On this view, what distinguishes noncontingent truths from contingent ones is not that their truth arises as a consequence of facts about our language or of meanings, etc.
Contingent propositions are true in some, but not all, possible circumstances or possible worlds. Noncontingent propositions, in contrast, are true in all possible circumstances or in none. There is no difference as to the nature of truth for the two classes of propositions, only in the ranges of possibilities in which the propositions are true.
An adherent of the Semantic Theory will allow that there is, to be sure, a powerful insight in the theories of linguistic truth. But, they will counter, these linguistic theories are really shedding no light on the nature of truth itself. Rather, they are calling attention to how we often go about ascertaining the truth of noncontingent propositions. While it is certainly possible to ascertain the truth experientially and inductively of the noncontingent proposition that all aunts are females — for example, one could knock on a great many doors asking if any of the residents were aunts and if so, whether they were female — it would be a needless exercise.
We need not examine the world carefully to figure out the truth-value of the proposition that all aunts are females. We might, for example, simply consult an English dictionary. How we ascertain , find out , determine the truth-values of noncontingent propositions may but need not invariably be by nonexperiential means; but from that it does not follow that the nature of truth of noncontingent propositions is fundamentally different from that of contingent ones.
On this latter view, the Semantic Theory of Truth is adequate for both contingent propositions and noncontingent ones. In neither case is the Semantic Theory of Truth intended to be a theory of how we might go about finding out what the truth-value is of any specified proposition. Indeed, one very important consequence of the Semantic Theory of Truth is that it allows for the existence of propositions whose truth-values are in principle unknowable to human beings.
And there is a second motivation for promoting the Semantic Theory of Truth for noncontingent propositions. How is it that mathematics is able to be used in concert with physical theories to explain the nature of the world? On the Semantic Theory, the answer is that the noncontingent truths of mathematics correctly describe the world as they would any and every possible world. The Linguistic Theory, which makes the truth of the noncontingent truths of mathematics arise out of features of language, is usually thought to have great, if not insurmountable, difficulties in grappling with this question.
The Correspondence Theory and the Semantic Theory account for the truth of a proposition as arising out of a relationship between that proposition and features or events in the world. Coherence Theories of which there are a number , in contrast, account for the truth of a proposition as arising out of a relationship between that proposition and other propositions. Coherence Theories are valuable because they help to reveal how we arrive at our truth claims, our knowledge. We continually work at fitting our beliefs together into a coherent system.
The major coherence theories view coherence as requiring at least logical consistency. Coherence Theories have their critics too. The proposition that bismuth has a higher melting point than tin may cohere with my beliefs but not with your beliefs.
Most philosophers prefer to preserve the law of non-contradiction over any theory of truth that requires rejecting it. A second difficulty with Coherence Theories is that the beliefs of any one person or of any group are invariably self-contradictory.
Thus most propositions, by failing to cohere, will not have truth-values. This result violates the law of the excluded middle. And there is a third objection. A fourth objection is that Coherence theories focus on the nature of verifiability and not truth. In recent years, one particular Coherence Theory has attracted a lot of attention and some considerable heat and fury.
Although everyone would agree that influential people — the movers and shakers — have profound effects upon the beliefs of other persons, the controversy revolves around whether the acceptance by others of their beliefs is wholly a matter of their personal or institutional prominence. Or, to put it another way, to the extent that there is an objective reality it is nothing more nor less than what we say it is.
We human beings are, then, the ultimate arbiters of what is true. Consensus is truth. These postmodernist views have received a more sympathetic reception among social scientists than among physical scientists. In contrast, physical scientists are — for the most part — rather unwilling to regard propositions in their own field as somehow merely the product of consensus among eminent physical scientists. They are inclined to believe that the proposition that protons are composed of three quarks is true or false depending on whether or not it accurately describes an objective reality.
They are disinclined to believe that the truth of such a proposition arises out of the pronouncements of eminent physical scientists. In short, physical scientists do not believe that prestige and social influence trump reality. A Pragmatic Theory of Truth holds roughly that a proposition is true if it is useful to believe. Peirce and James were its principal advocates. Utility is the essential mark of truth. The problems with Pragmatic accounts of truth are counterparts to the problems seen above with Coherence Theories of truth.
First, it may be useful for someone to believe a proposition but also useful for someone else to disbelieve it. For example, Freud said that many people, in order to avoid despair, need to believe there is a god who keeps a watchful eye on everyone.
According to one version of the Pragmatic Theory, that proposition is true. However, it may not be useful for other persons to believe that same proposition. They would be crushed if they believed that there is a god who keeps a watchful eye on everyone.
Thus, by symmetry of argument, that proposition is false. In this way, the Pragmatic theory leads to a violation of the law of non-contradiction, say its critics.
Second, certain beliefs are undeniably useful, even though — on other criteria — they are judged to be objectively false.
For example, it can be useful for some persons to believe that they live in a world surrounded by people who love or care for them. According to this criticism, the Pragmatic Theory of Truth overestimates the strength of the connection between truth and usefulness.
Truth is what an ideally rational inquirer would in the long run come to believe, say some pragmatists. Truth is the ideal outcome of rational inquiry. What all the theories of truth discussed so far have in common is the assumption that a proposition is true just in case the proposition has some property or other — correspondence with the facts, satisfaction, coherence, utility, etc.
Deflationary theories deny this assumption. Frege expressed the idea this way:. Frege, Where the concept of truth really pays off is when we do not, or can not, assert a proposition explicitly, but have to deal with an indirect reference to it. Advocates of the Redundancy Theory respond that their theory recognizes the essential point about needing the concept of truth for indirect reference.
The theory says that this is all that the concept of truth is needed for, and that otherwise its use is redundant. The Performative Theory is a deflationary theory that is not a redundancy theory. The Performative Theory of Truth argues that ascribing truth to a proposition is not really characterizing the proposition itself, nor is it saying something redundant. The speaker — through his or her agreeing with it, endorsing it, praising it, accepting it, or perhaps conceding it — is licensing our adoption of the belief in the proposition.
The case may be likened somewhat to that of promising. Critics of the Performative Theory charge that it requires too radical a revision in our logic. Advocates of the Correspondence Theory and the Semantic Theory have argued that a proposition need not be known in order to be true. Truth, they say, arises out of a relationship between a proposition and the way the world is. No one need know that that relationship holds, nor — for that matter — need there even be any conscious or language-using creatures for that relationship to obtain.
In short, truth is an objective feature of a proposition, not a subjective one. For a true proposition to be known, it must at the very least be a justified belief. Justification, unlike truth itself, requires a special relationship among propositions.
For a proposition to be justified it must, at the very least, cohere with other propositions that one has adopted. On this account, coherence among propositions plays a critical role in the theory of knowledge. Nevertheless it plays no role in a theory of truth, according to advocates of the Correspondence and Semantic Theories of Truth. Finally, should coherence — which plays such a central role in theories of knowledge — be regarded as an objective relationship or as a subjective one?
Not surprisingly, theorists have answered this latter question in divergent ways. But the pursuit of that issue takes one beyond the theories of truth. However, it would be fascinating if we could discover a way to tell, for any proposition, whether it is true. Perhaps some machine could do this, philosophers have speculated. For any formal language, we know in principle how to generate all the sentences of that language.
If we were to build a machine that produces one by one all the many sentences, then eventually all those that express truths would be produced. Unfortunately, along with them, we would also generate all those that express false propositions. We also know how to build a machine that will generate only sentences that express truths. However, to generate all and only those sentences that express truths is quite another matter. Leibniz dreamed of achieving this goal.
By mechanizing deductive reasoning he hoped to build a machine that would generate all and only truths. Some progress on the general problem of capturing all and only those sentences which express true propositions can be made by limiting the focus to a specific domain. For instance, perhaps we can find some procedure that will produce all and only the truths of arithmetic, or of chemistry, or of Egyptian political history. If we know the universal and probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics, then some philosophers have argued we thereby indirectly are in a position to know the more specific scientific laws about chemical bonding.
Significant progress was made in the early twentieth century on the problem of axiomatizing arithmetic and other areas of mathematics. In the s, David Hilbert hoped to represent the sentences of arithmetic very precisely in a formal language, then to generate all and only the theorems of arithmetic from uncontroversial axioms, and thereby to show that all true propositions of arithmetic can in principle be proved as theorems.
This would put the concept of truth in arithmetic on a very solid basis. Thus the concept of truth transcends the concept of proof in classical formal languages. This is a remarkable, precise insight into the nature of truth.
A very great many linguistic devices count as definitions. These devices include providing a synonym, offering examples, pointing at objects that satisfy the term being defined, using the term in sentences, contrasting it with opposites, and contrasting it with terms with which it is often confused.
For further reading, see Definitions, Dictionaries, and Meanings. However, modern theories about definition have not been especially recognized, let alone adopted, outside of certain academic and specialist circles. Many persons persist with the earlier, naive, view that the role of a definition is only to offer a synonym for the term to be defined.
The definition would allow for a line of reasoning that produced the Liar Paradox recall above and thus would lead us into self contradiction. That result shows that we do not have a coherent concept of truth for a language within that language. Some of our beliefs about truth, and about related concepts that are used in the argument to the contradiction, must be rejected, even though they might seem to be intuitively acceptable. There is no reason to believe that paradox is to be avoided by rejecting formal languages in favor of natural languages.
The Liar Paradox first appeared in natural languages. That is, they try to remove vagueness and be precise about the ramifications of their solutions, usually by showing how they work in a formal language that has the essential features of our natural language. The principal solutions agree that — to resolve a paradox — we must go back and systematically reform or clarify some of our original beliefs.
For more on the correspondence theory, see David , and the entry on the correspondance theory of truth. Though initially the correspondence theory was seen by its developers as a competitor to the identity theory of truth, it was also understood as opposed to the coherence theory of truth.
We will be much briefer with the historical origins of the coherence theory than we were with the correspondence theory. Like the correspondence theory, versions of the coherence theory can be seen throughout the history of philosophy. See, for instance, Walker for a discussion of its early modern lineage. Like the correspondence theory, it was important in the early 20th century British origins of analytic philosophy.
Particularly, the coherence theory of truth is associated with the British idealists to whom Moore and Russell were reacting. Many idealists at that time did indeed hold coherence theories.
Let us take as an example Joachim This is the theory that Russell a attacks. Joachim says that:. But a few remarks about his theory will help to give substance to the quoted passage. This is not merely a turn of phrase, but a reflection of his monistic idealism. Individual judgments or beliefs are certainly not the whole complete truth.
Such judgments are, according to Joachim, only true to a degree. One aspect of this doctrine is a kind of holism about content, which holds that any individual belief or judgment gets its content only in virtue of being part of a system of judgments.
Any real judgment we might make will only be partially true. We will not attempt that, as it leads us to some of the more formidable aspects of his view, e.
As with the correspondence theory, it will be useful to recast the coherence theory in a more modern form, which will abstract away from some of the difficult features of British idealism. As with the correspondence theory, it can be put in a slogan:.
To further the contrast with the neo-classical correspondence theory, we may add that a proposition is true if it is the content of a belief in the system, or entailed by a belief in the system. We may assume, with Joachim, that the condition of coherence will be stronger than consistency. With the idealists generally, we might suppose that features of the believing subject will come into play.
This theory is offered as an analysis of the nature of truth, and not simply a test or criterion for truth. It is the way the coherence theory is given in Walker , for instance. See also Young for a recent defense of a coherence theory.
Let us take this as our neo-classical version of the coherence theory. The contrast with the correspondence theory of truth is clear. Far from being a matter of whether the world provides a suitable object to mirror a proposition, truth is a matter of how beliefs are related to each-other. The coherence theory of truth enjoys two sorts of motivations. One is primarily epistemological.
Most coherence theorists also hold a coherence theory of knowledge; more specifically, a coherence theory of justification. According to this theory, to be justified is to be part of a coherent system of beliefs. An argument for this is often based on the claim that only another belief could stand in a justification relation to a belief, allowing nothing but properties of systems of belief, including coherence, to be conditions for justification. Combining this with the thesis that a fully justified belief is true forms an argument for the coherence theory of truth.
The steps in this argument may be questioned by a number of contemporary epistemological views. But the coherence theory also goes hand-in-hand with its own metaphysics as well. The coherence theory is typically associated with idealism. As we have already discussed, forms of it were held by British idealists such as Joachim, and later by Blanshard in America.
An idealist should see the last step in the justification argument as quite natural. More generally, an idealist will see little if any room between a system of beliefs and the world it is about, leaving the coherence theory of truth as an extremely natural option.
It is possible to be an idealist without adopting a coherence theory. For instance, many scholars read Bradley as holding a version of the identity theory of truth. See Baldwin for some discussion. However, it is hard to see much of a way to hold the coherence theory of truth without maintaining some form of idealism. Walker argues that every coherence theorist must be an idealist, but not vice-versa.
The neo-classical correspondence theory seeks to capture the intuition that truth is a content-to-world relation. It captures this in the most straightforward way, by asking for an object in the world to pair up with a true proposition. The neo-classical coherence theory, in contrast, insists that truth is not a content-to-world relation at all; rather, it is a content-to-content, or belief-to-belief, relation.
The coherence theory requires some metaphysics which can make the world somehow reflect this, and idealism appears to be it. A distant descendant of the neo-classical coherence theory that does not require idealism will be discussed in section 6. For more on the coherence theory, see Walker and the entry on the coherence theory of truth.
A different perspective on truth was offered by the American pragmatists. As with the neo-classical correspondence and coherence theories, the pragmatist theories go with some typical slogans.
For example, Peirce is usually understood as holding the view that:. See, for instance Hartshorne et al. Both Peirce and James are associated with the slogan that:. James e. True beliefs are guaranteed not to conflict with subsequent experience. See Misak for an extended discussion. This marks an important difference between the pragmatist theories and the coherence theory we just considered.
Even so, pragmatist theories also have an affinity with coherence theories, insofar as we expect the end of inquiry to be a coherent system of beliefs. As Haack also notes, James maintains an important verificationist idea: truth is what is verifiable. We will see this idea re-appear in section 4. For more on pragmatist theories of truth, see Misak Modern forms of the classical theories survive.
Many of these modern theories, notably correspondence theories, draw on ideas developed by Tarski. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that his seminal work on truth is very much of a piece with other works in mathematical logic, such as his , and as much as anything this work lays the ground-work for the modern subject of model theory — a branch of mathematical logic, not the metaphysics of truth.
In the classical debate on truth at the beginning of the 20th century we considered in section 1, the issue of truth-bearers was of great significance. Many theories we reviewed took beliefs to be the bearers of truth.
In contrast, Tarski and much of the subsequent work on truth takes sentences to be the primary bearers of truth. But whereas much of the classical debate takes the issue of the primary bearers of truth to be a substantial and important metaphysical one, Tarski is quite casual about it.
His primary reason for taking sentences as truth-bearers is convenience, and he explicitly distances himself from any commitment about the philosophically contentious issues surrounding other candidate truth-bearers e. We will return to the issue of the primary bearers of truth in section 6.
But it should be stressed that for this discussion, sentences are fully interpreted sentences, having meanings. We will also assume that the sentences in question do not change their content across occasions of use, i. In some places e. This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. In light of this, Convention T guarantees that the truth predicate given by the theory will be extensionally correct , i. Tarski does not merely propose a condition of adequacy for theories of truth, he also shows how to meet it.
But truth can be defined for all of them by recursion. This may look trivial, but in defining an extensionally correct truth predicate for an infinite language with four clauses, we have made a modest application of a very powerful technique.
They do not stop with atomic sentences. Tarski notes that truth for each atomic sentence can be defined in terms of two closely related notions: reference and satisfaction. Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. This was especially important to Tarski, who was concerned the Liar paradox would make theories in languages containing a truth predicate inconsistent.
The correspondence theory of truth expresses the very natural idea that truth is a content-to-world or word-to-world relation: what we say or think is true or false in virtue of the way the world turns out to be.
We suggested that, against a background like the metaphysics of facts, it does so in a straightforward way. But the idea of correspondence is certainly not specific to this framework. Indeed, it is controversial whether a correspondence theory should rely on any particular metaphysics at all. Yet without the metaphysics of facts, the notion of correspondence as discussed in section 1. This has led to two distinct strands in contemporary thinking about the correspondence theory.
One strand seeks to recast the correspondence theory in a way that does not rely on any particular ontology. Another seeks to find an appropriate ontology for correspondence, either in terms of facts or other entities. We will consider each in turn.
Tarski himself sometimes suggested that his theory was a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Whether his own theory is a correspondence theory, and even whether it provides any substantial philosophical account of truth at all, is a matter of controversy. One rather drastic negative assessment from Putnam —86, p. As it is normally understood, reference is the preeminent word-to-world relation. Satisfaction is naturally understood as a word-to-world relation as well, which relates a predicate to the things in the world that bear it.
The Tarskian recursive definition shows how truth is determined by reference and satisfaction, and so is in effect determined by the things in the world we refer to and the properties they bear. This, one might propose, is all the correspondence we need. It is not correspondence of sentences or propositions to facts; rather, it is correspondence of our expressions to objects and the properties they bear, and then ways of working out the truth of claims in terms of this.
This is certainly not the neo-classical idea of correspondence. In not positing facts, it does not posit any single object to which a true proposition or sentence might correspond. Rather, it shows how truth might be worked out from basic word-to-world relations. As we will discuss more fully in section 4. Rather, it offers a number of disquotation clauses , such as:. These clauses have an air of triviality though whether they are to be understood as trivial principles or statements of non-trivial semantic facts has been a matter of some debate.
With Field, we might propose to supplement clauses like these with an account of reference and satisfaction. In , Field was envisaging a physicalist account, along the lines of the causal theory of reference. 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. Much of the subsequent discussion of Field-style approaches to correspondence has focused on the role of representation in these views. These are instances of representation relations. According to representational views, meaningful items, like perhaps thoughts or sentences or their constituents, have their contents in virtue of standing in the right relation to the things they represent.
The project of developing a naturalist account of the representation relation has been an important one in the philosophy of mind and language. See the entry on mental representation. But, it has implications for the theory of truth. Representational views of content lead naturally to correspondence theories of truth.
To make this vivid, suppose you hold that sentences or beliefs stand in a representation relation to some objects. It is natural to suppose that for true beliefs or sentences, those objects would be facts.
We then have a correspondence theory, with the correspondence relation explicated as a representation relation: a truth bearer is true if it represents a fact. As we have discussed, many contemporary views reject facts, but one can hold a representational view of content without them. The relations of reference and satisfaction are representation relations, and truth for sentences is determined compositionally in terms of those representation relations, and the nature of the objects they represent.
If we have such relations, we have the building blocks for a correspondence theory without facts. Field anticipated a naturalist reduction of the representation via a causal theory, but any view that accepts representation relations for truth bearers or their constituents can provide a similar theory of truth. See Jackson and Lynch for further discussion. Representational views of content provide a natural way to approach the correspondence theory of truth, and likewise, anti-representational views provide a natural way to avoid the correspondence theory of truth.
This is most clear in the work of Davidson, as we will discuss more in section 6. 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.
For instance, Austin 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. Rather, correspondence relations to Austin are entirely conventional.
See Vision for an extended defense of an Austinian correspondence theory. 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 b. In a somewhat more Tarskian spirit, formal theories of facts or states of affairs have also been developed.
There are more metaphysically robust notions of fact in the current literature. 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.
It is then argued that facts are the appropriate truthmakers. In contrast to the approach to correspondence discussed in section 3. 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.
For one view on this, see Merricks 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. Parsons 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 notoriously expresses ambivalence about whether there are negative facts.
Armstrong rejects them, while Beall defends them. For more discussion of truthmakers, see Cameron and the papers in Beebee and Dodd 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.
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. Wright 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 , p. 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.
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. Another important mark of realism expressed in terms of truth is the property of bivalence. As Dummett has stressed e. 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. Both the approaches to realism, through reference and through bivalence, make truth the primary vehicle for an account of realism. A theory of truth which substantiates bivalence, or builds truth from 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. 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 Devitt 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. 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. 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 Fumerton and 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. Indeed, many contemporary forms of anti-realism may be formulated as theories of truth, and they do typically deny bivalence. The closest we can get to objective truth is intersubjective truth, where we have reached a general consensus due to our similar educations and social conditioning.
So our definition of truth needs to be much more flexible than Plato, Descartes and other philosophers claim. This is a theory Nietzsche came close to accepting. The lack of objective truth leaves us free to carve our own truths. Truth is mine. My truth and your truth have no necessary relevance to each other. Because truth is subjective, it can play a much more unique and decisive role in giving life meaning; I am utterly free to choose my truths, and in doing so, I shape my own life.
Without subjective truth, there can be no self-determination. Truth is interpersonal. We tell each other things, and when they work out we call them truths. What we take as truth depends on what others around us espouse. Nobody bothered to count because everyone assumed it was true. And when they finally counted, it was because everyone agreed on the result that the real truth became known. Even when we are alone, truth is interpersonal. We express these truths or errors or lies to others and to ourselves in language; and, as Wittgenstein pointed out, there can be no private language.
But the most essential truth, the truth by which we all live our lives, is intensely personal, private. Even though each of us lives our life by Truth, it can be different for each person. Or none of the above: shall I find my own Truth in my own way? But even in such a community, some beliefs would be acceptable, and others not: my belief that I am exceptional and deserve preferential treatment, perhaps because I alone have received a special revelation, is not likely to be shared by others.
From within the in-group we look with fear and revulsion on those who deny the accepted beliefs. From outside, we admire those who hold aloft the light of truth amidst the darkness of human ignorance. And in every case it is we who judge, not I alone. Even the most personal Truth is adjudicated within a community and depends on the esteem of others. Such ambiguity facilitates equivocation — useful to politicians, etc, who can be economical with the truth. One function of language is to conceal truth.
In an experiment by Solomon Asch, subjects were given pairs of cards. On one were three lines of different lengths; on the other card a single line.
The test was to determine which of the three lines was the same length as the single line. The truth was obvious; but in the group of subjects all were stooges except one. The stooges called out answers, most of which were of the same, obviously wrong, line.
The self-doubt thus incurred in the real subjects made only one quarter of them trust the evidence of their senses enough to pick the correct answer. Schopenhauer noticed the reluctance of the establishment to engage with new ideas, choosing to ignore rather than risk disputing and refuting them.
Van Vogt. Similarly, Robert Pirsig says that ideas coming from outside orthodox establishments tend to be dismissed. I think it is interesting to examine why philosophy students should hate the question so much. It seems that the question itself is meaningless for some of them. Postmodernism is not the opposite of realism.
Rather, postmodernism only questions the blatant acceptance of reality. If postmodernism did not ask the question of truth, but rather, assumed that [it is true that] there is no truth, it would be just as unassuming about truth as realism is. We agreed amongst ourselves that it certainly seemed that both questions are roughly treated as equal, since when one questions certainty, one questions both truth and reality, and postmodernists certainly question both.
The question then became: If Truth and Reality are so intimately connected, to what degree do we have access to reality, and what do we use to access this reality and come to truth? We perused the history of philosophy. Indeed, you could argue that a great deal of the history of Western philosophy was trying to deal with the problem of alienation, ie, the alienation of human beings from reality and truth.
There are various criteria, standards and rules by which to judge the truth that statements profess to claim. The problem is how can there be assurance that we are in accordance with facts or realities when the human mind perceives, distorts and manipulates what it wants to see, hear or decipher. Perhaps a better definition of truth could be, an agreement of a judgment by a body of people on the facts and realities in question.
I have indeed always been amazed at how far people are willing to be accomplices to the vast amount of lies, dishonesty and deception which continuously goes on in their lives. The Global Financial Crisis, the investment scandal of Bernard Madoff, the collapse of Enron, and the war in Iraq, are familiar stories of gross deception from the past decade.
The Holocaust is another baffling case of a horrendous genocide that was permitted to take place across a whole continent which seemed completely oblivious to reality. And yet even today we find people who deny such an atrocity having taken place, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Discovering the truth will be a hurtful and painful experience when the facts or realities turn out to be different from what is expected.
Yet there ought to be no grounds for despair if we accept that the ideal of truth, like all other virtues, can be approached rather than attained.
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