Theories of truth aim to identify what all truths have in common. They seek to clarify the role and concept of truth and discern itsessential features. Different theories disagree about what those features are, whether they depend on the domain of analysis, and whether truth has a substantive definition.[1]
Correspondence theories emphasize that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs.[2] This type of theory stresses a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a traditional model tracing its origins toancient Greek philosophers such asSocrates,Plato, andAristotle.[3] This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined in principle entirely by how it relates to "things" according to whether it accurately describes those "things". A classic example of correspondence theory is the statement by the thirteenth century philosopher and theologianThomas Aquinas: "Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus" ("Truth is the adequation of things andintellect"), which Aquinas attributed to the ninth centuryNeoplatonistIsaac Israeli.[4][5][6] Aquinas also restated the theory as: "A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality".[7]
Correspondence theory centres around the assumption that truth is a matter of accurately copying what is known as "objective reality" and then representing it in thoughts, words, and other symbols.[8] Many modern theorists have stated that this ideal cannot be achieved without analysing additional factors.[9][10] For example, language plays a role in that all languages have words to represent concepts that are virtually undefined in other languages. TheGerman wordZeitgeist is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may "know" what it means, but any translation of the word apparently fails to accurately capture its full meaning (this is a problem with many abstract words, especially those derived inagglutinative languages). Thus, some words add an additional parameter to the construction of an accuratetruth predicate. Among the philosophers who grappled with this problem isAlfred Tarski, whosesemantic theory is summarized further on.[11][a]
For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within a whole system. Very often, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system.[13] A central tenet of coherence theories is the idea that truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to an individual proposition only in virtue of its relationship to that system as a whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single absolute system.[14]
Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to describe the essential and intrinsic properties offormal systems in logic and mathematics.[15] Formal reasoners are content to contemplateaxiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side, for example, the variousalternative geometries. On the whole, coherence theories have been rejected for lacking justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially with respect to assertions about thenatural world,empirical data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and society, especially when used without support from the other major theories of truth.[16]
Coherence theories distinguish the thought ofrationalist philosophers, particularly ofBaruch Spinoza,Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, andGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, along with the British philosopherF. H. Bradley.[17] They have found a resurgence also among several proponents oflogical positivism, notablyOtto Neurath andCarl Hempel.
Three influential forms of thepragmatic theory of truth were introduced around the turn of the 20th century byCharles Sanders Peirce,William James, andJohn Dewey. Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other proponents of pragmatic theory, they all hold that truth is verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice.[18]
Peirce defines it: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth."[19] This statement stresses Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere asfallibilism and "reference to the future", are essential to a proper conception of truth. Although Peirce uses words likeconcordance andcorrespondence to describe one aspect of the pragmaticsign relation, he is also quite explicit in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence are no more thannominal definitions, which he accords a lower status thanreal definitions.
James' version of pragmatic theory, while complex, is often summarized by his statement that "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving."[20] By this, James meant that truth is aquality, the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to practice (thus, "pragmatic").
Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held thatinquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical, or cultural, is self-corrective over timeif openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine, and/or refute proposed truths.[21]
Though not widely known, a new variation of the pragmatic theory was defined and wielded successfully from the 20th century forward. Defined and named byWilliam Ernest Hocking, this variation is known as "negative pragmatism". Essentially, what works may or may not be true, but what fails cannot be true because the truth always works.[22] Philosopher of scienceRichard Feynman also subscribed to it: "We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong."[23] This approach incorporates many of the ideas from Peirce, James, and Dewey. For Peirce, the idea of "endless investigation would tend to bring about scientific belief" fits negative pragmatism in that a negative pragmatist would never stop testing. As Feynman noted, an idea or theory "could never be proved right, because tomorrow's experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought was right."[23] Similarly, James and Dewey's ideas also ascribe truth to repeated testing which is "self-corrective" over time.
Pragmatism and negative pragmatism are also closely aligned with thecoherence theory of truth in that any testing should not be isolated but rather incorporate knowledge from all human endeavors and experience. The universe is a whole and integrated system, and testing should acknowledge and account for its diversity. As Feynman said, "... if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong."[23]: 150
Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community. Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed," because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold). Rather, perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, includingrace,sexuality, andgender, are socially constructed.[24]
Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made. Vico'sepistemological orientation unfolds in one axiom:verum ipsum factum—"truth itself is constructed".Hegel andMarx were among the other early proponents of the premise that truth is, or can be, socially constructed. Marx, like many critical theorists who followed, did not reject the existence of objective truth, but rather distinguished between true knowledge and knowledge that has been distorted through power or ideology. For Marx, scientific and true knowledge is "in accordance with the dialectical understanding of history" and ideological knowledge is "an epiphenomenal expression of the relation of material forces in a given economic arrangement".[25]
Consensus theory holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might come to be agreed upon, by some specified group. Such a group might include all human beings, or asubset thereof consisting of more than one person.[26]
Among the current advocates of consensus theory as a useful accounting of the concept of "truth" is the philosopherJürgen Habermas.[27] Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in anideal speech situation.[28] Among the current strong critics of consensus theory is the philosopherNicholas Rescher.[29]
Modern developments in the field of philosophy have resulted in the rise of a new thesis: that the termtruth does not denote a real property of sentences or propositions. This thesis is in part a response to the common use oftruth predicates (e.g., that some particular thing "... is true") which was particularly prevalent in philosophical discourse on truth in the first half of the 20th century. From this point of view, to assert that "'2 + 2 = 4' is true" is logically equivalent to asserting that "2 + 2 = 4", and the phrase "is true" is—philosophically, if not practically (see: "Michael" example, below)—completely dispensable in this and every other context. In common parlance, truth predicates are not commonly heard, and it would be interpreted as an unusual occurrence were someone to utilize a truth predicate in an everyday conversation when asserting that something is true. Newer perspectives that take this discrepancy into account, and work with sentence structures as actually employed in common discourse, can be broadly described:
Whichever term is used, deflationary theories can be said to hold in common that "the predicate 'true' is an expressive convenience, not the name of a property requiring deep analysis."[9] Once we have identified the truth predicate's formal features and utility, deflationists argue, we have said all there is to be said about truth. Among the theoretical concerns of these views is to explain away those special cases where itdoes appear that the concept of truth has peculiar and interesting properties. (See, e.g.,Semantic paradoxes, and below.)
The scope of deflationary principles is generally limited to representations that resemble sentences. They do not encompass a broader range of entities that are typically considered true or otherwise. In addition, some deflationists point out that the concept employed in "... is true" formulations does enable us to express things that might otherwise require infinitely long sentences; for example, one cannot express confidence in Michael's accuracy by asserting the endless sentence:
This assertion can instead be succinctly expressed by saying:What Michael says is true.[31]
An early variety of deflationary theory is theredundancy theory of truth, so-called because—in examples like those above, e.g. "snow is white [is true]"—the concept of "truth" is redundant and need not have been articulated; that is, it is merely a word that is traditionally used in conversation or writing, generally for emphasis, but not a word that actually equates to anything in reality. This theory is commonly attributed toFrank P. Ramsey, who held that the use of words likefact andtruth was nothing but aroundabout way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic muddle".[9][32][33]
A variant of redundancy theory is the "disquotational" theory, which uses a modified form of the logicianAlfred Tarski'sschema: proponents observe that to say that "'P' is true"is to assert "P". A version of this theory was defended byC. J. F. Williams (in his bookWhat is Truth?). Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, andNuel Belnap as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims. They argue that utterances such as "that's true", when said in response to (e.g.) "it's raining", are "prosentences"—expressions that merely repeat the content of other expressions. In the same way thatit means the same asmy dog in the statement "my dog was hungry, so I fed it",that's true is supposed to mean the same asit's raining when the former is said in reply to the latter.[34]
As noted above, proponents of these ideas do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is not aproperty; rather, they can be understood to say that, for instance, the assertion "P"may well involve a substantial truth—it is only the redundancy involved in statements such as "that's true" (i.e., a prosentence) which is to be minimized.[9]
Attributed to philosopherP. F. Strawson is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "'Snow is white' is true" is to perform thespeech act of signaling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are more actions than communicative statements is not as odd as it may seem. For example, when a wedding couple says "I do" at the appropriate time in a wedding, they are performing the act of taking the other to be their lawful wedded spouse. They are notdescribing themselves as taking the other, but actuallydoing so (perhaps the most thorough analysis of such "illocutionary acts" isJ. L. Austin, most notably inHow to Do Things With Words).[35]
Strawson holds that a similar analysis is applicable to all speech acts, not just illocutionary ones: "To say a statement is true is not to make a statement about a statement, but rather to perform the act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement. When one says 'It's true that it's raining,' one asserts no more than 'It's raining.' The function of [the statement] 'It's true that ...' is to agree with, accept, or endorse the statement that 'it's raining.'"[36]
Several of the major theories of truth hold that there is a particular property the having of which makes a belief or proposition true. Pluralist theories of truth assert that there may be more than one property that makes propositions true: ethical propositions might be true by virtue of coherence. Propositions about the physical world might be true by corresponding to the objects and properties they are about.[37]
Some of the pragmatic theories, such as those byCharles Peirce andWilliam James, included aspects of correspondence, coherence and constructivist theories.[19][20]Crispin Wright argued in his 1992 bookTruth and Objectivity that any predicate which satisfied certain platitudes about truth qualified as a truth predicate. In some discourses, Wright argued, the role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of superassertibility.[38]Michael Lynch, in a 2009 bookTruth as One and Many, argued that we should see truth as a functional property capable of being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or coherence.[39]
Logic is concerned with the patterns inreason that can help tell if aproposition is true or not. Logicians useformal languages to express the truths they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under someinterpretation or truth within somelogical system.[40]
A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement that is true in all logically possible worlds[41] or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to afact (also called asynthetic claim or acontingency), which is only true in thisworld as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as "If p and q, then p" is considered to be a logical truth because of the meaning of thesymbols andwords in it and not because of any fact of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue.
Degrees oftruth in logic may be represented using two or more discrete values, as withbivalent logic (orbinary logic),three-valued logic, and other forms offinite-valued logic.[42][43] Truth in logic can be represented using numbers comprising acontinuous range, typically between 0 and 1, as withfuzzy logic and other forms ofinfinite-valued logic.[44][45] In general, the concept of representing truth using more than two values is known asmany-valued logic.[46]
There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are themodel theory of truth and theproof theory of truth.[47]
Historically, with the nineteenth century development ofBoolean algebra, mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity" is also an arbitrary constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". Inpropositional logic, these symbols can be manipulated according to a set ofaxioms andrules of inference, often given in the form oftruth tables.
In addition, before the time ofHilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century, the proof ofGödel's incompleteness theorems and the development of theChurch–Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics weregenerally assumed to be those statements that are provable in a formal axiomatic system.[48]
The works ofKurt Gödel,Alan Turing, and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system.[49] Two examples of the latter can be found inHilbert's problems. Work onHilbert's 10th problem led in the late twentieth century to the construction of specificDiophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution,[50] or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions. More fundamentally,Hilbert's first problem was on thecontinuum hypothesis.[51] Gödel andPaul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standardaxioms ofset theory.[52] In the view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom.
Gödel thought that the ability to perceive the truth of a mathematical or logical proposition is a matter ofintuition, an ability he admitted could be ultimately beyond the scope of a formal theory of logic or mathematics[53][54] and perhaps best considered in the realm of humancomprehension and communication. But he commented, "The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all".[55]
Tarski's theory of truth (named afterAlfred Tarski) was developed for formal languages, such asformal logic. Here he restricted it in this way: no language could contain its own truth predicate, that is, the expressionis true could only apply to sentences in some other language. The latter he called anobject language, the language being talked about. (It may, in turn, have a truth predicate that can be applied to sentences in still another language.) The reason for his restriction was that languages that contain their own truth predicate will containparadoxical sentences such as, "This sentence is not true". As a result, Tarski held that the semantic theory could not be applied to any natural language, such as English, because they contain their own truth predicates.Donald Davidson used it as the foundation of histruth-conditional semantics and linked it toradical interpretation in a form ofcoherentism.[56]
Bertrand Russell is credited with noticing the existence of such paradoxes even in the best symbolic formations of mathematics in his day, in particular the paradox that came to be named after him,Russell's paradox. Russell andWhitehead attempted to solve these problems inPrincipia Mathematica by putting statements into a hierarchy oftypes, wherein a statement cannot refer to itself, but only to statements lower in the hierarchy. This in turn led to new orders of difficulty regarding the precise natures of types and the structures of conceptually possibletype systems that have yet to be resolved to this day.[57]
Kripke's theory of truth (named afterSaul Kripke) contends that a natural language can in fact contain its own truth predicate without giving rise to contradiction. He showed how to construct one as follows:
Truth never gets defined for sentences likeThis sentence is false, since it was not in the original subset and does not predicate truth of any sentence in the original or any subsequent set. In Kripke's terms, these are "ungrounded." Since these sentences are never assigned either truth or falsehood even if the process is carried out infinitely, Kripke's theory implies that some sentences are neither true nor false. This contradicts theprinciple of bivalence: every sentence must be either true or false. Since this principle is a key premise in deriving theliar paradox, the paradox is dissolved.[58]
Kripke's semantics are related to the use oftopoi and other concepts fromcategory theory in the study ofmathematical logic.[59] They provide a choice of formal semantics forintuitionistic logic.
Socrates',Plato's andAristotle's ideas about truth are seen by some as consistent withcorrespondence theory. In hisMetaphysics, Aristotle stated: "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true".[60] TheStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy proceeds to say of Aristotle:[60]
... Aristotle sounds much more like a genuine correspondence theorist in theCategories (12b11, 14b14), where he talks of "underlying things" that make statements true and implies that these "things" (pragmata) are logically structured situations or facts (viz., his sitting, his not sitting). Most influential is his claim inDe Interpretatione (16a3) that thoughts are "likenesses" (homoiosis) of things. Although he nowhere defines truth in terms of a thought's likeness to a thing or fact, it is clear that such a definition would fit well into his overall philosophy of mind. ...
Similar statements can also be found in Plato's dialogues (Cratylus 385b2,Sophist 263b).[60]
Some Greek philosophers maintained that truth was either not accessible to mortals, or of greatly limited accessibility, forming earlyphilosophical skepticism. Among these wereXenophanes,Democritus, andPyrrho, the founder ofPyrrhonism, who argued that there was no criterion of truth.
TheEpicureans believed that all sense perceptions were true,[61][62] and that errors arise in how we judge those perceptions.
TheStoics conceived truth as accessible fromimpressions viacognitive grasping.[63]
Inearly Islamic philosophy,Avicenna (Ibn Sina) defined truth in his workThe Book of Healing, Book I, Chapter 8, as:
What corresponds in the mind to what is outside it.[64]
Avicenna elaborated on his definition of truth later in Book VIII, Chapter 6:
The truth of a thing is the property of the being of each thing which has been established in it.[65]
This definition is but a rendering of themedieval Latin translation of the work by Simone van Riet.[66] A modern translation of the original Arabic text states:
Truth is also said of theveridical belief in the existence [of something].[67]
Reevaluating Avicenna, and also Augustine and Aristotle,Thomas Aquinas stated in hisDisputed Questions on Truth:
A natural thing, being placed between two intellects, is calledtrue insofar as it conforms to either. It is said to be true with respect to its conformity with the divine intellect insofar as it fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect ... With respect to its conformity with a human intellect, a thing is said to be true insofar as it is such as to cause a true estimate about itself.[68]
Thus, for Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth in things (ontological truth).[69] Following this, he wrote an elegant re-statement of Aristotle's view in hisSumma I.16.1:
Veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei.
(Truth is the conformity of the intellect and things.)
Aquinas also said that real things participate in the act of being of theCreator God who is Subsistent Being, Intelligence, and Truth. Thus, these beings possess the light of intelligibility and are knowable. These things (beings;reality) are the foundation of the truth that is found in the human mind, when it acquires knowledge of things, first through thesenses, then through theunderstanding and thejudgement done byreason. For Aquinas, humanintelligence ("intus", within and "legere", to read) has the capability to reach theessence andexistence of things because it has a non-material,spiritual element, although some moral, educational, and other elements might interfere with its capability.[70]
Richard Firth Green examined the concept of truth in the later Middle Ages in hisA Crisis of Truth, and concludes that roughly during the reign ofRichard II of England the very meaning of the concept changes. The idea of the oath, which was so much part and parcel of for instanceRomance literature,[71] changes from a subjective concept to a more objective one (inDerek Pearsall's summary).[72] Whereas truth (the "trouthe" ofSir Gawain and the Green Knight) was first "an ethical truth in which truth is understood to reside in persons", in Ricardian England it "transforms ... into apolitical truth in which truth is understood to reside in documents".[73]
Immanuel Kant endorses a definition of truth along the lines of the correspondence theory of truth.[60] Kant writes in theCritique of Pure Reason: "The nominal definition of truth, namely that it is the agreement of cognition with its object, is here granted and presupposed".[74] He denies that this correspondence definition of truth provides us with a test or criterion to establish which judgements are true. He states in his logic lectures:[75]
... Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, onlyby cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object.
The ancients called such a circle in explanation adiallelon. And actually the logicians were always reproached with this mistake by the sceptics, who observed that with this definition of truth it is just as when someone makes a statement before a court and in doing so appeals to a witness with whom no one is acquainted, but who wants to establish his credibility by maintaining that the one who called him as witness is an honest man. The accusation was grounded, too. Only the solution of the indicated problem is impossible without qualification and for every man. ...
This passage makes use of his distinction between nominal and real definitions. A nominal definition explains the meaning of a linguistic expression. A real definition describes the essence of certainobjects and enables us to determine whether any given item falls within the definition.[76] Kant holds that the definition of truth is merely nominal and, therefore, we cannot employ it to establish which judgements are true. According to Kant, the ancient skeptics were critical of the logicians for holding that, by means of a merely nominal definition of truth, they can establish which judgements are true. They were trying to do something that is "impossible without qualification and for every man".[75]
G. W. F. Hegel distanced his philosophy from empiricism by presenting truth as a self-moving process, rather than a matter of merely subjective thoughts. Hegel's truth is analogous to an organism in that it is self-determining according to its own inner logic: "Truth is its own self-movement within itself."[77]
ForArthur Schopenhauer,[78] ajudgment is a combination or separation of two or moreconcepts. If a judgment is to be an expression ofknowledge, it must have asufficient reason or ground by which the judgment could be called true.Truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself which is its sufficient reason (ground). Judgments can have material, formal, transcendental, or metalogical truth. A judgment hasmaterial truth if its concepts are based on intuitive perceptions that are generated from sensations. If a judgment has its reason (ground) in another judgment, its truth is called logical orformal. If a judgment, of, for example, pure mathematics or pure science, is based on the forms (space, time, causality) of intuitive, empirical knowledge, then the judgment hastranscendental truth.[78]
WhenSøren Kierkegaard, as his characterJohannes Climacus, ends his writings:My thesis was, subjectivity, heartfelt is the truth, he does not advocate forsubjectivism in its extreme form (the theory that something is true simply because one believes it to be so), but rather that the objective approach to matters of personal truth cannot shed any light upon that which is most essential to a person's life. Objective truths are concerned with the facts of a person's being, while subjective truths are concerned with a person's way of being. Kierkegaard agrees that objective truths for the study of subjects like mathematics, science, and history are relevant and necessary, but argues that objective truths do not shed any light on a person's inner relationship to existence. At best, these truths can only provide a severely narrowed perspective that has little to do with one's actual experience of life.[79]
While objective truths are final and static, subjective truths are continuing and dynamic. The truth of one's existence is a living, inward, and subjective experience that is always in the process of becoming. The values, morals, and spiritual approaches a person adopts, while not denying the existence of objective truths of those beliefs, can only become truly known when they have been inwardly appropriated through subjective experience. Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes all systematic philosophies which attempt to know life or the truth of existence via theories and objective knowledge about reality. As Kierkegaard claims, human truth is something that is continually occurring, and a human being cannot find truth separate from the subjective experience of one's own existing, defined by the values and fundamental essence that consist of one's way of life.[80]
Friedrich Nietzsche believed the search for truth, or 'the will to truth', was a consequence of thewill to power of philosophers. He thought that truth should be used as long as it promoted life and thewill to power, and he thought untruth was better than truth if it had this life enhancement as a consequence. As he wrote inBeyond Good and Evil, "The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment ... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding ..." (aphorism 4). He proposed thewill to power as a truth only because, according to him, it was the most life-affirming and sincere perspective one could have.
Robert Wicks discusses Nietzsche's basic view of truth as follows:[81]
... Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") as a keystone in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call "truth" is only "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." His view at this time is that arbitrariness completely prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the very artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images; "truth" is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for merely practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistence. ...
Separately Nietzsche suggested that an ancient, metaphysical belief in the divinity of Truth lies at the heart of and has served as the foundation for the entire subsequentWestern intellectual tradition: "But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still takeour fire too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is Truth; that Truth is 'Divine' ..."[82][83]
Moreover, Nietzsche challenges the notion of objective truth, arguing that truths are human creations and serve practical purposes. He wrote, "Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are."[84] He argues that truth is a human invention, arising from the artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images, serving practical purposes like repose, security, and consistency; formed through metaphorical and rhetorical devices, shaped by societal conventions and forgotten origins:[85]
"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically ..."
Nietzsche argues that truth is always filtered through individual perspectives and shaped by various interests and biases. In "On the Genealogy of Morality," he asserts, "There are no facts, only interpretations."[86] He suggests that truth is subject to constant reinterpretation and change, influenced by shifting cultural and historical contexts as he writes in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" that "I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."[87] In the same book, Zarathustra proclaims, "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins."[88]
Other philosophers take this common meaning to be secondary and derivative. According toMartin Heidegger, the original meaning andessence of truth inAncient Greece was unconcealment, or the revealing or bringing of what was previously hidden into the open, as indicated by the original Greek term for truth,aletheia.[89][90] On this view, the conception of truth as correctness is a later derivation from the concept's original essence, a development Heidegger traces to theLatin termveritas. Owing to the primacy ofontology in Heidegger's philosophy, he considered this truth to lie within Being itself, and already inBeing and Time (1927) had identified truth with "being-truth" or the "truth of Being" and partially with the Kantianthing-in-itself in an epistemology essentially concerning a mode ofDasein.[91]
InBeing and Nothingness (1943), partially following Heidegger,Jean-Paul Sartre identified our knowledge of the truth as a relation between thein-itself andfor-itself ofbeing - yet simultaneously closely connected in this vein to the data available to the material personhood, in the body, of an individual in their interaction with the world and others - with Sartre's description that "the world is human" allowing him to postulate all truth as strictlyunderstood byself-consciousness as self-consciousnessof something,[92] a view also preceded byHenri Bergson inTime and Free Will (1889), the reading of which Sartre had credited for his interest in philosophy.[93] This firstexistentialist theory, more fully fleshed out in Sartre's essayTruth and Existence (1948), which already demonstrates a more radical departure from Heidegger in its emphasis on the primacy of the idea, already formulated inBeing and Nothingness, ofexistence as preceding essence in its role in the formulation of truth, has nevertheless been critically examined asidealist rather thanmaterialist in its departure from more traditional idealist epistemologies such as those ofAncient Greek philosophy in Plato and Aristotle, and staying as does Heidegger with Kant.[94]
Later, in theSearch for a Method (1957), in which Sartre used a unification of existentialism andMarxism that he would later formulate in theCritique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre, with his growing emphasis on theHegelian totalisation ofhistoricity, posited a conception of truth still defined by its process of relation to a container giving it material meaning, but with specific reference to a role in this broader totalisation, for "subjectivity is neither everything nor nothing; it represents a moment in the objective process (that in which externality is internalised), and this moment is perpetually eliminated only to be perpetually reborn": "For us, truth is something which becomes, ithas andwill have become. It is a totalisation which is forever being totalised. Particular facts do not signify anything; they are neither true nor false so long as they are not related, through the mediation of various partial totalities, to the totalisation in process." Sartre describes this as a "realistic epistemology", developed out ofMarx's ideas but with such a development only possible in an existentialist light, as with the theme of the whole work.[95][96] In an early segment of the lengthy two-volumeCritique of 1960, Sartre continued to describe truth as a "totalising" "truth of history" to be interpreted by a "Marxist historian", whilst his break with Heidegger's epistemological ideas is finalised in the description of a seemingly antinomous "dualism of Being and Truth" as the essence of a truly Marxist epistemology.[97]
The well-regarded French philosopherAlbert Camus wrote in his famous essay,The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), that "there are truths but no truth", in fundamental agreement with Nietzsche'sperspectivism, and favourably cites Kierkegaard in posing that "no truth is absolute or can render satisfactory an existence that is impossible in itself".[98] Later, inThe Rebel (1951), he declared, akin to Sartre, that "the very lowest form of truth" is "the truth of history",[99] but describes this in the context of its abuse and like Kierkegaard in theConcluding Unscientific Postscript he criticizes Hegel in holding a historical attitude "which consists of saying: 'This is truth, which appears to us, however, to be error, but which is true precisely because it happens to be error. As for proof, it is not I, but history, at its conclusion, that will furnish it.'"[100]
Pragmatists likeC. S. Peirce take truth to have some manner of essential relation to human practices for inquiring into anddiscovering truth, with Peirce himself holding that truth is what humaninquiry would find out on a matter, if our practice of inquiry were taken as far as it could profitably go: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth ..."[101]
According toKitaro Nishida, "knowledge of things in the world begins with the differentiation of unitary consciousness into knower and known and ends with self and things becoming one again. Such unification takes form not only in knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs knowing, the willing that directs action, and the feeling or emotive reach that directs sensing."[102]
Erich Fromm finds that trying to discuss truth as "absolute truth" is sterile and that emphasis ought to be placed on "optimal truth". He considers truth as stemming from the survival imperative of grasping one's environment physically and intellectually, whereby young children instinctively seek truth so as to orient themselves in "a strange and powerful world". The accuracy of their perceived approximation of the truth will therefore have direct consequences on their ability to deal with their environment. Fromm can be understood to define truth as a functional approximation of reality. His vision of optimal truth is described below:[103]
... the dichotomy between 'absolute = perfect' and 'relative = imperfect' has been superseded in all fields of scientific thought, where "it is generally recognized that there is no absolute truth but nevertheless that there are objectively valid laws and principles".
[...] In that respect, "a scientifically or rationally valid statement means that the power of reason is applied to all the available data of observation without any of them being suppressed or falsified for the sake of the desired result". The history of science is "a history of inadequate and incomplete statements, and every new insight makes possible the recognition of the inadequacies of previous propositions and offers a springboard for creating a more adequate formulation."
[...] As a result "the history of thought is the history of an ever-increasing approximation to the truth. Scientific knowledge is not absolute but optimal; it contains the optimum of truth attainable in a given historical period." Fromm furthermore notes that "different cultures have emphasized various aspects of the truth" and that increasing interaction between cultures allows for these aspects to reconcile and integrate, increasing further the approximation to the truth.
Truth, saysMichel Foucault, is problematic when any attempt is made to see truth as an "objective" quality. He prefers not to use the term truth itself but "Regimes of Truth". In his historical investigations he found truth to be something that was itself a part of, or embedded within, a given power structure. Thus Foucault's view shares much in common with the concepts ofNietzsche. Truth for Foucault is also something that shifts through variousepisteme throughout history.[104]
Jean Baudrillard considered truth to be largely simulated, that is pretending to have something, as opposed to dissimulation, pretending to not have something. He took his cue fromiconoclasts whom he claims knew that images of God demonstrated that God did not exist.[105] Baudrillard wrote in "Precession of the Simulacra":
Some examples ofsimulacra that Baudrillard cited were: that prisons simulate the "truth" that society is free; scandals (e.g.,Watergate) simulate that corruption is corrected; Disney simulates that the U.S. itself is an adult place. Though such examples seem extreme, such extremity is an important part of Baudrillard's theory. For a less extreme example, movies usually end with the bad being punished, humiliated, or otherwise failing, thus affirming for viewers the concept that the good end happily and the bad unhappily, a narrative which implies that the status quo and established power structures are largely legitimate.[105]
Truthmaker theory is "the branch ofmetaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and whatexists".[108] It is different from substantive theories of truth in the sense that it does not aim at giving a definition of what truth is. Instead, it has the goal ofdetermining how truth depends on being.[109]
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