In my studies, I learned that there are three major philosophical theories of truth:
- The correspondence theory of truth = truth is what corresponds with reality.
- The coherence theory of truth = truth is what coheres with other well-established beliefs.
- The pragmatic theory of truth = truth is what "works."
There are of course also denials that the concept of truth is meaningful any more. Here are some of those views, more spelled out:
- "Truth" is merely an invention of those in power, used to maintain their power. (They use claims to truth to bully others into submission.)
- Truth is a matter of individual determination. We each make beliefs true (for ourselves) by believing in them. (Relativism.)
Are there other major philosophical perspectives on truth that I am forgetting?
21 comments:
There are deflationary theories of truth. In short these say that there is no property that statements have that makes them true but "true" is just a kind of shorthand for repeating what the other person said.
There's also the camp that says "true" is just equivalent to warranted assertability, that is, to say that something is true is merely to say that the person was justified in saying so.
There's a song line, "When the truth is found, I hope it will be true for you." I kind of like the way that walks the line between these positions. It's like: to talk about truth doesn't settle whether it corresponds or coheres or works. Otherwise, how could we hope that it will? You couldn't do a song, "And when you find a bachelor, I hope he won't be already married."
Thanks -- very helpful. I also saw mention of the "operational" theory of truth alongside the three I mentioned. I can make guesses about what this is, and will look it up for more information, but if any of you readers have more information about this one, please let me know.
I'd like to see a real discussion take place here, so here are a couple of comments.
Correspondance: This is the old favorite which goes back to Aristotle. Main problem is that some statements have no intuitive state of affairs that makes them true. "The cat is on the mat" is made true by the cat's being on the mat but "The elephant is not on the mat" and "The unicorn is not on the mat" seem to be made true by nonfacts. Correspondance is puzzling when you dig into it.
Coherence and pragmatism seem better suited as tests of truth rather than definitions of what it is that makes statements true.
The postmodern "truth is power" seems to be a deflationary theory. That is "truth" doesn't mean anything at all but it is used to impose your will on someone else.
Ditto for relativism. "Truth" doesn't mean anything. X is true is just a way of saying I believe X.
My own view is that correspondance is correct. The puzzles which arise shouldn't convince us that what makes a statement true is that the world is the way the statement says it is. And concerning deflationary theories I don't see how these words could have the uses they are described as having if truth didn't mean correspondance. How could I bully someone by telling them that what they said wasn't true if neither of us thought "true" had any meaning. Does mere noise scare people?
Yes, I'm enthusiastic about continuing a real discussion too!
My latest thinking is this: there are different kinds of truth claims, and so different theories of truth become relevant depending on what kind of truth claim one is making.
For example, empirical statements are subject to the correspondence theory of truth, because they are claims about the physical world, and thus their truth depends on whether they correspond with physical reality or not. We determine this correspondence empirically.
But empirical claims are not the only truth claims we make. Questions of truth can also emerge when we make claims about people (others or ourselves), society, institutions, history, the meaning of events, purpose(s), morality, and religion, etc.
Here, questions of truth become more complex to analyze. Many of these may include empirical elements, but move beyond empiricism as well.
Also, the when the nature of the "reality" to which these truth claims corresponds is not physical/material reality, the task of testing for correspondence becomes more difficult, if not impossible.
Here is where the other theories of truth become useful.
Just to sketch a couple of examples, for now: some beliefs we have may be difficult to directly verify but play the role of helping connect the rest of our thinking coherently, in which case, the coherence theory of truth applies.
Others (such as certain kinds of moral principles and religious principles) have implications in terms of how we should act and live. If acting and living in these ways results in the kind of life that morally or religiously we hope to be living, such beliefs can be said to be subject to the pragmatic theory of truth: they work for us. They are, in a sense, proved true by lived experience. (They can also be proved false: you act on a principle, but then find the actual effect on others is not really desirable after all. This may prompt you to engage in some "soul-searching," which might result in a revision of your principles.)
By the way, this is work towards my paper for Jeff Dudiak's book project -- but this particular aspect I may work into its own stand-alone paper. What do you think? Has anyone analyzed the theories of truth in this way: that different theories are applicable to different kinds of truth claims?
I've been developing this in more detail -- this is just a preliminary sketch for now.
Glad to see this blog is active again. Thanks, Laura, for kicking us off. And on "truth" no less.
I’ll respond to things a bit more in the days ahead, but for now I’ll just throw something in.
Richard, thanks too for your comments. I for one am not convinced that truth, to be meaningful, is tied to correspondence (if that’s what you’re saying), or else it loses its meaning. That is our “modern, epistemological” intuition, no doubt. But truth has a broader (and I think older and more fundamental) meanings, like being “true to” someone, where truth means faithfulness, and where its etymological connection to “troth” is in evidence. My own sense is that truth as faithfulness is the core sense of truth, and that “correspondence” (the “faithfulness” of a proposition to some state of affairs) is a mere subcategory of this richer sense, albeit an entirely legitimate one when invoked in the appropriate contexts.
Further, correspondence, as Richard points out (despite his affirmation of it), is far from straightforward. While I don’t remember the exact example, Heidegger in his The Essence of Truth looks at the correspondence between (again, this is from memory) the claim that a coin is round and the state of affairs of a round coin, and notes that the word true is used equivocally for both the correspondence between the claim that the coin is round and the state of affairs of the round coin, and also of the state of affairs itself (it remains true that the coin is round even if I claim that it is square). He also wonders what corresponds here, because the word coin is not metallic like the coin it supposedly corresponds to, just like the word round is not itself round like the roundness of the coin it is supposed to correspond to. Indeed, one could push this in another direction and wonder how language, which consists of universals, could ever correspond to the world, that consists of individual things.
@Laura
In graduate school Albert Blumberg used to say that truth had one meaning for empirical truths (correspondance) and another meaning for logical truths, since the latter don't refer to anything at all. I have some sympathy for that idea.
In most discussions of truth the question of what truth is quickly slides over in discussion of how we determine which statements are true. I appreciate that the two issues (what is truth? and how do we determine what is true?) are connected but I think that they should be kept distinct. I think you fail to keep them distinct when you say that "when the nature of the "reality" to which these truth claims corresponds is not physical/material reality, the task of testing for correspondence becomes more difficult, if not impossible.
Here is where the other theories of truth become useful."
Suppose there is a part of physical reality disconnected to our space-time. It would be impossible for us to get any information about it. So it would be impossible for us to determine any truths about it. But I don't see this as a reason to adopt a different meaning of "truth." We should just say we don't know what is true concerning this other world.
We need both clear definitions of truth and theories about how we determine what is true. Such theories however are not in competition with each other. I prefer to see correspondance as the best theory that defines truth and pragmatic and coherence theories as attempts to answer the other question: how to tell what is true. And I don't see coherence and pragmatism as competing with each other. We can and should use both to determine what is true, but what we mean by true is "corresponds to reality."
I'll say more later about this whole correspondance to reality notion. As I've already admitted it isn't simple.
@Jeff
Sounds like Heidegger is making the familiar point that the correspondance relation isn't a kind of literal picturing or imitation. The word "round" isn't round, it's actually rather flat! This critique makes some sense applied to early modern philosophers like Locke who thought that ideas were pictures in the head so that correspondance could be something simple like the way that pictures resemble what they picture. But of course mental or linguistic representation is not a picturing relation. So when a modern philosopher (as opposed to Locke) defends correspondance they don't mean to say that true statements are pictures of states of affairs. So Heidegger's criticism is strawmanning any modern defender of correspondance.
We don't say today that correspondance is picturing. So we are not vulnerable to Heidegger's objection. But that invites the next question: if it isn't picturing then what is it? A fair question and not an easy one to answer. The answer in my opinion takes us into philosophy of language where I favor causal accounts.
Richard - Yes, I was aware that I was starting to blur the distinction between specifying what truth is and considering how to determine whether a given statement is true. And I agree that these should be kept conceptually distinct.
But if we take a statement such as: "It is never just to harm anyone," and ask whether it is true or not, the problem is not just one of how to answer this latter question: there is also a metaphysical question of how to characterize the reality to which this statement corresponds (or not).
I'm formulating thoughts about this myself, but am curious what your thoughts are.
So, Jeff poses questions about the difficulties of correspondence theories even in the "clear" case of claims about the physical world, and now I want to extend this to questions about truth-claims that are not about physical reality.
But, I should add: in both cases, I myself am still sympathetic to correspondence theories!
@Laura
Determining the truth of an ethical statement is controversial because the meaning of the ethical statement is controversial. Some ethical theories will give us clear answers however. Suppose I were a simple act utilitarian. Then "right" would mean "maximizes pleasure." Then a statement like "Joe was right to visit his grandmom in the nursing home" would be true just in case Joe's visit actually maximized pleasure and it would be false otherwise. The difficulties here don't concern "true" but rather the acceptability of this account of rightness.
PS I really ought to be grading papers, how aboutyou?
Yes, I really ought to be grading papers too!
But, yes, ethical statements definitely do present special problems -- which is why I am focusing on them. But if we cannot say that a statement such as "It is never just to harm anyone" has a truth value, what kind of statement is it then?
And if we say that it does have a truth value, AND want to uphold the correspondence theory of truth, then what reality does such a claim correspond to?
The way my students want to handle this is to say, "Well, that might be true for you" (the relativistic move).
Are there additional alternatives for such statements besides (a) having a truth value, or (b) being relativistic?
One more note: this is why I am considering the possibility that it does have a truth value, but it is not the correspondence theory of truth that helps us in this case to understand what "true" means.
Yet I am also considering the possibility that the correspondence theory does work in this case: on a more complex metaphysics (perhaps akin to Plato's theory of Forms) that allows "justice" in its ideal form to have a kind of reality even if it never is perfectly instantiated in this world.
@Laura
I opt that ethical statements have truth value and that truth is correspondance for these statements. What part of reality the statement corresponds to will depend on the speaker's definition of "right" or "just" or any other ethical term.
Many actual speakers will have no clear notion of what they mean when they say "that's not right" or "a just society would provide universal health care." So if the speaker has no clear definition of the ethical term, then their statement would have no clear truth value and there would be no clear state of affairs for their statement to correspond to. Again I say that this is not a fault with correspondance theory. The fault lies in the unclarity of people's thinking. I am with Socrates and Plato in thinking that ordinary folk are muddled in their thinking about ethical issues. I do not buy the glorification of "common sense" that became popular with G.E. Moore.
Bottom line is that philosophy has a responsibility to provide clear definitions of unclear concepts. Once we have defined "justice" in some clear way (e.g. Rawls theory of justice) then we can look for the complex naturalistic properties that make societies just (e.g. distributes benefits according to Rawls two rules.) By the way I'm not saying that Rawls is right, I'm only using him as an example.
to please let RichardM know he needs to temporarily moderate the last 2 comments over on his personal blog?
Forrest,
Thanks, I deleted them. I haven't been keeping that blog up lately.
Richard
I hope this conversation will continue. I've got a lot more to say but only want to participate if others do as well.
@Jeff I'm thinking that your idea that something like faithfulness is the core of truth is important to your thinking and that you were disappointed that we didn't pick up on it. Could you elaborate a bit? You seem to admit that correspondance is a good way to understand the truth of statements, but that there is more to it than that. What exactly is this more and why is it significant?
Yes, I am really appreciating this discussion and had planned to continue. (This has been the last week of classes so things have been very busy.)
And in fact I was just composing my response to your last point, Richard, on my way back from my last meeting, so here goes.
I really like what you say about how the correspondence depends on the speaker's definition of "right" or "justice."
But at the same time, there is something about that approach that doesn't completely satisfy me, and I'm trying to pinpoint why.
It would mean that a statement such as "It is never just to harm anyone," is true if the definitions of the key terms (justice, harm) line up in the right way, making the statement perhaps just a tautology, or at any rate, true analytically (pulling out implications from the definitions themselves).
Yet, this approach dangerously veers back towards relativism. Someone might reply, "Well, that may be true on your definition of justice, but not mine," or even, "all you are doing is manipulating your definitions to make it trivially true -- but that's just a trick -- I want to know if it's really true that it is never just to harm anyone!"
The result may be to shift the discussion to a discussion of what counts as justice then, which may be helpful.
But the person who believes something like, "it is never just to harm anyone" believes it to be true on any legitimate definition of justice. So there is a deeper question here -- not just one of how one's concepts line up, but of how to judge whether to accept a given definition.
When are we justified in rejecting a proposed definition, and on what basis?
When Socrates argues with Thrasymachus in Book I of Plato's Republic, he certainly thinks that Thrasymachus' proposed definitions of justice are wrong. His technique is to unearth internal contradictions, and so that is one way to critique a proposed definition.
But is that the only way a proposed definition can go wrong? Are there still enough internally consistent definitions that remain distinct enough that "it is never just to harm anyone" might be true on one of these definitions, and false on another?
And I too am intrigued by what Jeff had to say about truth, troth, and faithfulness, and would like to hear more.
@Laura. I'm sitting in my favorite coffeeshop composing my final exam on the laptop. Thanks for distracting me!
I hope you remember at least a little of the talk I gave at the FAHE meeting a couple years back, as it relates directly to this.
Different concepts of justice have different implications. Some of these may be mere tautologies. Others will require observation. (For example, suppose I accept Rawls definition of justice. Determining if the US economy is just will not follow as a mere tautology. I will need to observe the facts too.)
But evaluating definitions of justice is critical. Plato thought that there was a Form of Justice and so we should evaluate any definition by looking at the Form. Almost nobody believes that anymore. Instead philosophers substitute "our" concept of justice for the Platonic Form.
This is the move that I reject. First, I doubt there is any clear concept of justice in common use. Rather the word is used in many ways by many people. It's got a complex and tangled history.
I see little point in trying to untangle that history and "analyze" the concept. Instead I think that philosophers should recognize that concepts are HUMAN INVENTIONS. As such we should choose the concept that works best for us. The criterion of legitimacy for a concept is not common use, or history, but rather pragmatic.
This is how science works. Science does not try to analyze concepts of "matter" and "force." Instead it INVENTS better concepts.
It seems to me there are a great many related concepts for different contexts.
When Tony Priete was out here for PYM (_Pacific_ YM to you!) he told us that Hebrew didn't have a word for logical truth ala the Greek concept; instead they had a word that meant something closer to "reliable," "trustworthy."
But just in English we have different senses of truth, ie "mathematical logical truth" vs the natural language concept, which is more a matter of "causal truth" or "functional truth", ie "If it's raining Nasrudin will bring his umbrella" will be true in mathematical logic any time it isn't raining. It would not be true in the causal sense, because Nasrudin, in fact, would never bring his umbrella if it were raining! (His umbrella is full of holes, so rain would put him in the embarrassing situation of having to open it, or else go about in the rain with a closed umbrella.)
In the case of deciding 'true' vs 'false' for statements containing words like 'justice,' we aren't necessarily making either a purely utilitarian determination or trying to match some ideal concept--It comes down to whether an act or a situation fits our sense of 'fairness'--a sense that certainly depends on the particular customs we're used to... but customs seem to imply a tacit agreement on matters like "Who deserves more than whom?"--"Can any person deserve more than some other person?"--"How harsh should we allow the conditions of human life to be, given the choice?"--"What ways of gaining personal advantage should the rules permit?--in what contexts"
Utilitarian considerations are bound to enter into this, but to be true to what human beings ultimately value, it can't be on a one-dimensional quantitative sort of basis, ie "How many people are we willing to have tortured if that means we get to have Big Macs any time we want?" That is, we are also, in practice, going to adjust our concept of "justice" along the lines of "Does this [particular] concept of 'justice' encourage outcomes we can accept as appropriate for human beings?: not just 'pleasure' but also 'beauty', 'righteousness', 'holiness', etc."
But no matter how judicially-preferable it might seem to substitute a more easily-decided concept like "due process," there is something utterly inhuman in decisions like (for example): "Innocent, sminnocent; he's exhausted his appeal rights so string him up!"
@forrest,
Sounds like you are generally sympathetic to Laura's approach.
something to bear in mind in these discussions is the interaction of ambiguitities. You and Laura think that "true" is ambiguous. Maybe so, as I said I would seriously consider the hypothesis that "2 = 2 = 4 is true" might not mean the same as "the cat is on the mat is true."
In your example about the umbrella, I would also point out that "if" is ambiguous. The material implication sense used in formal logic is not the same as the ordinary language senses of "if." I think there is more than one ordinary language sense of "if."
I think we generally agree about ordinary language uses of "justice" too. Here I would say that its less a matter of ambiguity than of vagueness. I think the ordinary man or woman carries around in their head a small set of paradigm cases of justice and injustice. They have no clear definition. So when they run into a new case they compare it with the paradigms in their head.
If this is right then I think we can see how a good story could change the popular concept of justice more effectively than a philosophical argument. Maybe that's why Jesus taught in parables and avoided systematic theology!
Post a Comment