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What Is Truth? Essay Example

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The ideal of truth is relevant to the individual. Truth is based on a number of factors that are usually derived from absolute knowledge. However, when finding the relationship between knowledge and truth, one questions their own competence and confidence in establishing what is actually true. There are several debates among philosophers and research that try to derive the nature of truth. Defining the nature of truth is routed in technical analysis, a morass of arcane jargon, subtle distinctions from competing theories, and precise definition. Rene Desecrates famously wrote, “I am therefore I exist.” In stating this he holds that only truth that is certain is what the individuals own cognition of their existence. The principle question among the long time debate is to answer, what is truth? This questions have plagued the minds of philosophers since the time of Plato and Socrates. It has been a never ending debate trying to draw the relationship of knowledge, truth, and understanding what is relevant to their own assessment. From the readings of Martin Luther, Descartes, and others, this paper will explore the philosophical questions of knowledge and truth. Drawing on these reasons to come to a consensus on what can be the individual be assured of what they believe is the absolute truth, and what prevents individuals from the truth.

The notion of truth is developed through the ideas, belief, and opinion of what is and what is not. Truth is an object of relativism of an individual’s ideas, the agreement and disagreement of reality. In understanding truth, there are three principal interpretations that are used, truth as absolute, truth as relative, and truth as an unattainable reality. According to definition, absolute truth is, “is defined as inflexible reality: fixed, invariable, unalterable facts.” (All About Philosophy, n.d) Essentially it is a truth understood universally that cannot be altered. Plato was a staunch believer in this interpretation, as the truth found on earth was a shadow of the truth that existed within the universe. This is the hardest interpretation of truth because there can be no indefinite argument with those that try to negate the existence of absolute truth. In arguing against the interpretation, the arguer themselves tries to search for validation in their statement that absolute truth doesn’t exist. In a matter of contradiction in understanding what is truth is to establish that truth exists. In a better interpretation seeing the truth as relative is explaining that facts and realities vary dependent on their circumstances.

Relativism is in the matter of where no objectivity exists and is subjective which the validity of truth doesn’t exist. According to philosophy, “Relativism is not a single doctrine but a family of views whose common theme is that some central aspect of experience, thought, evaluation, or even reality is somehow relative to something else.” (Swoyer, 2014) The last interpretation of truth is that truth is an unattainable reality where no truth exists. Truth is a universal fact in which corresponds with evidence, reality, and experience. Since an individual’s reality and experience constantly change, it is impossible to reach an absolute truth. This interpretation is relative to one’s own knowledge because it is present in their person’s mind. Using this interpretation many philosophers have carved out several theories of truth.

The pragmatic approach to defining truth is by seeing that truth is the objects and ideas that the individual can validate, assimilate, verify, and corroborate. In understanding what is not true it is essentially what the individual cannot. In establishing the absolute truth, it is what happens and becomes true events that are verified through a process of verification.  In the view of this paper, is that truth is dependent on the individual’s fact and reality, as Aristotle stated, “to say of what is that is it not, or what is not that is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and what is not that it is not, is true.” As confusing as the statement may be to some, the concept of truth is based on a person’s confidence in their own reality as the basis of truth. Not only is the general consensus now, but in also philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas in the 9 th century in which, truth is the equation of things and intellect, more importantly the basis of truth as true is up to the individuals’ knowledge.

In Rene Descartes search for truth, he begins with the method of doubt. Written Descartes, Meditation , “I seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive, very clearly and distinctly is true.” (Descartes, 7.35) Descartes add to the questions of what is truth is by the confidence and certainty in knowing that what is true is from the natural experiences and own personal truths. The individuals’ definition of truth is what the person understands in life through logic and reason. The individual establishes their idea of reality from their senses, what they see, and true perceptions.  Descartes wrote in his, Letter to Mersenne , any doubts about truth is perpetuated by the notion that no one can be ignorant of truth because it symbolizes the conformity of thought with its object. (Smith, 2014) Drawing from Descartes works we will answer what prevents us from the truth.

In his Method of Doubt from his First Meditation , his purpose was to negate skepticism by doubting the truth of everything including what we know in our minds. The reasons in which people doubt their truth is based on people second guessing their own subsequent beliefs. People claim to know the truth beyond their own realms of justification. People senses and experiences that have been taught are largely provided from prejudices past down. (Descartes, 1639) People are disappointed that what they believe to be true is often not. Descartes stated, “Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.” (Descartes, 1639)  From these understandings people then began to doubt what they know to be true because they have reasonable doubt.

In order for a person to understand truth, they must first doubt all things around them in a hypothetical doubt, in order to provide a pretense of what we know is the truth and what we cannot know. By determining our own knowledge of what is true, such as the snow is white, because we know there is no other color in existence, we can have a foundation of unshakeable truths.  While the senses can sometimes present falsehood, it is subjective to suggest that all senses are wrong. In determining using one’s experience to determine truth, it is important to note that everyone’s experience is not the same. The way one person sees an event can be different from someone that sees the same event. Take for example the group of five blind men that felt the tusk of an elephant. One men said it was like a snake, while another suggested that was the neck of a giraffe. Who is to tell who is correct and not? From their own experiences, knowledge, and senses what they believe is to be true. By limiting knowledge on what we know is absolute certain is limiting one’s own perception of reality. This is how doubt is raised, and takes away from the confidence of the individuals’ own knowledge of the truth.

Martin Luther takes on the quest for truth through his thesis, which he wrote to the church. In his appendage for reformation of the Catholic Church, he questioned the authority of the Pope, and what their interpretation of the Bible. In his belief that the word of God is the truth, his stance is that followers of the religion must have faith. In believing what is true and what is not, Luther’s is bound by his idea of faith which correspond with God is the absolute truth.  His justification of God being true is based on the works of God, but more importantly the understanding of truth is by faith alone. His unshakeable foundation of what he believes to be true is routed in his on senses, ideas, and experiences derived from his faith.  Just like knowing what is true and not, Descartes share that while we cannot prove that God doesn’t exist, we can prove that he doesn’t exist. While we can see the things around us does exist, if that has indubitable truth in believing that something exists, it is impossible to prove it isn’t true.

From drawing on the works on how a person can assure that they know is true is using Descartes Method of Doubt to provide a foundation in which what we know is true, and what we know is not. Luther bases his justifications of truth on faith and knowledge, while drawing from logic and reasoning to know what is true. A person is able to draw from their own cognitive knowledge in determining what is true. While knowledge all things is limited, one cannot be limited to suggesting to know the truth of things beyond our resonance. Until proven otherwise, what we say is the truth and everything else is subjective. In the relationship between truth and knowledge, Plato and Charles Peirce had their own separate perceptions. Plato believed that truth is derived from a person’s knowledge, while Pierce believed absolute knowledge to determine absolute truth can never be obtained. Plato’s belief of knowledge and the truth is more correct in providing reasoning that knowledge is based on past experiences, where universal knowledge is a factor in determining truth.

The definition of truth and search for knowledge will continue to be an ongoing debate in which many great philosophers in past, present, and the future will offer philosophies to help guide the debate. While truth will continue to be a matter of one’s own perception, in order to assure that what people believe is the truth is to base their knowledge on their own perceptions.  Based what they know on their own absolute truth in their senses, knowledge, ideas, and beliefs that help form their own realities. Truth is relative to only that individual, as people will experience events differently from other individuals. Descartes said it best that what he knows to be true is based on his own existence. Since he knows that he exists, he knows that the reality around him exists, therefore, his own perception of what is true.

Absolute Truth. (n.d). All About Philosophy . Retrieved from http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/absolute-truth.htm

Bennett, Jonathan. (1990). Truth and Stability. Canadian Journal of Philosophy . Vo. 16. Pg. 75-108. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/jfb/trustab.pdf

Descartes, Rene. (1639). Meditations on First Philosophy . Marxists. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/descartes/1639/meditations.htm

James, William. (1909). The Meaning of Truth . Authorama. Retrieved from http://www.authorama.com/meaning-of-truth-1.html

Luther, Martin. (1520). The Freedom of a Christian . Lutheran Online. Retrieved from https://www.lutheransonline.com/lo/894/FSLO-1328308894-111894.pdf

Smith, Kurt. (2014). Descartes’ Life and Works.   The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/descartes-works

Swoyer, Chris. (2014). Relativism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/relativism

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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. Many of the papers mentioned in this essay can be found in the anthologies edited by Blackburn and Simmons (1999) and Lynch (2001b). There are a number of book-length surveys of the topics discussed here, including Burgess and Burgess (2011), Kirkham (1992), and Künne (2003). Also, a number of the topics discussed here, and many further ones, are surveyed at more length in papers in Glanzberg (2018).

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 representation and correspondence, 3.3 facts again, 3.4 truthmakers, 4.1 realism and truth, 4.2 anti-realism and truth, 4.3 anti-realism and pragmatism, 4.4 truth pluralism, 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, 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. Ideas that sound strikingly like a correspondence theory are no doubt very old. They might well be found in Aristotle or Aquinas. When we turn to the late 19th and early 20th centuries where we pick up the story of the neo-classical theories of truth, it is clear that ideas about correspondence were central to the discussions of the time. In spite of their importance, however, 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 the contemporary debate. For these reasons, we dwell on the origins of the correspondence theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at greater length than those of the other neo-classical views, before turning to its contemporary neo-classical form. For an overview of the correspondence theory, see David (2018).

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. An overview of these issues is given by Baldwin (2018).)

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 (1899; 1902) 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. (Related ideas about the identity theory and idealism are discussed by McDowell (1994) and further developed by Hornsby (2001).)

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), Candlish (1999), Candlish and Damnjanovic (2018), Cartwright (1987), Dodd (2000), 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) and David (2001) for 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; 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. (For more on facts and proposition in this period, see Sullivan and Johnston (2018).)

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, and indeed, the Tractatus remains one of the important sources for the neo-classical correspondence theory. For more recent extensive discussions of facts, see Armstrong (1997) and Neale (2001).)

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 \(\langle\) Ramey , Singing \(\rangle\). This fact exists. In contrast, the world (we presume) contains no fact \(\langle\) Ramey , Dancing \(\rangle\). The belief that Ramey sings stands in the relation of correspondence to the fact \(\langle\) Ramey , Singing \(\rangle\), 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 \(\langle\) Ramey , Singing \(\rangle\) 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 as the contents of beliefs and assertions, and propositions have structure which at least roughly corresponds to the structure of sentences. At least, for simple beliefs like that Ramey sings, the proposition has the same subject predicate structure as the sentence. (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:

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 David (1994, 2018) 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 (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. See also Young (2001) 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. (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 Walker (2018) 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:

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 (2004) 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 (2018). 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. (See Patterson (2012) for more on Tarski’s work in its historical context.)

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). For more discussion, see Woleński (2001).

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

An adequate theory of truth for \(\mathbf{L}\) must imply, for each sentence \(\phi\) of \(\mathbf{L}\)

\(\ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\phi\).

(We have simplified Tarski’s presentation somewhat.) This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. Given the assumption that \(\mathbf{L}\) is fully interpreted, we may assume that each sentence \(\phi\) 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 \(\mathbf{L}\).

Convention T draws our attention to the biconditionals of the form

\(\ulcorner \ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\phi \urcorner\),

which are usually called the Tarski biconditionals for a language \(\mathbf{L}\).

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 \(\mathbf{L}\) displays the right structure, then truth for \(\mathbf{L}\) can be defined recursively. For instance, let us suppose that \(\mathbf{L}\) is a simple formal language, containing two atomic sentences ‘snow is white’ and ‘grass is green’, and the sentential connectives \(\vee\) and \(\neg\).

In spite of its simplicity, \(\mathbf{L}\) 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.
• \(\ulcorner \phi \vee \psi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true or \(\ulcorner \psi \urcorner\) is true.
• \(\ulcorner \neg \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if it is not the case that \(\ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) 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 \(\mathbf{L}'\), just like \(\mathbf{L}\) except that instead of simply having two atomic sentences, \(\mathbf{L}'\) breaks atomic sentences into terms and predicates. \(\mathbf{L}'\) 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 \(\mathbf{L}'\) is like \(\mathbf{L}\), but also contains the sentences ‘Snow is green’ and ‘Grass is white’.)

We can define truth for atomic sentences of \(\mathbf{L}'\) 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 \(\ulcorner t\) is \(P \urcorner\): \(\ulcorner t\) is \(P \urcorner\) is true if and only if the referent of \(\ulcorner t \urcorner\) satisfies \(\ulcorner P\urcorner\).

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 \(\mathbf{L}\) to produce a full theory of truth for \(\mathbf{L}'\).

Let us say that a Tarskian theory of truth is a recursive theory, built up in ways similar to the theory of truth for \(\mathbf{L}'\). Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. A Tarskian theory of truth for a language \(\mathbf{L}\) can be used to show that theories in \(\mathbf{L}\) 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 Ray (2018) and the entries on axiomatic theories of truth , the Liar paradox , and 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. (For a discussion of Aristotle’s views in a historical context, see Szaif (2018).)

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.

Much of the subsequent discussion of Field-style approaches to correspondence has focused on the role of representation in these views. Field’s own (1972) discussion relies on a causal relation between terms and their referents, and a similar relation for satisfaction. 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. On many views, including Field’s, a name stands in such a relation to its bearer, and the relation is a causal one.

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. One interpretation of Field’s theory is just that. 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 (1972) 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 (2006) and Lynch (2009) 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 6.5.

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. (See Vision (2004) 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 (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.

For more on facts, see the entry on facts .

The truthmaker principle is often put as the schema:

If \(\phi\), then there is an \(x\) such that necessarily, if \(x\) exists, then \(\phi\).

(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. (For one view on this, see Merricks (2007).)

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. (For more discussion of truthmakers, see Cameron (2018) and the papers in Beebee and Dodd (2005).)

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.

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 1.1. 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 Fumerton (2002) 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.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 Shieh (2018) and the papers in Greenough and Lynch (2006) and 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 anti-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).

Davidson’s views on truth have also been associated with pragmatism, notably by Rorty (1986). Davidson has distanced himself from this interpretation (e.g., 1990), but he does highlight connections between truth and belief and meaning. Insofar as these are human attitudes or relate to human actions, Davidson grants there is some affinity between his views and those of some pragmatists (especially, he says, Dewey).

Another view that has grown out of the literature on realism and anti-realism, and has become increasingly important in the current literature, is that of pluralism about truth. This view, developed in work of Lynch (e.g. 2001b; 2009) and Wright (e.g. 1992; 1999), proposes that there are multiple ways for truth bearers to be true. Wright, in particular, suggests that in certain domains of discourse what we say is true in virtue of a correspondence-like relation, while in others it is its true in virtue of a kind of assertibility relation that is closer in spirit to the anti-realist views we have just discussed.

Such a proposal might suggest there are multiple concepts of truth, or that the term ‘true’ is itself ambiguous. However, whether or not a pluralist view is committed to such claims has been disputed. In particular, Lynch (2001b; 2009) develops a version of pluralism which takes truth to be a functional role concept. The functional role of truth is characterized by a range of principles that articulate such features of truth as its objectivity, its role in inquiry, and related ideas we have encountered in considering various theories of truth. (A related point about platitudes governing the concept of truth is made by Wright (1992).) But according to Lynch, these display the functional role of truth. Furthermore, Lynch claims that on analogy with analytic functionalism, these principles can be seen as deriving from our pre-theoretic or ‘folk’ ideas about truth.

Like all functional role concepts, truth must be realized, and according to Lynch it may be realized in different ways in different settings. Such multiple realizability has been one of the hallmarks of functional role concepts discussed in the philosophy of mind. For instance, Lynch suggests that for ordinary claims about material objects, truth might be realized by a correspondence property (which he links to representational views), while for moral claims truth might be manifest by an assertibility property along more anti-realist lines.

For more on pluralism about truth, see Pedersen and Lynch (2018) and the entry on pluralist theories of truth .

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 :

\(\ulcorner \ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true \(\urcorner\) has the same meaning as \(\phi\).

(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 \(\ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true is just to assert that \(\phi\).

This view was advanced by Strawson (1949; 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 \(\mathbf{L}\) and every \(\phi\) in \(\mathbf{L}\), the biconditionals \(\ulcorner \ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\phi \urcorner\) 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 (2005) 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; 1994), which will be discussed in section 6.3. For an insightful critique of deflationism, see Gupta (1993).

For more on deflationism, see Azzouni (2018) and 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 are meaningful , and are thereby able to say something about what the world is like. (We might say that they are able to represent the world, but that is to use ‘represent’ in a wider sense than we saw in section 3.2. No assumptions about just what stands in relations to what objects are required to see truth-bearers as meaningful.) It is in virtue of being meaningful that truth-bearers are able to enter into correspondence relations. Truth-bearers are things which meaningfully make claims about what the world is like, and are true or false depending on whether the facts in the world are as described.

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 are meaningful, 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 meaningful, however the background metaphysics (presumably idealism) understands meaning.

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 meaningful. 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 something meaningful. 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 meaning 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.

For more on these issues, see King (2018).

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 meaningful, 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 are meaningful. They are so in virtue of having constituents in the world, which are brought together in the right way. There are many complications about the nature of meaning, 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 are meaningful as of how their truth values are fixed. Again, abstracting from some complications about meaning, 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 \(\ulcorner \ulcorner \phi \urcorner\) is true if and only if \(\phi \urcorner\) is to fix whether \(\phi\) is in the extension of ‘is true’ or not. But it can also be seen as stating the truth conditions of \(\phi\). Both rely on the fact that the unquoted occurrence of \(\phi\) 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 \(a \in p\).

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 meaningful. 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; 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 meaningful.

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 meaningfulness of truth-bearers has 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. (For more discussion of these issues, see Higginbotham (1986; 1989) and the exchange between Higginbotham (1992) and Soames (1992).)

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 representational 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 (e.g. 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.

In Davidson (1986), he thought his view of truth had enough affinity with the neo-classical coherence theory to warrant being called a coherence theory of truth, while at the same time he saw the role of Tarskian apparatus as warranting the claim that his view was also compatible with a kind of correspondence theory of truth.

In later work, however, Davidson reconsidered this position. In fact, already in Davidson (1977) he had expressed doubt about any understanding of the role of Tarski’s theory in radical interpretation that involves the kind of representational apparatus relied on by Field (1972), as we discussed in sections 3.1 and 3.2. In the “Afterthoughts” to Davidson (1986), he also concluded that his view departs too far from the neo-classical coherence theory to be named one. What is important is rather the role of radical interpretation in the theory of content, and its leading to the idea that belief is veridical. These are indeed points connected to coherence, but not to the coherence theory of truth per se. They also comprise a strong form of anti-representationalism. Thus, though he does not advance a coherence theory of truth, he does advance a theory that stands in opposition to the representational variants of the correspondence theory we discussed in section 3.2.

For more on Davidson, see Glanzberg (2013) and 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.

For more on truth and assertion, see the papers in Brown and Cappelen (2011) and the entry on assertion .

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• –––, 1931, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Ray, Greg, 2018, “Tarski on the concept of truth”, in M. Glanzberg (ed.) 2018, 695–717.
• Rorty, Richard, 1986, “Pragmatism, Davidson and truth”, in Truth and Interpretation , E. Lepore (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 333–355.
• Ross, W. D. (ed.), 1928, The Works of Aristotle Translated into English , Oxford: Clarendon Press, second edn.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1903, Principles of Mathematics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, first edn.
• –––, 1904, “Meinong’s theory of complexes and assumptions I, II, III”, Mind , 13: 204–219, 336–354, 509–524. Reprinted in Lackey (1973).
• –––, 1910a, “The monistic theory of truth”, in Philosophical Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin, 131–146.
• –––, 1910b, “On the nature of truth and falsehood”, in Philosophical Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin, 147–159.
• –––, 1912, The Problems of Philosophy , London: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1956, “The philosophy of logical atomism”, in Logic and Knowledge , R. C. Marsh (ed.), London: George Allen and Unwin, 177–281. Originally published in The Monist in 1918.
• Shieh, Sanford, 2018, “Truth, objectivity, and realism”, in M. Glanzberg (ed.) 2018, 433–476.
• Soames, Scott, 1984, “What is a theory of truth?”, Journal of Philosophy , 81: 411–429.
• –––, 1992, “Truth, meaning, and understanding”, Philosophical Studies , 65: 17–35.
• Strawson, Peter F., 1949, “Truth”, Analysis , 9: 83–97.
• –––, 1950, “Truth”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 24. Reprinted in Strawson (1971).
• –––, 1971, Logico-Linguistic Papers , London: Methuen.
• Sullivan, Peter and Johnston, Colin, 2018, “Judgments, facts, and propositions”, in M. Glanzberg (ed.) 2018, 150–192.
• Szaif, Jan, 2018, “Plato and Aristotle on truth and falsehood”, in M. Glanzberg (ed.) 2018, 9–49.
• Tarski, Alfred, 1931, “Sur les ensembles définissables de nombres réels. I.”, Fundamenta Mathematicae , 17: 210–239. References are to the translation by J. H. Woodger as “On definable sets of real numbers. I” in Tarski (1983).
• –––, 1935, “Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen”, Studia Philosophica , 1: 261–405. References are to the translation by J. H. Woodger as “The concept of truth in formalized languages” in Tarski (1983).
• –––, 1944, “The semantic conception of truth”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 4: 341–375.
• –––, 1983, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics , Indianapolis: Hackett, second edn. Edited by J. Corcoran with translations by J. H. Woodger.
• Taylor, Barry, 1976, “States of affairs”, in Truth and Meaning , G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 263–284.
• Vision, Gerald, 2004, Veritas: The Correspondence Theory and Its Critics , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Walker, Ralph C. S., 1989, The Coherence Theory of Truth , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2018, “The coherence theory of truth”, in M. Glanzberg (ed.) 2018, 219–237.
• Williamson, Timothy, 1996, “Knowing and asserting”, Philosophical Review , 104: 489–523.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
• Woleński, Jan, 2001, “In defense of the semantic definition of truth”, Synthese , 126: 67–90.
• Wright, Crispin, 1976, “Truth-conditions and criteria”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 50: 217–245. Reprinted in Wright (1993).
• –––, 1982, “Anti-realist semantics: The role of criteria”, in Idealism: Past and Present , G. Vesey (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 225–248. Reprinted in Wright (1993).
• –––, 1992, Truth and Objectivity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1993, Realism, Meaning and Truth , Oxford: Blackwell, second edn.
• –––, 1999, “Truth: A traditional debate reviewed”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 24: 31–74
• Young, James O., 2001, “A defense of the coherence theory of truth”, Journal of Philosophical Research , 26: 89–101.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Davidson, Donald | facts | James, William | liar paradox | Peirce, Charles Sanders | realism | Tarski, Alfred: truth definitions | truth: axiomatic theories of | truth: coherence theory of | truth: correspondence theory of | truth: deflationism about | truth: identity theory of | truth: pluralist theories of

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Josh Parsons for advice on metaphysics, and to Jc Beall, Justin Khoo, Jason Stanley, Paul Teller, and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Copyright © 2018 by Michael Glanzberg < michael . glanzberg @ philosophy . rutgers . edu >

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• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Truth
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truth , in metaphysics and the philosophy of language , the property of sentences, assertions, beliefs , thoughts, or propositions that are said, in ordinary discourse, to agree with the facts or to state what is the case.

Truth is the aim of belief; falsity is a fault. People need the truth about the world in order to thrive . Truth is important. Believing what is not true is apt to spoil people’s plans and may even cost them their lives. Telling what is not true may result in legal and social penalties. Conversely, a dedicated pursuit of truth characterizes the good scientist, the good historian, and the good detective. So what is truth, that it should have such gravity and such a central place in people’s lives?

The classic suggestion comes from Aristotle (384–322 bce ): “To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.” In other words, the world provides “what is” or “what is not,” and the true saying or thought corresponds to the fact so provided. This idea appeals to common sense and is the germ of what is called the correspondence theory of truth. As it stands, however, it is little more than a platitude and far less than a theory. Indeed, it may amount to merely a wordy paraphrase, whereby, instead of saying “that’s true” of some assertion, one says “that corresponds with the facts.” Only if the notions of fact and correspondence can be further developed will it be possible to understand truth in these terms.

Unfortunately, many philosophers doubt whether an acceptable explanation of facts and correspondence can be given. Facts, as they point out, are strange entities. It is tempting to think of them as structures or arrangements of things in the world. However, as the Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, structures have spatial locations, but facts do not. The Eiffel Tower can be moved from Paris to Rome, but the fact that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris cannot be moved anywhere. Furthermore, critics urge, the very idea of what the facts are in a given case is nothing apart from people’s sincere beliefs about the case, which means those beliefs that people take to be true. Thus, there is no enterprise of first forming a belief or theory about some matter and then in some new process stepping outside the belief or theory to assess whether it corresponds with the facts. There are, indeed, processes of checking and verifying beliefs, but they work by bringing up further beliefs and perceptions and assessing the original in light of those. In actual investigations, what tells people what to believe is not the world or the facts but how they interpret the world or select and conceptualize the facts.

Starting in the mid-19th century, this line of criticism led some philosophers to think that they should concentrate on larger theories, rather than sentences or assertions taken one at a time. Truth, on this view, must be a feature of the overall body of belief considered as a system of logically interrelated components—what is called the “web of belief.” It might be, for example, an entire physical theory that earns its keep by making predictions or enabling people to control things or by simplifying and unifying otherwise disconnected phenomena. An individual belief in such a system is true if it sufficiently coheres with, or makes rational sense within, enough other beliefs; alternatively, a belief system is true if it is sufficiently internally coherent . Such were the views of the British idealists , including F.H. Bradley and H.H. Joachim, who, like all idealists, rejected the existence of mind-independent facts against which the truth of beliefs could be determined ( see also realism: realism and truth ).

Yet coherentism too seems inadequate, since it suggests that human beings are trapped in the sealed compartment of their own beliefs, unable to know anything of the world beyond. Moreover, as the English philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell pointed out, nothing seems to prevent there being many equally coherent but incompatible belief systems. Yet at best only one of them can be true.

Some theorists have suggested that belief systems can be compared in pragmatic or utilitarian terms. According to this idea, even if many different systems can be internally coherent, it is likely that some will be much more useful than others. Thus, one can expect that, in a process akin to Darwinian natural selection , the more useful systems will survive while the others gradually go extinct. The replacement of Newtonian mechanics by relativity theory is an example of this process. It was in this spirit that the 19th-century American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce said:

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

In effect, Peirce’s view places primary importance on scientific curiosity , experimentation, and theorizing and identifies truth as the imagined ideal limit of their ongoing progress. Although this approach may seem appealingly hard-headed, it has prompted worries about how a society, or humanity as a whole, could know at a given moment whether it is following the path toward such an ideal. In practice it has opened the door to varying degrees of skepticism about the notion of truth. In the late 20th century philosophers such as Richard Rorty advocated retiring the notion of truth in favour of a more open-minded and open-ended process of indefinite adjustment of beliefs. Such a process, it was felt, would have its own utility , even though it lacked any final or absolute endpoint.

The rise of formal logic (the abstract study of assertions and deductive arguments) and the growth of interest in formal systems (formal or mathematical languages) among many Anglo-American philosophers in the early 20th century led to new attempts to define truth in logically or scientifically acceptable terms. It also led to a renewed respect for the ancient liar paradox (attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Epimenides ), in which a sentence says of itself that it is false, thereby apparently being true if it is false and false if it is true. Logicians set themselves the task of developing systems of mathematical reasoning that would be free of the kinds of self-reference that give rise to paradoxes such as that of the liar. However, this proved difficult to do without at the same time making some legitimate proof procedures impossible. There is good self-reference (“All sentences, including this, are of finite length”) and bad self-reference (“This sentence is false”) but no generally agreed-upon principle for distinguishing them.

These efforts culminated in the work of the Polish-born logician Alfred Tarski , who in the 1930s showed how to construct a definition of truth for a formal or mathematical language by means of a theory that would assign truth conditions (the conditions in which a given sentence is true) to each sentence in the language without making use of any semantic terms, notably including truth, in that language. Truth conditions were identified by means of “T-sentences.” For example, the English-language T-sentence for the German sentence Schnee ist weiss is: “Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white. A T-sentence says of some sentence (S) in the object language (the language for which truth is being defined) that S is true if and only if…, where the ellipsis is replaced by a translation of S into the language used to construct the theory (the metalanguage ). Since no metalanguage translation of any S (in this case, snow is white ) will contain the term true, Tarski could claim that each T-sentence provides a “partial definition” of truth for the object language and that their sum total provides the complete definition.

While the technical aspects of Tarski’s work were much admired and have been much discussed, its philosophical significance remained unclear, in part because T-sentences struck many theorists as less than illuminating . But the weight of philosophical opinion gradually shifted, and eventually this platitudinous appearance was regarded as a virtue and indeed as indicative of the whole truth about truth. The idea was that, instead of staring at the abstract question “What is truth?,” philosophers should content themselves with the particular question “What does the truth of S amount to?”; and for any well-specified sentence, a humble T-sentence will provide the answer.

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Essay on Truth | Truth Essay for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay on Truth:  The term truth can be defined as the property according to reality or fact. Truth is attributed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it with propositions, beliefs, and declarative sentences.

The concept of truth is a completely subjective topic, and it varies from person to person. Truth is usually held in contrast to falsity. The idea of truth is debated and discussed in different contexts, including science, art, philosophy, and theology.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Truth for Students and Kids in English

We provide students with essay samples on a long Truth essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the same topic for reference.

Long Essay on Truth 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Truth is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

For centuries, there has been a conflict between what is right and what is wrong. Many conservatives still believe that truth is absolute reality, and there is no falsity involved. However, others tend to disagree who believe that truth is relative – it is an individual’s perception of beliefs and decisions.

For this reason, among individuals, truth differs through their contrasting opinions. However, truth is something that everyone believes to be correct. Hence it greatly depends on what is true in the minds of people. On the other hand, the truth spoken with a bad intention can be worse than a lie. Therefore truth is a statement or expression that corresponds with reality and happiness.

Today’s society places a high value on truth and the person who speaks the truth. Truth serves as a foundation of a fair and just society. In court, witnesses are required to swear to tell the truth – in this way, and justice can be delivered. Most modern religions have an opinion on the matter, and they place a high value on the principles of truthfulness. Broadly, there are two aspects of truthfulness: being true to others and being true to oneself. The two are not wholly the same thing; however, they are closely linked.

Truthful people understand themselves better. They know their strengths and weaknesses, and their successes and failures do not deceive them. Truth helps people in expressing their true selves and showcasing who they are. It helps them in being accurate in their descriptions of themselves and others and meeting any commitments or promises that one makes.

Truth matters, and it is important both to an individual and society as a whole as an individual being truthful means that one can grow and mature by learning from their mistakes. For society, truthfulness helps in building social bonds. At the same time, lying and hypocrisy has an adverse effect and break those bonds. There are two possible ways of not telling the truth -firstly by not providing all the information. Some people refrain from becoming overly personal, even if it is the truth. It depends on the context and whether the people need to know about the details. Some people even stop themselves from sharing anything at all.

Providing false information is wrong. Some people tend to lie to get themselves out of a situation or not hurt anyone’s feelings. However, in some scenarios, it becomes necessary to lie. Just like any other quality, in truthfulness finding the balance is essential. One should neither overplay nor underplay their weaknesses or their virtues. It is as bad to pretend that one is less good in something than they are as to exaggerate about their abilities.

It is important to live and act following one’s values. Being truthful to oneself is vital as one cannot live in line with their values if they keep pretending to themselves that they are something else. Being truthful helps individuals be honest about themselves, allowing them to live a life that reflects it.

Short Essay on Truth 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Truth is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Truth is defined as something that is following reality. Truth can be relative to a person and dominated by an individual’s subjective thoughts and believes. Truth is the purity that helps in differentiating between right and wrong. The ‘absolute truth’ is regardless of what one thinks and believes in.

Truth is what corresponds with the available facts and pieces of evidence. Truth does not change just because we learn something about it. However, it is not good to always tell the truth. If the main purpose of telling the truth is to hurt someone, it is then considered to be terrible than the most terrible lie. This is why many people keep in mind other people’s sentiments and beliefs before telling the truth. Sometimes, not telling the truth doesn’t necessarily mean someone has to lie. It can also be keeping from them a few details that they don’t need to know.

10 Lines on Truth in English

• Being truthful is vital in life because it brings happiness and builds strong trust bonds with people.
• Truth is subjective and is relatively different for every person.
• Truth coincides with facts and reality.
• Truth is a statement that never changes, no matter how people feel about it.
• Truth can be very complicated sometimes, and various people interpret it differently.
• Truth is the reality and the actions without any filter or edits.
• Telling the truth and accepting it are two completely different things.
• It is easier to tell a lie, but truth has its beauty and depth.
• The lie’s path is easy and short, whereas the truth is long-lived and helps achieve sincerity.
• The one who follows the path of truth always ends up happy, contented, and successful.

FAQ’s on Truth Essay

Question 1. Is truth an important value of life?

Answer: Truth serves as the building block of the qualities of life like morality, equality, justice, peace, love, security, freedom, spirituality, and even survival.

Question 2. Is it okay to lie sometimes?

Answer: Even though it is always right to stick to the truth, sometimes the truth can be harsh and hurt others’ sentiments and feelings. So, sometimes to refrain from hurting someone, it’s okay to lie.

Question 3.  How can one tell which is the truth?

Answer: Truth is the reality that is following the facts and shreds of evidence.

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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."

Custom Truth Essay for Students

On the whole, your essays could be written faster than you think. On WiseEssays.com, we can provide you with a top-notch custom writing anytime. All you need to do is to contact our customer support agents or leave an order on our website. Our professional writers will fill your assignment with relevant facts, convincing examples, and exciting ideas. So, if you're tired of different academic challenges, just rely on our experts!

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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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Essay on Truth

Students are often asked to write an essay on Truth in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Truth

What is truth.

Truth is something that is real and accurate. It is the opposite of a lie. Truth is important because it helps us understand the world around us. It also helps us make good decisions.

Why is Truth Important?

Truth is important for many reasons. First, it helps us to understand the world around us. When we know the truth about something, we can make better decisions. For example, if we know the truth about a product, we can decide whether or not to buy it.

Truth and Trust

Truth is also important for building trust. When we are honest with people, they are more likely to trust us. Truth is the foundation of all good relationships. Without truth, there can be no trust.

Truth is important for many reasons. It helps us to understand the world around us, make good decisions, and build trust. In a world where it can be difficult to know what is true, it is more important than ever to seek out the truth.

250 Words Essay on Truth

Truth is something that is real and accurate. It is the opposite of a lie. It is important to tell the truth because it helps us to build trust and relationships with others. When we tell the truth, people know that they can rely on us and that we are honest.

Truth is important because it allows us to make informed decisions. When we know the truth, we can make choices that are based on facts and evidence. This can help us to avoid making mistakes and to achieve our goals.

How Can We Find the Truth?

Sometimes it can be difficult to find the truth. There may be a lot of different opinions about something, and it can be hard to know which one is correct. However, there are a few things we can do to try to find the truth.

Be Open-Minded

One of the best ways to find the truth is to be open-minded. This means being willing to consider different viewpoints and to change your mind if you are presented with new evidence.

Do Your Research

Another way to find the truth is to do your research. This means gathering information from a variety of sources and evaluating it carefully. The more information you have, the better equipped you will be to make an informed decision.

Be Skeptical

500 words essay on truth.

Truth is a concept that has been studied and debated by philosophers for centuries. In simple terms, truth is the quality of being in accordance with reality or actuality. It is the opposite of a lie or falsehood.

Truth is Objective

One of the most important things to understand about truth is that it is objective. This means that it is not dependent on our individual beliefs or opinions. For example, the statement “the Earth is round” is true regardless of whether or not you believe it is true. This is because the Earth is round regardless of what we think about it.

Truth Can be Difficult to Find

Truth is important.

Despite the challenges, it is important to seek out the truth. This is because truth is essential for making good decisions. If we do not know the truth, we cannot make informed choices about our lives. We may end up making decisions that are based on false information or beliefs, and this can lead to negative consequences.

How to Find the Truth

There are a number of things we can do to try to find the truth. One important thing is to be open-minded and willing to consider evidence that contradicts our existing beliefs. We should also be critical of information that we come across, and we should not be afraid to ask questions. Finally, we should seek out multiple sources of information and try to get a well-rounded view of any issue.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Essay Samples on Truth

Universal truth: the importance of good explanations.

Introduction As a young child, I remember believing in the fictitious story of Santa Claus based purely on imagination. Every Christmas, my friends, and family would celebrate “Santa” coming from the North Pole to bring presents to all children who behaved well. Eighty-four percent of...

Implementing the Four Noble Truths in Everyday Life

Introduction One of the fundamental doctrines of Buddhism set forth by Buddha himself are the Four Noble Truths. These contain the very essence of the Buddha's pragmatic teachings. The Buddha is known to attain enlightenment only after the realization of these four truths during his...

Maintaining Trust: Importance of Telling the Truth

Have you ever wondered if lying is right or wrong? Have you ever lied and been tricked into telling the truth? Most people have been tricked by pretty much everyone. Lying according to research is always wrong. Most people feel guilty about lying and almost...

• Communication

Evaluation of Truth in Life with Doubt and Skepticism

Skepticism brings us to doubt everything in our lives that we once perceived as true. David Hume, Rene Descartes, and Sextus Empiricus have all made a contribution with their stance on skepticism through their writings Discourse on the method of rightly conducting the reason, and...

Uncovering The True Fiction Behind Ishmael Beah’s Recount of His Life Story

What settles the difference between nonfiction and fiction? The specifics. In a nonfiction novel, the author is recounting on purely true events. However, in a fictional text, the author has a wide range of possibilities and can be very subjective. The specifics can be used...

• A Long Way Gone

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The Effects of Sincerity on Our Lives

Whoever Sows Truth does not always Reap Confidence Whoever usually sows truth, as amazing as it may seem, does not always receive confidence. When we talk about sincerity, we are undoubtedly facing a double-edged sword before which many feel uncomfortable and even threatened, because sometimes...

• Human Behavior

Why Facts Are the Enemy of Truth: Facts and Misrepresented Context

The definition of truth is the quality or state of being true. The word truth is used in everyone’s life, whether it is a mom teaching their kid to always tell the truth, or a kid learning that telling the truth can hurt someone’s feelings....

The Perception of Reality and Truth by People

Truth, the property of sentences, assertions, beliefs, thoughts, or propositions in metaphysics and philosophy are said to agree with the facts or state what is the case in normal discourse. Truth is the object of the belief; logical error is a mistake. Individuals need to...

Understanding the Power of Truth from the Perspective of Philosophy

The word 'truth' originates from the Anglo-Saxon word 'tree' meaning 'believed'. 'Belief' itself is from the word 'glycan', which means 'to esteem dear'. Etymologically, ‘truth' would be something accepted to be of some value, instead of essentially being right. 'Believe' is used in the more...

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Understanding the Power of Truth and why it is so Important for Us

For as long as human beings have been able to think, they’ve had the desire to understand the truths of life. In ‘The Allegory of the Cave’, when referring to these desires Plato states, “God knows whether it is true”. When trying to answer many...

Development of Science in Postmodernistic Era

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A Lie: Social and Philosophical Definiton of Lying

Someone could argue that from an early age, the parents, the school teachers and everyone who is being involved with children, advise them that lying is evil and they should not use it as a practice. However, is it always bad to lie? What if...

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Edmund's Quest for Recognition in Shakespeare's "King Lear"

King Lear, one of William Shakespeare's most celebrated works, is a tragedy that explores the theme of revenge against society. The play follows the story of Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, who seeks vengeance against those who have wronged him due...

Lying or Withholding the Truth in the Medical Setting

Withholding the truth about a patient’s health, health outcomes, or treatment can be taxing for families and medical providers. Doing so could also be in direct violation of a patient’s autonomy, their right to make rational decisions and choices regarding one’s overall well-being (Vaughn, 2013,...

Best topics on Truth

1. Universal Truth: the Importance of Good Explanations

2. Implementing the Four Noble Truths in Everyday Life

3. Maintaining Trust: Importance of Telling the Truth

4. Evaluation of Truth in Life with Doubt and Skepticism

5. Uncovering The True Fiction Behind Ishmael Beah’s Recount of His Life Story

6. The Effects of Sincerity on Our Lives

7. Why Facts Are the Enemy of Truth: Facts and Misrepresented Context

8. The Perception of Reality and Truth by People

9. Understanding the Power of Truth from the Perspective of Philosophy

10. Understanding the Power of Truth and why it is so Important for Us

11. Development of Science in Postmodernistic Era

12. A Lie: Social and Philosophical Definiton of Lying

13. Edmund’s Quest for Recognition in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”

14. Lying or Withholding the Truth in the Medical Setting

• Ethics in Everyday Life
• Philosophy of Education
• Self Reflection
• Allegory of The Cave

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Question of the Month

What is truth, the following answers to this question each win a signed copy of how to be an agnostic by mark vernon. sorry if you’re not here; there were lots of entries..

True beliefs portray the world as it is; false beliefs portray the world as other than it is. A straight ruler appears bent when half-submerged in a glass of water. What is the truth of the matter? Truth’s character is both logical and empirical. The logical ‘principle of non-contradiction’ ensures that the contradictory propositions ‘the ruler is straight’ and ‘the ruler is not straight’ cannot both be true at the same time, and in principle observation should settle which is the case. In practice, things are not so simple. The observable truth would seem to change as the ruler enters the water. Perhaps this is to be expected? After all, if true beliefs describe the world, and the world changes, then truth must change too. However, relativists rubbing their hands at the thought that we each construct our own truth, and sceptics finger-wagging that this shows there is no such thing as truth, should both hold fire. As well as the principle of non-contradiction, we are also guided by the empirical principle that nature is uniform and not capricious. Solid objects are not usually deformed by immersion in water. So, we can approach a truth that is independent of particular observations by, ironically, taking account of the observer in looking at the bigger picture: optical effects resulting from refraction of light explain why the ruler appears bent but, really, is straight.

But how can we be sure there is a world to describe? What if reality itself is an illusion, like the bent stick – a flickering shadow on a cave wall? We may never know whether our observations are just shadows of what is real, but we should resist both mysticism and metaphysics when thinking about truth.

Reaching a consensus on an objective description of the world is possible in principle. That is the wonder of science. Consensus on our subjective descriptions is impossible in principle. That is the wonder of consciousness. Truth is the single currency of the sovereign mind, the knowing subject, and the best thinking – in philosophy, science, art – discriminates between the objective and subjective sides of the coin, and appreciates both the unity of reality and the diversity of experience.

Jon Wainwright, London

Let’s not ask what truth is: let us ask instead how we can recognize it reliably when it appears. Four factors determine the truthfulness of a theory or explanation: congruence, consistency, coherence, and usefulness.

• A true theory is congruent with our experience – meaning, it fits the facts. It is in principle falsifiable, but nothing falsifying it has been found. One way we can infer that our theory is congruent with the facts as we experience them is when what we experience is predictable from the theory. But truth is always provisional, not an end state. When we discover new facts, we may need to change our theory.

• A true theory is internally consistent . It has no contradictions within itself, and it fits together elegantly. The principle of consistency (same as the principle of non-contradiction) allows us to infer things consistent with what we already know. An inconsistent theory – one that contains contradictions – does not allow us to do this.

• Alongside this criterion, a true theory is coherent with everything else we consider true . It confirms, or at least fails to contradict, the rest of our established knowledge, where ‘knowledge’ means beliefs for which we can give rigorous reasons. The physical sciences – physics, chemistry, biology, geology and astronomy – all reinforce each other, for example.

• A true theory is useful . It gives us mastery. When we act on the basis of a true theory or explanation, our actions are successful. What is true works to organize our thought and our practice, so that we are able both to reason with logical rigor to true conclusions and to handle reality effectively. Truth enables us to exert our power, in the sense of our ability to get things done, successfully. It has predictive power, allowing us to make good choices concerning what is likely to happen.

Does this mean that what is useful is true? That is not a useful question, as it’s not the sole criterion. Rather, if a theory is congruent with our experience, internally consistent, coherent with everything else we know, and useful for organizing our thinking and practice, then we can confidently consider it true.

Bill Meacham, by email

Proposition P is true if P is the case, and P is the case if P is true. Together with all other propositions which meet the same criterion, P can then claim to inhabit the realm of Truth.

But is P the case? P may be a sincerely-held belief; but this alone is insufficient to establish its truth. Claims to truth must be well justified. Those beliefs based on prediction and forecast are particularly suspect, and can usually be discounted. The recent prediction that ‘the world will end at 6.00pm on 21 May 2011’ is an example. There was never any systematic attempt at justification, and without this any claim to truth is seriously (and usually fatally) flawed. If it cannot be shown that a belief either corresponds to a known fact, coheres with a ‘consistent and harmonious’ system of beliefs, or prompts actions which have desirable outcomes (the pragmatic approach), then any claim to Truth becomes impossible to justify.

The realm of Truth may contain those arising from mystical convictions, which are more difficult to justify than those based on observations. Although attempts are made to pragmatically justify religious beliefs, the many competing claims leave us in confusion. As regards Truth in the Art-World, Aquinas identifies Truth with Beauty, and defines the truth in art as ‘that which pleases in the very apprehension of it’.

So, Truth is the realm populated by well-justified beliefs. To a certain extent truth is subjective, although a belief gains greater currency by its wider acknowledgment.

Truth is not constant. Some beliefs which were held to be true are now considered false, and some for which truth is now claimed may be deemed false in the future, and vice versa . Truth is good for helping us decide how to act, because it serves as a standard for making some sort of sense of a world populated also by half-truths and untruths.

Ray Pearce, Manchester

Our ancestors did themselves (and us) a great favour when they began using noises to communicate. They probably started with “Hide!” “Wolves!” “Eat!/Don’t eat!” and “Mine/Yours!” The invention of language enabled us to do many things. We could use it to describe the world as we found it; but we could also use it to create things, such as boundaries and private property. As John Searle has argued, the vast structure of our social world, including our laws, businesses, politics, economics and entertainments, has been built out of language.

Telling the truth is just one of the uses of language. Telling the truth is complicated by the fact that we live in a hybrid world, partly natural, partly invented. “Earth rotates” is a true account of a natural given. “Earth rotates once every 24 hours” is only true within the language community which imposes that system of time-measurement on the given reality. Another complication is that we ourselves are physical objects which can be described using objective terms, but we are also social beings, in roles, relationships and structures which are all man-made.

Classifications are a key component of language. A sentence of the simple form ‘X is Y’ can locate an individual within a class (‘Socrates is a man’) or one class within another (‘Daisies are weeds’). Some classifications are givens in nature (the periodic table, biological taxonomy, physical laws) while others are inventions (social roles, types (uses) of furniture, parts of speech). Sentences can mix natural classes with inventions: ‘daisies’ refers to a class of plant given in nature, whereas ‘weeds’ refers to an invented class of ‘dislikeable plants’. In their search for truth the natural sciences seek to discover natural classifications, as distinct from social inventions.

True descriptions are like maps. Some descriptions map objective reality, as the natural sciences do, which is like a map of physical contours. Other descriptions map our socially-constructed world, as journalists, historians, novelists and theologians do, like a map showing political borders.

We have made great progress since our ancestors first grunted at each other. Language was essential to that progress and it provided the true/false distinction which enabled us to analyse and understand the natural world which sustains us.

Les Reid, Belfast

I would like to say that truth exists outside of us, for all to see. Unfortunately, humans can be stubborn, and so the actual pinning down of what a truth is is more complicated. Society plays host to two types of truths; subjective truth and objective truth. Subjective truth is given to us through our individual expe riences in relation to those around us: in short, it’s the truths we have been raised with. Objective truth is discovered by a search which is critical of our experiences until sufficient evidence has been gathered. The subjective truth is not always in opposition to the objective truth, but it does depend on the subject valuing their worldview more than others’.

Our preference as a society is, I believe, revealed through our use of language. If we say: “Look, the sun is going down” we are speaking from our subjective viewpoint. It is true from our individual standpoint, but it is not a truth in the objective sense. The truth, in an objective sense, is that we live on a planet which spins on its axis and it orbits the Sun. So in fact what we should say is “Look, the earth is spinning away from the Sun and will soon obstruct our view of it.” This may seem a pedantic point to make; however, if our language does not reflect the objective truth, it must mean that truth stands firmly in the subjective camp. Based on our use of language in the majority of situations, an alien may then well judge us to be very ignorant, and that our truth is self-serving.

It could be said that subjective truth isn’t truth at all, more belief ; but because as a society our values give more strength to the individual and to personal experience, we must bow to the power of the individual belief as truth, as we seem to do through our everyday use of language.

Anoosh Falak Rafat, St Leonard’s on Sea, East Sussex

Everyone knows perfectly well what truth is – everyone except Pontius Pilate and philosophers. Truth is the quality of being true, and being true is what some statements are. That is to say, truth is a quality of the propositions which underlie correctly-used statements.

What does that mean? Well, imagine a man who thinks that Gordon Brown is still the British PM, and that Gordon Brown was educated at Edinburgh (as he was). When he says “The PM was educated at Edinburgh”, what he means is clearly true: the person he is calling the PM was educated at Edinburgh. Therefore, if (somewhat counter-intuitively) we say the statement itself is true, we’re saying that what the statement actually means is true: that what anyone who understands the meanings and references of all the words in the statement means, is true. Nonetheless, it is perfectly natural to say that a statement itself is true; people who think this would say that the above statement, as uttered by the man who thinks Gordon Brown is PM, is false (even though what he meant by it is true).

However, to generalise, it is not really the statement itself that is true (or false), but what is meant by it. It can’t be the possible state of affairs described by the statement which is true: states of affairs are not true, they just exist. Rather, there must be some wordless ‘proposition’ nailed down by the statement which describes that state of affairs, and which could be expressed accurately in various forms of words (in a variety of statements); and it is that proposition which is either true or false. So when we say that a particular statement is true, that must be shorthand for “the proposition meant by someone who utters that statement, in full knowledge of the meanings and references of the words in it, is true.”

Bob Stone, Worcester

I dilute my solution, place it into a cuvette, and take a reading with the spectrophotometer: 0.8. I repeat the procedure once more and get 0.7; and once again to get 0.9. From this I get the average of 0.8 that I write in my lab-book. The variation is probably based upon tiny inconsistencies in how I am handling the equipment, so three readings should be sufficient for my purposes. Have I discovered the truth? Well yes – I have a measurement that seems roughly consistent, and should, assuming that my notes are complete and my spectrophotometer has been calibrated, be repeatable in many other labs around the world. However, this ‘truth’ is meaningless without some understanding of what I am trying to achieve. The spectrophotometer is set at 280nm, which – so I have been taught – is the wavelength used to measure protein concentration. I know I have made up my solution from a bottle labelled ‘albumin’, which – again, as I have been taught – is a protein. So my experiment has determined the truth of how much protein is in the cuvette. But again, a wider context is needed. What is a protein, how do spectrophotometers work, what is albumin, why do I want to know the concentration in the first place? Observations are great, but really rather pointless without a reason to make them, and without the theoretical knowledge for how to interpret them. Truth, even in science, is therefore highly contextual. What truth is varies not so much with different people, but rather with the narrative they are living by. Two people with a similar narrative will probably agree on how to treat certain observations, and might agree on a conclusion they call the truth, but as narratives diverge so too does agreement on what ‘truth’ might be. In the end, even in an entirely materialistic world, truth is just the word we use to describe an observation that we think fits into our narrative.

Dr Simon Kolstoe, UCL Medical School, London

Truth is unique to the individual. As a phenomenologist, for me, that I feel hungry is more a truth than that 2+3=5. No truth can be ‘objectively verified’ – empirically or otherwise – and the criteria by which we define truths are always relative and subjective. What we consider to be true, whether in morality, science, or art, shifts with the prevailing intellectual wind, and is therefore determined by the social, cultural and technological norms of that specific era. Non-Euclidean geometry at least partially undermines the supposed tautological nature of geometry – usually cited as the cornerstone of the rationalist’s claims that reason can provide knowledge: other geometries are possible, and equally true and consistent. This means that the truth of geometry is once more inextricably linked with your personal perspective on why one mathematical paradigm is ‘truer’ than its viable alternatives.

In the end, humans are both fallible and unique, and any knowledge we discover, true or otherwise, is discovered by a human, finite, individual mind. 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. This is why truths often don’t cross cultures. This is an idea close to ‘conceptual relativism’ – a radical development of Kant’s thinking which claims that in learning a language we learn a way of interpreting the world, and thus, to speak a different language is to inhabit a different subjective world.

So our definition of truth needs to be much more flexible than Plato, Descartes and other philosophers claim. I would say that a pragmatic theory of truth is closest: that truth is the ‘thing that works’; if some other set of ideas works better, then it is truer. This is a theory Nietzsche came close to accepting.

The lack of objective truth leaves us free to carve our own truths. As in Sartre’s existentialism, we aren’t trapped by objectivity; rather, the lack of eternal, immutable truths allows us to create what is true for ourselves. 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.

Andrew Warren, Eastleigh, Hants

Truth is interpersonal. We tell each other things, and when they work out we call them truths. When they don’t, we call them errors or, if we are not charitable, lies. What we take as truth depends on what others around us espouse. For many centuries European Christians believed that men had one fewer rib than women because the Bible says that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. 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. We might call this ‘Truth’, with a capital T. Even though each of us lives our life by Truth, it can be different for each person. Shall I believe and obey the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Zend Avesta, the Dhammapada? Or none of the above: shall I find my own Truth in my own way?

We thus need a community of seekers with a commitment to meta-Truth, recognizing that personal Truths are to be respected, even though any Truth will differ from someone else’s. 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.

Robert Tables, Blanco, TX

The word ‘true’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘ treowe ’ meaning ‘believed’. ‘Believe’ itself is from ‘ gelyfan ’, ‘to esteem dear’. So etymologically, ‘truth’ would be something believed to be of some value, rather than necessarily being correct. ‘Believe’ is still used in the older sense, as in “I believe in democracy” – a different sense to ‘believing in Father Christmas’. 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. Colin Wilson mentions Thomas Kuhn’s contention that “once scientists have become comfortably settled with a certain theory, they are deeply unwilling to admit that there might be anything wrong with it” and links this with the ‘Right Man’ theory of writer A.E.Van Vogt. A ‘Right Man’ would never admit that he might be wrong. Wilson suggests that people start with the ‘truth’ they want to believe, and then work backwards to find supporting evidence. Similarly, Robert Pirsig says that ideas coming from outside orthodox establishments tend to be dismissed. Thinkers hit “an invisible wall of prejudice… nobody inside… is ever going to listen… not because what you say isn’t true, but solely because you have been identified as outside that wall.” He termed this a ‘cultural immune system’.

We may remember our experiences and relate them accurately; but as to complex things like history, politics, peoples’ motives, etc, the models of reality we have can at best be only partly true. We are naive if taken in by ‘spin’; we’re gullible, paranoid or crazy if we give credit to ‘conspiracy theories’; and, with limited knowledge of psychology, scientific method, the nature of politics etc, the ‘truth’ will tend to elude us there too.

Jim Fairer, Kirriemuir, Scotland

As I gather amongst my fellow lovers of wisdom for another round of coffee, debate and discussion, I try to filter in the question I am trying to answer: ‘What is Truth?’ With many a moan and a sigh (and indeed a giggle from some), I try to wiggle out the truth from these B.A. philosophy students. 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. “Really?” they asked, “Aren’t we a little too postmodern for that?” Actually, I reminded them, the question itself can be considered to be postmodern. 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.

“But wait,” said one crafty little Socrates, “You mentioned, realism: so are the questions of what is true and what is real the same question?” Then it became terribly frightening, because we entered into a debate about the relation between language and reality. 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. It seemed to us that from Descartes to Kant (and some argued that even in phenomenology and existentialism) there has been an unhealthy relationship between us and reality/truth. 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.

Abigail Muscat, Zebbug, Malta

‘Truth’ has a variety of meanings, but the most common definitions refer to the state of being in accordance with facts or reality . 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. This ideal truth can be glimpsed if we manage to be sceptical, independent and open-minded when presented with the supposed facts and realities. However, in searching for the truth, precaution must be taken, that we are not trapped into a life overshadowed by fear, suspicion and cynicism, since this would suspend us in a state of continuous tension. One might easily conclude that living a life not concerned with probing for the truth would perhaps after all yield greater peace of mind. But it is the life that continuously struggles with the definition of the truth that will ultimately give scope and meaning to human existence.

Ian Rizzo, Zabbar, Malta

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Is Telling the Truth Always Good? Research Paper

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Truth is a virtue that is upheld by individuals and most societies around the globe. Telling the truth has been for ages held as a virtue and as a sign of honesty in human beings. It is a sign of respect for other people by showing them that you value their trust in you. It is important to note that telling the truth does not always bind a person to respond to every situation one is faced with. It can therefore be argued how one is supposed to respond to such situations. In this case we would ask ourselves whether it is always the best option to be honest and tell the truth or it is sometimes easier to tell lies and safe the situation of the day. This paper will generally focus on the importance of always telling the truth no matter the kind of situations we are faced with. Telling the truth can be held as always the better option.

The Virtue of always telling the truth helps to build ones character as an honest person. It does not really matter whether the act of telling the truth especially in difficult situations will put you into more problems. This is because one’s mind is cleared of guilt conscience. The mind is also cleared of any contradictions and one does not have to really always remember what you said to every one (Michael, p10). This is because you will not be afraid that a certain situation will come and the answer you might give might contradict the first one. Truth does not change and if one always tells the truth you don’t have to think and twist answers to save yourself. On the other hand telling the truth is good since this might prevent more problems to be created in future either in your life or other people’s lives. Once the truth about a situation is known, it can be handled with every possible solution to either solve problems of the day or be lessons to you and other people (Jean, p13).

It is always true that if one is used to telling the truth the people that you deal with will be more likely to tell the truth to you. This makes life very easy since you will also not have problems with the persons around you trying to think what is true and what is not true. You will be always a good example to the others. A person who learns to always tell the truth will also build a lot of self confidence. Being always true means no one can put you down for what you said as a form of deceit. This also makes one to be always proud of who they are. Since telling the truth clears one’s mind of guilt conscience, it follows that telling the truth reduces chances of a person being stressed. One is therefore able to always present themselves in a good manner, eat well and also improve on their physical appearance (Jean, p22). Truth also helps other individuals have confidence in you and also believe in you. This virtue assures other people that when things don’t work out as they should you will always present it as it is and this is what every one values as a bold person.

Telling the truth sometimes will hurt other people (Michael, p24). In such cases one should always try to use words and ways of expressions that will be taken in a very understanding manner. This is especially when we are dealing with very close friends, families and work colleagues. For example a friend asks you if a dress or a hair style is looking good on them. If you are sure it is not attractive one can respond with answers such as, “Am not certain this is your color or style.” In this way one can be able to automatically know they are not looking good and they will be willing to ask for opinions from you. It is also argued that sometimes we lie by telling the truth. The necessity of telling the truth also matters with the outcome of the situation. A false statement also has a degree of falsity and these measures whether one is really telling the truth or not. Not telling the truth does not really make some body a liar since the sole intention and the reactions by the speaker is what matters. What others believe about an individual also matters and some times telling the truth will only deceive the loyalty they hold on you. IT is therefore possible to not tell the truth and still get the satisfaction of others. He argues that telling the truth is always not part of the solution to everything (lumpur, p6).

A large number of individuals would consider not telling the truth with the sole intention of making other people believe in false facts. One may therefore argue it is good to not tell the truth in certain situations. The act of not telling the truth is considered a vice in the society and generally not accepted. The motive of not telling the truth is mostly directed towards preventing people from acting in a certain manner that may cause pain or hurt the informant. This then motivates the persons to make decisions or act in favor of the other person (Ben). Normally, People will not tell the truth because they are afraid of facing the consequences that might follow the truth. People also tell lies to save the situation of the day. One may not tell the truth because they consider it a short term solution of their problems. This is then followed by a series of lies as one tries to save the previous lies which might have been discovered and to avoid contradiction (Michael, p27).

In some situations one may weigh the cost of lying and that of telling the truth and decide the former is easier to handle. Individuals also find it easier to keep lying about different matters especially if one is used to not telling the truth to find favor. A perfect lie is said to be one that will result to some kind of benefit and which no one will find about. It can also be a lie that is used to divert people who will never affect once life either to add or reduce value (Ben). Life is very complicated and one may not be able differentiate who will be of benefit to you later in life and who will not. It is also very difficult to tell whether a certain lie will actually be discovered or not. It is very important to note that once a person learns to use lies as scapegoats to situations, the lies will finally be a habit and form patterns that are often repeated. Such repeated patterns will eventually give rise to a mistake and this might attract heavy consequences.

Mazur clearly brings out the vice of lying as corrupting the rational thinking of human beings. It denies one the freedom to make rational choices to reflect reality and also robs others their rationality and moral ethics (p15). It causes a lot of pain to the human dignity upon discovery of the truth. It diminishes the way we value ourselves and also the value we give to other individuals. The act of lying or not telling the truth clearly depicts the social uncertainty prevailing in the society and the lack of understanding the rules and authorities of personal behavior. Lying only acts as a solution to the dissatisfaction that we may have to go through by telling the truth (Bailey, p29).

In conclusion, it is always good to tell the truth since this increases one’s credibility. It helps in molding the relations-ships between individuals since they will be based on trust and believing in each other. The vice of not telling the truth no matter the consequences will always lead to short term solutions which may turn out to be bigger problems between individuals in future. The vice will eventually lead to a lot of enmity between individuals which might even cause psychological stress. The actual cost of not telling the truth is therefore higher than telling the truth. People should always weigh the cost of lying as a risk of creating enemies and losing their credibility as individuals who can be believed in.

Works Cited

Bailey. The Prevalence of Deceit. Cornell University Press, 1991, p 23-34.

Ben Best. Some Philosophizing About Lying. Web.

Greenberg, Michael A. The Consequences of Truth Telling. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 1991, p8-28.

Kuala Lumpur. Don’t Always Tell the Truth.Today’s Woman magazine, 2003.

Revell Jean. The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information. New York, Random House Books, 1992, p12-41.

Tim C. Mazur. Issues in Ethics -lying. California, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, 2003, p3-18.

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Essay on Honesty for Students and Children

 500+ words essay on honesty.

Honesty implies being truthful. Honesty means to develop a practice of speaking truth throughout life. A person who practices Honesty in his/her life, possess strong moral character. An Honest person shows good behavior, always follows rules and regulations, maintain discipline, speak the truth, and is punctual. An honest person is trustworthy as he always tends to speak the truth.

Honesty is the Best Policy

A major component for developing moral character is Honesty. Honesty helps in developing good attributes like kindness, discipline, truthfulness, moral integrity and more. Lying, cheating, lack of trust, steal, greed and other immoral attributes have no part in Honesty. Honest people are sincere, trustworthy and loyal, throughout their life. Honesty is valuable and it is the habit of utmost importance. There are famous quotes, said by a great personality like “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom”. It holds good due to its ability to build, shape and motivate integral values in one’s life.

Benefits of Honesty

Honesty is always admirable in the family, civil society, friends and across the globe. A person with honesty is respected by all. For one to build the character of Honesty entirely depends on his/her family values and ethics and his/her surrounding environment. Parents showing honest behavior and character in front of their children create an impact on the children and we say “Honesty lies in their genes”. Honesty can also be developed practically which requires proper guidance, encouragement, patience, and dedication.

An honest person is always known for his/her honesty just like a sun is known for its eternal light and unlimited energy. It is a quality which helps a person to succeed in life and get much respect. It gives identification to the moral character of a person. Dishonest people may easily get trust and respect from other people. However, they lose that forever whenever they get caught.

Being dishonest is a sin in all the religions, however, people practice it for their short time benefits and selfishness. They never become morally strong and their life becomes miserable. An honest person moves freely in society and spread his/her fragrance in all directions. Being honest is never mean to bear the bad habits of others or bear ill-treated activities. Everyone has rights to reveal and take action against what is going wrong with him.

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Importance of Honesty in Life

Honesty plays an important role in everyone’s life and it is a character which is visible with open eyes like an open book. Having considered as an Honest person, by society is one of the best compliment one can dream of in his/her entire life. It is the real character a person earns in life by being sincere and dedicated towards it. Lack of honesty in society is doom. It is due to the lack of proper interpersonal relationship between parents-children and students-teachers. Honesty is a practice which is built slowly and patiently, firstly at home and then school. Hence home and school are the best places for a child to develop Honesty since his/her growing times.

Home and school are the places where a child learns moral ethics. Thus, the education system should ensure to include some essential habits and practices to keep a child close to morality. Children must be instructed right from the beginning and their childhood to practice honesty. Youths of any country are the future of that country so they should give better opportunities to develop moral character so that they can lead their country in a better way.

For all human problems, Honesty is the ultimate solution. Corruption and various problems are everywhere in society. It is because of the decreasing number of honest people. In today’s fast and competitive world, we have forgotten about moral and integral ethics. It is very important and necessary for us to rethink and remodel, that we bring the honesty back in society so that everything goes in a natural manner.

Moral ethics of a person is known through Honesty. In a society, if all the people seriously practice getting honest, then society will become an ideal society and free of all the corruptions and evils. There will be huge changes in the day-to-day life of everyone. It can happen very easily if all the parents and teachers understand their responsibilities towards the nation and teach their children and students about moral ethics.

People should realize the value of honesty in order to manage social and economic balance. Honesty is an essential requirement in modern time. It is one of the best habits which encourages an individual and make capable enough to solve and handle any difficult situation in his/her life. Honesty acts as a catalyst in strengthening our will power to face and fight any odds in life.

FAQs on  Essay on Honesty

Q.1. What are the basic principles that were followed by Gandhiji?

Ans: The six principles followed by Gandhiji were Truth, Non-Violence, Simplicity, Faith, Selflessness, and Respect for an Individual.

Q.2. Who gave the proverb, “Honesty is the Best Policy”? Ans: Benjamin Franklin one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, gave the proverb, “Honesty is the Best Policy”.

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Truth - Free Essay Examples and Topic Ideas

Truth is the quality or state of being in accordance with fact or reality. It is an objective reality that exists independently of our beliefs, perceptions, or opinions. Truth is an essential element of human communication, integrity, and trust. It serves as a foundation for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Truthfulness is highly valued in personal relationships, professional ethics, and social justice. While truth may be subjective or relative in some situations, it is ultimately a universal and timeless principle that guides our actions and decisions.

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Essays on Truth

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An Exploration of The Universal Truth

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A Discussion on The Possibility of Finding The Truth About The Past

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A Theme of Truth in "The Sapphires" and "Beautiful Boy"

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16 The Socratic Concept of Truth

• Published: February 2005
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This essay explores the question of why Socrates practiced the elenctic method. It argues that the elenchus is a method that generally leads to truth, and suggests that Socrates was convinced that he himself would gain in wisdom and clarity from elenctic exchanges with others, even if they were not as wise as he. People mean what others can take them to mean; to learn what we mean is to learn what others we talk with mean. The understanding of others, agreeing with them on basic concepts, clarity about what we mean, come — to the extent that they do — together. The elenchus is a model of our only method for promoting these ends.

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Essay on Truth

"A KNOWLEDGE OF TRUTH IS BEST FOR HUMAN WELFARE,

To Observe Enquire Read and Think in order to find Truth is the Highest Duty of Man."

It would appear to a careless observer, on glancing at the above text, that there is very little left to say upon the subject beyond what is there stated; but if we take a more minute notice of the ideas contained in it, we shall see that in such few words, thoughts lay hidden which would, if fully explained and commented on, fill volumes. We shall carefully proceed to analyse the motto—first of all asking ourselves the oft repeated question, "What is Truth?" Various have been the definitions given of its character, and many the thinkers who have striven to describe it. We do not intend to dictate to the reader of this essay what Truth actually is, for we consider that there is far more to be learnt before man can give an approximately correct definition of its real character in all its varied phases. Our intention is merely to show that if we want to find the truth of anything or everything, we must search it out for ourselves; not merely asking another what we wish to know and then resting satisfied with the answer but making ass of the information to test its real value, and discarding it if it does not harmonise with our reason after being carefully weighed in our minds without bias or headstrong aversion.

This great question has puzzled many a wise head, ​ and so varied and important are its bearings, that we hesitate not to say it will be food for philosophers of all time. It is a subject of such vast extent that what little progress we may make in its acquirement is scarcely noticeable, for it seems to keep continually beyond our grasp; and, in fact, so apparent was this to the ancient philosophers that many of them actually declared that it was not within man's power to find; that try hard as he may he never could obtain truth; and even allowing that he could do so, he would not then be certain that he had possession of it. This is going to extremes indeed, but we must remember that extreme views help to extend and develope human thought, and are equally as beneficial as the most impartial views to the proper understanding of truth. We hold the opinion that although man may not be capable of knowing all truth, still when he has the truth he is capable of appreciating its presence, or what would be the use of his senses? We know full well that nothing in nature is made without a purpose, and our perceptive faculties are no exception to this universal rule. For this reason it is man's duty to analyse carefully everything with which his ideas are brought in contact. This brings us to the first proposition of our text, "A knowledge of Truth is best for human welfare." It will be observed that the statement does not simply say that truth is best; but it goes on to say that a knowledge of truth is best. It is no use having a machine without knowing how to use it, nor an electric telegraph without knowing how to communicate through its agency—the knowledge of its method of working and general management, is what is required. And the same argument applies to truth. Truth is of little or no use to man unless he has a knowledge of its existence and the proper method of applying it. For instance, of what use would be the truths revealed to us by the telescope if we did not properly understand their significance, and the uses to which discoveries effected by their aid might be put for the benefit of humanity? We shall further illustrate our remarks by noting one or two of the benefits conferred on the race by the discoveries of Astronomy.

​ The science of astronomy has played an imporant part in the history of man's civilizatlon—both for good and evil—eventually for the former alone. In early times the study of astronomy was confined to a few, and not a remarkably sensible few either. It was then used (under the name of astrology) as a means of divining a person's future welfare—an extensive system of fortune telling. In this stage of its history it plunged man into a state of ignorance and superstition; the weakest of mankind were played upon by the more enlightened and avaricious, merely for the sake of pecuniary gain and generally as a system of earning a livelihood. Knowledge was hindered and superstition reigned. Men did not trouble about the affairs of life, beyond obtaining their daily bread, and asking their future lot of a set of men almost as ignorant and superstitious as themselves. We are told that in those times ignorance was almost universal, and that the little knowledge that existed was confined to a select few—a small portion of the aristocracy. Out of the ignorance which then existed many strange beliefs have sprung, some of which exist even to his day; for instance: in some foreign lands eclipses are viewed as an omen of evil. Amongst the Chinese an eclipse is a cause for great alarm, for they believe that the sun and moon are being devoured by dragons, and make all possible noise with drums, gongs, and brass kettles to frighten the monsters away. In many uncivilized lands similar views are held. But these beliefs, singular as they are, are not confined to the uncivilized alone; we find superstition rampant amongst ourselves. it is a common belief that the moon is the cause of lunacy; that scientific discoveries are often the work of the devil; and many more notions equally absurd. But, as we have before said, these beliefs chiefly exist amongst the ignorant, and astrology is almost a thing of the past. We have mentioned the state of society when ignorance reigned supreme. Let us now calmly watch Truth, which, like the rising sun, gently ascends from the horizon of superstition through which it has almost passed. Watching carefully, we note the gradual development of intellect in its attempts to unravel the mysteries of the stars. First a few shepherds mark the ​ relative positions of the stars on the soft sands. Presently, more interest appears to be taken in a study, so sublime; and men give more thought to it. Chaldean shepherds are superseded by the cultured. One after another discoveries are made, upsettlng false theories and giving correct and useful ones in their places. The Governments of Greece and Egypt give their aid to its development. Great men arise who attempt to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies upon the theory that the world is fixed in the centre of space, and that the stars are moving round it; but this theory, founded, as it is, on fiction, has to give way before the searching glance of a Coperuicus, who, in spite of the persecution and hatred with which he is received makes the bold assertion that the world is moving with the planets around the sun. People cannot believe it. They ask how it is, if the world is turning round, that they do not, fall off when it is turned upside down. Now, with a spirit almost unequalled, the brave Kepler comes to the front, and proves after years of toilsome and unceasing labour that the theory of Copernicus is correct. But all is not yet finished. It still waits to be accounted for how the earth manages to keep its inhabitants from falling to oblivion. Kepler, who applies a theory of attraction to certain phenomena of nature, leaves it to the master mind of Newton to apply this rule, without discrimination to every particle of matter in existence; and after mathematical demonstration of the correctness of his reasoning, proclaims it to the world. And thus truth rises. But, the reader may ask, "What good has all this done to man?" It has done this! It has taught him, in the first place, that a thing is not necessarily true because someone has said it is so. Further, that the truth cannot be arrived at without labour—that it is man's duty to try and find the truth; and when found, not to hoard it to himself as a miser does his gold, but to give it to the world for the benefit of humanity, so that his knowledge may be a foundation for other minds to build their knowledge upon. The force of our remarks are amply exemplified in the case of the question as to the fixity of the earth. What have been the consequences of these grand discoveries? ​ Why! the trading of priestcraft upon human credulity has been nipped in the bud and almost annihilated, not withstanding the vain efforts of the early Fathers, consequeutly giving man that liberty of thought which his nature so unsparingly demands.

Scientific discovery has also been greatly assisted by the disclosures of Geology. It is mainly by this science that most of the old legends connected with the history of this earth have been swept away. (In remarking upon these myths, or what we believe to be such, we know that we are treading upon dangerous ground; for many have their cherished fancies, and if anyone attempts to upset them, it wounds llke an arrow but we ask from such nothing more than an impartial and unprejudiced hearing, hoping for correction if we state anything wrongly, and the credit which we deserve if we speak the truth. Our intention is to state what we honestly believe to be the truth, and to show others the way to do the same, for

"The Truth is Truth, where'er 'tis found, On Christian or on heathen ground").

One of the old myths we shall more particularly notice, it being a common feature amongst the beliefs of various nations. We refer to the story of an unversal deluge. A short time back anyone attempting to deny the truth of this legend in a Christian community would have been stigmatised as a blasphemer and an opponent of the Word of God. This state of things is happily departing, and mankind are gradually discarding those old stories which cannot stand the test of reason—stories so ancient that they have no reliable records of who the real authors of them were, and which, by the searches made by modern theologists and scientists, are in many cases distinctly proved to be of different authorship than that ascribed to them. This legend of the universal deluge has a seat, as is now well known, amongst most of the nations of the world. We find it amongst the Chaldeans, the Jews, (the Christian and Mahometan stories being derived from the latter), and in America, and various parts of the world. Many works have been written upon the subject, both antagonistic and ​ defensive; amongst the former being the works of such eminent men as Lyell, Clodd, Bishop Colenso (of the Church of England), who, in spite of his being in such a high position, was, out of love for the truth, compelled to openly avow his total disbelief of these stories; and so ably has he defended his position that no one but the most prejudiced or ill-informed could possibly believe in the story after hearing the arguments that have been brought forward by himself and others to refute it.

Many other foolish beliefs have been uprooted by the revelations of Geology, amongst which are the ridiculous stories told in connection with the creation of the world, the origin of life upon its surface, the time which has elapsed since the creation, and the antiquity of man. In past times, when science was in its infancy, it was the common idea to believe that the world was created in a strange manner, only five or six thousand years ago, and that man suddenly appeared on its surface a few days later. The revelations of science, however, have taught man to be in this matter, as in everything else, cautious and enquiring, and have shown him conclusively that man has existed on this earth hundreds of thousands of years—the time of his first appearance being generally estimated at one million of years! It has shown, also, that the world could not have been created in one week, the time usually supposed to have elapsed, but that, like everything else in nature, its growth has been slow and orderly, and that it must have taken millions of years to perform its varied evolutions of matter. There are still many who doubt these statements; but one thing is certain—although they may be wrong in some minor points, they are built upon the strong foundations of truth; and though a few useless ornaments may crumble away, the edifice itself still remains ready to be re-adorned with facts more substantial and incontrovertible; and though men may close their ears to the voice of reason, they do themselves more harm than good, and stifle those glorious faculties for research with which nature has so plentifully endowed them.

"The proper study of mankind is man," is a ​ well-worn maxim, and one that, although quoted o'er and o'er, is always welcome to the ear. When man can properly appreciate the value of this study his progress will be far more rapid and beneficial. The more Physiology is understood the happier does man live. A great many valuable lessons can be learnt from it. He can learn how to save his fellow-creatures from agony, and often prevent a premature death; can discover the injurious effects of poisonous stimulants upon his constitution; can analyse every part of his body in order to have a better knowledge of its functions than he could by merely watching its effects; and, finally, can make laws—laws in accordance with nature's workings, which shall keep his health intact, and cause him to find that "life is real, life is earnest," and that it can only be properly enjoyed and appreciated by being assisted instead of being misunderstood. Medicine was tolerably well understood amongst the ancients, and they paid especial attention to the benefits to be derived from healthful exorcises. Later on, however, in the Middle Ages, people did not pay proper attention to their bodies; they were uncleanly and intemperate in their habits, and did not pay any attention to the ventilation of their houses, nor the sanitary conditions generally of the towns and villages in which they dwelt. And what was the result? They were visited on all sides by famine, disease, and fever; and in the fourteenth century were visited with the terrible Black Death, the horrors of which the pen of a Milton could not describe, nor the pencil of a Doré illustrate. But men are now living in an age of science and they have reason to be thankful for their good fortune. A man may now live in comparative happiness with very little chance of unknowingly infringing the laws of his nature; if he is sick, the means are in his reach to procure relief; if he suffers from fever, he knows that it is caused by bad drainage, or some other careless oversight—maybe insufficient ventilation and stifled atmosphere; if he be a drnnkard, the blame is upon himself, even thongh he be led into it by others, for he has perfect freedom of his will in such a case, and must be well aware from the experience gained by others, ​ that his sin will be visited on himself, This aptly illustrates the statement put forth in the conditions in reference to this essay, that it is man's duty to constantly exercise his intellectual faculties, and the consequent sin of not doing so can be seen accurately illustrated every day (we are sorry to say) in the streets of our city, by noticing the pernicious effects of so vile a practice on the poor inebriated fools who so frequently parade our streets in a sort of zigzag march, lowering themselves below the four-footed brutes, and making themselves despised by their fellow-creatures. If they studied the truths of Physiology and health, and spent their money on literature, or any other kind of useful knowledge, instead of buying the poisonous "nobbler," that their depraved tastes so eagerly long for, they might become model men and women and a benefit to mankind.

History, so called, gives an account of mankind in the collective sense; Biography gives an account of each man individually. Let us now turn our attention to the latter, and see what lessons of truth await us there, remembering that Biography requires the same careful study that History does. In all countries, and in all ages, we find lovers of mankind, eager to benefit their suffering brethren, and teaching such truths as their knowledge made them aware of. It is these that ​ we shall notice, for two reasons; firstly, they are more to the point for our subject; and secondly, the short space at our disposal prevents our noticing more. These saviours of mankind may be traced back to the remotest regions of antiquity. Going far before the time at which our own era begins, and, in fact, in almost prehistoric times, we take the reader back to about the year 628 B.C. This is the period generally assigned to the birth of Budda. We commence with him because he is the first, in chronological order, of the great moral leaders of mankind of whom we have any particular knowledge. Budda was born in India, of royal parents (so say the accounts). His mother died not long after his birth, and he took to spending his life in thoughtful reverie, his mind being chiefly occupied with thoughts upon life and death. Often would he stroll alone in the forests, thinking of the misery and wickedness of mankind, and wondering how he could help to better his fellow creatures. He went about preaching good morals, and spurring his hearers up to benevolent actions. He is said to have been very handsome, and of extensive wisdom; be this as it may, his teachings, written by his disciples (he never having written anything himself), show with what good thoughts he was inspired. We shall give a few examples of his utterances, though they must not be considered in any way complete; like every other good man he had his failings, but "taking him all in all" he was a worthy example for man to follow. He says, when asked by Alvaka (the devil), "of savoury things which is indeed the most savoury?" "Truth is indeed the most savoury of all savoury things." Again, he says, "Let the wise man guard his thoughts, they are difficult to perceive, very artful, and they rush wherever they list; thoughts well guarded bring happiness." "Let no man think lightly of evil." "Let us live happily then, not hating those that hate us .... free from greed among the greedy .... and though we call nothing our own." "Not to commit any sin; to do good, and to purify one's mind, that is the teaching of the Awakened" Budda lived to see his doctrines preached throughout India, and died in the eightieth year of his age. His ​ followers number at the present time upwards of four hundred million souls: a significant fact, showing how the truth can be spread by perseverance and devotion to its cause. Ascending the ladder of time we come next to Zoroaster. We cannot here say much of him. We shall merely remark that he was born about 513 years B.C., that he lived about 76 years, and that the docrines which he taught were widely spread throughout Persia. Very little is known of him, as his history (like that of Pythagoras) is so enveloped in fable and mystery. In his Zend-Avesa, or Bible, he says, Hear with your ears what is best, perceive with your mind what is pure, so that every man may choose his tenets." "Let us then be of those who further this world. . . ,. Oh! bliss. whose history is almost lost in fable, the next great thinker we come to is Confucius . He was born 550 years B.C. He is the leading light amongst the Chinese. He was very fond of learning, and showed great veneration to the aged; he also showed great respect for the laws of his country. "His life was given to teaching a few great truths, obedience to which would bring happiness to every man." Some of his sayings are very telling. "To see what is right, and not to do it, is the want of courage," and "Have no depraved thoughts," are two of his sayings. Pope says:—

"Superior and alone Confucius stood, Who taught that noble science—be good."

Socrates, born 469 B.C., was a great pioneer of truth. He taught that man should use his judgment in all things; and he was the first Greek philosopher on record who taught the value of scepticism. He talked with the youth of Greece upon all subjects, questioning them in a style not unlike the cross-questioning of the present day. "He talked with everyone, no matter how low in life they were nor how apparently ignorant; his theory being that every man knew something better than he did." He heretically taught that there was but one God, and that man was guided by an inward monitor (no doubt alluding to Conscience); but the people of ​ his day did not share that opinion, but said that he was possessed of a devil. He was therefore condemned to death, and drank the fatal cup of hemlock, the usual mode of death in those days. Thus through Ignorance of the Truth, and its offshoot, Bigotry, the world lost one of its greatest thinkers and philosophers. Plato, the disciple of Socrates, lived to preach his doctrines, and helped greatly to benefit his fellow creatures. We now come to one, of whom the reader of this essay has, no doubt, heard. We refer to Jesus Christ. This good man and true philanthropist (for a man he undoubtedly was, or his example would have been useless for man to try and imitate), whose history will be found in almost every Christian library, has done a great deal to alleviate the sufferings of mankind, and to teach them the doctrine of brotherly love; and, although respect for the truth prevents us from saying that we agree with many as to his Divine origin, we cannot but look upon him as one of those great and good minds, whose sympathies have ever been with their suffering fellow-creatures and who have always been averse to seeing the rich and powerful tramping down the weak. His teachings may be summed up in his two great moral precepts—"Do unto others as you would have that they should do unto you," and "Love one another." If men obey this there will be very little selfish feeling between them, and they will learn to respect the rights of others. In reference to our denying the Divinity of Jesus, we may mention that Buddists, Zoroastrians, Confucians, &c., might all put in a similar claim, and, of course, would do so, but we cannot grant it to them all, and if all but one be untrue, who is to say which is the true one? Coming to later times we meet with such men as Mahomet, King Alfred the Great, that earnest-hearted reformer, Martin Luther, who set the noble example of free thought to his followers—an example which few of them have imitated, and many other good souls; these we must, however pass over. In conclusion we must say, that it is by studying the lives of those that have lived before us, that man can best benefit himself and others; and that those whose names we have mentioned should all be classed in the same category, namely, saviours of mankind;— ​ when we speak of saviours, we mean those who have endeavoured to enlighten and benefit mankind. But whilst noticing their good qualities we must not overlook their faults, nor place blind faith in every story that human cunning, or human credulity, has affixed to their names.

Let Truth flash like the lightning, on, on, from shore to shore; Let all assist its progress, till time shall be no more.

We can scarcely mention a discovery of any importance whatever, that has not turned of advantage to man. Each new invention or discovery leads to another; the discoveries of electricity led to the electric telegraph; the electric telegraph led to the telephone, and evolved from this we have had the phonograph, microphone, and other great triumphs, the bare supposition of which, a few years back, would have been looked upon as the mental wanderings of a maniac, or at least, as "castles building in the air." Man has far more opportunities of aiding in the advancement of truth at the present time than he has ever had before. With the aid of the printing press and the newspapers, ideas can be exchanged between one party and another, and he who searches for the truth may find it by these means in many things; but as we have before remarked, he must not think himself infallible, but must use extreme care in drawing his conclusions; above all, he must avoid that great enemy to truth—Prejudice; let him overcome this, and he need not fear the results. Those modern outgrowths of civilization and experience, namely; Business, Commerce, Politics, and Law, are always capable of improvement and extension. We find them now, not applied to the advantages of one party and the disadvantages of another, to anything like the extent that they formerly were; for man is gradually, though surely, recognising the rights of others besides himself. And we hope, and believe, a time will come when prejudice shall be almost forgotten, and man's mind shall be free to wander through the broad paths of knowledge and enlightenment.

Reviewing what we have said, we note, that a correct knowledge of truth, as we have endeavoured to show, is absolutely necessary to man's welfare; we have shown the evil results of his not exercising his intellectual faculties, by reference to his state during the Middle Ages. We have shown that it is necessary he should observe, carefully taking note of the smallest particulars, enquiring far and wide amongst parties of every ​ opinion, either verbally, or by the use of books and papers; and that when he does get the information, he should carefully consider in his mind what value it has, and whether he cannot, if it be imperfect, supplant it by something better, or, at least, endeavour to improve it, that the truth may be more certain, and more reliable for future ages to build their knowledge upon.

If, as we believe, we have given a reasonably fair exposition of our text, our labours will not be in vain. We have honestly stated what we believe to be the truth, hoping earnestly that others may follow in our footsteps, finishing that which we may not have completed,and correcting any errors of our judgment by careful and impartal investigation, and thorough enquiry into the Truth.

E, Purton & CO., Printers, 106 Elizabeth-st., Melbourne

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.

The longest-living author of this work died in 1928, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 95 years or less . This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works .

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On Law and Truth (2024 Lisbon Legal Theory Annual Lecture)

Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming

18 Pages Posted: 24 Jun 2024

University of Minnesota Law School

Date Written: May 31, 2024

Most legal systems recognize authoritative legal rules based both on (some version of) reason and (some version of) choice. Reason is legal reasoning, doctrinal reasoning; “will” or “fiat” are the choices made by lawmakers among available options, including choices made by judicial lawmakers. Because law is the product of both reason and will, there will always be the potential – greater in some legal systems than others – that the two criteria will conflict, leading to uncertainty in what the legal truth on some matter lies, including the possibility that two contradictory propositions about the law will have equally (or at least comparably) strong claims to be correct. The purpose of the present work is not to offer any general claims – and certainly no revolutionary claims – about the nature of truth. “Truth” in law is particular; it is woven into the practice of law, and it is that practice which grounds the somewhat paradoxical claims here discussed. And I would not call those claims “unconventional.” as it is only articulating something that experienced practitioners already know at some level, even if they are not always conscious of it. The ultimate point is that, because of the conflicting sources of authority, truth in law is, in small ways – on the margins or in the background – unstable and unsettled, or at least subject to being unsettled.

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Calls for Biden to Step Aside Are About to Get Deafening

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

For Democrats who tuned into Thursday night’s debate looking to calm their worries about President Joe Biden’s age and acuity, they came away with zero remedy. Within 10 minutes of the CNN-hosted event’s start, some of even Biden’s most loyal supporters found themselves asking if the nomination was, in fact, settled.

How bad was it? Vice President Kamala Harris rushed to join the clean-up, booking late-night cable appearances.

“Yes, there was a slow start but a strong finish,” said Harris, whose prospects for replacing her boss on the top of the ticket were getting hard scrutiny in real time as the debate unfolded. “Listen, people can debate on style points, but ultimately, this election and who is the President of the United States has to be about substance, and the contrast is clear,” she said on CNN in a show of unity with her boss.

At times jarring and deserving of double-takes, the evening left Democratic insiders gobsmacked . His campaign team tried to mask the disaster but there was no denying things did not go as planned. And with a painful 53 days until Democrats have their next big night in front of a national audience with the opening of their nominating convention in Chicago, the fumbling impression left Thursday evening is going to be the image that endures for a stretch.

Biden has faced pivotal nights like this before, the most analogous being his March State of the Union. Then, as now, voters were looking more at Biden’s performance than substance. The fears about the President’s capabilities faded somewhat when Biden nailed that performance. No one would say anything close to that on Thursday.

At times seeming to seize up and at others appearing confused, Biden rambled his way through a 90-minute session against former President Donald Trump. While it evened-out as the night progressed and Biden loosened up, the initial burst of anxiety among Democrats was not the prototypical bed-wetting that the President’s inner circle has proven adept at brushing off. The split-screen was impossible to ignore: Trump was not only more restrained than is typical for him, but he looked steadier even as he dodged specific questions in favor of populist platitudes.

Read more : Trump’s Debate Strategy Was to Let Biden Bury Himself

Biden took the stage with small, slow steps. He often steadied himself with both hands on his lectern. He looked down during some uncomfortable moments, appearing to zone out. And some of his answers veered wildly away from their intended marks, such as his invocation of Americans murdered by those in the country illegally. The question in play? About abortion rights.

"I spent half my career being criticized for being the youngest,” Biden said when asked directly about his age. Then, unprompted, he started talking about computer chips. “This guy is three years younger and a lot less competent,” he said of Trump.

There are some facts that no performance—even a flawless one—can erase or reverse. These are the two oldest presumptive nominees in history. The presidency takes a toll on everyone, and both men moved into the Oval Office as not-young men. At the time of their first head-to-head debate in 2020, they seemed like patrician party elders trying to steady a nation wrecked by a pandemic. Four years have not helped either look younger, and there is no denying that Biden, in particular, looks a little less steady, his voice a bit thinner, his jabs a little duller. Certainly, this Biden is not the man who stopped the panic inside Democratic circles in 2012 after Barack Obama’s objectively terrible first debate against Mitt Romney. 

The stakes for such an evening are always high. Americans are facing a choice between an 81-year-old sage with a literal senatorial vein and forgetful streak or a 78-year-old blowhard dragging behind him felony convictions and looming indictments. At the core of the decision is one posed by Ronald Reagan in the lone debate of the 1980 presidential race: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Read More : Our Exclusive Interview with President Joe Biden

The debate comes at a moment of a tight campaign, with Trump narrowly leading in most national polls and sitting stronger in the handful of states that will ultimately decide the race. Trump has narrowed Biden’s fundraising advantage and seems to have paid no real price for his 34 felony convictions in New York. And, it’s not exactly a secret even among Biden’s biggest defenders that the incumbent needed to knock it out of the park on Thursday .  

"I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either,” Trump said in an early moment that thwacked hard. “We’re trying to justify his presidency,” he said later.

Biden’s showing did little to remedy that reality. Message chains among Washington Democrats devolved as the night unfolded into crippling anxiety. “Unintelligible must have been the [closed captioning],” one senior Democrat strategist mused. “It would have been the most honest.”

Panic is not too strong of a word to describe some of those conversations . More than a few text chains were asking who knew the Democratic National Committee rules about how a nominee is locked in. Every elder strategist who still hopes to be part of the Biden orbit seemed to have found themselves on flights Thursday evening, unable to comment because they claimed they weren’t even watching.

Trump is, at his core, a showman with few beliefs of his own. Biden, who has a half-century of debating under his belt and spent a week secluded at Camp David practicing for the debate, did not put on a matching spectacle. Instead, Biden tried to prosecute the fact-based case against Trump while his predecessor danced around the specifics and hurled invective back across the eight-foot gap between the men.

“He gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian candidate,” Trump said.

A cheap shot, sure. But it’s one that rings much louder than almost anything Biden had at the ready. 

“If he wins this election, our country doesn’t stand a chance,” Trump said, reverting to vague warnings. 

A disturbing echo of that sentiment kept coming through: if Biden remains the nominee, Democrats might not, either.

There were still small reasons for Democrats to hold out hope, however faint. Trump remains a petty figure who continues to insist the 2020 election was rigged and thus illegitimate. He continues to vow retribution against those who he thinks wronged him. “Joe could be a convicted felon,” Trump said. “This man is a criminal.” And Trump—who is a convicted felon—continued to hurl inaccurate statements and fling innuendo all while flagrantly misrepresenting his own histories.

"The only person on this stage that is a convicted felon is the man I am looking at right now,” Biden said.

Biden also tried to fact-check Trump and landed some rehearsed barbs. “You have the morals of an alley cat,” Biden said in one honed line, ticking through a litany of Trump’s history.

But Biden’s rejoinders were no match for Trump’s antagonism. It was clear Biden had prepared, but he suffered from the curse of someone who memorizes a script without understanding any of its subtext. To summon the words he hammered home, he often appeared to be staring off into space.

Trump, meanwhile, just showed up and was himself with a coded appeal to his base supporters.

“You’ve destroyed the lives of so many people,” Trump said, accusing Biden of ruining the lives of innocent individuals connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He continued to insist that the protestors who sacked Capitol Hill were escorted in by police. And, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Trump continued to indulge in the Big Lie that he had actually won but the results were rigged.

“There’s no evidence at all,” Biden said.

He was right. But that’s the norm when it comes to Trump. What isn’t the norm—at least not to most Americans—is seeing a President seeming to sleepwalk through 90 minutes of live television.

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To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom.

President Biden has repeatedly and rightfully described the stakes in this November’s presidential election as nothing less than the future of American democracy.

Donald Trump has proved himself to be a significant jeopardy to that democracy — an erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust. He systematically attempted to undermine the integrity of elections. His supporters have described, publicly, a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. If he is returned to office, he has vowed to be a different kind of president, unrestrained by the checks on power built into the American political system.

Mr. Biden has said that he is the candidate with the best chance of taking on this threat of tyranny and defeating it. His argument rests largely on the fact that he beat Mr. Trump in 2020. That is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year.

At Thursday’s debate, the president needed to convince the American public that he was equal to the formidable demands of the office he is seeking to hold for another term. Voters, however, cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago.

The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant. He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.

Mr. Biden has been an admirable president. Under his leadership, the nation has prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges, and the wounds ripped open by Mr. Trump have begun to heal. But the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.

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New York Times Editorial Board: Biden should drop out after debate with Donald Trump

The New York Times Editorial Board is calling for President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race after his disastrous debate performance Thursday night with former President Donald Trump.

"The United States needs a stronger opponent to the presumptive Republican nominee," said the Times editorial board, which operates separately from its newsroom. Editorial writers cited the "stakes for the country and the uneven abilities of Mr. Biden."

Biden's debate performance against Trump Thursday night has sparked panic amongst Democrats and numerous calls for him to step down from the presidential ticket. His voice sounded unsteady and feeble and he noticeably froze while attempting to answer a question about the economy.

The Times argues in its op-ed piece that "the president is engaged in a reckless gamble," adding that "it's too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden's age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes."

Biden attempted to reframe the debate at a boisterous campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C. on Friday, where he addressed the sparring match with Trump. "I know I'm not a young man − to state the obvious," Biden said. "Folks, I don't walk as easy as I used to. I don't speak as smoothly as I used to. I don't debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth."

Biden vowed not to drop out of the campaign and said he was confident he could do the job if reelected. If he were to serve a full second term, he would be 86 by the time he left office. Trump, 78, and Biden are the oldest presumptive nominees for president in American history.

Dropping Out Is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option

If he believes that Trump is a unique threat, the choice is clear.

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Joe Biden says he ran for president in 2020 because of Charlottesville. He says he ran because he saw the threat Donald Trump posed to the country and the threat he posed to democracy. If Biden truly believes that, he needs to end his reelection campaign. Indeed, dropping out could be the most patriotic gesture of his long career in public service, and every senior Democratic official and leader in the country should be pressuring him to act immediately.

Read: A disaster for Joe Biden

Throughout last night’s debate , Trump lied; obfuscated; and made bizarre, unsupported arguments about the economy, foreign policy, abortion, and the January 6 riot. A halfway competent opponent would have capitalized on these many, many errors. But Biden could barely speak coherently. The catastrophe of the incumbent’s performance is almost impossible to capture in words; you have to watch.

According to reporting by The New York Times , the campaign believed that the debate would “provide an opportunity to go on the offensive on issues like immigration and abortion access.” When asked about the latter—Biden’s best issue—he rambled about his worst issue, immigrant crime. You can read for yourself:

There’s many young women who’ve been—including the young woman who was just murdered and he went to the funeral—the idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, they talk about that but here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, it’s just ridiculous and they can do nothing about, they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.

Before the debate , the president spent a week with a full slate of advisers at Camp David: former Chief of Staff Ron Klain, current Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, White House senior adviser Anita Dunn, and campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon. This performance was rehearsed .

It should be the last straw. The president went into this debate as a historically unpopular candidate. At this point in his presidency, a lower percentage of Americans support him than have supported any other president since at least Harry Truman. He’s running behind Democratic candidates for Senate in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin .

When the Times ’ Ezra Klein argued in February that Biden should step down , he was shot down by countless White House staff and Democratic leaders who claimed that Biden was up to the challenge of campaigning. And when Biden outperformed expectations at the State of the Union, speculation about his capacity to effectively campaign became more subdued.

But not anymore. Last night, Biden’s advisers were clearly underwhelmed with his performance; during the debate, they began leaking that he had a cold. After the event, when pressed repeatedly by Anderson Cooper on CNN, even Vice President Kamala Harris was forced to concede that the president’s showing had been lackluster. “He’s losing,” one prominent Democratic Party operative, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, told me by direct message. “The campaign said this debate would help him and it did not. Now he has no credible argument for how he’s going to turn the race around by November, especially since the convention is going to be a shit show.”

The problem facing the country is twofold. First, because the primaries are over, Biden would have to voluntarily step aside; there’s no other way for his party to nominate someone else. And second, there’s a first-mover disadvantage at play. No one wants to stick out their neck and end up as the laughingstock of the party—as Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota did when he briefly challenged Biden for this year’s Democratic nomination. And for those closest to Biden—Jill Biden, Val Biden, Mike Donilon, Ted Kaufman, and all those who joined him at Camp David this week—the question will be whether they can put the needs of their country above their loyalty to the current president.

In their recent book, The Hollow Parties , the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld discuss the weakening of the Democratic and Republican establishments. In another age, no party apparatus would have allowed an aging, frail Joe Biden to get to this point. I recently asked Schlozman why the Democratic Party hasn’t simply replaced Biden—why Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison hasn’t called Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or any number of other Democrats and tried to whip up support for them as potential replacements for Biden.

As a political scientist, Schlozman hates questions like this, so he answered me somewhat facetiously: He cited “the old joke of ‘Why is Profiles in Courage such a short book?’ ‘Because we don’t see these kinds of behaviors very much.’”

But what’s needed right now is exactly that kind of bravery: uncommon fortitude in the face of atrophied party institutions that have lost the power to prevent the rise of candidates such as Trump, and, more to the point, Biden’s continued presence in the race.

What exactly happens if Biden drops out? Well, there are two options. Either he drops out and endorses another candidate, or he allows the party to decide at the convention. Ideally, he would do the latter, to allow a competitive process to determine his successor as the Democratic nominee.

Either way, I have no illusions that any of this would be orderly. Speeding through a nominating process in a month and a half because the incumbent has decided he’s incapable of victory is going to be chaotic, and the Democrats could end up with a candidate with serious vulnerabilities.

But as Biden showed last night, the party most certainly has a flawed candidate now. The Democrats need to be able to find a nominee who’s actually able to mount a vigorous challenge to Trump and the singular threat he poses to American democracy.