Today in a tutorial session, I had a client ask me about the criterion of truth and about different perspectives or theories on what makes something true or false. And at the start, I said, well, we probably probably want to think in the plural.
Because if we're understanding criterion in the singular, to be what it is that we can use as an index for something being true or the opposite being false, or perhaps even not knowing which it is, then since we do have multiple theoretical perspectives on truth articulated in the history of philosophy, many of which are not known to quite a few people, including those who write about theories of truth.
Since this is the case, we need to talk in the plural, because there isn't just one conception of truth out there that everybody knows. buys into, accepts, uses references. And I think one natural place to begin is with the sort of thing that you'll find if you go online and look up truth in encyclopedias of philosophy, or on various websites, or you might find in an Intro to Philosophy textbook, or when you Google it and videos or podcasts come up where somebody claims that they're providing you with the three basic theories or five basic theories or something like that.
So usually there are three that show up over and over again, and sometimes they're well explained and sometimes they're not one of them is called the correspondence theory of truth another is usually called the coherence theory of truth and then the other one is usually also called the pragmatic theory of truth but you can find some outliers in the use of the language.
And the idea behind the correspondence theory of truth is that what we're looking for is correspondence, or to use Thomas Aquinas' term from earlier on, adequation between how things are in reality or in being, and our mental representations of those or our thoughts about them, or our linguistic you could say representations or expressions of those things.
I think this is actually a useful idea. It does cover a lot of ground. We can say when I give you a proposition which happens to be true right now such as I am holding a full cup of coffee, which is indeed the case, and you're thinking about it or you're hearing it, well, that's a true statement. It'll stop being a true statement once I've drank the coffee, or if I spill it or whatever else changes that condition.
And, you know, this works for quite a few things.: This is what we mean by true or false. If I tell you I have a million dollars in the bank that I will be happy to send you if you just find forward me a little bit of money, say $2,000, so that I can access this money and then get it to you, and I will do so out of gratitude.
I think many of you recognize the internet scams that set things up that way. Those are probably all false statements, right? We can say, what makes them false? Well, I'm not describing things as they really are.
So then we have the coherence theory of truth. And the idea there, this is often associated with people like Hegel or the Hegelians, is that what makes propositions true or thoughts true is not just corresponding to isolated bits of reality, but rather how they all cohere together in something like a system. There are no contradictions between them, or at least no important contradictions. And this can actually be quite useful as sort of a supplement, you could say, to the correspondence theory of truth.
And then another one that often gets talked about is the pragmatic theory of truth. I would say that, you know, this has been around longer than the term pragmatism has, although pragmatic is an earlier term. You see, for example, Kant actually using it. So the idea is typically associated with people like William James or John Dewey, people that we call pragmatists.
And it's often boiled down to truth is what works for a person. So, you know, you could see a lot of possibility for abuse in this. And it's not an adequate representation of, say, William James's position as he articulates it. But it's good enough for now, right?
So we can talk about other theories that are out there that have been recently named, you know, a semantic theory of truth, deflationary. But those are basically just things that philosophers, mostly analytic philosophers, think in terms of.
But there's actually a much richer and earlier history that I would like to mention. And this is what I told my client. And this is what I think is. You might be interested in as well there are conceptions of truth that are not adequately captured or expressed by these other named theories and they're associated with pretty important philosophers throughout philosophies history
So I'm not going to begin at the beginning. Instead, I'm going to start with somebody who this client and I have talked about quite a bit, and I think this may have been motivating the discussion and his question from the start.
So Kierkegaard has this notion of truth as subjectivity. Now, he's not saying that all truth is subjective or anything like that, but there are some important truths that we can only grasp subjectively and through commitment, perhaps even through passion, maybe the highest passion of faith, right?
So this is a different notion of of truth at play there. And it doesn't mean that we have to throw everything out and say, this is the only one that matters, because that's not what Kierkegaard is doing.
This client is quite interested in existentialist thought. So if you know your existentialism and you are used to talking in terms of truth, then Heidegger's truth as alētheia, which is a Greek term meaning something like unconcealing or uncovering. But it is the standard term for truth, and used as a noun, as an adjective. So Heidegger has a conception that doesn't fit in well with these standard theories either. But I think it's actually communicating something quite useful to us
Now going backwards in time, somebody who I do a lot of work on is Anselm of Canterbury, and he actually has quite a few thoughts about the nature of truth, veritas in Latin. And he's got a whole dialogue on it which is really important but very infrequently read by the people who want to talk about truth. Because in it not only does he discuss what's clearly a correspondence theory of truth with respect to our thoughts and our words and the realities that they're supposed to express, but he also talks about truth in the will and truth in everything.
So this is a differing conception. He will also discuss truth in the being of things and God as truth. So here we have a much more robust conception of truth than what we're typically getting. And I'd like to throw us even further back. And I'm just kind of picking a bunch of people. This is not a survey of every single philosopher and what they've had to say about truth.
But if you think about Aristotle, if you've ever read the Nicomachean Ethics, book six, where he's talking about what we often call the intellectual virtues, these are states or habits, hexeis, that allow us to attain truth in different kinds of matters. And Aristotle will talk about practical truth, truth that has to do with actions, somewhat like what Anselm was talking about, probably along the lines of what Kierkegaard is also implying, and our desires are right. The way in which he defines practical truth is not just having intellectual matters right but also having the right, rightly oriented let's say desires, a desire in the very broadest sense orexis
So I brought up these four as examples of important philosophical figures who really thought a lot about the nature of truth and have a lot to contribute that the let's call it standard fair literature often shows an ignorance of or a disengagement with that I think is quite important.
And what's the upshot of this? There is no one single conception of truth that is truly the only one. We actually need these to form a sort of composite picture of what it means to be true. And we need to use different conceptions or criteria of of truth in different kinds of situations. And I don't think that there is one single overarching perspective that we can draw all of these into.
But I also don't think that it makes everything up for grabs either. We don't have to be pessimists about that. So this is something that I was leading my client through. I thought it could be interesting for those of you who listen to this to learn about and reflect upon. And so there you go.
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