Truth

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Poland
barbara.lewandowska-tomaszczyk@konin.edu.pl

That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality or a fact or belief that is accepted as true. In metaphysics and the philosophy of language, truth is the property of sentences, assertions, beliefs, thoughts, or propositions that, in ordinary discourse, are to agree with the facts or to state what is the case. The question concerning the nature of truth has been asked by philosophers and semanticists for millennia.

The contemporary theories of truth are the correspondence theory, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth. Wittgenstein via the correspondence theory assumes that what we believe as true corresponds to the way things actually are – to the facts. This theory is connected with an assumption that belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity – a fact – to which it corresponds. Otherwise - the belief is false. In John Austin’s correspondence relations, on the other hand, facts (or so-called states of affairs) are entirely conventional. Modern correspondence theories of truth draw from the ideas developed by Alfred Tarski and his semantic conception of truth for sentences in terms of concepts like reference and satisfaction, related to the basic semantic functions of names and predicates with language as ‘a bearer of truth’. The coherence theory of truth in its modern form, connected with British idealism for Walker, is related to a statement that a belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent system of beliefs claims Glanzberg. American pragmatist theories of truth perCharles Sanders Peirce and William James in terms of utility (in James’s case) and as the result of inquiry (for Peirce), on the other hand, assume that truth is what is verifiable.

Keywords: correspondence, idealism, pragmatism, satisfaction, verification

Related Entries: Belief, Objectivity, Resonance, Sourcing, Speech Act/Speech Event

References:
Austin, J. L. (1961). Unfair to facts. In J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock (Eds.), Philosophical papers (pp. 102–122). Clarendon Press.
Glanzberg, M. (2023). Truth. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford University. https://plato.stanfor.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/truth/
James, W. (1907). Pragmatism’s conception of truth. In Pragmatism (pp. 197–236). Longmans.
Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vols. 1–8, C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, & A. W. Burks, Eds.). Harvard University Press.
Tarski, A. (1983). The concept of truth in formalized languages (J. H. Woodger, Trans.). In Logic, semantics, metamathematics (2nd ed., pp. 152–278). Hackett Publishing. (Original work published 1935).
Walker, R. C. S. (1989). The coherence theory of truth. Routledge.
Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Harcourt, Brace and Company.