Theories of Truth

 

What do we mean by calling something true? Most obviously we mean according with or corresponding to "the facts" — whatever those facts might be, or how we arrive at them. Logicians, however, would insist on being more specific, and in two ways. Given a sentence, they would first strip out the context, and then ensure that the remaining propositions could be simply true or false. Two simplifications, therefore. First the context is set aside: the who, when, how, why that every journalist covers is removed. Then the proposition itself is made to conform to a simple assertion of fact: expressions of belief, hope, wish, intention, etc. are ruled out of court. Such an approach may be remorselessly simplistic, reducing sentences to their simplest components, but the sentences then rest on assured foundations and can be built upon in logically sound ways.

So runs the theory, entirely necessary if logic is to prevail. If sentences (rather than propositions {2}) are to be made the carriers of truth then a statement true today may not have been so a year ago, or if spoken by someone else. A sentence like: he believed her makes its appeal not to logic but the common understanding of the human heart, the novelist's province. But he believed p, where p is some proposition that is either true or false, does make itself amenable to treatment.

Many philosophers dislike the correspondence theory — that truth is something that corresponds to the facts — precisely because of this naive acceptance of "the facts." Even at its basic level, things in the world are not directly given to us: we make interpretations and intelligent integrations of our sensory experience, as Kant claimed and extensive studies of the physiology of perception show all too plainly. Scientists make observations in ways guided by contemporary practice and the nature of the task in hand.

So what other approaches are there? Two: the theory of coherence and that of pragmatism. The first calls something true when it fits neatly into a well-integrated body of beliefs. The second is judged by its results, the practical "cash value" of its contribution. Theories of coherence were embraced by very different philosophies, and pragmatism is currently enjoying a modest revival in the States.

Stated more formally, the coherence theory holds that truth consists in a relation of coherence between beliefs or propositions in a set, such that a belief is false when it fails to fit with other mutually coherent members of a set. Though this concept of truth may seem more applicable to aesthetics or sociology, even a scientific theory is commonly preferred on the grounds of simplicity, experimental accessibility, utility, theoretical elegance and strength, fertility and association with models rendering such processes intelligible, on the very attributes of the coherence theory.

But if the set of beliefs needs to be as comprehensive as possible, what is to stop us inflating the system with beliefs whose only merit is that they fit the system, to make a larger but still consistent fairy-tale? Appeal to the outside world — that these new beliefs are indeed "facts" — is invalid, as our measure of truth is coherence within the set of beliefs, not correspondence with matters outside.

What then of the third theory of truth: pragmatism? In its crudest form, that something is true simply because it yields good works or congenial beliefs, the theory has few adherents. But its proponents put matters more subtly. Reality, said C.S. Pierce, constrains us to the truth: we find by enquiry and experiment what the world is really like. Truth is the consensus of beliefs surviving that investigation, a view that includes some correspondence theory and foreshadows Quine's web of beliefs. William James was not so committed a realist, and saw truth as sometimes manufactured by the verification process itself, a view that links him to relativists like Feyerband. John Dewey stressed the context of application, that we need to judge ideas by how they work in specific practices. But that makes truth into a property acquired in the individual circumstances of verification, perhaps even individual-dependent, which has obvious drawbacks.

A very short account: more can be found on TextEtc.

 

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Theories of Truth

 

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