cross. There is, therefore, a serious incentive to lie, and say that it was their sibling or a visitor.

You may therefore need to think about their incentives to confess, and make sure that they understand the value that you put on telling the truth. You will need to ensure that you demonstrate that, not just say it, by rewarding truth-telling in some way, even if you still need to punish the original misdeed.

Jo and her children had been helping to sort the donations cupboard at the school. There were some small toys in there, which the children really liked. Jo told them to leave the toys alone because they belonged to the school.

On the way home, Jo realised that both children had taken something from the box. She asked if they had done so. Both denied it. Not wishing to give them the wrong incentive, Jo thought carefully and then said,

“ If I find that you have taken something, I will be cross. But if you lie to me, and then I find that you have lied, I will be really, really cross. Did you take something? ”

Both children confessed that they had done so. Jo explained that was stealing, but because they had told her the truth, she gave them a choice: they could either return the toys that they had taken, or they could replace each one with another from home. Both children opted to do that.

Further Reading from Skills You Need

Looking after your physical and mental health is important. It is, however, not enough. Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs suggests that most of us need more than that. We need to know that we are living our ‘best life’: that we are doing all we can to lead a ‘good life’ that we will not regret later on.

Based on some of our most popular content, this eBook will help you to live that life. It explains about the concepts of living well and ‘goodness’, together with how to develop your own ‘moral compass’.

A Last Word

It is important to live and act in line with your values.

Being truthful to yourself matters because you cannot live in line with your values if you are pretending to yourself that you are something else.

Truthfulness allows you to be honest about yourself to yourself, and to others, and to live a life which reflects that.

Continue to: A Framework for Living Well Balancing Politeness and Honesty

See also: Critical Thinking and Fake News Self Control, Self Mastery Developing Resilience

Does the Truth Matter?

What does it mean to live in a post-truth world.

Posted December 29, 2016 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

Does the truth matter to you? No one likes being lied to. But the truth is that we seem to like some lies.

I really prefer that people tell me the truth. If a student needs to turn in something late, I tend to believe the story they tell me about it. Oh, I know some of them lie to me. But I generally act as though what they’ve said is true, even though I generally can’t verify it. So when they lie to me, I’m stuck.

As a scientist, I desperately care about truth. I need people to be honest about how they conducted their research and what they found. Science is dependent on truthfulness. Again, I generally trust my peers. I read their publications assuming that they told the truth. Luckily, with research publications there is a peer review process, a lot of information, and replications by other researchers. Science is eventually self-correcting. If someone conducts a poor experiment or if the results don’t reflect the truth of reality, eventually the real state of the world becomes clear. Even if someone lies, the truth eventually comes out.

Why is the truth important? We all need to know the truth if we want to be able to behave rationally. Should I grant the student an extension on a project? I need to know if they actually had a serious conflict or if they were simply lazy. Should I use the results of someone’s research to make an important argument? I need to know that the data are reliable and true. Should we continue this relationship? I need to believe that you’ve told me the truth about where you were last night.

Oh, but the internet and social media . Finding the truth seems impossible.

Recently some Stanford University researchers, Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, reported that students at all levels have difficulty assessing the reliability of information that they find on the internet. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Websites from unreliable organizations aren’t going to promote that they are unreliable. Those websites are going to look reliable and trustworthy. People can’t tell which websites are reliable and which information is true.

Fake news has also been in the news recently. There is a lot of fake news, often promoted by well-known people. One of these stories concerned a possible case of child trafficking in a pizza shop in Washington, DC that was supposedly linked to the Clintons. This was fake news . But all sorts of people, even some associated with the Trump campaign and transition, shared and promoted the story. It was never hard to find the truth about this case. But people chose to believe and spread lies. This led someone to attack the pizza shop with a gun to try and free the children.

So yes, the truth matters. It matters for personal relationships, for science, and for public policy.

How do you judge the truth? If you’re like most of us, you probably don’t do the hard work. With information on the internet, the hard work really isn’t so hard. You can check the sources, look at really reliable ones (Snopes is really good about checking lots of these fake news claims). Checking these things only takes a few moments.

But none of us have the time or resources to check all of the news we confront on a daily basis. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth. Do we trust the source? Then we believe the message. Does it have a picture? Then we are more likely to believe it. Have we heard this before? Then it starts to feel more true. Does it fit with our pre-existing beliefs? That is the lie we want to believe. We accept truthiness instead of requiring truth.

I worry that the truth is being buried in a landslide of misrepresentations and lies. Sometimes people make honest mistakes. Other times, we argue about how to interpret something. In these cases, we’ll eventually understand the real state of the world.

But there is a substantially more dangerous situation. People sometimes deliberately mislead and lie. People present information they know to be false with some goal in mind. Many people come to believe various lies. And these lies seem to be impossible to correct. The pizza shop story was one such deliberate lie with the goal of influencing the election.

There are other cases of fake news. For example, a number of people believe that vaccines cause autism , even though the original "study" that someone reported on this was a misrepresentation and has clearly been debunked. Many people prefer to believe that global warming isn’t happening or that humans aren’t part of the cause of warming. In another example, there was a recent study published in which some authors questioned new recommendations for lowering daily sugar intake . In these cases, the authors are misrepresenting findings and often directly lying . Most of the people involved have received compensation for their work. But the harm they’ve caused is hard to measure.

Truth and lies are a matter of ethics . In science, there are consequences for misrepresentations and lies. Eventually, science gets to the truth. In our political debates, I worry that the internet has made it substantially more difficult for people to find the truth. Too many people may have too many rewards for the lies they are telling. The rest of us are left accepting things that feel true. Making rational choices becomes impossible in such a climate.

This is what it means to live in a post-truth world with fake news. Even if we try to be rational and thoughtful, we may base our judgments on lies. We may make decisions based on things we want to be true rather than the real state of the world. When the truth is buried under a mountain of misrepresentations, we cannot make wise decisions.

Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S (November 1, 2016). Why Students Can't Google Their Way to the Truth: Fact-checkers and students approach websites differently. Education Week.

Ira E. Hyman, Jr., Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at Western Washington University.

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• Why Truthtelling Is Important

Besides emulating the character of God, truthtelling is critical for a flourishing society. Therefore, except in rare circumstances, God mandates it. Though God’s command would be a sufficient motivation, theologians and philosophers have identified other reasons as well.

• Authentic Communication Requires Truthtelling

Truthtelling is essential for authentic communication to occur, and makes genuine interaction between people possible. That is, if truth were not expected, it would not be long before communication would entirely break down. Imagine what it would be like living in a society in which no one expected the truth. How could a person discern what is accurate and what is a falsehood? On what basis could a person make important decisions if there was no expectation of the truth? Life would be chaotic without the norm of honesty.

This is essentially the view of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the principle of universalizability of truthtelling (though he would not support the notion given here that there are exceptions to the universal norm). Kant argued that this principle was the test of a valid moral principle, and used truthtelling as one of his primary illustrations. He insisted that for a norm to be legitimate, it must be universalizable—applicable to everyone. One of his illustrations envisioned what might happen if no one accepted the norm in question. He correctly argued that without a universal norm of truthtelling, the basis for communication would be in jeopardy, and a society in which this was not a norm would not be functional. [1] This is recognized by the fact that virtually every civilization has some kind of norm that promotes truthtelling and prohibits deception. [2]

• Trust and Cooperation Require Truthtelling

Truthtelling builds trust and civil cooperation among human beings. Trust is critical for a prosperous society, and being a person of one’s word establishes trust and trustworthiness. [1] The Mosaic Law underscored this in Deuteronomy 25:15, connecting honest dealings with Israel’s prosperity in the land. “You shall have only a full and honest weight; you shall have only a full and honest measure, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (also see Leviticus 19:36). Similarly Proverbs brings out the connection between trustworthiness and social harmony. Proverbs 3:29 emphasizes that trust among neighbors is what enables them to live in peace, not fearing harm from one’s neighbor. Further, Proverbs emphasize that trustworthiness brings healing to both relationships and communities (Prov. 13:17, 25:13). Adam Smith was very clear that honest dealings and trustworthiness were critical for a properly functioning market system. Cultures that are given to corruption are often in the most impoverished parts of the world, since it is more difficult and risky to do business in cultures in which the level of trust is low. Similarly, companies in which there is a culture of distrust typically have higher costs of doing business, since they require costly regimens of oversight. They also have intangible costs, as employees tend to be more reluctant to “go the extra mile” for their employer and tend to be less eager to embrace change and less committed to their work.

• Human Dignity Requires Truthtelling

Truthtelling treats people with dignity. To tell someone the truth is a measure of respect that is missing when someone is lied to.

The Scriptures illustrate this with the Genesis account of Jacob and his service to Laban (Genesis 29-30). Jacob works seven years for the right to marry Rachel and after the years of service are complete, Laban deceives Jacob and substitutes his less desirable daughter Leah as Jacob’s bride. Jacob is justifiably outraged at being deceived and treated with such disrespect (Gen. 29:25). Jacob returns the disrespect to Laban in Genesis 30 when he deceives Laban with respect to the flocks that Jacob is tending for Laban, separating out the stronger flocks for himself and leaving the weaker ones for Laban (Gen. 30:42).

Similarly in 2 Kings 12, when it came to the money for the repair of the temple, there were certain workmen who were so trustworthy that the overseers of the repairs did not need an accounting of the money they spent for the repairs. Because they were honest, they were treated with dignity and trust by the king and by the priests in charge of temple repair (also 2 Kings 22:7). This is also borne out by the proverb that warns a person, “Well meant are the wounds a friend inflicts, but profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Proverbs 27:6). The enemy who multiplies kisses is the one who showers a person with false flattery, deceiving the person into the illusion of friendship and trust, when in reality, he is the enemy. Here, deception treats the person being deceived as a pawn to be manipulated for the deceiver’s own selfish purposes, not as someone with dignity who is deserving of respect. Disrespect also comes through in, “A lying tongue hates its victims; and a flattering mouth works ruin” (Prov. 26:28; also Prov. 26:18-19, 24, 26).

The right of a person to make his or her own autonomous decisions is based on having accurate information, so much so that people often and understandably feel violated and disrespected when they are deceived. A person’s autonomy is weakened when they are deceived. This is evident in the example of Jacob and Laban. Jacob’s autonomy to marry the woman of his choice was completely undermined by Laban’s deception, since Jacob would never have married Leah if left entirely to his own choice (Genesis 29:17-20). It is further evident in Jacob’s reciprocal deception of Laban, since Laban would not have managed the flocks to his obvious financial disadvantage had he not been deceived so effectively by Jacob (Gen. 30:42-43).

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals , tr. James W. Ellington, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993, original, 1785), 30-36. See also, Kant’s essay, “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Altruistic Motives,” ibid.

See C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1943). See especially the appendix for a listing of the virtues in common to most of the world’s major civilizations. There are rare exceptions to this—a few cultures hold treachery and deceit as virtues. See for example, Don Richardson, Peace Child: An Unforgettable Story of Primitive Jungle Treachery , 4th edition (Ventura, California: Regal, 2005).

For more on this, see Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).

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Table of Contents

• Truthtelling in the Bible
• Truthtelling is the Norm in the Bible
• Exceptions to Truthtelling in the Bible
• Truthtelling in the Workplace
• Financial Statements Must Tell the Truth
• There May Be Exceptions to Truthtelling in the Workplace
• Puffery/Exaggeration
• When Someone Has No Right to the Truth
• Deception to Obtain Information You Have a Right to Know
• Information You Have No Right to Know
• Social Implications of Protecting Information Others Have No Right to Know
• Conclusions About Truth & Deception
• Key Biblical Texts on Truth & Deception

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Contributors: Scott Rae Adopted by the Theology of Work Project Board October 3, 2012. Image by Used under license from Veer . Used by permission.

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Theology of Work Project Online Materials by Theology of Work Project, Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Based on a work at www.theologyofwork.org

You are free to share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work), and remix (to adapt the work) for non-commercial use only, under the condition that you must attribute the work to the Theology of Work Project, Inc., but not in any way that suggests that it endorses you or your use of the work.

© 2012 by the Theology of Work Project, Inc.

Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

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True to Life

Why Truth Matters

by Michael P. Lynch

ISBN: 9780262622011

Pub date: August 5, 2005

• Publisher: The MIT Press

216 pp. , 6 x 9 in ,

ISBN: 9780262122672

Pub date: August 13, 2004

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• Published: August 2004
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• Description

Why truth is important in our everyday lives.

Why does truth matter when politicians so easily sidestep it and intellectuals scorn it as irrelevant? Why be concerned over an abstract idea like truth when something that isn't true—for example, a report of Iraq's attempting to buy materials for nuclear weapons—gets the desired result: the invasion of Iraq? In this engaging and spirited book, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. Lynch explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is. "We need to think our way past our confusion and shed our cynicism about the value of truth," he writes. "Otherwise, we will be unable to act with integrity, to live authentically, and to speak truth to power."

True to Life defends four simple claims: that truth is objective; that it is good to believe what is true; that truth is a goal worthy of inquiry; and that truth can be worth caring about for its own sake, not just because it gets us other things we want. In defense of these "truisms about truth", Lynch diagnoses the sources of our cynicism and argues that many contemporary theories of truth cannot adequately account for its value. He explains why we should care about truth, arguing that truth and its pursuit are part of living a happy life, important in our personal relationships and for our political values.

Bradford Books imprint

Michael P. Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Humanities Institute. In 2019 he was awarded the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. He is the author of Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity and True to Life: Why Truth Matters , both published by the MIT Press.

Wit is surpassed only by acumen in this pithy book. Chief objections to physicalism are stated lucidly, and rebutted convincingly. The field is enlivened and even readers who demur will reap. Ernest Sosa, Departments of Philosophy, Brown University and Rutgers University

An engagingly written, carefully reasoned defence of 'objective truth' as a respectable, even desirable goal and standard. Barry Allen The Globe and Mail

True to Life is a passionate demonstration that truth matters; it is strikingly clear and painstakingly reasoned, and ranges from technical work in the philosophy of logic to a discussion of the role of truth-telling in government. Anthony Gottlieb The New York Times Book Review

This is an important and timely volume, and philosophy owes Lynch a considerable debt. Duncan Pritchard The Philosophers' Magazine

True to Life is a bracing antidote to the disease of postmodern cynicism that renders truth impossible and leaves us with nothing but wind-blown opinion. Douglas Groothuis The Denver Post

True to Life ...asserts some simple truths about truth; for example, that it's good, [and] that it's worthy of pursuit... Richard Halicks Atlanta Journal-Constitution

True to Life performs a major public service. Michael Lynch explains with engaging energy and clarity why the concept of truth matters to a decent public culture. Fully accessible to people without prior philosophical training, the book nonetheless explains serious philosophical debates with considerable sophistication. It will be wonderful for use (and debate) in undergraduate courses in many disciplines, but it is also just good reading for anyone who is interested in unmasking deception and confusion, and who thinks that this activity matters for the health of democracy. Martha Nussbaum, The University of Chicago

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Why is truth-telling so important? Our research shows meaningful reconciliation cannot occur without it

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Professor of Race Relations, Deakin University

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Vanessa Barolsky received funding to conduct research on community truth-telling from Reconciliation Australia, Deakin University and the Centre for Inclusive and Resilient Societies.

Yin Paradies receives funding to conduct research on community truth-telling from Reconciliation Australia, Deakin University and the Centre for Inclusive and Resilient Societies.

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This article mentions ongoing colonial violence towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and contains references that feature antiquated language.

Truth-telling is a key demand in the Uluru Statement and is seen as a vital step for both the Voice to Parliament and a Treaty. However, there has been ongoing debate as to whether historical injustices against First Nations peoples need to be addressed today.

Wiradjuri and Wailwan lawyer Teela Reid posed a question in a 2020 essay, is Australia ready to Gari Yala (speak truth) and reckon with its past?

We recently conducted a study to investigate this question by looking at First Nations community truth-telling practices. Our study found these communities have shown significant leadership in truth-telling, often without resources or support. Importantly, they have invited non-Indigenous people to also take part in truth-telling.

Truth-telling can take the form of memorial and commemorative events, repatriation of remains and cultural artefacts, the renaming of places, and the creation of public artworks and healing sites. A recent example is the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s truth-telling commission. Yoorrook released the truth-telling report this week, providing 46 recommendations for reforms into Victoria’s justice and child protection systems.

We found when non-Indigenous people participated in truth-telling with First Nations communities, it helped build a deeper shared understanding of the past and the achievements of First Nations peoples. This is why truth-telling is a collective social responsibility and non-Indigenous Australians are crucial participants.

But there is still much work to do. Many important historical events and First Nations achievements remain largely unrecognised. Sustained funding and support and the recognition of Australia’s difficult historical truths are crucial.

Read more: First Nations people have made a plea for 'truth-telling'. By reckoning with its past, Australia can finally help improve our future

Our research findings

Our research focused on documenting community truth-telling that reclaimed First Nations sovereignty and self-determination, as well as recognising colonial violence. We did in-depth investigations through 25 case studies, including ten in which we held yarning interviews with community organisers. These interviews helped shed new light on rich and diverse ways to engage with the truths of colonial history.

In the MacArthur region of New South Wales, reconciliation group Winga Myamly worked to make sure the 1816 Appin massacre on Dharawal Country is recognised and commemorated annually .

In the massacre, at least 14 (likely more) Aboriginal men, women and children were killed by members of a British Army regiment. The regiment chased the group to nearby cliffs at Cataract Gorge where many jumped to their deaths.

The 2019 commemoration brought together Dharawal Elder Aunty Glenda Chalker, a descendent of Giribunger, one of the survivors of the massacre, and Sandy Hamilton, descended from Stephen Partridge, who served with the regiment that carried out the attack.

In Portland, Victoria, a towering gum leaf sculpture, Mayapa Weeyn (meaning “make fire”) was erected near the site of the Convincing Ground massacre . This is where between 20 and 200 members of the Kilcarer Gunditj clan were killed by British whalers.

The sculpture recognises all 59 Gunditjmara clans, many of whom were killed during the Eumeralla Wars that followed the Convincing Ground massacre. Gunditjmara Elder Walter Saunders, who designed the sculpture, spent two years building it and talking with local residents in an informal process of truth-telling.

In Tasmania, the Mannalargenna Day Festival commemorates Pairrebeenne/Trawlwoolway leader Mannalargenna. Mannalargenna tried to negotiate to save the lives of Aboriginal people in Tasmania who had been devastated by the Black War during the 1830s.

Our study found truth-telling is more effective when it occurs through immersive experiences. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural practices, such as smoking ceremonies, walking on Country, storytelling and personal engagements with survivors, contributed to healing, dialogue and a deeper shared understanding of history.

Through these events Indigenous people deepened their connections to community, history and Country and non-Indigenous people learned about these connections from them. The increasing attendance at events such as the Appin massacre memorial, the Mannalargenna Day Festival and similar commemorations is evidence of the impact of this type of truth-telling.

Read more: 'Why didn't we know?' is no excuse. Non-Indigenous Australians must listen to the difficult historical truths told by First Nations people

Why is truth-telling important?

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have long called for Australia’s history to be told truthfully. The local truth-telling activities we have documented are examples of how communities have responded to this desire. They emphasise the importance of supporting communities to tell their stories, rather than government directing how truth-telling occurs.

While truth-telling does not guarantee reconciliation, the participants in our study stressed that meaningful reconciliation cannot occur without it. They emphasised the importance of reconciliation between First Nations and non-Indigenous communities because for some people these relationships have never existed, or are in need of repair.

Truth-telling is also crucial for political and social transformation. For example, the Queensland government is using truth-telling to help inform the path to Treaty. In Victoria, the Yoorrook Justice Commission is investigating historic and ongoing injustices experienced by First Nations peoples, alongside ongoing Treaty negotiations.

Read more: What is NAIDOC week? How did it start and what does it celebrate?

Community truth-telling can demonstrate the power of Indigenous identity and self-determination. It can also counter past attempts to erase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from Australian history.

Truth-telling highlights the crucial roles and contributions of First Nations peoples. Their acts of bravery and sacrifice, resistance against colonialism and contributions to communities.

Although some local governments have played a key role in supporting truth-telling, more support for local initiatives is required. National proposals, such as a national recognition of Mabo Day and a formal remembrance for frontier conflicts, have the potential to create a better environment for truth-telling.

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What ‘Justice’ Really Means

The word has taken a beating in the past few weeks. But what role does it truly play in our lives?

By Paul Bloomfield

Mr. Bloomfield is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

It’s a staple of common sense that we don’t let judges try their own cases. Yet if we are to gain self-knowledge, we all must do just that: We must judge ourselves to know ourselves. While we typically think of justice as a virtue of social arrangements or political institutions, the United States has recently bore witness to this virtue in its first-person aspect — self-regarding justice — while watching the confirmation hearings of a Supreme Court Justice.

The virtue of justice requires not only that we judge others fairly, but also that we judge ourselves fairly. This is no mean feat. The trouble is that if a person is a poor judge of him or herself, it is hard to imagine that person being a good judge of others. Bias toward the self often leads to bias against others. Justice begins within ourselves.

While justice is important for each of us in our personal lives, it becomes strikingly important when we think of those in positions of power. We need leaders motivated by a love of justice and not merely self-aggrandizement. Leadership without an inner moral compass reliably pointing toward justice inevitably ends in the abuse of power.

Philosophically, all virtues are ideals that we can only approach without fully attaining them. So, we can always aspire to do better. Given this, what role does the virtue of justice play in our personal lives? What role ought it to play?

In fact there are two roles: Justice functions both in our epistemology, or how we form and justify our beliefs, as well as in practical morality, informing our private and public behavior. These ought to be entwined in our lives since we ought not only think in a fair and just manner but also act accordingly.

The apotheosis of justice is the courtroom judge, interpreting the law and ruling on evidence concerning innocence and guilt. Model judges are epistemically just: Their cognitive processes are never biased or unduly swayed, their conclusions are not prejudged, and their verdicts reliably correspond to the facts. Truth is their goal. Not only must there be no thumb on the scale, the evidence must be balanced while wearing a blindfold. The rulings of judges, however, are also undeniably moral, bearing as they do on issues of justice, restitution and the execution of punishment.

Just people are wise in the ways of fairness, equality, desert and mercy. They are normally pacific. Just people mind their own business, except when they see and call out injustice, speaking truth to power, which they’ll do even at a personal cost. Justice questions authority.

Just people also question themselves. This makes them honest and non-self-deceptive. They vigilantly maintain a clear conscience. Just people are cognizant of their own mistakes and faults, and so they are forgiving of others. They respect who they actually are and not whom they merely wish they were, and their authentic self-respect makes them respectful of others. People who are just do as they say and say as they do: their word is their bond. They are capable of great loyalty and fidelity, but not without limit.

The central epistemic principles of justice require like cases to be treated alike, as captured legally by the concepts of the rule of law and precedent . Weak and strong, rich and poor, all are equal before the law (where this must include the Supreme Court justices and presidents of the United States). While applying general principles alone is sufficient for clear, ordinary cases, a fine sensitivity, experience and reflection is necessary for reliably judging unusual or exceptional cases. Well-developed justice requires expertise in making hard “judgment calls.”

The central moral principles of justice require us to give proper respect to one another : Each of us must recognize the other as a person and not merely as an object. Each of us may testify. The least common denominator among us is that we are all human beings. In addition to that, we each have particular features making us all unique. Justice pays proper attention to what we have in common and to what sets us apart.

In discussing justice as a personal virtue, Aristotle said that being just, “ is a mean between committing injustice and suffering it, since the one is having more than one’s share, while the other is having less .” As recklessness and cowardice are opposing vices of courage, arrogance and servility are opposing vices of justice.

From sidewalk sexual harassment to the obstruction of justice, all abuses of power involve an unjust willingness to greedily arrogate more than one’s due. Typically, those who abuse their strength or cheat, and then don’t get caught or punished, self-deceptively think they’ve “beaten the system” and “won.” But fooling others into thinking you have earned a victory is not the same as genuinely being victorious. Cheaters fool themselves when they elide this difference.

The other way to fail justice is by judging ourselves to be less worthy than we truly are. This is sadly common among oppressed people, but it also arises among the affluent and powerful under the guise of the “impostor syndrome.” Humility has its place, but we shouldn’t overdo it, nor let it interfere with the intellectual courage required to call out injustice. Those who unfairly put themselves down or are servile, for whatever reason, are doing themselves an injustice by willfully accepting less than their fair share.

Given all this, the virtue of justice plays an important role in families and friendships, between neighbors and citizens, colleagues and clients, acquaintances and strangers. But it is also central to being a good person and living happily, and not merely deceiving oneself into believing that one is a good person and that one is happy.

Bringing justice fully into our lives, thinking in terms of it, will make us more circumspect. We are all too fallible. But it is often the case that we are much better at spotting the faults of others than we are at spotting faults in ourselves. Our blind spots are conveniently located to keep us from seeing our own weaknesses. What a coincidence!

Life is neither just nor fair: Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. This, however, only increases our obligation to be as just and fair as we can be, to be honest with ourselves as well as others, to try to correct injustice when we see it, and to do as much right in this unfair world as we can.

Paul Bloomfield is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of “ The Virtues of Happiness .”

Now in print : “ Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments ,” and “ The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments ,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

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She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.