the search for truth essay

The Search for Truth in Philosophy

Rorty sees his task in radically deconstructing and overcoming the traditional view of philosophy as a discipline that provides an accurate representation of being. The philosopher proposes a post-positivist concept of coherence as the correspondence of an affirmation to the principles and requirements of a particular language game operating in a specific historical community of individuals (Owens, 2019). Society is understood primarily as a linguistic community, and the philosopher considers it possible to view it as the only justification for human knowledge, norms, and standards of behavior.

According to Foucault, being inside an era, a person cannot understand its nature entirely. As Foucault emphasizes, traditional history is based on the idea of ​​a particular predetermined subject of knowledge, thanks to which the disclosure of truth is possible; Foucault’s task is to trace the formation of this subject in the depths of history. Thus, the philosopher argued that an adequate truth about love or, for example, madness is inaccessible to the cognizing subject. These objects are accessible to knowledge only through representations that change depending on the era. It is practically impossible to separate the “thing-in-itself” from the discourse in which it is enclosed.

Another point of view was proposed by the English philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar. Within the framework of critical realism, he argues that research aimed at finding truth makes sense only when its results are valid not only in the laboratory but also outside it (Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2020). The philosopher talks about the issues of perception and reality, which makes people doubt the truth of many familiar ideas and perceptions. Through this critical approach, people can rethink old beliefs and take a fresh look at the truth.

Undoubtedly, every philosophical idea has a reasonably solid foundation and scientific justification. They are based on concepts from other philosophers who have worked on these issues for centuries. Thus, any of these ideas can be accepted or refuted; however, in any case, they should be treated with respect and understanding. This will help us look at the issue from different points of view and accept the most suitable idea for ourselves or, possibly, work out a new one.

I am close to Foucault’s idea, who argued that it is difficult to understand the truth, being inside a particular era. Indeed, a person cannot always cover the entire event horizon and consider all the influencing factors to get the correct perspective. At the same time, looking back, we often understand where we made a mistake and how we should have behaved to achieve a better outcome. Thus, knowing the truth is a complex process that requires broad views and attention to detail from people.

However, I believe that any philosophical idea has some significant meaning. Thus, for example, the concepts of critical realism force people to consider reality carefully, “scientifically.” This allows us to rely on reason and draw conclusions from strict logic. Sometimes this can support correct and informed decisions, which may seem wrong from the point of view of feelings, but ultimately lead to beneficial consequences. In any case, the search for truth is a long and ongoing process. Even when looking into the past, researchers do not always agree on where exactly the truth was. Consequently, everyone should determine this issue for themselves independently, but at the same time, remember that the point of view should not be detrimental to others.

Buch-Hansen, H., & Nielsen, P. (2020). Critical realism: Basics and beyond. Macmillan Education UK.

Owens, J. (2019). Rorty, religion, and metaphysics. Lexington Books.

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Seven Approaches to Finding the Truth

This blog summarizes seven different approaches to justifying the truth..

Posted September 7, 2020 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

The question of what is true resides at the very core of philosophy , especially the Greek tradition that was so powerfully shaped by the trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Perhaps more than anyone else, Socrates was responsible for founding the modern approach to philosophy. Indeed, I would argue he essentially launched what we can call "formal epistemology". This is the systematic way of addressing the questions of “How do we know?” and “In what sense are one’s claim to knowledge really justifiable?” We can appreciate the difficulty in finding truly justifiable knowledge when we consider that Socrates was considered the wisest man in the land in large part because he realized he "knew nothing”.

Since Socrates' time, there have been many different approaches to developing knowledge systems that are justified by more than one’s subjective impressions and wishes. Here are seven different approaches that attempt to ground the justification of truth.

Seven Approaches to Finding Truth

1. The Foundational Approach . This attempts to ground knowledge in deductive certainty. The most obvious systems that work from foundational truth claims are those in logic and mathematics. Consider, for example, that 1 + 1 = 2 is true by definition and mathematical proofs are derived from deductive logic. Perhaps the most famous foundationalist approach in philosophy was advanced by Rene Descartes, who argued for a substance dualist view of matter and mind that was in part grounded to the foundationalist truth claim, “I think; therefore I am”.

2. The Coherence Approach . This approach emphasizes the way concepts link up with one another and proceed to offer a clearly understandable view of the world and how one knows about it in a way that is comprehensive and ordered. A good example of coherence is when one achieves a sense of insight so that one’s perspective shifts and a number of pieces fall into place. Metatheories like the Unified Theory of Knowledge are often justified based on the coherence that they are able to achieve.

3. The Correspondence Approach . A famous quip regarding the emergence of modern empirical natural science from the rest of philosophy is that the scientists “got up out of their armchairs” and actually looked through microscopes and telescopes to see what was there. That is, they developed an empirical focus on data collection, and developed methods that tested or corresponded models that generated hypotheses that could then be examined to see if the data lined up with the predict the expected state of affairs.

4. The Phenomenological Approach . When we think of data, where does it reside? Does it reside in the world or do empirical sense impressions reside inside the perceptions of the observers? This is a powerful consideration. It was Immanuel Kant who embraced a phenomenological approach that divided the world into that which we can experience and the thing-in-itself. Other philosophers like Husserl developed a full philosophy based on phenomenology.

5. The Pragmatic Approach . Human activity, even the search for truth, can be conceptualized in terms of goals and utility, and thus is contextualized. The pragmatic approach, emphasized by American philosophers like William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, emphasizes a conception of truth as being that which works, and what is useful in the world in determining accurate from inaccurate and fostering other goals.

6. The Social Construction Approach . Where do we get our truth claims? Clearly a key determiner of our beliefs is the cultural context, where we have been socialized into various systems and then justify our truths in relationship to other ideas that exist in the context in which we reside. The remarkable plurality of different views demonstrates the influence that the explicit intersubjective consensus by groups of people have regarding what constitutes truth. The “linguistic turn” in philosophy, as well as the post-structuralists like Michael Foucault, emphasize how truth claims are intertwined with power, influence, and social context.

7. The Moral/Ethical/Aesthetic Approach. One of the most famous distinctions in modernist thinking is the separation from is and ought. The philosopher David Hume famously argued that one cannot derive what ought to be solely on the basis of what is. This led to a separation between “is” and “ought” that modern empirical natural science has only strengthened in many ways. However, it is crucial to realize that many argue that “is” and “ought” cannot be as neatly separated. It can be argued both that what is true is often seen as what is beautiful, as exemplified by mathematical equations like the Euler Identity . In addition, many argue that there are ultimate values pertaining to goodness and beauty that are as true in how they orient our embodiment as any claims to accuracy. Although they did so in different ways, philosophers as different as Kant and Aristotle both saw goodness and truth as tied together in profound ways.

These seven approaches represent the dominant ways philosophers have attempted to ground their truth claims. It seemly likely that they all have their place in helping humanity generate an understanding of that which is true in the deepest sense of that word.

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at James Madison University.

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, the search for truth.

Today a student asked for help with the big questions of life. I thought I might try to briefly answer.

We Are All Beggars When It Comes to Truth

William James taught me long ago that no one should claim intellectual superiority regarding questions about the mystery of existence. As James put it: “All of us are beggars here.” I like the humility of that statement, although I always thought it should be amended slightly to: All of us are beggars here, but some beg a bit better than others. In other words, while none of us know the answers to the big questions, some probably do know a bit more than others.

Truth is Ineffable

Unsurprisingly the more knowledgeable often aren’t the most vocal. Perhaps that’s because of their awareness of the complexity of reality and the humility that awareness engenders. Or perhaps that’s because truth, whatever it is, is ineffable. This is the basic idea of the first lines of the Tao Te Ching, in one of its many translations:

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal name…

Arrogance about Truth

Another curious thing is those who pretend to own the truth and speak confidently about it seem the least likely to actually possess it. This is probably due to vanity, hubris, or insecurity. (Think TV evangelist, cable news host, or ignorant politician.) Bertrand Russell thought this attitude consequential:  “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

You Must Find Truth for Yourself

If we are beggars when it comes to the biggest questions because deep truths are ineffable or incomprehensible, then what do we do when asked about them? We could pretend to have answers like the priests, politicians, imams, and assorted gurus. Or we could reply humbly as did the Buddha on his deathbed when his students sought guidance: “Therefore … be a lamp unto yourself, be a refuge to yourself.” This is a most beautiful answer, as the only real answers to existential questions are the ones we find for ourselves. All others are hand-me-down or second-hand answers. Comrades may help us, but in the end, we must find our own reasons for the mystery of being. This echoes what Walt Whitman taught me more than 40 years ago.

I tramp a perpetual journey—(come listen all!) My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods; No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair; I have no chair, no church, no philosophy; I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, or exchange; But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.

Not I—not any one else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far—it is within reach; Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know; Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip, And in due time you shall repay the same service to me; For after we start, we never lie by again.

This day before dawn I ascended a hill, and look’d at the crowded heaven, And I said to my Spirit,  When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then? And my Spirit said,  No, we but level that life, to pass and continue beyond.

You are also asking me questions, and I hear you; I answer that I cannot answer—you must find out for yourself.

Sit a while, dear son; Here are biscuits to eat, and here is milk to drink; But as soon as you sleep, and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-bye kiss, and open the gate for your egress hence.

Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams; Now I wash the gum from your eyes; You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light, and of every moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore; Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.

Stanza 46 from “Song of Myself.”

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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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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

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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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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Searching for Truth in 1984

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Review Essay of “Tom Wright and the Search for Truth: A Theological Evaluation” by Tom Holland

Tom Holland, Tom Wright and the Search for Truth: A Theological Evaluation  (London: Apiary Publishing), 2017. Pp. 495.

by Don Garlington

This full-sized volume consists of thirteen chapters: (1) “Probing the Contours of Recent Research;” (2) “Probing Saul and His Political Identity;” (3) “Probing Paul and His Theological Identity;” (4) “Probing Paul and His Intellectual Identity;” (5) “Probing Further Use of Hellenistic Language and Imagery;” (6) “Probing Paul’s Use of Second Temple Literature;” (7) “Probing Paul’s Understanding of the Person of Christ (Christology);” (8) “Probing Paul’s Doctrine of the Atonement;” (9) “Probing Wright’s Doctrine of Justification;” (10) “Probing the Doctrine of Justification” (11) “Probing the Doctrine of Justification in Romans and Galatians;” (12) “Probing Justification in the Remainder of Paul’s Letters;” (13) “Reconciling Conflict and Review.” As is readily evident, the book is an extended exercise in probing. [i]

In the Preface, Holland outlines his initial contacts with Wright and sketches out his concerns. Mainly, Holland takes issue with Wright’s historical reading of Paul in the light of Second Temple Judaism (2TJ). The author does not deny that these texts have value in shedding light on the cultural backdrop of the day, but he is concerned that “this relatively new method of reading the New Testament through this lens has inadvertently opened the door for this literature to have an undue influence on Tom Wright’s interpretation of the New Testament” (p. 16). Consequently, “I believe. . .that by using these extra-biblical sources, Tom Wright has added extraneous thoughts and concepts to Paul’s theology resulting in a loss of clarity regarding the apostle’s teaching” (p. 16). So, we are not surprised to read that, according to Holland, Wright’s What Saint Paul Really Said should have been What Saint Paul Ought to Have Said (p. 17).

As Holland continues, the reason for opening this discussion is that Wright’s methodology has had such an influence on hundreds of other scholars. While Holland supports Wright’s desire to show that Paul taught a Jewish message, he also believes the way Wright uses intertestamental literature has unwittingly produced an inaccurate version of Paul’s teaching (pp. 17–18). Another reason for this undertaking is the interest the two authors share regarding the New Exodus motif. Holland relates that he has a “deep commitment” to the model, but has reached different conclusions than those of Wright. Thus, “The fact that our work shares a common emphasis on the New Exodus theme give me the opportunity of showing the benefits of my methodology against his” (p. 18). In a nutshell, it all boils down to a matter of methodology. If, writes Holland, Wright’s research had been “properly controlled then his contribution would be of far greater value than it has been” (pp. 19–20).

Chapter One is a sketch of some of the work done since the arrival on the scene of E. P. Sanders and Wright (James Dunn is curiously absent). Holland reminds us of the well-know rise of the historical-critical method, originating actually at the turn of the seventeenth century into the eighteen, not the nineteenth. [ii] No doubt, he is correct that the tendencies of the Enlightenment contributed massively to the erosion of the trustworthiness of the Bible as a whole. It is also accurate that certain Jewish documents had been known for centuries before the discovery of the Qumran texts, and it was the unearthing of these materials that spearheaded the current fascination with the historical setting of the NT itself. It is also factual that Wright, despite some reservations, aligned himself with Sanders’ contention that 2TJ was not legalistic and that “covenantal nomism” is an accurate depiction of the Judaism of the era. Additionally, it is true enough that Wright has offered a reassessment of the place of justification in Paul’s theology. For him, justification is not about soteriology, but rather has to do with the identity of the people of God. Elsewhere, I have addressed this aspect of Wright’s understanding of justification. If I may relay that observation:

. . . Wright has constructed a seemingly false dichotomy between the identity of the people of God and salvation. It is closer to the mark to say that Galatians does have to do with entrance into the body of the saved, meaning that to belong to the new covenant is to belong to the community of the saved. [iii]

Holland does acknowledge that Wright’s research into the Jewishness of Paul’s theology has opened up many interesting and valuable insights, which have resulted in an appreciation of his work by the scholarly community. Indeed, “Much of what Wright has written is excellent. He has helped Christians to see the importance of the OT for interpreting the NT” (p. 34). The bulk of Wright’s work, as Holland concedes, has assured many that he is a trustworthy teacher of the church and that the early suspicions respecting justification have evaporated. It would seem, however, that there is a downside to all this: “The consequence of this theological movement is that many no longer think that the Reformers are reliable authorities for guiding the 21st century church” (p. 35).

Chapter Two endeavors to probe Paul and his political identity. The gist of the chapter is that Holland thinks that Wright has overblown Paul’s relationship to the likes of Elijah and Phinehas, “zealots” for the cause of Israel. “Wright’s claim that Saul was a zealot significantly impacts the way in which he interprets Paul and his spiritual journey; it is the foundation of much of what Wright thinks explains the apostle’s motives and message” (p. 42).

The question is posed whether Paul would have chosen a “liberal” mentor, Gamaliel, if he were himself were of a much more “conservative” disposition. “Would a zealot deliberately put himself under such a teacher when their theologies would have been so very difference” (p. 43). The comeback, I would say, is provided by Wright, as acknowledge by Holland. The former cites the example of Rabbi Akiba, who broke with his teacher, Nehunya, over his pacifistic commitment. Holland, however, avers that the analogy is invalid because Akiba broke with his teacher only after leaving his school and that, for Wright, Paul became a disciple of Gamaliel whilst disagreeing with him (p. 44). Yet Holland himself, in citing correspondence with David Instone-Brewer, has to acknowledge that there is a dearth of information relating to how ancient Jewish students chose their teachers—“the answer is far from decisive” (p. 46). Be that as it may, it does not follow that Saul was a “practising zealot” at the time of his attachment to Gamaliel (p. 49); the break could have occurred later. Given the rise of a theology of zeal at this juncture in Jewish history, [iv] it would not at all be surprising that Paul was caught up in the movement and chose to discontinue some of his former associations. On the contemporary scene, students can (and do) chose teachers or thesis supervisors who can be quite at variance with their personal convictions. In the modern era, the likes of Käsemann and Bornkamm broke radically with their teacher, Bultmann, over the question of the historical Jesus. In brief, the appeal to the manner in which students would have selected a teacher proves nothing in itself. If I may draw on personal experience, I chose to study with James Dunn at Durham, even though our positions on Scripture and Christology vary appreciably.

Holland seems especially concerned to deny that Saul of Tarsus was a “zealot” in any meaningful sense. “Of course, Saul would have held political views, but they were most unlikely to have been the views of the zealots.” Not only does this line of reasoning beg the question, it simply disregards the “theology of zeal” that commenced with OT persons such as Elijah and Jehu. Phinehas (Num 25:7–8 = Ps 106:30–31) is mentioned, but it is completely overlooked that Mattathias, in the Second Temple Period, was modeled on Phinehas. According to 1 Macc 2:19–26:

But Mattathias answered and said in a loud voice: “Even if all the nations that live under the rule of the king obey him, and have chosen to do his commandments, departing each one from the religion of his fathers, yet I and my sons and my brothers will live by the covenant of our fathers. Far be it from us to desert the law and the ordinances. We will not obey the king’s words by turning aside from our religion to the right hand or to the left.” When he had finished speaking these words, a Jew came forward in the sight of all to offer sacrifice upon the altar in Modein, according to the king’s command. When Mattathias saw it, be burned with zeal and his heart was stirred. He gave vent to righteous anger; he ran and killed him upon the altar. At the same time he killed the king’s officer who was forcing them to sacrifice, and he tore down the altar. Thus he burned with zeal for the law, as Phinehas did against Zimri the son of Salu .

The sons of Mattathias, not surprisingly, perpetuated this tradition of zeal, as related by 1 and 2 Maccabees. [v] It was the first-century Zealots who modeled themselves on the likes of Elijah, Phinehas, Jehu and Mattathias. [vi]

Because Holland refuses to read Paul historically in his own Sitz im Leben , effectively he has constructed a “Docetic” Paul, one who effectively had very little contact with the actual world in which he lived. Moreover, the assertion that Palestinian Judaism was pacifistic (p. 50) is contradicted, among others, by Hengel’s Zealots and Jacob Neusner’s study. [vii] As both demonstrate, Josephus considered the Pharisees to be a political party with some clout in the first century, although later they evolved into a pietistic movement. The Pharisees, as confirmed by Acts 9:1–2, would have been entirely sympathetic with the Zealot resistance of anything considered to be Anti-Judaism.

But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord , went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

It was just the Pharisees who likened Jesus to the reprobate son of Deut 21:18–21 (Matt 11:17–19), who was to be put to death and whose body was to be affixed to a tree, to which we may add that the mob demanding his crucifixion was hardly pacifistic.

It is demonstrable from the Gospels that the Pharisees (and other groups) exerted as much pressure as feasible on the Roman authorities; and it is virtually inconceivable that Saul would have been unaffected by the turbulent times in which he lived. Such considerations lead Hengel to conclude that although the Pharisaic Jew was not necessarily closely connected with the Zealot movement of Judas of Galilee, nevertheless for God’s cause and the hallowing of the law, he was prepared to use force, if necessary, even to the point of killing the lawbreaker. This was an attitude that was “very popular in contemporary Judaism.” As he continues, “The best modern paradigm for this atmosphere is present-day Islamic fundamentalism with its theocratic ideals, which causes us so much concern today.” In a nutshell, “Paul’s ‘zeal,’ which made him a persecutor, is thus directed against what in his eyes were severe transgressions of the law, of which Stephen, too, was accused.” [viii]

Next in the chapter comes another specious argument, viz., that a “zealous” Saul would never have done the bidding of a high priest who was “a notorious stooge of the Roman Emperor” (p. 51). But the answer is obvious enough. Whether a zealot or not, Saul was still obliged to work within the system of the Jewish State and of necessity had to cooperate with its authorities. His compliance with the high priest simply reflects the necessity of working through the appropriate channels. The high priest’s approval and/or commissioning was standard procedure in such cases.

In pursuing “Zealot Claims and Roman Citizenship,” Holland postulates that a “zealous” Paul would have been obliged to renounce his status as a Roman citizen. In so doing, he constructs the proverbial “straw man” that turns out to be a caricature of Wright, not a fair representation. “To say that a zealot, jealous for his country, and fanatical about the independence of Israel, would turn up meekly every five years to ensure that he continued to enjoy the benefits of being a Roman citizen is to ask us to accept something that is several steps beyond credibility!” But again, a response is readily at hand. In order to be zealous for Israel, it was not at all necessary for Saul to forego his Roman citizenship and later take it up again. He could well have registered with the government every five years and still have harbored antagonism toward Roman oppression and worked toward an eventual end to Roman rule. As a contemporary example, citizens of any given country can (and do) take umbrage at the government without renouncing their citizenship. So, this is hardly a serious problem for Wright’s “construction” (p. 52). Holland’s entire line of reasoning is a non sequitur .

Finally in this chapter, Holland is at pains to establish that Saul the Pharisee was not a Zealot in the technical sense of an insurrectionists against Rome. In point of fact, it makes very little difference whether the pre-Christian Paul was formally a member of any anti-Roman faction. Given the entire atmosphere of first-century Palestine, one stemming from the Maccabean era, he would have fit right into mindset of resistance. Holland’s own problems are compounded by the distinction entailed in the phrase “political zealot” (p. 56). There simply was no hard-and-fast distinction between “religion” and “politics” in the ancient world generally and certainly not in ancient Palestine; the two always went hand-in-hand. Additionally, the citation of Gal 1:13–14, if anything, places Paul squarely in the tradition of Maccabean zeal for the law, in spite of Holland’s simple assertion that such was not the case (p. 57). That “Paul links his esteemed status in Judaism with his persecution of the church” (p. 57) fits hand-in-glove with the Zealot agenda of eliminating any and all opposition to “the traditions of the fathers.” It falls flat to maintain that Paul’s persecution of the church consisted not in killing but in bringing Christians to stand trial. One wonders what would have been the penalty imposed on those who were perceived to have betrayed Israel. If I bring to the fore something submitted earlier:

With the passage of time, particularly given the Syrian and Roman conquests of Palestine, “Judaism” became synonymous with “zeal for the law” and an implacable nationalism that was prepared to deal harshly with even an apparent usurpation of power over the law and the temple. For this reason, Paul’s subsequent struggle against circumcision and the law was not least a “betrayal of Judaism” in the eyes of his Judaistic opponents because of its “ethnic political consequences” (Hengel, Judaism , 1.307–8). [ix]

If I may put it bluntly, Holland’s resistance of such phenomena as these is a denial of the obvious.

Chapter Three endeavors to probe Paul and his theological Identity. In so doing, Holland delves into one of Paul’s theological antecedents, viz., Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. Holland shows how the OT understanding of the role of the servant is thoroughly embedded in the concept of covenant, and thus it should not be confused with a Greco-Roman concept of servant or slave. Holland proceeds from a narrative substructure guided by OT motifs. He demonstrates clearly enough how Paul alludes to Isa 49:8 and 52:11 in 2 Cor 6:1–2, thus making it evident that “Paul saw his own ministry as that of a servant of the new covenant, just as Moses, Isaiah, and the nation of Israel were servants in the old covenant” (p. 68). Furthermore, Paul never saw his sufferings as unique to his apostolic calling; rather, they were part of his life as a Christian, as one who fills up “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body” (Col 1:24).

Holland concludes the chapter with a treatment of Christ’s sufferings and that of Christians. Since the NT church understood itself as the servant of God, as Christ is the servant of God, the early church wanted to ensure that Christ’s vicarious suffering was unique to him. In this regard, Holland maintains that the servant motif challenges Wright’s claim that Paul was a zealot: “We need to ask if Saul saw himself as a zealot in the way that Wright has claimed. Is it possible that a man burning with such anger and hatred could change in a matter of hours and without any theological instruction to help him see how wrong he had been in his previous understanding?” (p. 76). My comeback is that indeed a man burning with such anger and hatred could change in a matter of hours and see how wrong he had been previously, if he was knocked on the ground, blinded and left in the darkness to contemplate his life and beliefs in view of these events and all the other events to which he had been witness. Holland’s reasoning in this regard is tenuous, to say the least, and entirely rooted in presuppositions.

In Chapter Four, Holland challenges the notion that Paul’s Judaism had already been thoroughly Hellenized, engaging with Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (London: SCM, 1974). Holland states that Hengel’s widely accepted proposal should not go unchallenged. He admits that first-century Judaism had been Hellenized but claims that there could still be individuals who resisted the widespread cultural influence. Therefore, he maintains, Paul’s writings come from an exclusively Hebraic perspective. It is conceded that Paul draws on some elements Hellenistic culture: he writes in the Greek language and in keeping with Greco-Roman epistolary structure and current writing style. But, Holland argues, there is a enormous difference between making use of cultural norms of the prevailing culture and using the literature and its presupposition in various disciplines to build his theological models.

Holland goes on to illustrate the implications of his claim, starting with a description of Paul’s “new exodus theology.” For him, this theme is a key substructure for Paul, and it is a theme that is often obscured by references to Greco-Roman rather than Jewish culture. Holland claims that Wright “has failed to see just how pervasive the paradigm is” (p. 103). He goes on to show how a key subtheme in the exodus narrative is the marital theme: the exodus is the occasion where Yahweh is joined covenantally with his people, much like a marriage. Holland then shows how the combination of these two motifs allows for a deeper understanding of the role of the law for the believer. For Holland, the law was a wedding gift given to Israel (p. 131). The role of the Torah was to bring Israel to her bridegroom. In and of itself, this conclusion is sound enough:

This was the antitype of the great exodus type, the fulfillment of the Passover type, the time of Israel’s marriage to Yahweh and the feast when Israel was united with Moses and he became their representative. In this antitype that Paul has followed, the entire remnant community, which included all believing Jews and gentiles, slaves and free, male and female, were united with Christ as he died. This was not only the moment of unity through death but also through marriage for she was being cleansed to become Christ’s bride. (p. 130).

On balance, I would agree with Holland in this assessment. Paul’s actual theological milieu was informed by “classic Judaism,” not Greco-Roman Hellenism. No doubt, this Hellenism had made inroads into first-century Palestine, as witnessed by the fact that the high priestly cast (mainly identified with the Sadducees) was in the “hip pocket” of Rome. The qualification, however, is that such a consideration hardly does any real damage to Wright’s overall model.

Chapter Five endeavors to further support to Holland’s general claims in chapter 4. In essence, What would it look like to read the New Testament being thoroughly convinced that Paul was indeed a “Hebrew of Hebrews” (Phil 3:5)? Holland proceeds to provide a systematic investigation of the Pauline themes or metaphors that seem the most Greco-Roman: military procession imagery (2 Cor 2:14–17), Christian armor imagery (Eph 6:10–20), anthropological tripartite language (1 Thess 5:23–24), and the Greek games (1 Cor 9:24–27). For every supposed reference to Greco-Roman culture, Holland provides counterarguments for potential OT references. Especially in 2 Corinthians, the exodus/pilgrimage imagery makes much more sense in the structure of the letter. In this regard, he correctly cautions against an uncritical acceptance of Greco-Roman antecedents in Paul.

In chapter Six, Holland attempts a broadside against the current use of Second Temple literature in biblical studies. He begins with a reference to Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), drawing on Hays’ seven criteria for recognizing intertextuality between the OT and NT. These seven criteria provide guidelines for determining echoes and allusions of the OT in the NT, with the caution that students should avoid “parallelomania” (Samuel Sandmel). Holland then observes that there are no corresponding criteria for detecting echoes or allusions to Second Temple literature. As it relates to Wright, Holland notes that the presence of one word, or even a string of words, found in both the intertestamental literature and Paul is insufficient to allow Wright to utilize these texts as supporting evidence for his views concerning the teachings of the primitive apostolic church. Holland is clear that some engagement with Second Temple literature is legitimate, but his concern is that Wright and others tend to use it as a “theological Rosetta stone” rather than an occasional cultural resource.

Holland forwards two major considerations to support his case. First, the date, occasion, authorship and overall culture details behind Second Temple documents are quite ambiguous. There is great danger in ascribing similarity between texts that could be proved to be erroneous in the next generation, as per Bultmann’s connection between the NT and Gnosticism. Second, as John Barclay has demonstrated, Second Temple literature is extremely diverse, and any alleged connection between themes needs significant nuance to produce any kind of theological fruit ( Paul and the Gift [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015]). [x] By way of qualification, he does make clear that his problem is not that Second Temple literature is used in biblical studies but rather the way in which it is used. He maintains that this literature is helpful in providing a context for broader cultural issues but contends that the help they offer is limited. The complaint is that Wright does not just glean from Second Temple documents from time to time. Rather, he weaves ideas from extra-biblical literature into the biblical story line.”

Again, legitimate hermeneutical issues are raised. It is true enough that Second Temple literature has to be sifted through and that conclusions must be drawn with care. However, to assert that Wright and others have used these sources as a “theological Rosetta stone” misunderstands the methodology at stake and, once more, constructs a “Docetic Paul” who had very little contact with his own history and current place with the Judaism of this era. Holland’s Paul is simply out of touch with his own world.

Chapter Seven applies the same overall critique to Wright’s Christology. For Holland, Wright’s Christology is wrongfully (mis)informed by 4 Maccabees. Holland rightly points out that the primary festal tradition of the book of 4 Maccabees is Hanukkah, which is rather absent from the Gospels: “If [Hanukkah] is the key to understanding Jesus’ mindset, then it has to be asked why this feast was not chosen by Jesus to illustrate the meaning of his coming death? Instead, he explained his death and its significance right in the centre of the Passover celebration” (p. 241).

Furthermore, continues Holland, Wright’s Christology looks too similar to that of the secular historians who adopt an evolutionary model of Jesus’ self-awareness. In Wright’s own words, “Jesus did not . . . ‘know that he was God’ in the same way that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate an orange an hour ago. His ‘knowledge’ was of a more risky, but perhaps more significant, sort: like knowing that one is loved.” [xi] Upon read this myself some years ago, I was struck with the manner of expression, and certainly I would have phrased it otherwise. Nevertheless, Jesus’ knowledge was limited in certain regards (e.g., Mark 5:31; 13:32), and such considerations should have tempered Holland’s appraisal. Additionally, Holland concedes that Wright is “a committed Trinitarian” (p. 193), which should have taken into account before pronouncing that the latter has adopted an evolutionary model of Jesus’ self-awareness.

In pursuing the connection between Jesus as “firstborn” and “redeemer,” Holland is on solid enough ground. His analysis is supported by the four “hymns” in the NT: Col 1:13–20; Phil 2:6–10; Heb 1:3–6; Rev 1:5–18. Holland’s contention that the Passover contains an atoning element through the connection of “firstborn” and “redeemer” is plausible enough. However, as before, none of this militates against Wright’s essential premises.

Chapter Eight embraces Paul’s doctrine of the atonement. Holland begins with a summary of Wright’s view as well as briefly touching on the work of others, such as Leon Morris. As before Holland is at pains to pin Wright’s position of the atonement to 4 Maccabees. It is fair enough that there are differences between the Gospels and documents such as 4 Maccabees, and that Jesus’ death is represented by the former as an atonement for sin. It is also true that in 2TJ there was no notion that the Messiah would die as a substitute for the sins of Israel. However, Holland has belabored the connection with 4 Maccabees in particular, while glossing over the martyr passages of 1 and 2 Maccabees. That said, it is also true, as Holland contends, there is an atoning aspect to the exodus or Passover. I would agree that there is a clear echo of the original Passover in Rom 3:25. The chapter concludes with a discussion of OT antecedents to the theme of resurrection on the third day.

Chapter Nine centers on the NPP debate and the controversy surrounding Wright. Holland primarily critiques Wright for his covenantal definition of justification, which he summarizes in three parts. First, justification is not about how one was made right with God, but about being declared to be in the right with God because of being in the covenant. Second, God the Judge acquits the guilty not because of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness but because of the believer’s right standing in the covenant. Third, there is an eschatological dimension to justification, when Israel will be declared to be God’s people before all the nations of the earth. To sum up, Wright views justification as an ecclesiological, not a soteriological, doctrine; it is about recognizing who is acceptable within the covenant, not about how to get into the covenant.

Holland lodges three major critiques of Wright’s view of justification. First, he has either misunderstood or misrepresented the Reformers’ arguments. Second, Holland claims that Wright has suggested a false dichotomy between Paul’s focus on the corporate body of Christ and individual benefits given to the believer. Wright frequently complains that Pauline scholars are too prone to focus on the individual, where Paul focused on the collective. For Wright, the corporate nature of Paul’s theology eliminates the possibility of a soteriologically focused justification. In contrast, Holland points out that Wright sometimes misses some elements of Paul’s corporate focus. Yet, for Holland, none of this focus eliminates individual blessings of salvation. Third, Holland believes that Wright has placed far too much emphasis on 4QMMT in his understanding of justification. He argues that Wright has committed a major transgression of hermeneutic practice by allowing the phrases common to both 4QMMT and Galatians to shape Wright’s understanding of justification.

In principle, one may agree with Holland that Second Temple sources are to be employed with discretion. But in the case of 4QMMT, Paul’s famous phrase “works of the law” is enlightened considerably by this document from the Scrolls. Holland’s denial of its significance betrays a myopic reading of NT texts, as though they could isolated from the milieu of 2TJ. Moreover, and perhaps not surprisingly, Holland has ignored Dunn’s treatment of 4QMMT in The New Perspective on Paul (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 339–45.

Thereafter, Holland turns to his own positive construction of Paul’s doctrine of justification. In so doing, he proposes nine meanings for the term “justify:” (1) the acquittal of sin; (2) the imputation of righteousness; (3) the declaration that a person is in the covenant; (4) the creation of a covenant; (5) justification ratification; (6) the deliverance and justification of Israel; (7) the justification of the Gentiles; (8) the justification of God; and (9) the justification of the divine marriage.

All of this is fair enough—apart from imputation, which, of course, is a mainstay of Puritan/Reformed theology. Whether such a category is actually present in the Hebrew Bible or the NT is certainly open to challenge. I have addressed the issue elsewhere and have drawn contrary conclusions. [xii] A review of this sort can hardly engage the debate in any detail. However, it should be pointed out that the Heidelberg Catechism purposely took issue with the Westminster Confession on the matter of imputation. We are led to ask, Which one is Reformed: Heidelberg or Westminster? The answer, I should think, is that the category “Reformed” is broad enough to allow for divergence of conviction. I might add that Wesley rejected imputation because of its cold and impersonal nature. With that I would concur.

Holland devotes the next two chapters endeavoring to showcase his methodology, in which he takes conceptual approach. He examines not only at texts that include the word “justification” but also at texts that include related themes. Once again, one may agree with a great deal of the presentation, but, at the same time, there is hardly anything in it devastating to Wright.

The conclusion of the book returns to Wright’s methodology and, among other things, weighs the invective that Wright’s historical realism is nothing other than a rewritten history in which Jesus has been deeply influenced by the Maccabean exploits and claims, which, Holland maintains, is not critical realism but historical surrender. Moreover, Wright’s version of critical realism is only possible by closing one’s mind to the issues that have been raised in his book. Those who follow Wright’s methodology, without having his confessional underpinning, will be in danger of even more fanciful exegesis than that which he has followed, one which will lead them away from their intended theological home. In leveling these criticisms, Holland simply resorts to sniping from an entrenched position. The tone is aggressive and the comebacks to Wright stem from a set of presuppositions that, to some of us at least, are exegetically unfounded.

[i] A very similar volume appeared the same year as Holland’s: Robert J. Cara, Cracking the Foundation of The New Perspective on Paul: Covenantal Nomism Versus Reformed Theology (Reformed, Exegetical and Doctrinal Studies; London: Mentor [Christian Focus Publications], 2017. I have reviewed Cara at http://www.thepaulpage.com . Many of the criticisms of Cara pertain to Holland as well.

[ii] Among many, see Werner Geog Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970).

[iii] Don Garlington, An Exposition of Galatians: A Reading From the New Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 9.

[iv] Cf. my ‘ The Obedience of Faith’: A Pauline Phrase in Historical Context (WUNT 2/38; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991) [rep. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009]), 46–47, 112–14, 119–20, 145–46, 248–49. Holland, for some reason, ignores Martin Hengel, The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 A.D. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), and only twice does he even mention Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (London: SCM, 1974).

[v] See my Obedience of Faith , 111–14. Holland does not even interact with basic sources like W. F. Farmer, IDB 4.936–39, let alone Hengel, Zealots .

[vi] See, among many, Hengel, Zealots ; Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); Richard A. Horsley and John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985); Andrea M. Berlin and J. Andrew Overman, eds., The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology (London: Routledge, 2002).

[vii] Jacob Neusner , From Politics to Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973). Both volumes are among the numerous omissions in Holland’s book. Though noted in the index, Holland could have devoted at least some attention to Stephen Anthony Cummins, Paul and the Crucified Christ in Antioch: Maccabean Martyrdom and Galatians 1 and 2 (SNTSMS 114; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[viii] Martin Hengel, The Pre-Christian Paul (London: SCM, 1991), 71. Relevant also are Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Paul Between Damascus and Antioch: The Unknown Years (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1997).

[ix] Garlington, Galatians , 81. See the entire discussion of pp. 79–85.

[x] I have reviewed Barclay in Bulletin for Biblical Research 26 (2016): 606–8.

[xi] Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 653.

[xii] Garlington, Studies in the New Perspective on Paul: Essays and Reviews (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 137-227.

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What Is Truth? Essay Example

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The ideal of truth is relevant to the individual. Truth is based on a number of factors that are usually derived from absolute knowledge. However, when finding the relationship between knowledge and truth, one questions their own competence and confidence in establishing what is actually true. There are several debates among philosophers and research that try to derive the nature of truth. Defining the nature of truth is routed in technical analysis, a morass of arcane jargon, subtle distinctions from competing theories, and precise definition. Rene Desecrates famously wrote, “I am therefore I exist.” In stating this he holds that only truth that is certain is what the individuals own cognition of their existence. The principle question among the long time debate is to answer, what is truth? This questions have plagued the minds of philosophers since the time of Plato and Socrates. It has been a never ending debate trying to draw the relationship of knowledge, truth, and understanding what is relevant to their own assessment. From the readings of Martin Luther, Descartes, and others, this paper will explore the philosophical questions of knowledge and truth. Drawing on these reasons to come to a consensus on what can be the individual be assured of what they believe is the absolute truth, and what prevents individuals from the truth.

The notion of truth is developed through the ideas, belief, and opinion of what is and what is not. Truth is an object of relativism of an individual’s ideas, the agreement and disagreement of reality. In understanding truth, there are three principal interpretations that are used, truth as absolute, truth as relative, and truth as an unattainable reality. According to definition, absolute truth is, “is defined as inflexible reality: fixed, invariable, unalterable facts.” (All About Philosophy, n.d) Essentially it is a truth understood universally that cannot be altered. Plato was a staunch believer in this interpretation, as the truth found on earth was a shadow of the truth that existed within the universe. This is the hardest interpretation of truth because there can be no indefinite argument with those that try to negate the existence of absolute truth. In arguing against the interpretation, the arguer themselves tries to search for validation in their statement that absolute truth doesn’t exist. In a matter of contradiction in understanding what is truth is to establish that truth exists. In a better interpretation seeing the truth as relative is explaining that facts and realities vary dependent on their circumstances.

Relativism is in the matter of where no objectivity exists and is subjective which the validity of truth doesn’t exist. According to philosophy, “Relativism is not a single doctrine but a family of views whose common theme is that some central aspect of experience, thought, evaluation, or even reality is somehow relative to something else.” (Swoyer, 2014) The last interpretation of truth is that truth is an unattainable reality where no truth exists. Truth is a universal fact in which corresponds with evidence, reality, and experience. Since an individual’s reality and experience constantly change, it is impossible to reach an absolute truth. This interpretation is relative to one’s own knowledge because it is present in their person’s mind. Using this interpretation many philosophers have carved out several theories of truth.

The pragmatic approach to defining truth is by seeing that truth is the objects and ideas that the individual can validate, assimilate, verify, and corroborate. In understanding what is not true it is essentially what the individual cannot. In establishing the absolute truth, it is what happens and becomes true events that are verified through a process of verification.  In the view of this paper, is that truth is dependent on the individual’s fact and reality, as Aristotle stated, “to say of what is that is it not, or what is not that is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and what is not that it is not, is true.” As confusing as the statement may be to some, the concept of truth is based on a person’s confidence in their own reality as the basis of truth. Not only is the general consensus now, but in also philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas in the 9 th century in which, truth is the equation of things and intellect, more importantly the basis of truth as true is up to the individuals’ knowledge.

In Rene Descartes search for truth, he begins with the method of doubt. Written Descartes, Meditation , “I seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive, very clearly and distinctly is true.” (Descartes, 7.35) Descartes add to the questions of what is truth is by the confidence and certainty in knowing that what is true is from the natural experiences and own personal truths. The individuals’ definition of truth is what the person understands in life through logic and reason. The individual establishes their idea of reality from their senses, what they see, and true perceptions.  Descartes wrote in his, Letter to Mersenne , any doubts about truth is perpetuated by the notion that no one can be ignorant of truth because it symbolizes the conformity of thought with its object. (Smith, 2014) Drawing from Descartes works we will answer what prevents us from the truth.

In his Method of Doubt from his First Meditation , his purpose was to negate skepticism by doubting the truth of everything including what we know in our minds. The reasons in which people doubt their truth is based on people second guessing their own subsequent beliefs. People claim to know the truth beyond their own realms of justification. People senses and experiences that have been taught are largely provided from prejudices past down. (Descartes, 1639) People are disappointed that what they believe to be true is often not. Descartes stated, “Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.” (Descartes, 1639)  From these understandings people then began to doubt what they know to be true because they have reasonable doubt.

In order for a person to understand truth, they must first doubt all things around them in a hypothetical doubt, in order to provide a pretense of what we know is the truth and what we cannot know. By determining our own knowledge of what is true, such as the snow is white, because we know there is no other color in existence, we can have a foundation of unshakeable truths.  While the senses can sometimes present falsehood, it is subjective to suggest that all senses are wrong. In determining using one’s experience to determine truth, it is important to note that everyone’s experience is not the same. The way one person sees an event can be different from someone that sees the same event. Take for example the group of five blind men that felt the tusk of an elephant. One men said it was like a snake, while another suggested that was the neck of a giraffe. Who is to tell who is correct and not? From their own experiences, knowledge, and senses what they believe is to be true. By limiting knowledge on what we know is absolute certain is limiting one’s own perception of reality. This is how doubt is raised, and takes away from the confidence of the individuals’ own knowledge of the truth.

Martin Luther takes on the quest for truth through his thesis, which he wrote to the church. In his appendage for reformation of the Catholic Church, he questioned the authority of the Pope, and what their interpretation of the Bible. In his belief that the word of God is the truth, his stance is that followers of the religion must have faith. In believing what is true and what is not, Luther’s is bound by his idea of faith which correspond with God is the absolute truth.  His justification of God being true is based on the works of God, but more importantly the understanding of truth is by faith alone. His unshakeable foundation of what he believes to be true is routed in his on senses, ideas, and experiences derived from his faith.  Just like knowing what is true and not, Descartes share that while we cannot prove that God doesn’t exist, we can prove that he doesn’t exist. While we can see the things around us does exist, if that has indubitable truth in believing that something exists, it is impossible to prove it isn’t true.

From drawing on the works on how a person can assure that they know is true is using Descartes Method of Doubt to provide a foundation in which what we know is true, and what we know is not. Luther bases his justifications of truth on faith and knowledge, while drawing from logic and reasoning to know what is true. A person is able to draw from their own cognitive knowledge in determining what is true. While knowledge all things is limited, one cannot be limited to suggesting to know the truth of things beyond our resonance. Until proven otherwise, what we say is the truth and everything else is subjective. In the relationship between truth and knowledge, Plato and Charles Peirce had their own separate perceptions. Plato believed that truth is derived from a person’s knowledge, while Pierce believed absolute knowledge to determine absolute truth can never be obtained. Plato’s belief of knowledge and the truth is more correct in providing reasoning that knowledge is based on past experiences, where universal knowledge is a factor in determining truth.

The definition of truth and search for knowledge will continue to be an ongoing debate in which many great philosophers in past, present, and the future will offer philosophies to help guide the debate. While truth will continue to be a matter of one’s own perception, in order to assure that what people believe is the truth is to base their knowledge on their own perceptions.  Based what they know on their own absolute truth in their senses, knowledge, ideas, and beliefs that help form their own realities. Truth is relative to only that individual, as people will experience events differently from other individuals. Descartes said it best that what he knows to be true is based on his own existence. Since he knows that he exists, he knows that the reality around him exists, therefore, his own perception of what is true.

Absolute Truth. (n.d). All About Philosophy . Retrieved from http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/absolute-truth.htm

Bennett, Jonathan. (1990). Truth and Stability. Canadian Journal of Philosophy . Vo. 16. Pg. 75-108. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/jfb/trustab.pdf

Descartes, Rene. (1639). Meditations on First Philosophy . Marxists. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/descartes/1639/meditations.htm

James, William. (1909). The Meaning of Truth . Authorama. Retrieved from http://www.authorama.com/meaning-of-truth-1.html

Luther, Martin. (1520). The Freedom of a Christian . Lutheran Online. Retrieved from https://www.lutheransonline.com/lo/894/FSLO-1328308894-111894.pdf

Smith, Kurt. (2014). Descartes’ Life and Works.   The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/descartes-works

Swoyer, Chris. (2014). Relativism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/relativism

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Discovering Faith: The Search for Truth and Certainty Essay (Article Review)

In The Search For Truth And Certainty , D. Taylor discusses different ways to find the truth for both believers and nonbelievers. The author starts his article with “truthseekers” using reason and faith as tools to find the truth. As opposed to both extremes, Fundamentalist Protestantism and Christian apologetic, Taylor argues that it is wrong to ridicule reason for mere faith and it is not healthy to believe that there is an unbiased and right way for using reason to defend our beliefs. In order to have a healthy attitude for reason, one must understand its limitation since we live in a world where there are unexplainable forces acting. In the article, Taylor also suggests as “truthseekers” we must embrace doubt in order to discover faith. In other words, it is wrong to view truth and certainty as equal meaning. Lastly, he points our gullibility towards the idea of absolute because humans with restrictions cannot possibly grasp the idea of infinity just to feel secure. Instead of leaning on certainty and absolutes, we must rethink the meaning which can lead us to the right way.

Overall, I have enjoyed reading this article because it has helped me to solve religious issues. I have grown up with these issues in an atmosphere where I have no choice but to believe them without doubting. I have agreed with his argument that doubting can grow help in faith. Proper attitude with reasoning can find the right way towards grasping the truth. I believe without asking the question “why?” to find the meaning, we will lose our identity as “truthseekers.” It is easier to understand his argument because the author uses two stories that support his claims. These stories which deal with real people help me to apply the reading to my life.

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The Search for Truth

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Science and the Search for Truth

Critical Rationalism and the Methodology of Science

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• Hans Albert 2  

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science ((BSPS,volume 58))

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I should perhaps begin by noting my fundamental agreement with the general thrust of the position paper, although I would have some bones to chew with various details. As I see it, critical rationalism exhibits three basic characteristics which are intimately connected with one another: a consistent fallibilism, a methodical rationalism and a critical realism. Each of these components plays a role in the solution of the problems we are concerned with. I should also like to emphasize that this philosophical conception has consequences that are of importance for problems of all kinds, not merely for problems pertaining to knowledge.

I am very grateful to Claude Evans for his help with the translation.

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Cf. the position paper, p. 3ff above. This fusion is at work in Aristotle: cf. von Fritz, Kurt, ‘Die ARXAI in der griechischen Mathematik’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte I, 21ff. (1955), for a discussion of the Aristotelian definition of knowledge. The fusion is accentuated by Descartes, and is still at work in various strands of twentieth century philosophy, e.g. the work of Hugo Dingier.

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For a detailed discussion, see my Traktat über kritische Vernunft , third edition, Mohr, Tübingen, 1975.

Following Popper, it has been above all William Warren Bartley who has done great service in demonstrating in detail the possibility of separating the idea of rational criticism from the idea of absolute justification. See Bartley, W. W., The Retreat to Commitment , Augustus Kelley, New York, 1962, p. 134ff.

Cf. Lakatos, I., ‘Infinite Regress and Foundations of Mathematics’, Suppl. Vol. Aristotelian Society XXXVI , 155ff. (1962).

Cf. Barth, E. M., Evaluaties , Vam Gorcum, Assen, 1972, pp. 5–18.

Cf. e.g. Külpe, O., Einleitung in die Philosophie , 10th edition, S. Hirzel, Leipzig, 1921, p. 183ff. and passim; for a comparative analysis and criticism of other views cf. Külpe, O., Die Realisierung. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Realwissenschaften , 1st vol., S. Hirzel, Leipzig, 1912, 2nd vol., 1920, 3rd vol. 1923. Külpe elaborated a critical realism in the Kantian tradition, taking up the transcendental question in a realistic interpretation. In a similar manner, Popper began with a criticism and revision of Kantianism. cf. his book written in the early thirties. Popper, K., Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie , Mohr, Tübingen, 1976. Popper’s first criticism of Kant and his interpretation of the transcendental viewpoint is to be found in this work. This reference may be of particular interest to those who believe that critical rationalism has no connection to this kind of problem, e.g. Wellmer and other members of the Frankfurt School.

For a defence of the realism of common sense and of science, cf. Popper, K., Objective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach , Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972, p. 32 and passim, cf. also Agassi, J., ‘Sensationalism’, in J. Agassi, Science in Flux , D. Reidel Publ. Co., Dordrecht, Holland, 1975, p. 92ff.

Cf. Külpe, O., Einleitung in die Philosophie , 10th ed., S. Hirzel, Leipzig, 1921, p. 191f., where critical realism is presented as the dominating philosophical view from the Presocratics to the 18th century.

During a walk during the Kronberg Conference, the proceedings of which are presumably in this volume, Wolfgang Stegmüller, whose work on the problem of testing scientific propositions is well known, tried to convince me that the idea of truth has its proper place in theology rather than the philosophy of science, and this in spite of his interest in problems of this kind prior to his conversion to a sneedified Kuhnian view, cf. note 13 below.

Bühler, K., Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache , 1934, 2nd ed., Gustav Fischer, Stuttgart, 1965; and even before: Bühler, K., Die Krise der Psychologie, 1927 , 3rd ed., Gustav Fischer, Stuttgart, 1965, where Bühler analyses — among other things — problems pertaining to meaning and understanding. As far as I know, these important investigations have not been taken into account by German hermeneutic philosophy at all. Philosophers of this stripe tend to prefer the pretentious and foggy tales of Martin Heidegger, which now seems to be finding an eager audience even in the United States, in spite of the warnings of competent scholars such as Walter Kaufmann. cf. Kaufmann, W., ‘Heidegger’s Castle’ and ‘German Thought After World War II’, in W. Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism , Doubleday, Garden City, 1960, Anchor Book.

Cf. Bühler, K., Die Krise der Psychologie , op. cit., p. 49: “Der Begriff und die Kriterien der Wahrheit oder Richtigkeit sind wesensgesetzlich aus der Darstellungsfunktion zu entnehmen, und umgekehrt bestimmt das Ideal der zutreffenden und richtigen Darstellung weitgehend die Produktion sprachlicher Gebilde bis in die Wortwahl und Struktur der Sätze hinein”.

Cf. above all Kraft, V., Erkenntnislehre , Springer, Wien, 1960, p. 181f., where the difference between these two questions is clearly laid out. This book also contains a clear analysis of other aspects of the problem of knowledge and truth.

Tarski is correct when he claims that the concept of truth doesn’t differ from some other concepts in logic, mathematics, theoretical physics and other disciplines in this respect. Cf. Tarski, A., ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics’, Philosophy and Phenomenalogical Research 4, (1944). It is interesting to note that many modern critics of the idea of truth act just like operationalists when it comes to epistemological and semantical concepts, even if they have long since understood that this conception is no longer defensible with regard to science. This remark refers to certain views expressed during the Kronberg Conference. I do not know if they will be defended in the pages of this volume.

The views of Hugo Dingier might be characterized in this manner. cf. Dingler, H., Die Ergreifung des Wirklichen , 1955, Chapter I till IV, with an introduction of K. Lorenz and J. Mittelstraß, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1969. Cf. also my criticism in the book mentioned in note 2 above. Karl Popper dealt with Dingier’s views as early as 1935 in his Logik der Forschung , comparing them to his own strongly opposed views. Cf. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery , Hutchinson, London, 1959, p. 78ff. Something like Dingler’s ‘method of exhaustion’ has been resuscitated in Kuhn’s ‘normal science’. On the contemporary scene in Germany, the school of Paul Lorenzen explicitly goes back to Dingler’s views, although some of its members have recently moved away from the priority which Dingier assigned to the idea of certainty. Cf. Janich, P., Kambartel, F., and Mittelstraß, J., Wissenschaftstheorie als Wissenschaftskritik , Aspekte Verlag, Frankfurt, 1974. For a reply to their criticisms of critical rationalism — which are maintained in spite of their recent movement — cf. my postscript to the book mentioned in note 2, p. 190ff.

Cf. Bertrand Russell’s criticism of Dewey’s conception of ‘warranted assertability’ in B. Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth , Allen and Unwin, London, 1940, p. 318ff. Cf. also Kraft, V., Erkenntnislehre , op. cit. p. 175f.

This doctrine has been elaborated by Jürgen Habermas and Karl Otto Apel, cf. Habermas, J., ‘Erkenntnis und Interesse’ 1965, in J. Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1968, and Apel, K. O., ‘Szientistik, Hermeneutik, Ideologiekritik. Entwurf einer Wissenschaftslehre in erkenntnisanthropologischer Absicht’, in K. O. Apel, Transformation der Philosophie , Vol. II, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1973, p. 96ff. and other articles in this and the first volume of this work; for a criticism cf. Albert, H., Transzendentale Träumereien , Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg, 1975.

But see Tarski, op. cit., who prefers this answer. At any rate, the fact that one may have to put up with contradictions for the time being does not make them any less undesirable, but I cannot go into this question here.

Külpe correctly remarks that this fact is essential for the development from naive to critical realism; cf. his above metioned book: Einleitung in die Philosophie , op. cit., p. 192f.

Cf. Elkana, Y., ‘Boltzmann’s Scientific Research Programme and its Alternatives’, in Y. Elkana (ed.), The Interaction between Science and Philosophy , Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, 1974, p. 243ff., where he points at the role of different ‘images of science’.

Cf. Popper, K., Objective Knowledge , op. cit., p. 191ff.

In the tradition of critical realism, the reinterpretation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy mentioned above hints at this direction. Cf. Külpe, O., ‘Festrede zur Kantfeier der Würzburger Universität 1904’, in Kopper/Malter (eds.), Immanuel Kant zu ehren , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1974, p. 185f.: “Es verhält sich demnach die Erkenntnistheorie zu dem wirklichen Forschen und Arbeiten in den Wissenschaften ähnlich wie die Theorie des Mikroskops zur Anwendung desselben. Unser Erkenntnisvermögen gleicht einem Instrument, desser Leistungsfähigkeit und Tragweite, dessen Grenzen und Fehler main einigermaßen muß beurteilen können, wenn man sich nicht der Gefahr einer Täuschung aussetzen will…. Wenn wir die Theorie eines Instruments entwickeln wollen, so geschieht das an Hand seines Baus und seiner Leistungen. Seine Elemente und deren Zusammensetzung werden betrachtet und auf ihre Gesetze zurückgeführt. Genau so verfährt Kant bei der Ausbildung seiner Erkenntnistheorie…”. There is, of course, no question but that Kant’s own transcendental approach is still a part of the tradition of classical rationalism in that he attempted to provide a solution of the problem of justification in the classical sense of finding a foundation. But if one dispenses with the claim to justification , then there is the possibility of viewing the approach as an attempt to explain scientific knowledge by means of a hypothetical recourse to the structure of our cognitive faculty.

The critical remarks of Paul Feyerabend usually flow into comments about such questions. But also in the work of Max Weber we find analyses of this kind in the context of philosophy of science, cf. especially: Weber, M., Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre , 2nd ed., Mohr, Tübingen, 1951, p. 566ff.

Cf. my article: ‘Hermeneutik und Realwissenschaft’, in H. Albert, Plädoyer für kritischen Rationalismus , 4th ed., Piper, München, 1975.

This gives me the welcome opportunity to make a short remark about one aspect of Imre Lakatos’ methodology. I agree with Alan Musgrave (cf. his ‘Falsification and its Critics’, in P Suppes et al. (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science IV , North Holland Publ. Co., Amsterdam, 1973, p. 393ff.) that Lakatos’ concessions to the Kuhnian critique go a bit too far. I see absolutely no reason to immunize the core of a research program against criticism, and I see even less reason for turning this immunization into a triviality by means of the ‘non-statement view’. The problem of anomalies can be dealt with without recourse to such a strategy. Should someone like ‘hard cores’ for one reason or apother, he can certainly produce them, but he will have great difficulty in persuading other people that it is unreasonable for them to use their power of imagination for the purpose of improving upon this arbitrary hard core.

Cf. notes 6 and 23.

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Albert, H. (1978). Science and the Search for Truth. In: Radnitzky, G., Andersson, G. (eds) Progress and Rationality in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9866-7_9

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2 Truth, Justice, and Justification

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Part 1 unpacks the disagreement over the claim that the trial is a search for the truth. Part 2 examines that claim from an external standpoint. There is a contingent connection, to which terms like ‘accuracy’ and ‘reliability’ refer, between the outcome of fact-finding and truth. Truth is needed so that justice (conceived as ‘rectitude of decision’) can be done. Part 3 offers a different analysis from the internal standpoint. Here the focus is on the deliberative process. The central issues are questions of justification. Justification has two inter-dependent aspects: the epistemic and the ethical. The fact-finder has to consider, on the evidence, what to believe about the facts in dispute. She must also be concerned about the morality of the process by which she reaches her verdict. Deliberation must be conducted with justice, conceived as emphatic care for the party who is the target of an adverse finding.

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Philosophy and the search for truth

2013, Philosophia 41 (2013), 1079-1094.

Philosophy, as it is understood and practiced in the West, is and has been generally considered to be the search for truth. But even if philosophy is the search for truth, it does not automatically follow that those who are identified as ‘philosophers’ are themselves actually engaged in that search. And indeed, in this paper I argue that many philosophers have in fact not been genuinely engaged in the search for truth (in other words, many philosophers have not been doing philosophy) and as such much of what passes for philosophy is in fact not really philosophy at all.

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Research in Phenomenology

James Risser

Josko Zanic

This paper claims that what philosophy primarily does is interpret our notions, offer ways of understanding these notions that are not scientific in nature but not contrary to science either. The paper draws a distinction between conceptual analysis, a highly constrained enterprise that is supposed to bring to light what was in the concept all along, and the interpretation of notions, a creative enterprise that offers ways of understanding notions that were not already prefigured by the content of these notions-philosophy consists in the latter, not the former. It explains how these interpretations are justified and what the difference is between better and worse interpretations. The remainder of the paper is organized around three headings: philosophy and science, philosophy and language, and philosophy and progress. It claims that in philosophy there is no real progress, but that philosophy does move forward because the notions at issue are endlessly interpretable.

Philosopy and True Knowledge

Joseph Basaran

This paper will define philosophy in light of the definitions provided by academic sources and analyze major areas of study of philosophy. Furthermore, I will discuss Russell and Wittgenstein's argument that ethics is unnecessary aspect of philosophy. I argue that philosophy requires a neutral mind to find the true knowledge. A mind contaminated with ideological bias will mislead others by producing false knowledge. According to the University of Florida's Department of Philosophy, the term philosophy means love of wisdom. It is about becoming a truth seeker in order to understand the meaning of life, including purpose of existence also known as ontology. People who study philosophy are called philosophers. However, I argue that every human being comes to this world as a natural born philosopher thanks to the connection between the mind and the soul. Philosophers are perpetually engaged in asking, critically thinking, analyzing and arguing for ontological questions. Academic philosophy is traditionally divided into the following four major areas of study; Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics and Logic. Metaphysics involves with the study of the nature of reality of what exists in the world, what it is like, and how it came into existence. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; "It is not easy to say what metaphysics is. Ancient and Medieval philosophers might have said that metaphysics was, like chemistry or astrology, to be defined by its subject-matter: metaphysics was the "science" that studied "being as such" or "the first causes of things" or "things that do not change". It is no longer possible to define metaphysics that way, for two reasons. First, a philosopher who denied the existence of those things that had once been seen as constituting the subject-matter of metaphysics first causes or unchanging things would now be considered to be making thereby a metaphysical assertion. Second, there are many philosophical problems that are now considered to be metaphysical problems (or at least partly metaphysical problems) that are in no way related to first causes or unchanging things the problem of free will, for example, or the problem of the mental and the physical" For instance, philosophers who study metaphysics struggle with whether God exist or not, the essence of the truth, the nature of human being, the nature of the world, the nature of the mind and the soul, and the relationship between cause and effect. It has always been the curiosity to philosophers whether space and time are constructed as one. However, for some, the concept of time exists in theory only but not in reality because whichever direction we face, we are in the same moment except the orbital momentums. This is because each planet and star circulates in

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Why Philosophy?

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In addition to the long-standing divide between so-called 'analytic' and so-called 'continental' philosophy, philosophy is challenged in the political realm and concerns about public spending for philosophy increase. This is matched with a growing effort to popularize philosophy, bringing it into the public sphere. The effort to secure support for philosophy highlights the ambiguity of philosophical demarcation tactics, especially in a post-truth era which tends to underline science and technology education contra philosophy. But as with a concern for the history of science, philosophy's past may yet prove useful in the future. Looking at both hermeneutics and history, inviting more than the usual cast of favorite authors into our intellectual network, it may be possible to bring philosophy into more global and pluralist expressions.

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An exploration of philosophy, its subject-matter (and development of new objects of study and investigation or philosophizing, for example experimental ‘philosophy’, inter-disciplinary work such as in the discourse of cognitive research and philosophy of everything, i e the arts, sport, religion, sex, love, politics, etc), its methods and confines, both internal and external linits, eg cognitive biases, fallacies, -isms, one-dimensionality, uni-levelled, etc.

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Kate Middleton Won't Return to Royal Duties for 'Many Years,' Friends 'Lost Contact' with Her?

The princess of wales had made no public appearances after announcing her cancer diagnosis in march 2024., nick hardinges, published may 8, 2024.

About this rating

On May 6, 2024, an X user disputed reports  that Kate Middleton would return to royal duties in the following months and claimed her comeback could take "many years." The user also said close friends of the Princess of Wales had admitted they were no longer in touch with her.

The user's post read: "BREAKING!! Despite numerous reports of Kate returning to royal duties within the next few months, sources close to her say that her come back could take 'many years'. Close friends of Kate admit they have 'lost contact' with her. #WhereIsKate #WhereIsKateMiddleton #KateMiddleton"

Similar posts later appeared elsewhere on X  and in numerous iterations on Facebook , where one user wrote: "#NotSorry but if there is truth in this and #TimeWillTell as it always does, then something with this whole thing is WAY OFF from being normal!!!!!!"

Together, the posts had amassed more than 970,000 interactions at the time of this writing.

However, Snopes found no examples of any reputable news outlets reporting the same claims, which appeared to originate from the X user, and no relevant announcements from the Royal Family, which is why we have rated this claim "Unfounded."

Searching the Royal Family's website  and Google , we found no evidence of anyone revealing Kate's return would take "many years." There was also no proof  she had "lost contact" with friends. No reputable news publications substantiated the claims — which, if true, would be eminently newsworthy.

Snopes contacted the X user and Buckingham Palace for comment on the rumor and will update this article if, or when, we receive responses.

On Jan. 17, 2024, Buckingham Palace announced the princess was  admitted to a hospital the day before for planned abdominal surgery, and that she was "unlikely to return to public duties until after Easter." However, on March 22, Kensington Palace released a video of Kate announcing she was being treated for cancer.

After releasing the footage, multiple British media outlets, including Sky News , ITV  and The Independent , reported a statement from Kensington Palace, which read:

The princess will return to official duties when she is cleared to do so by her medical team. She is in good spirits and is focused on making a full recovery.

Snopes also asked Buckingham Palace whether this was the latest update on Kate's health and will update this article if, or when, we receive a response.

Similar unsubstantiated rumors appeared on social media about King Charles III in  March and May , where rumors spread that the British monarch had been given two years to live and, respectively, his funeral plans had been updated, as he was "very unwell."

'A statement from Kensington Palace'.  Royal.UK, 17 Jan. 2024 . https://www.royal.uk/news-and-activity/2024-01-17/a-statement-from-kensington-palace. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Instagram . https://www.instagram.com/p/C402JKPtLVB/?hl=en. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Kate Middleton Catherine OR Princess OR of OR Wales OR Return OR Comeback 'Many Years' - Google Search . https://www.google.com/search?as_q=+kate+middleton&as_epq=%22many+years%22&as_oq=catherine+princess+of+wales+return+comeback&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&as_filetype=&tbs=&gws_rd=ssl. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Kate Middleton Friends Catherine OR Princess OR of OR Wales 'Lost Contact' - Google Search . https://www.google.com/search?as_q=+kate+middleton+friends&as_epq=%22lost+contact%22&as_oq=catherine+princess+of+wales&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&as_filetype=&tbs=&gws_rd=ssl. Accessed 8 May 2024.

'Princess of Wales Cancer Treatment: When Will Kate Return to the Public Eye?' Sky News , https://news.sky.com/story/princess-of-wales-cancer-treatment-when-will-kate-return-to-the-public-eye-13100363. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Royal.UK . https://www.royal.uk/news. Accessed 8 May 2024.

'When will we see the Princess of Wales in public again?'  ITV.com , 23 Mar. 2024. https://www.itv.com/news/2024-03-23/when-will-we-see-the-princess-of-wales-in-public-again. Accessed 8 May 2024.

William, Helen. 'When Will We See Kate in Public Again?' The Independent , 22 Mar. 2024. www.independent.co.uk , https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/prince-of-wales-kensington-palace-prince-wales-princess-of-wales-b2517284.html.

By Nick Hardinges

Nick Hardinges is a London-based reporter who previously worked as a fact-checker at Reuters.

Article Tags

Sophia Bush comes out as queer, confirms relationship with Ashlyn Harris

Actor Sophia Bush came out as queer in an emotional essay in Glamour and confirmed she’s in a relationship with retired U.S. Women’s National Team soccer player Ashlyn Harris. 

“I sort of hate the notion of having to come out in 2024,” Bush wrote in a cover story for the fashion magazine published Thursday. “But I’m deeply aware that we are having this conversation in a year when we’re seeing the most aggressive attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in modern history.” 

Bush noted that there were more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed in state legislatures last year and said this motivated her to “give the act of coming out the respect and honor it deserves.” 

“I’ve experienced so much safety, respect, and love in the queer community, as an ally all of my life, that, as I came into myself, I already felt it was my home,” she wrote. “I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum. Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer . I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.”

The “One Tree Hill” star filed for divorce from entrepreneur Grant Hughes in August. People magazine first reported in October that Bush and Harris were dating, but neither confirmed nor commented on the report. The pair later attended an Oscar’s viewing party together in March . 

In the essay, Bush addressed online rumors that her relationship with Harris began before Harris had officially divorced from fellow soccer star Ali Krieger, in September. 

“Everyone that matters to me knows what’s true and what isn’t,” Bush wrote. “But even still there’s a part of me that’s a ferocious defender, who wants to correct the record piece by piece. But my better self, with her earned patience, has to sit back and ask, What’s the f------- point? For who? For internet trolls? No, thank you. I’ll spend my precious time doing things I love instead.”

Bush said that after news about her and Harris became public, her mom told her that a friend called and said, “Well, this can’t be true. I mean, your daughter isn’t gay .” 

“My mom felt that it was obvious, from the way her friend emphasized the word, that she meant it judgmentally,” Bush wrote. “And you know what my mom said? ‘Oh honey, I think she’s pretty gay. And she’s happy .’”

Bush wrote that she felt like she was wearing a weighted vest that she could finally put down. 

“I finally feel like I can breathe,” Bush wrote. “I turned 41 last summer, amid all of this, and I heard the words I was saying to my best friend as they came out of my mouth. ‘I feel like this is my first birthday,’ I told her. This year was my very first birthday.”

For more from NBC Out, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Jo Yurcaba is a reporter for NBC Out.

Did Taylor Swift go to 2024 Met Gala? Here's the truth

Find out if taylor swift will be attending the 2024 met gala on may 6 with her boyfriend travis kelce. this year's party theme centers around the new "sleeping beauties: reawakening fashion" exhibit., by gabrielle chung | e • published may 6, 2024 • updated on may 6, 2024 at 9:29 pm.

You'll have to wait longer than a fortnight for Taylor Swift's  Met Gala  return.

The "Cruel Summer" singer skipped this year's event in New York City to prepare for the European leg of her  sold-out Eras Tour , E! News confirms.

The fundraiser—which is themed around the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion" exhibit, with an  official "Garden of Time" dress code —took place on May 6, just three days before Taylor is scheduled to hit the stage at the Paris La Défense Arena in France. 

As for her boyfriend Travis Kelce? He appeared to sit it out as well, with  TMZ  reporting last week that the Kansas City Chiefs tight end has RSVP'd "no" on his invitation to the 2024 bash, co-chaired by Zendaya, Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Chris Hemsworth.  See all the stars who  did  step out on the red carpet here —including Swift's pals Gigi Hadid, Cara Delevingne, Ed Sheeran and Nicki Minaj.

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Still, Swift is very familiar with the Met Gala. After all, she's attended six previous iterations of fashion's biggest night, even  co-chairing the 2016 version  celebrating the "Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology" exhibition.

As the Swiftie folklore goes, that was the star-studded gathering where the Grammy winner first saw sparks fly with Joe Alwyn, who she went on to  date for six years  before their  2023 breakup . 

Will Taylor Swift be at the Met Gala? Looking back at each of her past appearances

See all the best looks from the 2024 Met Gala

On her  Reputation  track  "Dress," Swift appeared to touch on their red carpet looks at the lavish affair, singing, "Flashback when you met me / Your buzzcut and my hair bleached."

And on her  Midnights  song "Mastermind," she seemingly  alluded to having a hand in orchestrating their meeting . "What if I told you none of it was accidental / And the first night that you saw me, nothing was gonna stop me?" she sang. "I laid the groundwork and then, just like clockwork / The dominoes cascaded in a line." 

Since then, Swift has not stepped back onto fashion's holy ground. Last year, she also  missed out on the Met Gala  in order to focus on her Eras Tour in Nashville.

This article tagged under:

Empirical Tests of the Green Paradox for Climate Legislation

The Green Paradox posits that fossil fuel markets respond to changing expectations about climate legislation, which limits future consumption, by shifting consumption to the present through lower present-day prices. We demonstrate that oil futures responded negatively to daily changes in the prediction market's expectations that the Waxman-Markey bill — the US climate bill discussed in 2009-2010 — would pass. This effect is consistent across various maturities as the proposed legislation would reset the entire price and consumption path, unlike temporary supply or demand shocks that phase out over time. The bill’s passage would have increased current global oil consumption by 2-4%. Furthermore, a strengthening of climate policy, as measured by monthly variations in media salience regarding climate policy over the last four decades, and two court rulings signaling limited future fossil fuel use, were associated with negative abnormal oil future returns. Taken together, our findings confirm that restricting future fossil fuel use will accelerate current-day consumption.

We would like to thank Kyle Meng and Derek Lemoine for sharing the prediction market data and for helpful feedback, as well as participants of the Virtual Seminar on Climate Economics by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Harvard Seminar in Environmental Economics and Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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