sports day essay in urdu

کھیلوں کی اہمیت پر مضمون | Importance Of Sports Essay in Urdu

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بزرگوں نے کہا ہے کہ ایک صحت مند دماغ کے لئے ایک صحت مند جسم کا ھونا بہت ہی ضروری ہے کیونکہ صحت مند جسم کے اوپر ہی صحت مند دماغ ملک سکتا ہے۔ یہ بات بالکل ٹھیک ہے۔ اگر آدمی کی صحت اچھی نہ ہوگی، جسم بیمار بیماریوں کا گھر ہوگا تو قدرتی بات ہے کہ وہ آدمی بے چین ہو گا اسے دماغی سکون حاصل نہ ہوگا۔ جب دماغی سکون حاصل نہ ہو گا تو ظاہر ہے کہ وہ آرام سے کچھ سوچ بھی نہیں سکے گا۔ اسی وجہ سے بزرگوں کا قول ہے کہ ہر انسان کو اپنی جسمانی اور دماغی صحت برقرار رکھنے کے لئے کوئی نہ کوئی کھیل ضرور کھیلنا چاہیے۔

بچپن میں کھیل کود کے ذریعے بچے کا فی کسرت یعنی ورزش کر لیتے ہیں۔ پڑھائی کے دنوں میں جہاں پڑھائی ضروری ہے وہاں کھیل کود بھی از حد ضروری ہے۔ ان دونوں کا توازن قائم رکھنا چاہیے اس سے نہ صرف بچے اچھی طرح مطالعہ کر سکتے ہیں بلکہ اپنی صحت کو برقرار بھی رکھ سکتے ہیں۔

زندگی کی جدوجہد میں وہ لوگ ہی کامیاب ہوتے ہیں جن کی صحت اچھی ہوتی ہے۔ بعض طلباء ہر وقت کتاب کے کیڑے بنے رہتے ہیں اور کھیل کود کی طرف دھیان نہیں دیتے ان کی صحت کمزور ہو جاتی ہے اور بعض کی تو نظر بھی کمزور ہوجاتی ہے جس کی وجہ سے بچپن میں ہی انہیں عینک لگ جاتی ہے۔

یہ طلبہ اگرچہ امتحان میں اچھی پوزیشن حاصل کر لیتے ہیں مگر بڑے ہو کر ترقی نہیں کرسکتے۔ وہ محنت سے جی چرانے رکھتے ہیں کیونکہ صحت انہیں سخت محنت کی اجازت نہیں دیتی۔ اس کے برعکس جو طلبہ اور طالبات اپنی سکولی پڑھائی کے دوران کسرت یعنی ورزش کرتے ہیں یا کھیل کود میں حصہ لیتے ہیں وہ زندگی کی جدوجہد میں آسانی سے کود سکتے ہیں اور آنے والے دنوں میں سخت محنت کر کے ترقی کرسکتے ہیں۔

کھیل کود کا پہلا فائدہ

ورزش کے مقابلہ میں کھیل کود زیادہ بہتر ہے کیونکہ اس سے سارے جسم کی ورزش ہو جاتی ہے اور ساتھ ہی دوستوں کے ساتھ مل کر کھیلنے کی وجہ سے ایک حد تک دل بہلاوا بھی ہو جاتا ہے۔ لہذا اس بات کو مدنظر رکھتے ہوئے ہم کہہ سکتے ہیں کہ کھیل کود کا سب سے بڑا فائدہ یہ ہے کہ انسان کی صحت بچپن میں اچھی ہو جاتی ہے اور وہ زندگی میں محنت مشقت کے قابل ہوجاتا ہے۔

کھیل کود کا دوسرا فائدہ

کھیل کود کا دوسرا فائدہ یہ ہے کہ یہ ہمیں ڈسپلین میں رہنا سکھاتا ہے اور کھیل کے کچھ اصول اور قواعد ہوتے ہیں۔ کھلاڑی ان اصولوں پر چلنے چلتے ہیں۔ جہاں کسی نے اصول توڑا ریفری نے اسی وقت سیٹی بجا کر اسے بتا دیا کہ فلاں ٹیم کے ایک ممبر نے اصول کے خلاف ورزی کی ہے۔ جو قوم ڈسپلن چھوڑ دیتی ہے وہ تباہ ہو جاتی ہے اور اس کی ترقی رک جاتی ہے۔

زندگی کو شروع میں ہی اگر لڑکے اور لڑکیاں کھیل کود کے ذریعے ڈسپلن یعنی نظم و ضبط کے پابند ہونا سیکھ جائیں تو یہ عادت زندگی بھر قائم رہتی ہے اور انسان کھیل کود کے بعد زندگی کے میدان میں بھی ڈسپلن کا پابند ہو جاتا ہے۔ اس لیے سکولوں میں کھیل کود کے پیرڈ کا ہونا بہت ضروری قرار دیا گیا ہے تاکہ طلباء تعلیم کے ساتھ ساتھ ڈسپلن بھی سیکھ سکیں۔ اور اگر یہ کہا جائے کہ ڈسپلن تعلیم کا ایک اہم جز ہے تو غلط نہیں ہوگا۔

کھیل کود کا تیسرا فائدہ

کھیل کود کا تیسرا فائدہ باہمی تعاون ہے۔ کسی بھی ٹیم کا کوئی ممبر اکیلا کوئی کھیل نہیں کھیلتا بلکہ وہ اپنے ساتھی کھلاڑیوں کی مدد سے دوسری ٹیم کو ہرانے کی کوشش کرتا ہے۔ اس کوشش میں ٹیم کے سارے ممبر ایک دوسرے کی مدد کرتے ہیں اور باہمی تعاون کی وجہ سے ہی فتح حاصل کرتے ہیں۔

اگر بچپن میں ہم باہمی تعاون کا جذبہ اپنے اندر پیدا کرنے میں کامیاب ہو جائیں تو یہ بات ہمیں زندگی میں فائدہ دیتی ہے۔ یہ دیکھا گیا ہے کہ کوئی بھی انسان زندگی کی جدوجہد میں اکیلا حصہ نہیں لے سکتا۔ اس سلسلے میں اسے اپنے دوستوں کی مدد کی ضرورت ہوتی ہے۔انسان کو زندگی میں مدد تب ہی ملتی ہے جب وہ دوسروں کے کام آئے۔ یہ اصول بھی ہے اگر ہم دوسروں کے کام آئیں گے تو ظاہر ہے کہ دوسرے بھی ہمارے کام آئیں گے۔ کھیل کود کے دوران ہمارے اندر یہ جذبہ آہستہ آہستہ پیدا ہوتا ہے اور پختہ ہوتا جاتا ہے۔ اس طرح کہا جاسکتا ہے کہ کھیل کود ہمیں جسمانی طور پر ہی مضبوط نہیں کرتے بلکہ ایک دوسرے کی مدد کرتے ہوئے آگے بڑھنے میں بھی مدد دیتے ہیں۔

کھیل کود کا چوتھا فائدہ

کھیل کود کا چوتھا فائدہ یہ ہے کہ ہم زندگی کی جدوجہد کے وقت کامیابیوں کے ساتھ ساتھ ناکامیوں کو بھی برداشت کرنا سیکھ جاتے ہیں۔ جب دو ٹیمیں آپس میں مقابلہ کرتی ہیں تو ظاہر ہے کہ ایک وقت میں دونوں فتح یاب نہیں ہوتیں۔ ایک ٹیم جیت جاتی ہے اور دوسری ٹیم ہار جاتی ہے۔ اس کے باوجود دونوں ٹیمیں ایک دوسرے کو مبارکباد دیتی ہیں۔ ہارنے والی ٹیم کے ممبر خندہ پیشانی سے اپنی ہار کو تسلیم کرتے ہوئے دوسری ٹیم کے ممبران کی تعریف کرتے ہیں انہیں مبارکباد دیتے ہیں اور پھر واپس لوٹ کر دوبارہ پریکٹس کرتے ہیں تاکہ آنے والے مقابلہ میں جیت حاصل کر سکیں۔

یہ بات آہستہ آہستہ ہماری عادت بن جاتی ہے اور جب ہم بڑے ہوتے ہیں تو اس وقت زندگی میں اگر مشکلات بھی آتی ہیں تو اسے خندہ پیشانی سے تسلیم کرتے ہیں اور وہ ان مشکلات پر حاوی ہونے کے لیے دوبارہ کوشش کرتے ہیں۔ ناکام ہوجائیں تو حوصلہ نہیں ہارتے بلکہ دوبارہ تیاری کر کے جیت حاصل کرنے کے لئے میدان عمل میں کود پڑتے ہیں۔

زندگی میں اپنی ناکامی کو خندہ پیشانی سے قبول کرنا اور اپنی منزل پر پہنچنے کے لئے دوبارہ کوشش کرنا ایک بہت ہی اچھی اور قابل تعریف عادت ہے اور یہ عادت کھیل کود کے ذریعے ہم آسانی سے پیدا کر سکتے ہیں۔

کھیل کود کا پانچواں فائدہ

جب انسان مطالعہ کرتا ہے یا جسمانی یا دماغی محنت کرتا ہے تو اس کا جسم تھک جاتا ہے۔ صحت کے ماہرین کا کہنا ہے کہ دل بہلاوا اس تھکاوٹ کا بہترین علاج ہے۔ بعض لوگوں کا تو یہ خیال ہے کہ دماغی یا جسمانی محنت کے بعد ہمارے جسم میں ایک قسم کا زہر پیدا ہو جاتا ہے اور جب ہم دل بہلاوا کرتے ہیں تو اس کی وجہ سے ہمیں ایک خوشی حاصل ہوتی ہے اور یہی خوشیاں ہمارے جسم کے اندر پیدا ہوئے زہر کو ختم کرنے میں مددگار ثابت ہوتی ہے۔

بچپن میں دل بہلاوے کا سب سے اچھا ڈھنگ کھیل کود میں حصہ لینا ہے۔ اس سے خوشی حاصل ہوتی ہے، ورزش بھی ہو جاتی ہے اور دل بہلاوا بھی ہو جاتا ہے۔ اس سے خون کی گردش تیز ہو کر ہر حصہ تک آکسیجن کو پہنچاتی ہے جس سے جسم سڈول، خوبصورت اور صحت مند ہو جاتا ہے۔ انسانی چہرہ پر رونق آجاتی ہے، اداسی دور ہو جاتی ہے اور انسان ہنس مکھ ہوجاتا ہے۔ اس لیے عام دیکھا گیا ہے کہ کھلاڑی ہنس مکھ اور حاضر جواب ہوتے ہیں اور یہ محض کھیل کود کی وجہ سے ہوتا ہے۔

کھیل کود کا چھٹا فائدہ

کھیل کود کا ایک فائدہ یہ بھی ہے کہ انسان قدرت کے اصول کے مطابق چلنا سیکھ جاتا ہے۔ موسم کا حال دیکھیں تو باری باری گرمی، سردی، بہار اور برسات کا موسم آتا ہے۔ دن کے بعد رات اور رات کے بعد دن آتا ہے۔ کھیتوں میں گندم کے بعد کوئی دوسری فصل اور پھر اس فصل کے بعد کھیت میں گندم بوئی جاتی ہے۔ ایک ہی فصل کاٹ کر اس میں وہی فصل دوبارہ بو دی جائے تو پیداوار کم ہو جاتی ہے۔ اس کی وجہ یہی ہے کہ قدرت حالات کو ایک جیسا نہیں رکھتی بلکہ اس میں تبدیلی لاتی ہے۔

کھیل کود کا سکولوں میں ضروری ہونے سے ہم قدرت کے اصول پر چلتے ہیں۔ پڑھائی کر لیتے ہیں اس کے بعد کھیل کود کی باری آتی ہے اور پھر مطالعہ کی باری آتی ہے۔ اس طرح بدل بدل کر کام کرنے سے کام کی رفتار بڑھتی ہے۔ اسکول میں کھیل کود ضروری ہونے اور اس پر عمل ہونے کا نتیجہ یہ نکلتا ہے کہ طلباء میں پڑھائی کی رفتار بڑھتی ہے اور اس کے ساتھ ہی کھیل کود کا شوق بڑھنے سے لوگوں کی صحت پر خوشگوار اثر ہوتا ہے۔

اس لیے ہماری رائے میں سارے طلباء کو اپنی پڑھائی کے ساتھ ساتھ کھیل کود میں بھی حصہ لینا چاہیے اور باقاعدہ طور پر ہر روز کچھ نہ کچھ وقت نکال کر کسی نہ کسی کھیل میں حصہ لینا چاہیے۔ امتحان کے دنوں میں بھی کوئی معمولی سی ورزش کرنی چاہیے یا ایک آدھ گھنٹہ کھیل کے میدان میں جا کر اپنا دل بہلانا چاہیے۔ اس سے وہ دوبارہ تازہ دم ہوکر صحتمند ڈھنگ سے دہرائی کرنے میں کامیاب ہو جائیں گے۔

Essay on The Importance of Sports

کھیل کی اہمیت پر مضمون اردو میں | Essay on The Importance of Sports In Urdu - 800 الفاظ میں

ٹیلی ویژن، کمپیوٹر اور ویڈیو گیمز کی بڑھتی ہوئی مقبولیت بچوں کے غیر فعال طرز زندگی میں معاون ہے۔ اوسطاً بچہ ہفتے میں 24 گھنٹے ٹیلی ویژن دیکھنے میں گزارتا ہے۔ یہ وقت کسی تفریحی یا جسمانی سرگرمی میں گزارا جا سکتا ہے۔ اپنے بچوں کے لیے رول ماڈل بنیں۔ اگر بچے آپ کو ایکٹو دیکھتے ہیں تو ان کے ایکٹو رہنے اور ساری زندگی متحرک رہنے کا امکان زیادہ ہوتا ہے۔

نوجوان بڑھتے ہوئے دماغوں اور جسموں کے لیے، صحت مند غذا اور ایک فعال طرز زندگی بہت اچھے نتائج لاتے ہیں۔ آج کل بہت سارے بچے کمیونٹی پول میں جانے یا مقامی YMCA میں باسکٹ بال کا پک اپ گیم کھیلنے کے بجائے گھر آتے ہیں اور ٹیلی ویژن دیکھتے ہیں۔

زیادہ سے زیادہ، ہم ایسے بچوں کو دیکھتے ہیں جو بور ہوتے ہیں، کیونکہ ان کی پرورش کھیلوں کے ذہن کے ساتھ نہیں ہوئی ہے۔ یہاں تک کہ اگر کسی بچے کے والدین کھیل کی طرف مائل نہیں ہیں، تب بھی انہیں اپنے بچوں کے لیے تفریحی اہداف مقرر کرنے میں مدد کرنے کی ضرورت ہے۔ بچوں کو ان کی اپنی چیز کی ضرورت ہوتی ہے۔

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کھیل اور دیگر تفریحی سرگرمیاں غیر صحت بخش عادات اور نمونوں کو کم کرتی ہیں جو ذیابیطس، ہائی بلڈ پریشر، ہائی کولیسٹرول، جوڑوں کے درد اور تکلیف، دل کی بیماری، فالج، کینسر اور دیگر سنگین وجوہات کا باعث بن سکتی ہیں۔ اس بات کا ثبوت ہے کہ طلباء جسمانی طور پر فٹ ہونے پر، تعلیمی لحاظ سے زیادہ حاصل کرتے ہیں۔ لیکن ہم اپنے بچوں کی جسمانی ضروریات کو پورا کرنے کے لیے اسکول کے پروگراموں پر انحصار نہیں کر سکتے۔ تمام خاندانوں کو جسمانی طور پر ایک ساتھ فٹ رہنے کے لیے سرگرمیوں کی منصوبہ بندی کرنے کی ضرورت ہوتی ہے، جیسے دن بھر چلنا اور بات کرنا

یہ دیکھنا مشکل نہیں ہے کہ اتنے سارے بچے زیادہ وزن کی راہ پر کیوں چل رہے ہیں۔ سرکاری اسکول کے کلاس روم میں، تقریباً 50% طلباء کا وزن زیادہ ہے۔ ضرورت سے زیادہ کھانے، کھانے کی ناقص کوالٹی اور بیہودہ طرز زندگی کا کلچر عام ہے۔ کتے کے ساتھ پارک میں دوڑنا، ویک اینڈ پر فیملی کے طور پر بائیک چلانا وغیرہ۔ جسمانی طور پر متحرک رہتے ہوئے یہ ایک ساتھ وقت گزارنے کا بہترین طریقہ ہے۔

ایسی سرگرمیاں تلاش کریں جو آپ اور آپ کے خاندان کے لیے کارآمد ہوں اور کھیلوں اور تفریح ​​کو ایک ساتھ نافذ کریں۔ بیرونی کھیلوں میں مشغول ہونا آپ کے بچے کے لیے ورزش کرنے اور سماجی طور پر بات چیت کرنے کا ایک بہترین موقع ہے۔ ایکشن اسپورٹس جیسے سکیٹ بورڈنگ مقبول ہیں۔ اس قسم کی سرگرمیاں بچوں کو بغیر کسی کوچ یا ساتھی کے دباؤ کے وہ کرنے کی اجازت دینے کا ایک بہترین طریقہ ہے۔

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اس میں اپنے دوستوں کے ساتھ وقت گزارتے ہوئے اپنی پسند کی چیزیں کرنا، اور اس کا احساس کیے بغیر صحت مند اور متحرک رہنا شامل ہے۔ کھیلوں میں حصہ لینا نہ صرف بچوں کو صحت مند اور خوش رکھتا ہے بلکہ بچوں کو مقصد کے تعین، حوصلہ افزائی، لگن اور ٹیم ورک کی اہمیت بھی سکھاتا ہے۔

واقعی کھیل اس کا ایک لازمی حصہ ہیں جو بچوں کو بہت چھوٹی عمر میں سیکھنے کی ضرورت ہے۔ یہ جوانی میں فرق کی دنیا بنائے گا اور نسل در نسل اس طرز کو جاری رکھے گا۔ جب بچہ بڑا ہوتا ہے تو ہڈیاں پٹھوں اور ٹینڈرز سے زیادہ تیزی سے بڑھتی ہیں۔ نوجوانوں کے لیے یہ یقین کرنا ضروری ہے کہ وہ اپنی دلچسپی اور قابلیت پر اعتماد محسوس کرتے ہوئے جو کچھ بھی چاہتے ہیں اسے پورا اور حاصل کر سکتے ہیں۔

یہ اپنے آپ میں اعلی خود اعتمادی، تعلق کے احساس، اور صحت مند طرز زندگی کی حوصلہ افزائی کا باعث بنے گا۔ مزہ کرتے ہوئے اور جو آپ کرنا پسند کرتے ہیں وہ کرتے ہوئے صحت مند رہنے کا اس سے بہتر اور کیا طریقہ ہے؟! آخر میں ایک صحت مند اور خوش حال بچہ اسٹرائیک باؤلنگ کر رہا ہو گا، ہوم رن مار رہا ہو گا، یا جیتنے والا گول سکور کر رہا ہو گا، اور اگر وہ ایسا نہیں بھی کر سکے گا، تو اچھے کام کا اطمینان، اور دوست اور یادیں جو ان کے لیے زندہ رہیں گی۔ زندگی بھر. ایک صحت مند اور جسمانی طور پر فٹ زندگی ایک طویل اور کامیاب تناؤ سے پاک زندگی کا راستہ ہے۔

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کھیل کی اہمیت پر مضمون اردو میں | Essay on The Importance of Sports In Urdu

Sports Day Essay

500 words essay on sports day.

Sports day consists of events which many schools stage in which students participate in sporting activities. They usually participate to win trophies or prizes. A lot of elementary schools hold sports day annually on their campus. Through the sports day essay, we will take a look at what all happens on this day.

Sports Day at My School

My school conducts sports day every year. It takes place in the month of November every year. Each year, all the classes present different acts to the audience. As per the class, the acts are chosen.

For instance, the junior classes perform simple acts like aerobics while the senior classes perform difficult acts like forming pyramids, long jump, and more. The sports day at my school takes place with full preparation.

The preparations begin two months earlier so that students can perfect their act. We get extra time to practice for the sports day. It also helps to cut down on some academic studying which everyone enjoys.

All of us practice in the sun and try to perfect our moves. On the final day, we all invite our parents to watch us perform our act. The parents come excitedly and watch and film their children perform harmoniously with the other students.

Moreover, there are also marathons and walkathons which are very interesting to watch. It happens on the basis of the division of houses. The most number of wins in my school have been procured by the blue house.

Thus, we all enjoy ourselves a lot on our sports day and perform for our parents and teachers. There is always a chief guest invited to our sports day that inaugurates and concludes the ceremony with their encouraging words.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

My Favourite Day

Sports Day is my favourite day because it helps me demonstrate my talents. I am a very athletic person and enjoy playing sports. I can run marathons and go through the ring of fire with ease.

My friends are also very athletic so we wait for this day throughout the year. Moreover, on our sports day, we are allowed to bring snacks of all kinds. So, I share it with my friends and we have a gala time while waiting to perform.

On sports day, I always bring back home at least one trophy or medal. I have a great collection of certificates, awards and medals at home which signifies my wins on the sports day.

Sports day provides me with unforgettable memories every year. It gives me a chance to make even more and better memories with my friends. Thus, I enjoy this day a lot. When I pass out of my school, I will try to visit my school on sports day. It will be a sweet walk down memory lane and also a great chance to meet my teachers .

Conclusion of Sports Day Essay

Sports Day is a very exciting and happy day that every student looks forward to. Every student can participate in different types of sporting events. Personally, I enjoy sports day and look forward to it every year. It helps me showcase my athletic abilities in front of an enthusiastic audience.

FAQ of Sports Day Essay

Question 1: What is the importance of sports day?

Answer 1: Sports day is an important day which helps every student to indulge in physical activities and sports. It helps the students to take a break from their academic routine and enjoy playing sports.

Question 2: How do schools celebrate Sports Day?

Answer 2: Most of the school have common ways of celebrating sports days. It encourages students to participate in it by partaking in sporting activities like flat race, hurdle race, cycling, high and long jump and more.

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does truth always matter essay

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What Is Truth and Why Does it Matter?

• June 10, 2004

The Old and New Testament terms for truth are, respectively, emet and alethia . The meaning of these terms and, more generally, a biblical conception of truth are broad and multifaceted: fidelity, moral rectitude, being real, being genuine, faithfulness, having veracity, being complete. Two aspects of the biblical conception of truth appear to be primary: faithfulness and conformity to fact. The latter appears to involve a correspondence theory of truth (see below). Arguably, the former may presuppose a correspondence theory. Thus, faithfulness may be understood as a person’s actions corresponding to the person’s assertions or promises, and a similar point could be made about genuineness, moral rectitude and so forth.

There are hundreds of passages that explicitly ascribe truth to propositions in a correspondence sense. Thus, God says “I, the Lord, speak the truth; I declare what is right” (Isaiah 45:19). Also, there are numerous passages that explicitly contrast true propositions with falsehoods. Repeatedly, the Old Testament warns against false prophets whose words do not correspond to reality (for example Deuteronomy 18:22: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken”), and the ninth commandment warns against bearing false testimony, that is, testimony that fails to correspond to what actually happened (Exodus 20:16).

What is the correspondence theory of truth?

In its simplest form, the correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition is true just in case it corresponds to reality, when what it asserts to be the case is the case. More generally, truth obtains when a truth bearer stands in an appropriate correspondence relation to a truth maker:

truth bearer => correspondence relation => truth maker

First, what is a truth bearer? What kind of thing can bear truth? The thing that is either true or false is not a sentence, but a proposition. A proposition is the content of a sentence. For example, “It is raining” and “Es regnet” are two different sentences that express the same proposition. A sentence is a sense perceptible string of markings (such as the consonants and vowels on this page) or sounds (such as those made speaking, in normal conversation) formed according to a set of syntactical rules; it is a grammatically well-formed string of spoken or written sounds or marks. A sentence can rightfully be called true only if its content is true, only if it expresses a true proposition.

What about truth makers? What is it that makes a proposition true? The best answer is: facts. A fact is some real state of affairs in the world, a way the world actually is. For example, grass’s being green, an electron’s having a negative charge and God’s being all-loving are all facts. Consider the proposition Mark has black hair . This proposition is true just in case a specific fact (namely, Mark’s having black hair) actually obtains in the real world. A state of affairs “makes” the propositional content of a statement true only if that state of affairs actually is the way the proposition represents it to be. If a proposition represents Mark’s having black hair, then Mark’s actually having black hair makes that proposition true. If, however, a proposition represents Marks’s having blonde or blue hair, then Mark’s actually having black hair makes that proposition false . Suppose Sally says, “Mark has black hair.” It’s important to note that Mark’s having black hair makes the content of Sally’s statement true even if Sally is blind and cannot tell whether or not it is true . In fact, Mark’s having black hair makes it true even if Sally does not believe it, even if she thinks she was lying when she said that Mark’s hair was black. Reality makes propositions true or false. A proposition is not made true by someone’s thinking or expressing it, and it is not made true by our ability to determine that it is true. Put differently, evidence allows us tell if a proposition is true or false, but reality (the way the world is) is what makes a proposition true or false.

Our study of truth bearers has already taken us into the topic of the correspondence relation. Correspondence is a two-placed relation between a proposition and a relevant fact (see the diagram above). A two-placed relation is one that requires two things before it can hold. For example, “larger than” is a two-placed relation. If we have a desk and a book, and if the desk is bigger than, larger than, the book, the “larger than” relation holds between the desk and the book. “Next to” is also a two-placed relation; if we have a car and a house, and the car is to the side of, next to, the house, the “next to” relation holds between the car and the house. Similarly, the correspondence relation holds between two things — a proposition and a relevant fact — just in case the proposition matches, conforms to, corresponds with the fact. If we have the proposition Mark has black hair, then, if Mark’s hair is actually black, the correspondence relation holds between the proposition and Mark’s having black hair.

Why believe the correspondence theory?

What reasons can be given for accepting the correspondence theory of truth? Two main arguments have been advanced for the correspondence theory, one descriptive and one dialectical.

The descriptive argument focuses on a careful description and presentation of specific cases to see what can be learned from them about truth. As an example, consider the case of Joe and Frank. While in his office, Joe receives a call from the university bookstore saying that a specific book he had ordered — Richard Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul — has arrived and is waiting for him. At this point, a new mental state occurs in Joe’s mind — namely, the though that Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore.

Now Joe, being aware of the content of the thought, becomes aware of two things closely related to it: the nature of the thought’s object (Swinburne’s book being in the bookstore) and certain steps that would help him determine the truth of the thought. For example, Joe knows that swimming in the Pacific Ocean would not help him determine the truth of the thought. Rather, he knows that he must take a series of steps that will bring him to a specific building and look in certain places for Swinburne’s book in the university bookstore.

So Joe starts out for the bookstore, all the while being guided by the proposition Swinburne’s book on the soul is in the bookstore . Along the way, his friend Frank joins him, though Joe does not tell Frank where he is going or why. They arrive at the store and both see Swinburne’s book there. At that moment, Joe and Frank simultaneously have the same experience — the experience of seeing Swinburne’s book The Evolution of the Soul . But Joe has a second experience not possessed by Frank. Joe experiences that the thought he had in his office matched, corresponded with, an actual state of affairs. He is able to compare his thought with its object and “see,” be directly aware, that the thought was true. In this case, Joe actually experiences the correspondence relation itself and truth itself becomes an object of his awareness.

As in this scenario, the descriptive argument for the correspondence theory of truth makes its case ostensively, by pointing to instances of the correspondence relationship in our everyday lives.

The dialectical argument asserts that those who advance alternative theories of truth or who simply reject the correspondence theory actually presuppose it in their own assertions, especially when they present arguments for their views or defend them against critics. Sometimes this argument is stated in the form of a dilemma: Those who reject the correspondence theory either take their own utterances to be true in the correspondence sense or they do not. If they take their utterances to be true in the correspondence sense, then those utterances are self-defeating — they run into the same problems as the English sentence “I can’t say anything in English.” If, on the other hand, they don’t take their utterances to be true, then there is no reason to accept them, because to accept them is, after all, to accept them as true .

The dialectical argument shows that those who reject the correspondence theory of truth (either directly or indirectly) rely on the correspondence relationship to do so.

Why does this matter?

We have looked at what the correspondence theory of truth. Truth is when things really are the way one thinks them to be. We have also examined two reasons for accepting the correspondence theory of truth. But does any of this discussion really matter? You bet it does. According to the correspondence theory, truth is what puts us in contact with reality — not just physical, material aspects of reality, but spiritual and moral as well. And reality can be a pretty brutal thing. One philosopher said that reality is what you bump up against when your beliefs are false!

Why, then, does truth matter? Because ideas have consequences, and false ideas generally have bad consequences. Truth should be the rails on which we all live our lives. Because truth puts us in touch with reality, it removes us from a self-serving, destructive fantasy world of our own creation, and it leads to a life of well-being and flourishing.

Truth, in other words, is prerequisite both to accountability and success. Sometimes the truth hurts, but in the end, it is the only way to navigate reality.

Copyright 2004 J.P. Moreland. All rights reserved.

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About the author.

J.P. Moreland is distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and director of Eidos Christian Center. He has contributed to over 40 books, including Love Your God With All Your Mind and over 60 journal articles. Dr. Moreland also co-authored The Lost Virtue of Happiness: Discovering the Disciplines of the Good Life .

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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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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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Does Truth Really Matter? Notes on a Crisis of Faith

2020, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

This essay reflects on what it would mean to have faith in the reality of truth, particularly in light of current affairs and the apparent insignificance and impotence of truth to sway opinion or affect behavior. In doing so, it draws on American pragmatism&#39;s consequentialist epistemology, C. S. Peirce&#39;s “Fixation of Belief,” and George Santayana&#39;s concept of a realm of truth.

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In this dissertation, I argue for a pluralist Peircean epistemic approach to democratic justification to address the challenge of reasonable pluralism. Whereas public reason approaches to democratic justification require citizens privatize their worldviews, an epistemic approach to democracy allows citizens the freedom to express their personal reasons while harnessing the epistemic power of democracy to identify and solve social problems. I find that of the various epistemic approaches available, Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse’s Peircean Epistemic Defense of Democracy (PED) is the most promising because it is widely inclusive of personal reasons, uses pluralism to further the epistemic goals of democracy, and offers a robust defense of democratic procedures, norms, and institutions. The PED argues that beliefs aim at truth, and in holding a belief properly, one must engage in a process of reason exchange to support the truth of that belief. Moreover, only in a democracy can one properly engage in this process of reason exchange due to the epistemic requirements of an open society. The Peircean requirements for proper believing have been criticized for allegedly being oppressive and exclusive in a similar manner to public reason. What I call the ‘faith objection’ claims that the epistemic norms of religious belief and faith are different and even contradictory to the epistemic norms imposed by the PED. I disagree with this objection and argue that thePED is inclusive of religious reasons because religious belief and faith are sufficiently responsive to reasons and evidence. Though this raises a new challenge: if the PED is radically inclusive, to what extent will reasons that are inaccessible, incommensurable, weak, or false corrupt the epistemic environment of democracy? For the PED to avoid the faith objection, it will need to include reasons that are out of the ordinary, for example, conspiracy theories. But if conspiracy theories or other non-traditional modes of reasoning are rampant in democratic deliberation, then there may be a decline in the epistemic functioning of democracy, thus endangering the epistemic justification the PED is built upon. I argue that while the challenge of including non-traditional reasoning is difficult, it also offers the opportunity for new paths towards truth. These non-traditional forms of reasoning may be novel approaches to truth that only some democratic citizens have access. By including conspiracy theories, religion, or other inaccessible and incommensurable reasoning in public deliberation, the PED can be inclusive of all democratic citizens, while offering a robust justification of democracy.

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Everywhere one turns in American society the relativity of truth is proclaimed. In this essay, the issue of whether truth is relative is examined in general and from the respective points of view of several well-known thinkers.

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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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5.3: Truth and Scientific Truth

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Truth Overview

There are several different theories of what truth is. It turns out that as with most questions in philosophy, the question “what is truth?” Does not have a simple answer.

The conformity of a proposition to the way things are. Precise analysis of the nature of truth is the subject of the correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, redundancy, and semantic theories of truth.

• Theories of Truth

Correspondence Theory of Truth

This is the theory most people are brought up to believe but it has too many problems with it to be the complete answer. A claim is made about the universe. We go and check out the claim with observations and physical measuring devices. This is understood by many people in the simplest way. A claim is made about the physical universe and people want to go and check it out. Is that so for all claims?

The theory is based on the belief that a proposition is true when it conforms with some fact or state of affairs. While this theory properly emphasizes the notion that propositions are true when they correspond to reality, its proponents often have difficulty explaining what facts are and how propositions are related to them.

• There exists an independent realm of facts: reality
• Truth is the correspondence of belief with fact
• Belief corresponds to facts = truth
• Belief does not correspond to facts = false

Verification involves subjective experiences as to both observations and require interpretations.

Claims are made about things that are very large; such as galaxies and the entire universe, as to its shape and size and duration that are beyond the ability of any human to have a direct experience of it.

Claims are made about things that are very small such as sub atomic particles and small quanta of energy, bosons, gluons, neutrinos, charm particles and the like which no human can have a direct experience of.

A simple claim: There is a container of milk in the refrigerator.

To determine whether or not this is true all one needs to do is to go to the refrigerator and check. Would the claim be true if:

• There is a bottle of milk there?
• There is a wax container of milk there.
• There is a wax container of powdered milk there?
• There is a wax container of parmalat there?

Some answer yes it would be true in all 4 cases. Some think it is only true in case B. It all depends on what you mean by "container." For some, it means a wax container. For others, it may mean any object that holds any sort of contents.

Is the following claim true or not?

Bill Clinton: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman," i.e. Monica Lewinski.

It all depends on what you mean by "sex". For some, it means any act involving the sexual organs being stimulated to the point of organs. For others, it might mean only the penetration of the penis into a vagina and only for beings of the same species.

Coherence Theory of Truth

This explains how scientists can make claims about the very large and small objects using a system of claims already accepted to be true.

The theory is the belief that a proposition is true to the extent that it agrees with other true propositions. In contrast with the correspondence theory's emphasis on an independent reality, this view supposes that reliable beliefs constitute an inter-related system, each element of which entails every other.

From Correspondence to Coherence

• Truth is a property of a related group of consistent statements
• What if other judgments (statements) are false? Consistent error is possible?
• Coherence theory in the last analysis seems to involve a correspondence for the first judgments must be verified directly. How?

Pragmatic Theory of Truth

This theory is the belief that a proposition is true when acting upon it yields satisfactory practical results. As formulated by William James, the pragmatic theory promises (in the long term) a convergence of human opinions upon a stable body of scientific propositions that have been shown in experience to be successful principles for human action.

Examines how beliefs work in practice, the practical difference. Truth of a belief is determined by evaluating how well the belief satisfies the whole of human nature over a long period of time: How well does it work? What are its consequences?

Pragmatic Theory of Truth-A Problem to be Solved

• What is justified for one community to believe may not be true!!!!
• How to explain errors? Falsehoods?
• No absolute truth.
• No objective truth.
• Many truths at once!
• Self-refuting basic claims:

The pragmatic theory makes the claims that :

• There is no objective knowledge
• There is no absolute knowledge
• There is no objective truth
• There is no absolute truth

If these claims are true then they would refute themselves. If all claims are true only within a community that accepts them as true then the claims above (a to d) are only true within the communities that accept them as being true by whatever criteria they use and think has been satisfied. So within the community of pragmatists the claims would be true but for others they would not be true and thus there is affirmed a series of contradictions.

Pragmatists would by their principles and theories accept that claims above (a to d) are true and not true at the same time! Pragmatists overlook a number of things. There are different types of claims and it is only the empirical, aesthetic, and ethical claims that appear to be troublesome. The empirical claims can be resolved as to their accuracy. This is so because there is a difference between truth and justified belief which pragmatism overlooks.

C.S. Pierce’s solution was to postulate an ideal community of inquirers who would come to agreement concerning what is known and what is true in the infinite long run of time. C. S. Pierce held that there was but one reality. Truth is what an ideal community would believe in the long run of time.This is particularly true for empirical claims.

However there are many post modernist pragmatists who have abandoned the idea of an objective truth and objective knowledge.

Rorty thus is emphasizing the nature of all human knowledge as "made" rather than "found." Rorty is mostly content to point out the fallacy of trying to pursue objective reality. His makes truth something that is psychological. What difference do the beliefs make if they are true? Truth is whatever has met a society's criteria for justification. For pragmatists like Richard Rorty, there is no objective truth at all. All claims need only satisfy the group’s expectations for verification. Science is just one of many groups with its own rules and criteria. As there are multiple groups with different criteria there can be multiple truths.

This makes truth something that is psychological. What difference do the beliefs make if they are true? Truth is whatever has met a society's criteria for justification. For pragmatists like Richard Rorty, there is no objective truth at all. All claims need only satisfy the group’s expectations for verification. Science is just one of many groups with its own rules and criteria. As there are multiple groups with different criteria there can be multiple truths.

Logical Empiricism

For the logical empiricist movement the truth of a proposition rests on how well it is verified. For them what makes a proposition true or false would be how well it checks out through a process of verification.

The answer is that we test the validity of an empirical hypothesis by seeing whether it actually fulfills the function which it is designed to fulfill. And we have seen that the function of an empirical hypothesis is to enable us to anticipate experience. Accordingly, if an observation to which a given proposition is relevant conforms to our expectations, the truth of that proposition is confirmed. There is no certainty in this operation. If the experiment comes off according to expectations then credibility has been enhanced. There is no question that it will be repeated. If it does not, then questions about the experiment may be raised; if it is successful again, greater probability of being true is attached to the statement.

Thus the best that is offered is that at the present time a proposition would have a certain amount of support and of verification.

Does Truth Matter?

If objectivity is rejected, every groups claims would be equal. So the claims of the following ideologies would be true: racism, sexism, Nazism, etc... According to this post modern theory of truth all claims are ideologies. Must all claims be accepted as true at once?

With empirical claims how can it be that there would not be some basis for truth that would rule out inconsistent and contradictory claims from all being true at once? How could it be true that the earth would be flat and spherical at the same time?

Even with claims about non-physical entities, how could it be that there are more than one truth as when:

• Group A thinks it is true that people have souls
• Group B thinks that there are no souls

How can the claims to truth for both group A and group B be true at the same time?

Does Truth Matter?- Carl Sagan

Truth, Conflicts, and Power

Must we tolerate and respect all groups even those with conflicting claims? How is it to be resolved when there are conflicts? For the pragmatists, all the criteria for resolution are criteria that groups have developed. It will then always come down to which group has the most power. For pragmatists and postmodern thinkers: power is knowledge

There is a cynicism with pragmatists such as Rorty and other post modernists who would deny that there is "truth" as objective. They claim that truth is only and whatever those in power have persuaded people to believe. They accept that truth is whatever experts happen to agree upon but not that it relates to anything that is "objective". They make truth something based on the consent or agreement of the folks who wish to claim that truth. Such cynics make truth depend on nothing "objective" and deny that there is anything that is "objective". The resolution of conflicting claims concerning what is true lies not in any reference to an objective reality or to an objective truth but to whatever criteria the group holds for the resolution of claims. If two groups have two different sets of criteria then the group with the most power will determine what truth is by its criteria and impose it upon the others who will go on thinking that their original ideas were true anyway. There will be two truths at once over the same situation. This will apply to claims as to what is real as well as to what is true.

One group may use the scientific method and hold to the criteria of science and another group may use consultation with a shaman and the shaman's mystical experiences as the basis for truth and the results of each approach are thought to be the truth by each group and for the pragmatists both are correct at the same time. A large rock in the American museum of natural history can be a meteorite for the group using science and a messenger from the sky god for the original peoples at the same time.

It can be true for one group that (Jews, blacks, and women) are inferior to (Christians, whites, or men) and for another group the opposite can be true at the same time according to this theory. One of the values that pragmatists attempt to promote is tolerance and in the name of tolerance and for the sake of tolerance people are asked to respect the right of others to hold their own views. Yet if a person holds the view that tolerance is wrong then they can be right and tolerance can be both good and bad at the same time. This theory results in applications of political power to resolve conflicts and has not lead to a more tolerant set of societies in this world.

Philosophy and the Truth

Redundancy Theory of Truth

Belief that it is always logically superfluous to claim that a proposition is true, since this claim adds nothing further to a simple affirmation of the proposition itself. "It is true that I am bald." means the same thing as "I am bald."

Why Truth Matters?

Truth has fallen victim to a proliferation of behaviors that diminish the importance of truth in popular culture. Among the behaviors are the increase in use of what is known as "truthiness" and "bullshit" as well as denialism and postmodern ideas of relativism, denying that there is or can be truth.

On Bullshit

In his essay On Bullshit (originally written in 1986, and published as a monograph in 2005), philosopher Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University characterizes bullshit as a form of falsehood distinct from lying. The liar, Frankfurt holds, knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The "bullshitter", on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking to impress.

Is it impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

In Science, denialism has been defined as the rejection of basic concepts that are undisputed and well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a topic in favor of ideas that are both radical and controversial. It has been proposed that the various forms of denialism have the common feature of the rejection of overwhelming evidence and the generation of a controversy through attempts to deny that a consensus exists. A common example is young earth creationism and its dispute with the evolutionary theory.

The terms Holocaust denialism and AIDS denialism have been used and the term climate change denialists has been applied to those who argue against the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and that human activity is its primary cause. Use of the word denialism has been criticized, for example as a polemical propaganda tool to suppress non-mainstream views. Similarly, in an essay discussing the general importance of skepticism, Clive James objected to the use of the word denialist to describe climate change skeptics, stating that it "calls up the spectacle of a fanatic denying the Holocaust." Celia Farber has objected to the term AIDS denialists arguing that it is unjustifiable to place this belief on the same moral level with the Nazi crimes against humanity. However, Robert Gallo et al. Defended this latter comparison, stating that AIDS denialism is similar to Holocaust denial as it is a form of pseudoscience that "contradicts an immense body of research."

Several motivations for denialism have been proposed, including religious beliefs and self-interest, or as a psychological defense mechanism against disturbing ideas.

Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration. The term is often used to refer to the context of moral principle, where in a relativistic mode of thought, principles and ethics are regarded as applicable in only limited context. There are many forms of relativism which vary in their degree of controversy. The term often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture. Another widespread and contentious form is moral relativism.

There is a cynicism regarding truth or objective truth. There also exists the desire to believe what is useful to believe and to believe that what matters are the consequences. In reaction to this there is not to be a promotion of truth that is conservative in advocating an allegiance to you beliefs. This is not truth but dogma. There is not to be support for the liberal equation of truth with absolute certain truth. This then would promote relativism.

Truth Does Matter

Without truth there is no support for outrage over atrocities if all reports are of equal truth value and treated as just text. Truth and its pursuit are politically important especially the need to distinguish right answers from wrong answers, true from false reports about the world

• Criticisms are not permissible
• Dissent is not permissible or supportable
• The idea of a fundamental right or human right is undermined as they presuppose some idea of truth.
• Truth is a necessary condition asserting the existence of any human right apart from what government decrees
• Truth is necessary to reject the idea that believing in claim x makes claim x true.

It follows that a necessary condition for fundamental rights is a distinction between what the government -- in the wide sense of the term -- says is so and what is true. That is, in order for me to understand that I have fundamental rights, it must be possible for me to have the following thought: that even though everyone else in my community thinks that, for example, same-sex marriages should be outlawed, people of the same sex still have a right to be married. But I couldn't have that thought unless I was able to entertain the idea that believing doesn't make things so, that there is something that my thoughts can respond to other than the views of my fellow citizens, powerful or not. The very concept of a fundamental right, presupposes the concept of truth. Take-home lesson: if you care about your rights, you had better care about truth.

• Governmental transparency and freedom of information are the basis of a defense against tyranny.
• Truth is important for the integrity of the democratic process.

But the anti-tyranny argument will be of interest to those whose government is not yet tyrannical, but who fear it is heading in that direction. In brief, the anti-tyranny argument is precisely the sort of argument that is of interest to concerned citizens of a liberal democracy like our own. Unless the government strives to tell the truth, liberal democracies are no longer liberal or democratic.

Caring about truth provides a ground and a motivation for our curiosity about the facts and for our commitment to the importance of inquiry. Certain aspects of our experience make it apparent that they are independent of us. That is the origin of our concept of reality, which is essentially a concept of what limits us, of what we cannot alter or control by the mere motion of our will. We learn our powers and our vulnerabilities.

It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent of reality, fact and truth that we come both to recognize ourselves as being distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our own identities.

Scientific Truth

For logical, semantic, and systemic claims there are methods to determine their truth. It is with regard to the empirical claims about the universe, events and properties of it that is the main concern of the theories about truth. Perhaps the best that humans have been able to do with regard to getting at the truth concerning empirical claims is the development of a method for doing it. In Science there are a number of views that are operative in its various phases.

• Instrumentalist view - pragmatist theory

The scientific theory makes predictions; the predictions are verified and so it works and it satisfies the community of inquirers (the scientists).

• The realist view - correspondence theory

The scientific theory provides true explanations because its predictions are verified through empirical testing.

• The conceptual relativist - coherence theory

The scientific theory is coherent within a given framework, which coheres or fits in with a system of beliefs

True theory is that which is accepted by the community of working scientists with its own conceptual framework. Independent checks are not possible because all observations are theory laden. So in the end perhaps the truth concerning empirical claims is that claim which:

• Corresponds to fact and
• Coheres with and is consistent with other established truths and
• Has useful consequences for those concerned.

Perhaps what is the most useful consequence of a belief concerning an empirical claim is to correspond to reality (facts) and to cohere (be consistent) with what has already been accepted as true by the same means.

Philosophers shall continue to spend time arriving at a more certain foundation for claims of truth. For now what do we have? What is knowledge? To claim to know and to have that claim accepted by others as being correct is to satisfy the criteria that the claim be warranted. What supplies the warrant is that the claim be justified and true. How is that accomplished or established? Well that depends on the type of claim that it is:

• Semantic claim: supported by references to dictionaries or lexicons
• Systemic claim: supported by the rules of the system in which the claim is being made
• Logical claim: supported by and consistent with the rules of logic

This may be the best explanation that humans have for what and how they know what they claim to know. It is not totally satisfying to all critical inquirers but it is more well founded within human experience than the position that there is no knowledge at all or that there is no knowledge that is objective or that there is no knowledge that is certain. There are types or forms of knowledge and within each there are the means to establish the justification for making and accepting claims.

Does Science = Truth

• The Coherence Theory of Truth
• When Can We Say We Know?
• The Post Modern Rejection of Absolute Truth
• Consequences of Pragmatism
• On The Scientific Method
• The Myth of the Scientific Method

Vocabulary Quizlet 5.3

• Postmodernism

The pursuit of truth is often thought to be "intrinsically" valuable. Scientists and philosophers, who eschew religious rationales for their life's work, take the pursuit of truth to be obviously a worthwhile enterprise. But what's so great about truth? Sure, it's good to know what's for lunch, or the nature of the disease that plagues you, but is there any intrinsic or instrumental value in knowing how far away the farthest stars are? Or whether Milton's greatest works were written while he had a headache? Or what the next layer of basic particles are like? Truth telling on Philosophy Talk with Simon Blackburn, author of  Truth: A Guide.

Listening Notes

What's so valuable about truth? Ken thinks that the value of truth is obvious. Having true beliefs help us act so as to satisfy our desires. John points out that sometimes the truth can be harmful, such as knowing where drugs are being sold. There are a lot of truths that are irrelevant or trivial. There are also depressing truths. Ken thinks that you can't separate truth from believing because when we believe something, we take it to be true. Ken introduces the guest, Simon Blackburn, professor at Cambridge. John asks Blackburn to explain the nature of truth. Blackburn explains minimalism about truth, which says that there is no general answer about truth. The correspondence theory of truth says that there is some fact that makes a judgment true. However, there is no higher-order verification of this judgment. Another view is the pragmatist theory which says that the truth is valuable because it is useful.

What is the postmodernists' problem with truth? Blackburn says that the general idea goes back to Nietzsche and it is that our judgments and beliefs are formed and shaped by various forces beyond our control. Ken says that we would get around this if we had some method of tracking the truth. Blackburn says that the correspondence theory of truth works great when we are working with a straightforward representation of the world that we understand. How do we discern truth from falsehood? Blackburn thinks that is a skill that requires a lot of practice.

Some truths hurt us and some falsehoods are comforting. Should we always seek out truth for its own sake? There are a bunch of useless truths, such as the composition of dirt on Mars. Blackburn thinks that the useful falsehood is a hard idea to dispel. According to many psychologists, most people think they are about 15% smarter or good-looking than they actually are, and that keeps many people from being depressed. Nietzsche was moved to his relativism by perspectivism, which says that we view the world from our own perspective. Blackburn doesn't think that perspectivism leads to relativism because the visual metaphor breaks down.  

• Roving Philosophical Report  (Seek to 05:20): Polly Stryker asks several people whether we should always tell the truth.

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Web Resources

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the correspondence theory of truth
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the deflationary theory of truth
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the revisionary theory of truth
• Laurence BonJour's essay "Truth and Correspondence"
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on truth
• The Wikipedia entry on truth
• An introductory website on truth
• An excerpt from Emile Durkheim's Pragmatism and the Question of Truth
• Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide
• Michael Lynch's Why Truth Matters
• The Oxford Readings in Philosophy series Truth
• Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto's Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed
• Richard Kirkham's Theories of Truth
• Michael Lynch's Nature of Truth
• William Alston's A Realist Conception of Truth
• Michael Devitt's Realism and Truth
• Scott Soames's Understanding Truth
• Paul Horwich's Truth
• Simon Blackburn's Dictionary of Philosophy

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Does Truth Really Matter in Politics?

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The following remarks on truth and democracy were presented at the opening of a brainstorming session entitled Does Truth Really Matter in Australian Politics? Political Accountability in an Era of Agitated Media . The lively, all-day gathering of journalists, academics, students and web activists was convened by Peter Fray and hosted by the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights (IDHR) and the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, 9th April, 2013.

Sceptics say that talk of truth is implausible, or a downright fraud, but remarkable – and puzzling – is the tenacity of the whole idea of truth. Look at two contradictory trends of our times. It’s said we live in the age of ‘truthiness’ (Stephen Colbert), an age when clever politicians say openly that what ‘is’ depends on ‘the meaning of what is is’ (Bill Clinton). It’s argued by others that truth is a trope, that everything’s relative to everything else. For still others, Truth died along with God, or ‘truth’ is a power/knowledge effect (Foucault).

Despite the scepticism and prevarication, we live in times when public references to the ‘truth’ of things are flourishing. There’s much talk of the value of ‘objectivity’, references to indisputable ‘facts’ and resort to Truth Commissions, websites such as www.factcheck.org and Truth-o-Meters provided by organisations like PolitiFact . Despite everything, we live in an age when people from all walks of life regularly say things like ‘that’s not true’. It’s a period as well when ‘sorting out the truth in politics’ hatches great political scandals that double as media events, episodes when ‘telling the truth’ becomes of paramount value.

I’d like to convince you that the simultaneous public denial and public embrace of truth is a feature of democracies like Australia. So let’s look in a bit more depth at the truth paradox, let’s call it. For complicated historical reasons that run deep, and stretch back to Luther’s famous, explosive, influential attack on popery as the sole interpreter of scripture in An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate (1520), talk of ‘Truth’ or ‘truth’ has become philosophically and politically questionable. Tropes like ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ nowadays arouse suspicions. There’s a quantum turn going on, a pluralisation of people’s lived perceptions of the world. The whole trend is fed by a growing abundance of platforms where power is interrogated and chastened, so that monitory democracies tend to nurture uncertainty, doubt, scepticism, modesty, irony, the conviction that truth has many faces, the recognition that the meaning of the world and its dynamics are so complicated that, ultimately, its true meaning and significance cannot be fully grasped.

During my lifetime, philosophers in the European tradition have complicated matters by pointing to the disputed plural meanings of the ‘truth’ word. For instance, truth can refer to propositions that correspond to ‘reality’, to the accurate ‘mirroring’ of reality by ideas in our heads, or in bar graphs or statistical charts that purport to represent ‘objectively’ some or other state of affairs. Alternatively, truth can refer to water-tight, logical reasoning, to the learned art of developing a chain of premises which lead to a valid conclusion, such as ‘snow is white is true if and only if snow is white’. Heidegger, by contrast, thought that truth can only mean ‘the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed’. Wittgenstein meanwhile famously said that truth or knowledge is in the end always based on acknowledgement, the more or less shared ‘world picture’ and language framework (Thomas Kuhn would later say the paradigm) in which we live our lives, a framework that pre-structures interpretations of the world and shapes what meaningfully is communicated to others.

These contested meanings of truth are symptomatic of the contemporary trend that is leading democracies towards the pluralisation of truth, or to organised efforts to destroy it outright. Coming to grips with this trend isn’t easy, so let’s for a moment think counter-factually about truth. Imagine a world where talk of truth and Truth had been abolished, for instance by switching on a political version of Killswitch, a mobile phone app that promises to ‘seamlessly and discreetly remove all traces of your ex from your Facebook’ (it was released, defiantly, on Valentine’s Day)? What would be the consequences? I see four probable effects.

First: the whole phenomenon of lying would disappear. Truth and lies are twins. We don’t usually think of things this way, but lying, the opposite of truth, keeps the whole idea of truth alive. Lying is the deliberate saying of what is not so. It is wilful deception – covering up things that the liar supposes to be ‘true’. When Harry Truman said: ‘Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in..’. Truman meant: when Richard Nixon lies, he supposes he knows what is true. When inventing effective lies, he designs falsehoods under the guidance of truth. When all’s said and done, Richard Nixon, the no good lying bastard, knows the meaning of, and pays homage to, truth.

It follows that in a world without truth, lying would by definition disappear. We could no longer say ‘all politicians are bloody liars’. We could no longer accuse bogus think tanks and lobbyists of ‘handling the truth carelessly’. Emancipated from the scourge of lying, we might feel welcome relief, and propose three cheers, but that would be premature, for the disappearing of truth would entail several probable downsides for democracy.

The most obvious setback would be that the powerful, those who decide on behalf of others who gets what when and how, would find it much easier to get their way. Speaking truth to power, the originally 18th - century mantra of philosophers, journalists and citizens, always forced the powerful to do battle with public accusations of their illegitimacy. Talk of truth (she was often represented as a woman) was one of power’s limits, as I tried to show in two studies of power: the late 18th-century life and writings of Tom Paine (who triggered the Silas Deane affair, the first public scandal of the young American republic) and a history of power in 20th-century Europe centred on Václav Havel, a citizen playwright who courageously defied arbitrary power for several decades before 1989 in the name of the principle of ‘living in the truth’ (it was famously articulated in the essay ‘ The Power of the Powerless ’).

So the abolition of truth would abolish more than lying. Truth is a trope, but its champions can have unsettling and undermining effects on arrogant and powerful governors. In a world where (say) belief in God has lost its absolute grip, so that references to God no longer serve as a check upon hubris, ditching truth would require citizens and their (elected and unelected) representatives to lay down a powerful weapon when confronted by arbitrary power. The powerless would become more vulnerable to the powerful.

There would be a second consequence: a world that disregarded veracity would become vulnerable to the spread of bullshit. Advertising, public relations and political ‘announcables’ (Lindsay Tanner) are examples of bullshit. It’s a democratic phenomenon: every citizen, every politician, every organisation is supposed to have views on things, no matter how ill-conceived or carelessly put. I recommend to you Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit . It argues that bullshit, carefully defined, is on the rise, and that we should worry our heads about bullshit because it is much more dangerous than lying. Why? This is because bullshit sends veracity packing. Take an example: consider an Anzac Day orator, who goes on bombastically about how great Australia is, and how the diggers who gave their lives, their guts and their blood, on foreign shores made us the greatest country in the world. The speaker isn’t trying to deceive the audience; the speaker doesn’t care what the audience thinks. Matters of what’s true and what’s false are irrelevant. The speaker as ‘bullshit artist’ wants simply to be seen as a good bloke, a patriot, sincere all the way down to his socks, or underpants. Sincerity is a form of bullshit. It’s a performance, sure, but like excrement, from which all nutrients have been removed, bullshit is empty speech. It’s ‘hot air’, improvised speech from which informative content and truth claims have been extracted. The abolition of truth, it follows, would most probably increase the volume and spread of bullshit, which would function (as it already does now) as fertiliser for publicly unaccountable, arbitrary power.

The disappearance, or the disappearing of truth, would feed a third trend in 21st-century media-saturated democracies: the growth of pockets of organised public silence about the operation of power. I’ve tried elsewhere to analyse the dynamics of public silence by examining Lehmann Bros, Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima. These are recent examples of the troubling privatisation of power. Those in charge of their operations managed successfully to govern their organisations in silence – silence within and outside the organisation. This silence fed upon intensive public relations campaigns that had the knock-on effect of cocooning these large-scale power adventures. That nurtured group think by fabricating positive stories of their performance within media-saturated settings. In the end, we now know, the privatisation of power resulted in catastrophes.

I’d like to close by returning to the truth paradox with which I began. Democratic societies are today simultaneously undermining and clinging to talk of truth. Truth is a democratic trope. It’s as if democracies can neither live with nor live without clean-cut, straightforward truth. Can they live indefinitely with the ambiguity? Perhaps they can’t. Perhaps something has to give. Perhaps we’re heading backwards into a world where simple-minded or un-ironic belief in Truth will triumph, a world that enfranchises Certainties and Facts – a world that embraces the view that Truth is a plebiscite of Facts and Certainties, whose clear and vocal verdicts must be respected.

Perhaps political gravity will pull us in this direction. For more than a few reasons, I somehow doubt it, if only because something subtle is going on within democracies such as Australia. Without mincing words, might it be that the stubbornness of truth, people’s embrace of a retro-ideal, is feeding a fundamental pluralisation of its meaning, to the point where truth has many faces and, in consequence, the greatest foes of truth are not lies and ignorance but the illusion of a single Truth – like the Market, the Nation, Christianity or Islam?

If Truth is the great enemy of truths, then it follows that the only known human cure for the potentially deadly effects of singular Truth and, as it happens, the cure for lying, bullshit and silence, is what Greek democrats called parrhesia . By this I mean free-spirited talk, the bold circulation of differing viewpoints about what is true and false, challenges to bullshit or unwarranted public silence, in other words, courageous conjectures, corrective judgements, the institutional humbling of power by means of checks and balances placed on the merchants of Truth, Lying, Bullshit and Silence, all done with a strong sense that ‘truth’ has many faces.

Something like this democratic conception of the pluralism of truths was recommended by Wittgenstein. ‘Suppose it were forbidden to say “I know” and only allowed to say “I believe I know"’, he wrote in On Certainty . I’ve always loved that aphorism, which happens to be the founding core principle of the Dutch start-up crowd-funded news site [de Correspondent](de Correspondent](http://blog.decorrespondent.nl/post/46365101498/crowdfunding-record-for-quality-journalism) . Soon to launch (in September), it’s already raised around $1.3 million (in 8 days!) through reader subscription pledges in advance. de Correspondent is in pursuit of a new and more pluralist understanding of ‘truth’ and ‘news’.

Its editor, Rob Wijnberg, explains that ‘news’ claiming to be ‘true’ and ‘objective’ is the great unrecognised addiction of our time. He insists that those who only see the world via ‘the news’ are unlikely to know how the world works, and that what is therefore needed is a digital experiment that presents news differently, from a variety of perspectives, more slowly, more contextually. ‘I don’t believe in "the news” in the objective sense of the word’, says Wijnberg. ‘You can describe the world in infinite ways, and “the news” happens to be one of them…I want the correspondents to make their choices explicit – what they do think is important, and why should readers care about it? You do that by making clear that you’re not following an objective news agenda, but a subjective journey through the world.’

One final remark about the political consequences of a plural and more ironic understanding of truth: if I’m right about the need for democrats to think in terms of a plurality of truths, then the whole ideal of ‘the informed citizen’ has to be abandoned. It has become an unhelpful cliché in discussions of media and politics. Engaged citizens whose heads are stuffed with unlimited quantities of “information” about a “reality” that they’re on top of: that’s an utterly implausible and – yes – anti-democratic ideal which dates from the late nineteenth century. Favoured originally by the champions of a restricted, educated franchise, and by interests who rejected partisan politics grounded in the vagaries and injustices of everyday social life, the ideal of the “informed citizen” was elitist. Today, it’s an intellectualist ideal. It’s unsuited to the age of plural truths, lying, bullshit and silence. It does not belong to times that badly need not ‘informed citizens’, but wise citizens who know that they are not the only ones who know that they do not know everything.

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Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity and True to Life: Why Truth Matters , both published by the MIT Press.

Part III: Why Truth Matters

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Is Telling the Truth Always Good? Research Paper

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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IvyPanda. (2021, December 3). Is Telling the Truth Always Good? https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-telling-the-truth-always-good/

"Is Telling the Truth Always Good?" IvyPanda , 3 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/is-telling-the-truth-always-good/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Is Telling the Truth Always Good'. 3 December.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Is Telling the Truth Always Good?" December 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-telling-the-truth-always-good/.

1. IvyPanda . "Is Telling the Truth Always Good?" December 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-telling-the-truth-always-good/.

IvyPanda . "Is Telling the Truth Always Good?" December 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-telling-the-truth-always-good/.

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True to Life

Why Truth Matters

by Michael P. Lynch

ISBN: 9780262622011

Pub date: August 5, 2005

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ISBN: 9780262122672

Pub date: August 13, 2004

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Why truth is important in our everyday lives.

Why does truth matter when politicians so easily sidestep it and intellectuals scorn it as irrelevant? Why be concerned over an abstract idea like truth when something that isn't true—for example, a report of Iraq's attempting to buy materials for nuclear weapons—gets the desired result: the invasion of Iraq? In this engaging and spirited book, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. Lynch explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is. "We need to think our way past our confusion and shed our cynicism about the value of truth," he writes. "Otherwise, we will be unable to act with integrity, to live authentically, and to speak truth to power."

True to Life defends four simple claims: that truth is objective; that it is good to believe what is true; that truth is a goal worthy of inquiry; and that truth can be worth caring about for its own sake, not just because it gets us other things we want. In defense of these "truisms about truth", Lynch diagnoses the sources of our cynicism and argues that many contemporary theories of truth cannot adequately account for its value. He explains why we should care about truth, arguing that truth and its pursuit are part of living a happy life, important in our personal relationships and for our political values.

Bradford Books imprint

Michael P. Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Humanities Institute. In 2019 he was awarded the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. He is the author of Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity and True to Life: Why Truth Matters , both published by the MIT Press.

Wit is surpassed only by acumen in this pithy book. Chief objections to physicalism are stated lucidly, and rebutted convincingly. The field is enlivened and even readers who demur will reap. Ernest Sosa, Departments of Philosophy, Brown University and Rutgers University

An engagingly written, carefully reasoned defence of 'objective truth' as a respectable, even desirable goal and standard. Barry Allen The Globe and Mail

True to Life is a passionate demonstration that truth matters; it is strikingly clear and painstakingly reasoned, and ranges from technical work in the philosophy of logic to a discussion of the role of truth-telling in government. Anthony Gottlieb The New York Times Book Review

This is an important and timely volume, and philosophy owes Lynch a considerable debt. Duncan Pritchard The Philosophers' Magazine

True to Life is a bracing antidote to the disease of postmodern cynicism that renders truth impossible and leaves us with nothing but wind-blown opinion. Douglas Groothuis The Denver Post

True to Life ...asserts some simple truths about truth; for example, that it's good, [and] that it's worthy of pursuit... Richard Halicks Atlanta Journal-Constitution

True to Life performs a major public service. Michael Lynch explains with engaging energy and clarity why the concept of truth matters to a decent public culture. Fully accessible to people without prior philosophical training, the book nonetheless explains serious philosophical debates with considerable sophistication. It will be wonderful for use (and debate) in undergraduate courses in many disciplines, but it is also just good reading for anyone who is interested in unmasking deception and confusion, and who thinks that this activity matters for the health of democracy. Martha Nussbaum, The University of Chicago

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

Front matter, the epistemic value of democracy, truth and public space: setting out some signposts.

• Raf Geenens, Ronald Tinnevelt

Epistemic Proceduralism and Democratic Authority

• David Estlund

Truth and Democracy: Pragmatism and the Deliberative Virtues

• Cheryl Misak

Folk Epistemology and the Justification of Democracy

• Robert B. Talisse

Truth and Power in Modern Politics

• Philippe Raynaud

Institutionalizing Democracy

Truth and trust in democratic epistemology.

• Matthew Festenstein

The People Versus the Truth: Democratic Illusions

The physical spaces of democracy, does democracy require physical public space.

• John R. Parkinson

Cities as Spaces of Democracy: Complexity, Scale, and Governance

Semi-public spaces: the spatial logic of institutions.

• Bart Verschaffel

Transnational Democracy

Democratization through transnational publics: deliberative inclusion across borders.

• James Bohman

Conceptualizing the Power of Transnational Agents: Pragmatism and International Public Spheres

• Molly Cochran

Back Matter

• Epistemology
• Public Sphere
• responsibility

Raf Geenens

Ronald Tinnevelt

Book Title : Does Truth Matter?

Book Subtitle : Democracy and Public Space

Editors : Raf Geenens, Ronald Tinnevelt

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8849-0

Publisher : Springer Dordrecht

eBook Packages : Humanities, Social Sciences and Law , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Hardcover ISBN : 978-1-4020-8848-3 Published: 28 November 2008

Softcover ISBN : 978-90-481-8004-2 Published: 19 October 2010

eBook ISBN : 978-1-4020-8849-0 Published: 30 November 2008

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 194

Topics : Philosophy of the Social Sciences , Political Philosophy , Philosophy of Law , Pragmatism

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Does the Truth Matter?

What does it mean to live in a post-truth world.

Posted December 29, 2016 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

Does the truth matter to you? No one likes being lied to. But the truth is that we seem to like some lies.

I really prefer that people tell me the truth. If a student needs to turn in something late, I tend to believe the story they tell me about it. Oh, I know some of them lie to me. But I generally act as though what they’ve said is true, even though I generally can’t verify it. So when they lie to me, I’m stuck.

As a scientist, I desperately care about truth. I need people to be honest about how they conducted their research and what they found. Science is dependent on truthfulness. Again, I generally trust my peers. I read their publications assuming that they told the truth. Luckily, with research publications there is a peer review process, a lot of information, and replications by other researchers. Science is eventually self-correcting. If someone conducts a poor experiment or if the results don’t reflect the truth of reality, eventually the real state of the world becomes clear. Even if someone lies, the truth eventually comes out.

Why is the truth important? We all need to know the truth if we want to be able to behave rationally. Should I grant the student an extension on a project? I need to know if they actually had a serious conflict or if they were simply lazy. Should I use the results of someone’s research to make an important argument? I need to know that the data are reliable and true. Should we continue this relationship? I need to believe that you’ve told me the truth about where you were last night.

Oh, but the internet and social media . Finding the truth seems impossible.

Recently some Stanford University researchers, Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, reported that students at all levels have difficulty assessing the reliability of information that they find on the internet. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Websites from unreliable organizations aren’t going to promote that they are unreliable. Those websites are going to look reliable and trustworthy. People can’t tell which websites are reliable and which information is true.

Fake news has also been in the news recently. There is a lot of fake news, often promoted by well-known people. One of these stories concerned a possible case of child trafficking in a pizza shop in Washington, DC that was supposedly linked to the Clintons. This was fake news . But all sorts of people, even some associated with the Trump campaign and transition, shared and promoted the story. It was never hard to find the truth about this case. But people chose to believe and spread lies. This led someone to attack the pizza shop with a gun to try and free the children.

So yes, the truth matters. It matters for personal relationships, for science, and for public policy.

How do you judge the truth? If you’re like most of us, you probably don’t do the hard work. With information on the internet, the hard work really isn’t so hard. You can check the sources, look at really reliable ones (Snopes is really good about checking lots of these fake news claims). Checking these things only takes a few moments.

But none of us have the time or resources to check all of the news we confront on a daily basis. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth. Do we trust the source? Then we believe the message. Does it have a picture? Then we are more likely to believe it. Have we heard this before? Then it starts to feel more true. Does it fit with our pre-existing beliefs? That is the lie we want to believe. We accept truthiness instead of requiring truth.

I worry that the truth is being buried in a landslide of misrepresentations and lies. Sometimes people make honest mistakes. Other times, we argue about how to interpret something. In these cases, we’ll eventually understand the real state of the world.

But there is a substantially more dangerous situation. People sometimes deliberately mislead and lie. People present information they know to be false with some goal in mind. Many people come to believe various lies. And these lies seem to be impossible to correct. The pizza shop story was one such deliberate lie with the goal of influencing the election.

There are other cases of fake news. For example, a number of people believe that vaccines cause autism , even though the original "study" that someone reported on this was a misrepresentation and has clearly been debunked. Many people prefer to believe that global warming isn’t happening or that humans aren’t part of the cause of warming. In another example, there was a recent study published in which some authors questioned new recommendations for lowering daily sugar intake . In these cases, the authors are misrepresenting findings and often directly lying . Most of the people involved have received compensation for their work. But the harm they’ve caused is hard to measure.

Truth and lies are a matter of ethics . In science, there are consequences for misrepresentations and lies. Eventually, science gets to the truth. In our political debates, I worry that the internet has made it substantially more difficult for people to find the truth. Too many people may have too many rewards for the lies they are telling. The rest of us are left accepting things that feel true. Making rational choices becomes impossible in such a climate.

This is what it means to live in a post-truth world with fake news. Even if we try to be rational and thoughtful, we may base our judgments on lies. We may make decisions based on things we want to be true rather than the real state of the world. When the truth is buried under a mountain of misrepresentations, we cannot make wise decisions.

Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S (November 1, 2016). Why Students Can't Google Their Way to the Truth: Fact-checkers and students approach websites differently. Education Week.

Ira E. Hyman, Jr., Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at Western Washington University.

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Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation

By Manvir Singh

Millions of people have watched Mike Hughes die. It happened on February 22, 2020, not far from Highway 247 near the Mojave Desert city of Barstow, California. A homemade rocket ship with Hughes strapped in it took off from a launching pad mounted on a truck. A trail of steam billowed behind the rocket as it swerved and then shot upward, a detached parachute unfurling ominously in its wake. In a video recorded by the journalist Justin Chapman, Hughes disappears into the sky, a dark pinpoint in a vast, uncaring blueness. But then the rocket reappears and hurtles toward the ground, crashing, after ten long seconds, in a dusty cloud half a mile away.

Hughes was among the best-known proponents of Flat Earth theory , which insists that our planet is not spherical but a Frisbee-like disk. He had built and flown in two rockets before, one in 2014 and another in 2018, and he planned to construct a “rockoon,” a combination rocket and balloon, that would carry him above the upper atmosphere, where he could see the Earth’s flatness for himself. The 2020 takeoff, staged for the Science Channel series “Homemade Astronauts,” was supposed to take him a mile up—not high enough to see the Earth’s curvature but hypeworthy enough to garner more funding and attention.

Flat Earth theory may sound like one of those deliberately far-fetched satires, akin to Birds Aren’t Real, but it has become a cultic subject for anti-scientific conspiratorialists, growing entangled with movements such as QAnon and COVID -19 skepticism. In “ Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything ” (Algonquin), the former Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill writes that the tragedy awakened her to the sincerity of Flat Earthers’ convictions. After investigating the Flat Earth scene and following Hughes, she had figured that, “on some subconscious level,” Hughes knew the Earth wasn’t flat. His death set her straight: “I was wrong. Flat Earthers are as serious as your life.”

Weill isn’t the only one to fear the effects of false information. In January, the World Economic Forum released a report showing that fourteen hundred and ninety international experts rated “misinformation and disinformation” the leading global risk of the next two years, surpassing war, migration, and climatic catastrophe. A stack of new books echoes their concerns. In “ Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It ” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation is threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, affecting problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine .” In “ Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity ” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a social-psychology professor at Cambridge, warns that “viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” Or, as the M.I.T. political scientist Adam J. Berinsky puts it in “ Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It ” (Princeton), “a democracy where falsehoods run rampant can only result in dysfunction.”

Most Americans seem to agree with these theorists of human credulity. Following the 2020 Presidential race, sixty per cent thought that misinformation had a major impact on the outcome, and, to judge from a recent survey, even more believe that artificial intelligence will exacerbate the problem in this year’s contest. The Trump and the DeSantis campaigns both used deepfakes to sully their rivals. Although they justified the fabrications as transparent parodies, some experts anticipate a “tsunami of misinformation,” in the words of Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and the first C.E.O. of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “The ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified,” he told the Associated Press.

The fear of misinformation hinges on assumptions about human suggestibility. “Misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other dangerous ideas, latch on to the brain and insert themselves deep into our consciousness,” van der Linden writes in “Foolproof.” “They infiltrate our thoughts, feelings, and even our memories.” Thagard puts it more plainly: “People have a natural tendency to believe what they hear or read, which amounts to gullibility.”

But do the credulity theorists have the right account of what’s going on? Folks like Mike Hughes aren’t gullible in the sense that they’ll believe anything. They seem to reject scientific consensus, after all. Partisans of other well-known conspiracies (the government is run by lizard people; a cabal of high-level pedophilic Democrats operates out of a neighborhood pizza parlor) are insusceptible to the assurances of the mainstream media. Have we been misinformed about the power of misinformation?

In 2006, more than five hundred skeptics met at an Embassy Suites hotel near O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, to discuss conspiracy. They listened to presentations on mass hypnosis, the melting point of steel, and how to survive the collapse of the existing world order. They called themselves many things, including “truth activists” and “9/11 skeptics,” although the name that would stick, and which observers would use for years afterward, was Truthers.

The Truthers held that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were masterminded by the White House to expand government power and enable military and security industries to profit from the war on terror. According to an explanation posted by 911truth.org, a group that helped sponsor the conference, George W. Bush and his allies gagged and intimidated whistle-blowers, mailed anthrax to opponents in the Senate, and knowingly poisoned the inhabitants of lower Manhattan. On that basis, Truthers concluded, “the administration does consider the lives of American citizens to be expendable on behalf of certain interests.”

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The Truthers, in short, maintained that the government had gone to extreme measures, including killing thousands of its own citizens, in order to carry out and cover up a conspiracy. And yet the same Truthers advertised the conference online and met in a place where they could easily be surveilled. Speakers’ names were posted on the Internet along with videos, photographs, and short bios. The organizers created a publicly accessible forum to discuss next steps, and a couple of attendees spoke to a reporter from the Times , despite the mainstream media’s ostensible complicity in the coverup. By the logic of their own theories, the Truthers were setting themselves up for assassination.

Their behavior demonstrates a paradox of belief. Action is supposed to follow belief, and yet beliefs, even fervently espoused ones, sometimes exist in their own cognitive cage, with little influence over behavior. Take the “Pizzagate” story, in which Hillary Clinton and her allies ran a child sex ring from the basement of a D.C. pizzeria. In the months surrounding the 2016 Presidential election, a staggering number of Americans—millions, by some estimates—endorsed the account, and, in December of that year, a North Carolina man charged into the restaurant, carrying an assault rifle. Van der Linden and Berinsky both use the incident as evidence of misinformation’s violent implications. But they’re missing the point: what’s really striking is how anomalous that act was. The pizzeria received menacing phone calls, even death threats, but the most common response from believers, aside from liking posts, seems to have been leaving negative Yelp reviews.

That certain deeply held beliefs seem insulated from other inferences isn’t peculiar to conspiracy theorists; it’s the experience of regular churchgoers. Catholics maintain that the Sacrament is the body of Christ, yet no one expects the bread to taste like raw flesh or accuses fellow-parishioners of cannibalism. In “ How God Becomes Real ” (2020), the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann recounts evangelical Christians’ frustrations with their own beliefs. They thought less about God when they were not in church. They confessed to not praying. “I remember a man weeping in front of a church over not having sufficient faith that God would replace the job he had lost,” Luhrmann writes. The paradox of belief is one of Christianity’s “clearest” messages, she observes: “You may think you believe in God, but really you don’t. You don’t take God seriously enough. You don’t act as if he’s there.” It’s right out of Mark 9:24: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The paradox of belief has been the subject of scholarly investigation; puzzling it out promises new insights about the human psyche. Some of the most influential work has been by the French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. Born into a Jewish family in France in 1942, during the Nazi Occupation, Sperber was smuggled to Switzerland when he was three months old. His parents returned to France three years later, and raised him as an atheist while imparting a respect for all religious-minded people, including his Hasidic Jewish ancestors.

The exercise of finding rationality in the seemingly irrational became an academic focus for Sperber in the nineteen-seventies. Staying with the Dorze people in southern Ethiopia, he noticed that they made assertions that they seemed both to believe and not to believe. People told him, for example, that “the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.” Nevertheless, the average Dorze man guarded his livestock on fast days just as much as on other days. “Not because he suspects some leopards of being bad Christians,” Sperber wrote, “but because he takes it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous.”

Sperber concluded that there are two kinds of beliefs. The first he has called “factual” beliefs. Factual beliefs—such as the belief that chairs exist and that leopards are dangerous—guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency; you can’t believe that leopards do and do not eat livestock. The second category he has called “symbolic” beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they’re cordoned off from action and expectation. We are, in turn, much more accepting of inconsistency when it comes to symbolic beliefs; we can believe, say, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering.

In a masterly new book, “ Religion as Make-Believe ” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence.

One of Van Leeuwen’s insights is that people distinguish between different categories of belief in everyday speech. We say we “believe” symbolic ones but that we “think” factual ones are true. He has run ingenious experiments showing that you can manipulate how people talk about beliefs by changing the environment in which they’re expressed or sustained. Tell participants that a woman named Sheila sets up a shrine to Elvis Presley and plays songs on his birthday, and they will more often say that she “believes” Elvis is alive. But tell them that Sheila went to study penguins in Antarctica in 1977, and missed the news of his death, and they’ll say she “thinks” he’s still around. As the German sociologist Georg Simmel recognized more than a century ago, religious beliefs seem to express commitments—we believe in God the way we believe in a parent or a loved one, rather than the way we believe chairs exist. Perhaps people who traffic in outlandish conspiracies don’t so much believe them as believe in them.

Van Leeuwen’s book complements a 2020 volume by Hugo Mercier, “ Not Born Yesterday .” Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure who studied under Sperber, argues that worries about human gullibility overlook how skilled we are at acquiring factual beliefs. Our understanding of reality matters, he notes. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be disastrous. On top of that, people have a selfish interest in manipulating one another. As a result, human beings have evolved a tool kit of psychological adaptations for evaluating information—what he calls “open vigilance mechanisms.” Where a credulity theorist like Thagard insists that humans tend to believe anything, Mercier shows that we are careful when adopting factual beliefs, and instinctively assess the quality of information, especially by tracking the reliability of sources.

Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many beliefs are not best interpreted as factual ones, although they lay out different reasons for why this might be. For Van Leeuwen, a major driver is group identity. Beliefs often function as badges: the stranger and more unsubstantiated the better. Religions, he notes, define membership on the basis of unverifiable or even unintelligible beliefs: that there is one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that person was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate yet one. Mercier, in his work, has focussed more on justification. He says that we have intuitions—that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians can’t be trusted—and then collect stories that defend our positions. Still, both authors treat symbolic beliefs as socially strategic expressions.

After Mike Hughes’s death, a small debate broke out over the nature of his belief. His publicist, Darren Shuster, said that Hughes never really believed in a flat Earth. “It was a P.R. stunt,” he told Vice News. “We used the attention to get sponsorships and it kept working over and over again.” Space.com dug up an old interview corroborating Shuster’s statements. “This flat Earth has nothing to do with the steam rocket launches,” Hughes told the site in 2019. “It never did, it never will. I’m a daredevil!”

Perhaps it made sense that it was just a shtick. Hughes did death-defying stunts years before he joined the Flat Earthers. He was born in Oklahoma City in 1956 to an auto-mechanic father who enjoyed racing cars. At the age of twelve, Hughes was racing on his own, and not long afterward he was riding in professional motorcycle competitions. In 1996, he got a job driving limousines, but his dream of becoming the next Evel Knievel persisted; in 2002, he drove a Lincoln Town Car off a ramp and flew a hundred and three feet, landing him in Guinness World Records.

When Hughes first successfully launched a rocket, in 2014, he had never talked about the shape of the planet. In 2015, when he co-ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the next rocket flight, the stated motivation was stardom, not science: “Mad Mike Hughes always wanted to be famous so much that he just decided one day to build a steam rocket and set the world record.” He got two backers and three hundred and ten dollars. Shortly afterward, he joined the Flat Earth community and tied his crusade to theirs. The community supported his new fund-raising effort, attracting more than eight thousand dollars. From there, his fame grew, earning him features in a documentary (“Rocketman,” from 2019) and that Science Channel series. Aligning with Flat Earthers clearly paid off.

Not everyone believes that he didn’t believe, however. Waldo Stakes, Hughes’s landlord and rocket-construction buddy, wrote on Facebook that “Mike was a real flat earther,” pointing to the “dozens of books on the subject” he owned, and said that Hughes lost money hosting a conference for the community. Another of Hughes’s friends told Kelly Weill that Flat Earth theory “started out as a marketing approach,” but that once it “generated awareness and involvement . . . it became something to him.”

The debate over Hughes’s convictions centers on the premise that a belief is either sincere or strategic, genuine or sham. That’s a false dichotomy. Indeed, the social functions of symbolic beliefs—functions such as signalling group identity—seem best achieved when the beliefs feel earnest. A Mormon who says that Joseph Smith was a prophet but secretly thinks he was a normal guy doesn’t strike us as a real Mormon. In fact, the evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers argued in “ Deceit and Self-Deception ” (2011) that we trick ourselves in order to convince others. Our minds are maintaining two representations of reality: there’s one that feels true and that we publicly advocate, and there’s another that we use to effectively interact with the world.

The idea of self-deception might seem like a stretch; Mercier has expressed skepticism about the theory. But it reconciles what appear to be contradictory findings. On the one hand, some research suggests that people’s beliefs in misinformation are authentic. In “Political Rumors,” for example, Berinsky describes experiments he conducted suggesting that people truly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that the U.S. government allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen. “People by and large say what they mean,” he concludes.

On the other hand, there’s research implying that many false beliefs are little more than cheap talk. Put money on the table, and people suddenly see the light. In an influential paper published in 2015, a team led by the political scientist John Bullock found sizable differences in how Democrats and Republicans thought about politicized topics, like the number of casualties in the Iraq War. Paying respondents to be accurate, which included rewarding “don’t know” responses over wrong ones, cut the differences by eighty per cent. A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy. Some studies have reported smaller or more inconsistent effects, but the central point still stands. There may be people who believe in fake news the way they believe in leopards and chairs, but underlying many genuine-feeling endorsements is an understanding that they’re not exactly factual.

Van der Linden, Berinsky, and Thagard all offer ways to fight fabrication. But, because they treat misinformation as a problem of human gullibility, the remedies they propose tend to focus on minor issues, while scanting the larger social forces that drive the phenomenon. Consider van der Linden’s prescription. He devotes roughly a third of “Foolproof” to his group’s research on “prebunking,” or psychological inoculation. The idea is to present people with bogus information before they come across it in the real world and then expose its falsity—a kind of epistemic vaccination. Such prebunking can target specific untruths, or it can be “broad-spectrum,” as when people are familiarized with an array of misinformation techniques, from emotional appeals to conspiratorial language.

Prebunking has received an extraordinary amount of attention. If you’ve ever read a headline about a vaccine against fake news, it was probably about van der Linden’s work. His team has collaborated with Google, WhatsApp, the Department of Homeland Security, and the British Prime Minister’s office; similar interventions have popped up on Twitter (now X). In “Foolproof,” van der Linden reviews evidence that prebunking makes people better at identifying fake headlines. Yet nothing is mentioned about effects on their actual behavior. Does prebunking affect medical decisions? Does it make someone more willing to accept electoral outcomes? We’re left wondering.

The evidential gap is all the trickier because little research exists in the first place showing that misinformation affects behavior by changing beliefs. Berinsky acknowledges this in “Political Rumors” when he writes that “few scholars have established a direct causal link” between rumors and real-world outcomes. Does the spread of misinformation influence, say, voting decisions? Van der Linden admits, “Contrary to much of the commentary you may find in the popular media, scientists have been extremely skeptical.”

So it’s possible that we’ve been misinformed about how to fight misinformation. What about the social conditions that make us susceptible? Van der Linden tells us that people are more often drawn to conspiracy theories when they feel “uncertain and powerless,” and regard themselves as “marginalized victims.” Berinsky cites scholarship suggesting that conspiratorial rumors flourish among people who experience “a lack of interpersonal trust” and “a sense of alienation.” In his own research, he found that a big predictor of accepting false rumors is agreeing with statements such as “Politicians do not care much about what they say, so long as they get elected.” A recent study found a strong correlation between the prevalence of conspiracy beliefs and levels of governmental corruption; in those beliefs, Americans fell midway between people from Denmark and Sweden and people from middle-income countries such as Mexico and Turkey, reflecting a fraying sense of institutional integrity. More than Russian bots or click-hungry algorithms, a crisis of trust and legitimacy seems to lie behind the proliferation of paranoid falsehoods.

Findings like these require that we rethink what misinformation represents. As Dan Kahan, a legal scholar at Yale, notes, “Misinformation is not something that happens to the mass public but rather something that its members are complicit in producing.” That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications.

From this perspective, railing against social media for manipulating our zombie minds is like cursing the wind for blowing down a house we’ve allowed to go to rack and ruin. It distracts us from our collective failures, from the conditions that degrade confidence and leave much of the citizenry feeling disempowered. By declaring that the problem consists of “irresponsible senders and gullible receivers,” in Thagard’s words, credulity theorists risk ignoring the social pathologies that cause people to become disenchanted and motivate them to rally around strange new creeds.

Mike Hughes was among the disenchanted. Sure, he used Flat Earth theory to become a celebrity, but its anti-institutionalist tone also spoke to him. In 2018, while seeking funding and attention for his next rocket ride, he self-published a book titled “ ‘Mad’ Mike Hughes: The Tell All Tale.” The book brims with outlandish, unsupported assertions—that George H. W. Bush was a pedophile, say—but they’re interspersed with more grounded frustrations. He saw a government commandeered by the greedy few, one that stretched the truth to start a war in Iraq, and that seemed concerned less with spreading freedom and more with funnelling tax dollars into the pockets of defense contractors. “You think about those numbers for a second,” he wrote, of the amount of money spent on the military. “We have homelessness in this country. We could pay off everyone’s mortgages. And we can eliminate sales tax. Everyone would actually be free.”

Hughes wasn’t a chump. He just felt endlessly lied to. As he wrote near the end of his book, “I want my coffee and I don’t want any whipped cream on top of it, you know what I mean? I just want this raw truth.” ♦

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

Author Interviews

Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

The concerns cited in the previous essay are inherent and have been there all along. They are the classic philosophic problems of solipsism, mind-matter dysjunction and that of supposed-but-never-proven independent existence. ... Truth does matter. However, truth is of relative importance and should be considered so. There are truths and truths ...

But people chose to believe and spread lies. This led someone to attack the pizza shop with a gun to try and free the children. article continues after advertisement. So yes, the truth matters. It ...

Truth should be the rails on which we all live our lives. Because truth puts us in touch with reality, it removes us from a self-serving, destructive fantasy world of our own creation, and it leads to a life of well-being and flourishing. Truth, in other words, is prerequisite both to accountability and success.

Does it matter whether people have the truth? Does it matter? Some think truth is not only possible but is valuable. ... in an essay discussing the general importance of skepticism ... The term often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame ...

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 ...

If you are the leader of this study, you would assume that the results your peers give you are 100% true. Falsifying information/ results for something as important as this study could lead to horrible things. It is very wrong to lie about things, especially if it puts a person's life at risk. But, there are some cases where lying could help ...

In other words, belief in substance notes on a crisis of faith 497 • Truth is not a fact but a description of facts. Facts (Santayana explains elsewhere) are material and conscious events. The notion of there being "a truth of the matter" captures this connotation of truth and matter as related but not identical in being.

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.

Vocabulary Quizlet 5.3. This page titled 5.3: Truth and Scientific Truth is shared under a CK-12 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by CK-12 Foundation via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

In this engaging and spirited book, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. Lynch explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is. "We need to think our way past our confusion and shed our cynicism about the value of truth," he writes.

Ken thinks that the value of truth is obvious. Having true beliefs help us act so as to satisfy our desires. John points out that sometimes the truth can be harmful, such as knowing where drugs are being sold. There are a lot of truths that are irrelevant or trivial. There are also depressing truths. Ken thinks that you can't separate truth ...

Published: April 9, 2013 6:29pm EDT. X (Twitter) LinkedIn. The following remarks on truth and democracy were presented at the opening of a brainstorming session entitled Does Truth Really Matter ...

Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity and True to Life: Why Truth Matters, both published by the MIT Press ... "Why Truth Matters", True to Life: Why Truth Matters, Michael P. Lynch. Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference ...

Truly Normative Matters: An Essay on the Value of Truth Charles Kamper Floyd III University of Kentucky, [email protected] Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Floyd, Charles Kamper III, "Truly Normative Matters: An Essay on the Value of Truth" (2012). Theses and

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 1,435 word does the truth matter? essay example includes a title, topic, introduction, thesis statement, body, and conclusion. Support Available 24/7/365 ... Moral journalists will always observe integrity in their work. After all, their biggest and most important duty is public service. In this process, "journalists should avoid ...

Why truth is important in our everyday lives.Why does truth matter when politicians so easily sidestep it and intellectuals scorn it as irrelevant? Why be co... Skip to content. Books. Column. View all subjects; New releases; ... Why Truth Matters. by Michael P. Lynch. Paperback. $40.00. Paperback. ISBN: 9780262622011. Pub date: August 5, 2005 ...

About this book. The claim once made by philosophers of unique knowledge of the essence of humanity and society has fallen into disrepute. Neither Platonic forms, divine revelation nor metaphysical truth can serve as the ground for legitimating social and political norms. On the political level many seem to agree that democracy doesn't need ...

1. Does truth always matter to you? Truth is a fundamental aspect of our lives and it holds great importance to me. I firmly believe that truth should always matter to individuals as it forms the basis of trust, integrity, and ethical behavior. Truth allows us to make informed decisions, build meaningful relationships, and contribute to a just ...

breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary Implication in the word "spiritual" that we are talking of anything otlier than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything out-side die realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word.

Does truth always matter to you? The truth will always prevail as they say, In my own perception truth always matters. There are no justifiable explanations when it comes to telling a lie. It will always be better to live a life without lies even if its just a white lie because a lie is still a lie no matter how you say or defend it. In most ...

It will always be up to you what you believe or whoever you believe. Yes, for me we indeed, need to avoid hindrances in searching for our own truth because barriers will not lead us to the truth we always wanted to find. Hindrances will only feed more lies in our lives, it will make our life more miserable, and it will make us look like a fool.

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument.

The fear of misinformation hinges on assumptions about human suggestibility. "Misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other dangerous ideas, latch on to the brain and insert themselves deep ...

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media, with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower. Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, ...

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Earth Day: How a senator’s idea more than 50 years ago got people fighting for their planet

FILE - Climate activists hold a rally to protest the use of fossil fuels on Earth Day at Freedom Plaza, April 22, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

FILE - Activists display prints replicating solar panels during a rally to mark Earth Day at Lafayette Square, Washington, April 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe, File)

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Millions of people around the world will pause on Monday, at least for a moment, to mark Earth Day. It’s an annual event founded by people who hoped to stir activism to clean up and preserve a planet that is now home to some 8 billion humans and assorted trillions of other organisms.

Here are answers to some common questions about Earth Day and how it came to be:

WHY DO WE CELEBRATE EARTH DAY?

Earth Day has its roots in growing concern over pollution in the 1960s, when author Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” about the pesticide DDT and its damaging effects on the food chain, hit bestseller lists and raised awareness about nature’s delicate balance.

But it was a senator from Wisconsin, Democrat Gaylord Nelson, who had the idea that would become Earth Day. Nelson had long been concerned about the environment when a massive offshore oil spill sent millions of gallons onto the southern California coast in 1969. Nelson, after touring the spill site, had the idea of doing a national “teach-in” on the environment, similar to teach-ins being held on some college campuses at the time to oppose the war in Vietnam.

Nelson and others, including activist Denis Hayes, worked to expand the idea beyond college campuses, with events all around the country, and came up with the Earth Day name.

WHY WAS APRIL 22 CHOSEN FOR EARTH DAY?

A history of the movement by EarthDay.org, where Hayes remains board chair emeritus, says the date of the first Earth Day — April 22, 1970 — was chosen because it fell on a weekday between spring break and final exams and the aim was to attract as many students as possible.

IS EARTH DAY A REAL HOLIDAY?

It’s not a federal holiday. But many groups use the day to put together volunteer events with the environment in mind, such as cleanups of natural areas. You can see a list of events worldwide , or register your own event, at EarthDay.org.

HAS IT HAD AN IMPACT?

It has. The overwhelming public response to the first Earth Day is credited with adding pressure for the U.S. Congress to do more to address pollution, and it did, passing landmark legislation including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. More broadly, it’s seen as the birth of the modern environmental movement. In later years, Earth Day expanded to become a truly global event. It now claims to have motivated action in more than 192 countries.

In 2000, Earth Day began taking aim at climate change, a problem that has grown rapidly more urgent in recent years.

WHAT’S THE THEME THIS YEAR?

This year’s Earth Day is focusing on the threat that plastics pose to our environment, with a call to end all single-use plastic and find replacements for their use so they can quickly be phased down.

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