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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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Of Truth, by Francis Bacon

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"Of Truth" is the opening essay in the final edition of the philosopher, statesman and jurist  Francis Bacon 's "Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral" (1625). In this essay, as associate professor of philosophy Svetozar Minkov points out, Bacon addresses the question of "whether it is worse to lie to others or to oneself--to possess truth (and lie, when necessary, to others) or to think one possesses the truth but be mistaken and hence unintentionally convey falsehoods to both oneself and to others" ("Francis Bacon's 'Inquiry Touching Human Nature,'" 2010). In "Of Truth," Bacon argues that people have a natural inclination to lie to others: "a natural though corrupt love, of the lie itself."

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly, there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free-will in thinking as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor, but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love lies where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant; but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell: this same truth is a naked and open daylight that doth not show the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves? One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum [the wine of devils] because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it that doth the hurt, such as we spake of before. But howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. The first creature of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense; the last was the light of reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of his spirit. First he breathed light upon the face of the matter, or chaos; then he breathed light into the face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth light into the face of his chosen. The poet that beautified the sect that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well, "It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below"*; so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil business: it will be acknowledged, even by those that practice it not, that clear and round dealing is the honor of man's nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent, which goeth basely upon the belly and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious; and therefore Montaigne saith prettily, when he inquired the reason why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace and such an odious charge. Saith he, "If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much as to say that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards man." For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood and breach of faith cannot possibly be so highly expressed as in that it shall be the last peal to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men: it being foretold that when Christ cometh, "He shall not find faith upon the earth."

*Bacon's paraphrase of the opening lines of Book II of "On the Nature of Things" by Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus.

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Truth: Absolute or Relative? Essay

Introduction, works cited.

Truth is a complex aspect that has been debated for ages. Truth can be defined as the state or quality of being true or rather that which is considered to be true or in accordance with reality or fact. Truth is a contentious element that is influenced by a variety of aspects. It could also be defined as that to which a given community eventually settles down.

A community is therefore a key element in the search for truth. The definition of truth, its pursuit as well as its discovery forms a critical part of human intellectual activity. Truth could be found in religion or cultural beliefs (Erban 47). This piece of work gives a critical look at the concept of truth and the aspects that surround it. Much emphasis will however be given to the issue of whether truth is absolute or relative and the theories about truth.

Truth could be understood through having a deeper look at the various theories that have been put forth with respect to the definition, origin, and pursuits of truth. Another way of understanding the concept of truth is through looking at it on the grounds of whether it is absolute or relative.

This issue has been controversial with the popular postmodern view stating that truth is relative while Christianity stipulates that truth is absolute and that the teachings of the Bible are universal and should always stand. A majority of people go by the fact that there is nothing as absolute truth.

Absolute truth can be defined as something that is deemed to be true for all people, at all times, and in all places (Erban 42). Absolute truth possesses the following characteristics; it is discovered rather than being invented, it is knowable, it is not affected by the individual that profess it and it does not change and thus it can be conveyed across time. Absolute truth is also trans-cultural meaning that it can be conveyed across different cultures and it is founded under the premise that all truths are absolute.

Relative truth on the other hand is built on the understanding of truth on the basis of the naturalist world-view. It states that there is nothing like absolute truth and that truth originates in man. The beliefs that are attributed to relative truth include the fact that truth is created rather than discovered. This therefore follows that there is no universal truth since truth is mainly invented.

Different individuals and cultures are thus expected to define truth in a different way depending on their background and perspective. In relative truth, absolute truth is not knowable, truth changes and an individual’s belief can change a truth statement. Relative truth is also affected by the attitude of the person professing it (Williams 112). Anything can therefore be true irrespective of its origin.

There have been a lot of critics of relative truth which state that it should be rejected and absolute truth be adopted. First, relativism is founded on a world-view of naturalism. This could only hold if God does not exist and man is the measure of truth. Relativism is also self-defeating, without standards.

Relativism also rejects reason as a way through which truth can be determined. Reason is very crucial in coming up with truth and thus, it should never be underrated. Although everyone has a right and freedom to believe in anything, absolute truth seems to carry more weight as compared to relativism. This does not however mean that relativism is absolutely wrong.

There are various ways through which truth could be determined or tested. They include the following: Logical consistency; this test on the availability of proper reasoning as opposed to contradictions in statements. The other test is empirical adequacy; this entails looking for evidence in support of what is being said. Evidence could be in the form of data. The other way of ascertaining truth is having a livability test. This entails looking at how consistently one can live with the belief in question (Williams 174).

Some of the theories that have been put forth to explain the concept of truth include; correspondence theory that stipulates that true statements and beliefs ought to correspond to actual state of affairs or reality.

This shows that there is a relationship between thoughts and objects. The other theory is the coherence theory. It states that truth calls for an appropriate fit of elements within an entire scheme. A system or rather a statement should reflect some elements of logical consistency. Truth is considered to be a unit of whole systems of propositions.

It can be attributed to individual proposals only according to their lucidity with the whole. Constructivist supposition on the other hand says that truth is constructed through societal progressions and is shaped through the supremacy struggles within a given group of people. Truth is also considered to be culturally and historically specific. Consensus presumption holds that truth is anything that is concurred upon by some explicit group. The group could consist of as few as two people or even the entire society (Schmitt 102).

These are just some of the theories that try to explain what truth is. The fact that many theories have emerged is enough justification that the concept of truth is controversial and complex. Various critics have been raised with respect to the different theories. It is therefore difficult to come up with a clear cut definition of what truth is but rather ideas should be drawn from the various aspects that have been raised.

From the above discussion, it is evident that the concept of truth is complex and surrounded by a variety of issues. It is a concept that has been debated for a relatively long period of time with an aim of coming up with an answer of what truth is.

Truth could be understood through having a deeper look at the various theories that have been put forth with respect to the definition, origin, and pursuits of truth. While looking at the Bible teachings and human logic we can say that truth is absolute and not relative. Truth is narrow as it does not entail its opposite.

It is also knowable and unchanging. Absolute truth is founded on God who is Supreme and eternal while relativism is founded on naturalism. This makes facts put forth for absolute truth to be stronger than those supporting relative truth. Relativism ought to be handled carefully because evidence indicates that we live in a theistic universe. It goes against biblical teachings. However, people have the freedom to choose whichever way so long as it does not affect others.

Erban, Joseph. What Is Truth? London: Lulu.com, 2008.Print

Schmitt, Fredrick. Theories of truth . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. Print

Williams, Christopher, John, Fards. What is truth? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Print

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Read our detailed notes on the Francis Bacon’s famous essay, “Of Truth”. Our notes cover Of Truth summary and analysis.

Of Truth by Francis Bacon Summary & Analysis

In this essay, Bacon has presented the objective truth in various manifestations.Similarly, Bacon shares with us the subjective truth, operative in social life. “OF TRUTH” is Bacon’s masterpiece that shows his keen observation of human beings with special regard to truth. In the beginning of the essay, Bacon rightly observes that generally people do not care for truth as Pilate, the governor of the Roman Empire, while conducting the trial of Jesus Christ, cares little for truth:

“What is truth? Said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.”

Advancing his essay, Bacon explores the reasons why the people do not like truth. First, truth is acquired through hard work and man is ever reluctant to work hard. Secondly, truth curtails man’s freedom. More than that the real reason of man’s disliking to truth is that man is attached to lies which Bacon says “a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.” Man loves falsehood because, Bacon says that truth is as if the bright light of the day and would show what men, in actual, are. They look attractive and colourful in the dim light of lies.He futher adds,

“A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.”

It is a fact that man prefers to cherish illusions, which make his life more interesting. With a profound observation of man’s psychology, Bacon states that if deprived of false pride and vanities, the human mind would contract like a deflated balloon and these human beings would become poor, sad and ill. However, poetic untruth is not gone unnoticed by Bacon’s piercing intellect. He says though poetic untruth is a wine of the Devil in priest’s eyes, yet it is not as harmful as the other lies are. Bacon being a literary artist illustrates this concept with an apt imagery that the poetic untruth is but the shadow of a lie. The enquiry of truth, knowledge of truth and belief of truth are compared with the enjoyment of love. Such a comparison lends the literary charm to this essay.Bacon further says in that the last act of creation was to create rational faculty, which helps in finding truth, is the finished product of God’s blessing as he says:

“… The last was the light of reason…is the illumination of his spirit.”

Bacon’s moral idealism is obvious when he advancing his argument in favour of truth asserts that the earth can be made paradise only with the help of truth. Man should ever stick to truth in every matter, do the act of charity and have faith in every matter, do the act of charity and have faith in God. Bacon’s strong belief in truth and Divinity is stated thus:

“Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in Providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.”

From the objective truth, Bacon passes judgment, to the subjective truth, which he calls “the truth of civil business”. It is the compelling quality of truth, Bacon observes, that the persons who do not practice truth, acknowledge it. Bacon’s idealistic moral attitude is obvious in these lines when he says: “….. that clear and round dealing is the honour of man’s nature; and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work better, but it embaseth it.”

Bacon further asserts that the liars are like a snake that goes basely upon the belly and not upon the feet. Imagery comprising comparison is apt and convincing. Moreover, Bacon refers to Montaigne who is of the view that “a lie faces God and shrinks from man”. Bacon adds that falsehood is the height of wickedness and as such will invite the Judgment of God upon all human beings on Doom’s day. Therefore, Bacon concludes his essay with didacticism with a tinge of Christian morality.

In the essay, “OF TRUTH”, there is no digression. All the arguments in the essay pertain to the single main idea, truth. Bacon’s wide learning is clearly observed when he refers to Pilate (history), Lucian (Greek literature), Creation, Montaigne (a French essayist). “OF TRUTH” is enriched with striking similes and analogies, such as he equates liars as a snake moving basely on its belly, mixture of falsehood is like an alloy of gold and silver.Similarly, truth is ‘open day light’ whereas lie is ‘candle light i.e fake dim light. Truth is ‘a pearl’ i.e worthy and precious whereas ,lie is ‘a diamond’ that reflects light illusions when placed in daylight.

The essay “OF TRUTH” is not ornamental as was the practice of the Elizabethan prose writers. Bacon is simple, natural and straightforward in his essay though Elizabethan colour is also found in “OF TRUTH” because there is a moderate use of Latinism in the essay. Economy of words is found in the essay not alone, but syntactic brevity is also obvious in this essay. We find conversational ease in this essay, which is the outstanding feature of Bacon’s style. There is a peculiar feature of Bacon i.e. aphorism. We find many short, crispy, memorable and witty sayings in this essay.

Therefore, Bacon’s essay “OF TRUTH” is rich in matter and manner. This is really a council ‘civil and moral’.

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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.

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 facts again, 3.3. truthmakers, 4.1 realism and truth, 4.2 anti-realism and truth, 4.3 anti-realism and pragmatism, 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, bibliography, 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. In spite of its importance, 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 contemporary debate. For these reasons, we dwell on the origins of the correspondence theory at greater length than those of the other neo-classical views, before turning to its contemporary neo-classical form.

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.)

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 (1902); Moore (1899) 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.

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), Cartwright (1987), 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) for a 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); Russell (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.

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.)

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 < Ramey , Singing >. This fact exists. In contrast, the world (we presume) contains no fact < Ramey , Dancing >. The belief that Ramey sings stands in the relation of correspondence to the fact < Ramey , Singing >, 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 < Ramey , Singing > 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 at 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:

proposition that Ramey sings ↓ ↓ fact < Ramey , Singing >

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 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.) 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 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 (1991) 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.

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.

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).

Let us suppose we have a fixed language L whose sentences are fully interpreted. The basic question Tarski poses is what an adequate theory of truth for L would be. Tarski's answer is embodied in what he calls Convention T :

An adequate theory of truth for L must imply, for each sentence φ of L

⌈ φ ⌉  is true if and only if φ .

(We have simplified Tarski's presentation somewhat.) This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. Given the assumption that L is fully interpreted, we may assume that each sentence φ 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 L .

Convention T draws our attention to the biconditionals of the form

⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ ,

which are usually called the Tarski biconditionals for a language 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 L displays the right structure, then truth for L can be defined recursively. For instance, let us suppose that L is a simple formal language, containing two atomic sentences ‘snow is white’ and ‘grass is green’, and the sentential connectives ∨ and ¬.

In spite of its simplicity, 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.
• ⌈ φ ∨ ψ ⌉ is true if and only if ⌈ φ ⌉ is true or ⌈ ψ ⌉ is true.
• ⌈ ¬φ ⌉ is true if and only if it is not the case that ⌈ φ ⌉ 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 L ′ , just like L except that instead of simply having two atomic sentences, L ′ breaks atomic sentences into terms and predicates. 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 L ′ is like L , but also contains the sentences ‘Snow is green’ and ‘Grass is white’.)

We can define truth for atomic sentences of 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 ⌈ t is P ⌉ : ⌈ t is P ⌉ is true if and only if the referent of ⌈ t ⌉ satisfies ⌈ P ⌉ .

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 L to produce a full theory of truth for 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 L ′. Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. A Tarskian theory of truth for a language L can be used to show that theories in 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 the entry on 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.

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.

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. 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.

The truthmaker principle is often put as the schema:

If φ , then there is an x such that necessarily, if x exists, then φ .

(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.

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.

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.

Either the approach makes the theory of truth—or truth-and-reference—the primary vehicle for an account of realism. A theory of truth which substantiates bivalence, or 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 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 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 ant-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).

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 :

⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true ⌉ has the same meaning as φ.

(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 ⌈ φ ⌉ is true is just to assert that φ.

This view was advanced by Strawson (1949); Strawson (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 L and every φ in L , the biconditionals ⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ 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 (forthcoming) 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); Field (1994), which will be discussed in section 6.3. For an insightful critique of deflationism, see Gupta (1993).

For more on deflationism, see 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 represent the world. It is in virtue of representing the world that truth-bearers are able to enter into correspondence relations. Truth-bearers are things which represent, and are true or false depending on whether they correctly represent the facts in the world.

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 represent, 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 representations, however the background metaphysics (presumably idealism) understands representation.

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 representations. 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 representations. 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 representation 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.

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 representational, 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 represent the world. They do so by having constituents in the world, which are brought together in the right way. There are many complications about the nature of representation, 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 represent as of how their truth values are fixed. Again, abstracting from some complications about representation, 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 ⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ is to fix whether φ is in the extension of ‘is true’ or not. But it can also be seen as stating the truth conditions of φ. Both rely on the fact that the unquoted occurrence of φ 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 ∈ 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 representational. 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); Field (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 representational.

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 representational properties of truth-bearers have 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.

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 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 (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.

At the same time, Davidson insists that this observation is compatible with a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Indeed, insofar as the Tarskian theory of truth provides a correspondence theory, radical interpretation builds a correspondence theory of truth into its account of content. As we have seen, whether or not this really amounts to a correspondence theory is disputed. As we saw in section 3.1, the Tarskian theory by itself is weaker than the kind of theory proposed by Field (1972); as we saw in section 4.2, it is compatible with anti-realist views of truth. Nonetheless, the Tarskian clauses themselves state more of about the relation of word-to-world than the neo-classical coherence theory anticipated, which leads Davidson to the conclusion that coherence results in correspondence.

For more on Davidson, see 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.

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• Haack, Susan, 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 27: 231-249.
• Halbach, Volker, 1999, “Disquotationalism and infinite conjunctions”, Mind , 108: 1-22.
• Hartshorne, C., Weiss, P., and Burks, A. W. (eds.), 1931-58, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce , vol. 1-8, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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• Joachim, H. H., 1906, The Nature of Truth , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kaplan, David, 1989, “Demonstratives”, in Themes From Kaplan , J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 481-563. First publication of a widely circulated manuscript dated 1977.
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• Lackey, Douglas (ed.), 1973, Essays in Analysis , New York: George Braziller.
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• McDowell, John, 1976, “Truth-conditions, bivalence, and verificationism”, in Truth and Meaning , G. Evans and J. McDowell, eds., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 42-66.
• Misak, Cheryl J., 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Moore, George Edward, 1899, “The nature of judgment”, Mind , 8: 176-193.
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• Moore, George Edward, 1953, Some Main Problems of Philosophy , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Mulligan, Kevin, Simons, Peter, and Smith, Barry, 1984, “Truth-makers”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 44: 287-321.
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• Ross, W. D. (ed.), 1928, The Works of Aristotle Translated into English , Oxford: Clarendon Press, second ed.
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• Tarski, Alfred, 1931, “Sur les ensembles définissables de nombres réels. I.”, Fundamenta Mathematicae , 17: 210-239. References are to the translation by J. H. Woodger as “On Definable Sets of Real Numbers” in Tarski (1983).
• Tarski, Alfred, 1935, “Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalizierten Sprachen”, Studia Philosophica , 1: 261-405. References are to the translation by J. H. Woodger as “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages” in Tarski (1983).
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• Tarski, Alfred, 1983, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics , Indianapolis: Hackett, second ed. Edited by J. Corcoran with translations by J. H. Woodger.
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• Wright, Crispin, 1992, Truth and Objectivity , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Wright, Crispin, 1993, Realism, Meaning and Truth , Oxford: Blackwell, second ed.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Davidson, Donald | James, William | Peirce, Charles Sanders | realism | Tarski, Alfred: truth definitions | truth: axiomatic theories of | truth: coherence theory of | truth: correspondence theory of | truth: deflationary theory of | truth: identity theory of

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Josh Parsons for advice on metaphysics, and to JC Beall, Justin Khoo, Jason Stanley, and Paul Teller for very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

The Nature of Truth : Classic and Contemporary Perspectives ( Second Edition )

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

Jeremy Wyatt is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Junyeol Kim is Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

Nathan Kellen is Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Kansas State University.

The definitive and essential collection of classic and new essays on analytic theories of truth, revised and updated, with seventeen new chapters.

The question “What is truth?” is so philosophical that it can seem rhetorical. Yet truth matters, especially in a “post-truth” society in which lies are tolerated and facts are ignored. If we want to understand why truth matters, we first need to understand what it is. The Nature of Truth offers the definitive collection of classic and contemporary essays on analytic theories of truth. This second edition has been extensively revised and updated, incorporating both historically central readings on truth's nature as well as up-to-the-moment contemporary essays. Seventeen new chapters reflect the current trajectory of research on truth.

Highlights include new essays by Ruth Millikan and Gila Sher on correspondence theories; a new essay on Peirce's theory by Cheryl Misak; seven new essays on deflationism, laying out both theories and critiques; a new essay by Jamin Asay on primitivist theories; and a new defense by Kevin Scharp of his replacement theory, coupled with a probing critique of replacement theories by Alexis Burgess. Classic essays include selections by J. L. Austin, Donald Davidson, William James, W. V. O. Quine, and Alfred Tarski.

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The Nature of Truth : Classic and Contemporary Perspectives Edited by: Michael P. Lynch, Jeremy Wyatt, Junyeol Kim, Nathan Kellen https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.001.0001 ISBN (electronic): 9780262363143 Publisher: The MIT Press Published: 2021

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Table of Contents

• [ Front Matter ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0056 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Front Matter ] in another window
• Preface to the Second Edition: Truth in a Post-Truth Age By Michael P. Lynch Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0001 Open the PDF Link PDF for Preface to the Second Edition: Truth in a Post-Truth Age in another window
• Acknowledgments Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0002 Open the PDF Link PDF for Acknowledgments in another window
• Original Sources Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0003 Open the PDF Link PDF for Original Sources in another window
• Introduction: The Metaphysics of Truth By Michael P. Lynch Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0004 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction: The Metaphysics of Truth in another window
• Introduction By Michael P. Lynch , Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Jeremy Wyatt , Jeremy Wyatt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Junyeol Kim Junyeol Kim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0006 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 1: Truth and Falsehood By Bertrand Russell Bertrand Russell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0007 Open the PDF Link PDF for 1: Truth and Falsehood in another window
• 2: Truth By J. L. Austin J. L. Austin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0008 Open the PDF Link PDF for 2: Truth in another window
• 3: A Realist Conception of Truth By William P. Alston William P. Alston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0009 Open the PDF Link PDF for 3: A Realist Conception of Truth in another window
• 4: On Truth By Ruth Garrett Millikan Ruth Garrett Millikan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0010 Open the PDF Link PDF for 4: On Truth in another window
• 5: In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth By Gila Sher Gila Sher Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0011 Open the PDF Link PDF for 5: In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth in another window
• Introduction By Michael P. Lynch , Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Jeremy Wyatt , Jeremy Wyatt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Junyeol Kim Junyeol Kim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0013 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 6: Coherence as the Nature of Truth By Brand Blanshard Brand Blanshard Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0014 Open the PDF Link PDF for 6: Coherence as the Nature of Truth in another window
• 7: The Coherence Theory By Ralph C. S. Walker Ralph C. S. Walker Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0015 Open the PDF Link PDF for 7: The Coherence Theory in another window
• Introduction By Michael P. Lynch , Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Nathan Kellen , Nathan Kellen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Jeremy Wyatt Jeremy Wyatt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0017 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 8: How to Make Our Ideas Clear By Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0018 Open the PDF Link PDF for 8: How to Make Our Ideas Clear in another window
• 9: Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth By William James William James Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0019 Open the PDF Link PDF for 9: Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth in another window
• 10: Truth, Inquiry, and Experience: A Pragmatist Epistemology By Cheryl Misak Cheryl Misak Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0020 Open the PDF Link PDF for 10: Truth, Inquiry, and Experience: A Pragmatist Epistemology in another window
• 11: Truth By Michael Dummett Michael Dummett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0021 Open the PDF Link PDF for 11: Truth in another window
• 12: Two Philosophical Perspectives By Hilary Putnam Hilary Putnam Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0022 Open the PDF Link PDF for 12: Two Philosophical Perspectives in another window
• 13: Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright By Richard Rorty Richard Rorty Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0023 Open the PDF Link PDF for 13: Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright in another window
• Introduction By Michael P. Lynch , Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Nathan Kellen , Nathan Kellen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Jeremy Wyatt Jeremy Wyatt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0025 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 14: The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics By Alfred Tarski Alfred Tarski Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0026 Open the PDF Link PDF for 14: The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics in another window
• 15: Tarski’s Theory of Truth By Hartry Field Hartry Field Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0027 Open the PDF Link PDF for 15: Tarski’s Theory of Truth in another window
• Introduction By Jeremy Wyatt Jeremy Wyatt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0029 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 16: The Nature of Truth By Frank Plumpton Ramsey Frank Plumpton Ramsey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0030 Open the PDF Link PDF for 16: The Nature of Truth in another window
• 17: Truth By P. F. Strawson P. F. Strawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0031 Open the PDF Link PDF for 17: Truth in another window
• 18: Truth By W. V. O. Quine W. V. O. Quine Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0032 Open the PDF Link PDF for 18: Truth in another window
• 19: Transparent Truth as a Logical Property By Jc Beall Jc Beall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0033 Open the PDF Link PDF for 19: Transparent Truth as a Logical Property in another window
• 20: The Prosentential Theory: Further Reflections on Locating Our Interest in Truth By Dorothy Grover Dorothy Grover Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0034 Open the PDF Link PDF for 20: The Prosentential Theory: Further Reflections on Locating Our Interest in Truth in another window
• 21: A Defense of Minimalism By Paul Horwich Paul Horwich Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0035 Open the PDF Link PDF for 21: A Defense of Minimalism in another window
• 22: A Substitutional Theory of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence By Christopher Hill Christopher Hill Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0036 Open the PDF Link PDF for 22: A Substitutional Theory of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence in another window
• 23: Deflationism as Alethic Fictionalism via a SPIF Account of Truth-Talk By Bradley Armour-Garb , Bradley Armour-Garb Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar James A. Woodbridge James A. Woodbridge Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0037 Open the PDF Link PDF for 23: Deflationism as Alethic Fictionalism via a SPIF Account of Truth-Talk in another window
• 24: Truth and Insubstantiality: The Metaphysics of Deflationism By Jeremy Wyatt Jeremy Wyatt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0038 Open the PDF Link PDF for 24: Truth and Insubstantiality: The Metaphysics of Deflationism in another window
• 25: The Use of Force against Deflationism: Assertion and Truth By Dorit Bar-On , Dorit Bar-On Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Keith Simmons Keith Simmons Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0039 Open the PDF Link PDF for 25: The Use of Force against Deflationism: Assertion and Truth in another window
• Introduction By Michael P. Lynch , Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Jeremy Wyatt , Jeremy Wyatt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Junyeol Kim Junyeol Kim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0041 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 26: The Folly of Trying to Define Truth By Donald Davidson Donald Davidson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0042 Open the PDF Link PDF for 26: The Folly of Trying to Define Truth in another window
• 27: Primitivism about Truth By Jamin Asay Jamin Asay Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0043 Open the PDF Link PDF for 27: Primitivism about Truth in another window
• 28: Truth: The Identity Theory By Jennifer Hornsby Jennifer Hornsby Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0044 Open the PDF Link PDF for 28: Truth: The Identity Theory in another window
• Introduction By Michael P. Lynch , Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Jeremy Wyatt , Jeremy Wyatt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Nathan Kellen Nathan Kellen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0046 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 29: Minimalism, Deflationism, Pragmatism, Pluralism By Crispin Wright Crispin Wright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0047 Open the PDF Link PDF for 29: Minimalism, Deflationism, Pragmatism, Pluralism in another window
• 30: Three Questions for Truth Pluralism By Michael P. Lynch Michael P. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0048 Open the PDF Link PDF for 30: Three Questions for Truth Pluralism in another window
• 31: Truth, Winning, and Simple Determination Pluralism By Douglas Edwards Douglas Edwards Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0049 Open the PDF Link PDF for 31: Truth, Winning, and Simple Determination Pluralism in another window
• 32: Austere Truth Pluralism By Filippo Ferrari , Filippo Ferrari Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Sebastiano Moruzzi , Sebastiano Moruzzi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0050 Open the PDF Link PDF for 32: Austere Truth Pluralism in another window
• 33: Deflationism, Pluralism, Expressivism, Pragmatism By Simon Blackburn Simon Blackburn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0051 Open the PDF Link PDF for 33: Deflationism, Pluralism, Expressivism, Pragmatism in another window
• 34: Conceptual Engineering and Replacements for Truth By Kevin Scharp Kevin Scharp Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0052 Open the PDF Link PDF for 34: Conceptual Engineering and Replacements for Truth in another window
• 35: Keeping “True”: A Case Study in Conceptual Ethics By Alexis Burgess Alexis Burgess Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0053 Open the PDF Link PDF for 35: Keeping “True”: A Case Study in Conceptual Ethics in another window
• Contributors Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0054 Open the PDF Link PDF for Contributors in another window
• Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12112.003.0055 Open the PDF Link PDF for Index in another window
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Introduction to the English Institute Essays On "Truth-Telling"

• Ian Balfour , Sangeeta Ray
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 87, Number 2, Summer 2020
• pp. 293-299
• 10.1353/elh.2020.0019
• View Citation

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Be thinking

What is truth (on the nature and importance of truth today).

Have you ever been told that truth is relative? That it's all based on language and context? That it's only what a culture believes to be real? Douglas Groothuis tackles these issues and more as he examines the question, "What is truth?".

Truth is so obscured nowadays, and lies so well established, that unless we love the truth, we shall never recognize it . Blaise Pascal

Staring Truth in the Face

"Everyone on the side of truth listens to me." Jesus Christ made this statement after Pontius Pilate had interrogated him prior to the crucifixion (John 18:37, NIV). Pilate then famously replied, "What is truth?" and left the scene.

As philosopher Francis Bacon wrote in his essay 'On Truth':

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer .

Although Jesus made no reply to Pilate, Christians affirm that Pilate was staring truth in the face, for Jesus had earlier said to his disciple Thomas, "I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6).

This historic exchange raises the perennial question of the very nature of truth itself. What does it mean for a statement to be true? Or, to put it another way: What does it take for a statement to achieve truthfulness?

This has been a subject of much debate in postmodernist circles, where the traditional view of truth as objective and knowable is no longer accepted. Many even outside of academic discussions may be as cynical about truth as Pilate. "What is truth?" they smirk, without waiting for an answer. Postmodernist philosopher Richard Rorty claimed that truth is what his colleagues let him get away with. [1] Unless we are clear about the notion of truth, any claim to truth – religious or otherwise – will perplex more than enlighten.

Before attempting to determine which claims are true, we need to understand the nature of truth itself. I will briefly argue for the correspondence view of truth and then pit it against two of its main rivals, relativism and pragmatism.

Truth and Correspondence

The correspondence view of truth, held by the vast majority of philosophers and theologians throughout history, holds that any declarative statement is true if and only if it corresponds to or agrees with factual reality, with the way things are. The statement, "The desk in my study is brown" , is true only if there is, in fact, a brown desk in my study. If indeed there is a brown desk in my study, then the statement, "there is no brown desk in my study" , is false because it fails to correspond to any objective state of affairs.

Minds may recognize this truth, but minds do not create this truth

The titanic statement, "Jesus is Lord of the universe" , is either true or false. It is not both true and false; it is not neither true nor false. This statement either honors reality or it does not; it mirrors the facts or it does not. The Christian claims that this statement is true apart from anyone's opinion (see Romans 3:4). In other words, it has a mind-independent reality. Minds may recognize this truth, but minds do not create this truth. This is because truth is a quality of some statements and not of others. It is not a matter of subjective feeling, majority vote or cultural fashion. The statement, "The world is spherical" , was true even when the vast majority of earthlings took their habitat to be flat.

The correspondence view of truth entails that declarative statements are subject to various kinds of verification and falsification. This concerns the area of epistemology, or the study of how we acquire and defend knowledge claims. [2] A statement can be proven false if it can be shown to disagree with objective reality. The photographs from outer space depicting the earth as a blue orb (along with prior evidence) falsified flat-earth claims. Certainly, not all falsification is as straightforward as this; but if statements are true or false by virtue of their relationship to what they attempt to describe, this makes possible the marshaling of evidence for their veracity or falsity. [3]

Therefore, Christians – who historically have affirmed the correspondence view of truth – hold that there are good historical reasons to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead in space-time history, thus vindicating His divine authority (see Romans 1:4; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11). [4] The Apostle Paul adamantly affirms this view:

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. (1 Corinthians 15:14-15)

Without the correspondence view of truth, these resounding affirmations ring hollow. Christianity cannot live and thrive without it.

Postmodernism: Truth in Doubt

Today this view of truth is being brought into doubt. Postmodernist philosophers claim that the quest for objective truth asserted through language is part of the discredited project of modernism, an over-confident approach to knowledge stemming from enlightenment rationalism. [5] Therefore, statements about scientific facts, religious claims or moral principles cannot refer to objective states of affairs. On the contrary, language is constructed through communities, and it cannot move beyond its own context and refer to realities outside itself.

A thorough analysis of the postmodernist assault on truth would take us beyond the limits of this article, [6] but a basic critique of this notion of truth is that this view is self-refuting. If all language fails to describe objective conditions, due to its immersion in various cultures, then any language used to describe this universal immersion would be subject to the limitations of its context. And that would mean that any and all language fails to describe the universal limitations of all languages. This kind of statement, therefore, discredits itself. For all its protests about the illegitimacies of "metanarratives" (worldviews), postmodernism offers a metanarrative of its own – one that cannot be true given its own precepts. [7]

Moreover, the notion that objective truth is unknowable entails that a relativistic and/or pragmatic view of truth be put in the place of a correspondence view. I contend that both of these views – that is, relativism and pragmatism – are logically defective and unworthy of belief.

Relativism: Who's to Say?

Relativism comes in various shapes and sizes, but its salient claim is that the truth of a statement depends on the views of persons or cultures, not on whether statements correspond to objective reality. To say a statement is true is simply to say that a person or culture believes it to be true. Hence the popular refrain, "Well, that's true for you."

According to this view, one person can say "Jesus is Lord" and another can say "Allah is Lord" , and both statements will be true, if they accurately express the sentiments of the speakers. This view seems to advance tolerance and civility, but it does so at the expense of logic, meaning and truth. That price is too high.

If I say "Jesus is Lord" and you say "Allah is Lord" , both statements cannot be objectively true because they describe mutually exclusive realities. Jesus is known by Christians as God made flesh (John 1:14), while Muslims deny that Allah incarnates. [8] So, if "Lord" means a position of unrivaled metaphysical and spiritual supremacy, then Jesus and Allah cannot both be Lord because "Jesus" and "Allah" are not two words that mean the same thing.

If we mean to say that I believe in Jesus and you believe in Allah, there is no logical contradiction, since subjective beliefs cannot contradict each other; that is, it may be true that I subjectively believe X and you subjectively believe non-X. However, X and non-X themselves cannot both be objectively true. When dealing with divergent claims to objective truth, contradictions emerge frequently. [9] A 2002 survey by Barna Research found that 44 percent of Americans contend that "the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon are all different expressions of the same spiritual truths." This reveals an untrue view of truth.

Applied to medicine or science, this sort of relativistic attitude would be deemed ridiculous. Medical doctors have good reason not to bleed their patients, as was commonly done for centuries. This is because we objectively know that bleeding does not help patients, whatever the social consensus may have been at an earlier time.

Truth is what corresponds to reality

Unlike the correspondence view of truth, which seeks objective support for the truth or falsity of statements (whenever possible), relativism offers no means of verifying or falsifying any belief apart from discerning whether one holds the belief or whether a particular culture tends to affirm certain things.

The Weakness of Pragmatism

A pragmatic view of truth also rejects the objectivity of truth. This view holds that a belief is true only if it works for a particular person. Therefore, Christianity may be "true for me" if it helps me, but false for another if it doesn't seem to help her. But this view confuses usefulness with verity.

Think of a person who chronically mismanages his money and is very unsuccessful. A few hundred dollars are stolen from him without his knowledge. Yet he thinks he has misplaced the money and says to himself, "That's the last straw. I've got to get my life in order!" After this, he becomes successful through hard work and diligence. Yet his belief that he lost the money, however beneficial, was not true because it did not conform to the reality that the money was stolen. This shows that the truth-value of a belief is different from its use-value. [10]

Truth Defined

So, "What is truth?" Truth is what corresponds to reality. When this is established, we can move on to considering which particular statements are true and reasonable and which are not. Unlike Pilate, we can stay and listen to what Jesus has to say to us. He alone has the words of eternal life (John 6:68).

[1] This is a paraphrase, but represents his views truly. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New York: Princeton University Press, 1979), p.176.

[2] For a superb introduction to epistemology in relation to postmodernism, see R. Douglas Geivett, 'Is God a Story? Postmodernity and the Task of Theology', in Myron Penner, ed., Christianity and the Postmodern Turn (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), pp.37-52.

[3] For an introduction to the role of logic in the testing of worldviews, see Ronald Nash, World-Views in Conflict: Choosing Christianity in a World of Ideas (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), especially pp.54-106.

[4] See J.P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City (Grand Rapids, Baker Books, 1987), Chapter 6; N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003).

[5] See Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), Chapter 2.

[6] See Groothuis, Truth Decay .

[7] See James Sire, The Universe Next Door, 4th ed . (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p.237.

[8] See Abduhl Saleeb and Norman Geisler, Answering Islam, 2nd ed . (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002).

[9] On this see the booklet by Douglas Groothuis, Are All Religions One? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), and Ajith Fernando, Sharing the Truth in Love: How to Relate to People of Other Faiths (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House, 2001).

[10] See Winfried Corduan, No Doubt About It (Nashville, TN: Broadman, Holman, 1997), pp.60-61.

© 2007 Douglas Groothuis This article is an updated, edited and revised version of the essay, "What is Truth?" which originally appeared on LeaderU.com.

Douglas Groothuis

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Truth Essay Guide - Importance of a Truth Today

Any topic expressing a particular view of truth is a good idea as it's an all-time relevant issue. While working on a truth essay, you should combine examples from real-life, widely-accepted definitions, and personal experience to identify this phenomenon as accurately as possible.

If this writing guide, we will explain how to write an essay about truth, explore the matter in terms of prompts and topics, and provide you with some simple examples and tips.

What to Write in Your Truth Essay?

An essay on such a specific topic isn't a separate type of academic paper - it's just writing with a different subject matter. Defining it is not that easy. Our beliefs and perception of truth may vary depending on subjective experience and even life values. That is why one of the simplest strategies would be to come up with a definition of truth. There, you don't have to argue that lying is evil, and we should be honest with each other. You can just provide a trustworthy definition to the phenomena and analyze the way the world translates its importance. The main sources one can use for this paper are reliable websites and dictionaries.

And what if you're writing a philosophy essay? This is what is preferred the most amongst the college students because Philosophy offers more self-expression. Here, every opinion may be considered relevant if you provide the reader with reliable evidence and reasonable statements. But don't forget about the coherence. While being immersed in your thoughts, you may forget about the essay structure and start beating around the bush. To avoid that, pay attention to the structure of your truth essay and don't neglect to outline your assignment. Here is an example of how you can start this writing:

"I think that truth is one's perception of beliefs and decisions. The contrasting points of view predetermine the way each of us understands this phenomenon and answer the question, 'What is true or false?'. There is only one thing that unites all possible definitions of truth and makes people agree on it. That is something believed to be accurate while the opposite is wrong."

So, a philosophy essay on this topic is based more on the author's opinion than an official definition from the dictionary.

Master Absolute Truth Essay Writing

We've gone through two most popular assignment types that the students of different schools frequently deal with. But there are truth essays with other purposes that we must consider. Look through the following list with short explanations.

• Descriptive. Involving touch, smell, hear, sight, taste, try to describe what a true is by these means.
• Narrative. Create a narration in which the frankness will be a core idea.
• Compare-contrast. Analyze why people express the same or completely different opinions on truth.
• Cause-effect (problem-solution). Consider the consequences the world actually is facing because of the lie.
• Argumentative. Formulate an idea related to the topic and provide arguments showing your statement is true and valid.
• Persuasive. Convince the reader that a certain statement is/is not the truth.
• Reflective. The way you reflect on being honest or telling lies.

So, when you are assigned to write an essay on truth, you may focus on the purpose that interests you the most (unless the type is assigned)

10 Great Truth Essay Topics

There are many students thinking that truth essays are all about "grass is green" and "the moon has craters" issues. The joke is it's not true - there are many great ideas to write about. It depends on which aspect you wish to focus as well as the type of academic paper you have to turn in. Here are some questions to consider:

• The issue of true words through the history of mankind.
• Locke's theories of truth correspondence.
• The link between truth and honesty.
• The challenges of being sincere.
• The consequences of pretending to be someone else.
• The idea of honesty in "Dear Evan Hansen."
• Lies VS Truth: A never-never-ending battle.
• Importance of being honest as a postmodern thought.
• Situations in which lies could be justified.
• Lying to dear people. How do they know about you being dishonest?
• The correspondence theory of truth in everyday life.
• How lying can distort our sense of reality.

The range of possible topic options is far wider - just decide a knowledge of what life aspect, science, or course you can successfully apply in your assignment.

Essay Thesis Statement

Each paper of this type should have a frankness-related thesis statement. That is the main idea of the entire writing that should appear in the opening paragraph (introduction). In your conclusion, you may paraphrase the thesis from the first paragraph to remind people of what you plan to talk about. However, we advise you to make conclusions more valuable than that and come up with thought-provoking ideas.

Essay about Honesty

Now, we're going to provide several examples, and the first one is an essay about truth and honesty. These two terms are interrelated, and one can barely exist without another. You may start with something like this:

"How is telling accurate things related to honesty? Honesty is one of the best human traits as it refers to always being open, no matter how bitter or sweet it is. Honesty is what makes human beings brave and robust, and that is why it is one of the most significant traits of candidates to become a president and other ruling authorities. It can lead to certain problems, but people tend to sympathize with those who are honest. It's an integral part of morality, which is the best policy in relationships; it's a significant building block."

Essay about Lies

Is life worth lying? In an essay about lies, you may compare and contrast two opposites. It is okay if you think that telling lies is more beneficial than being frank in specific cases. Share some examples and try to prove your position by providing relevant evidence. Here's an example that can inspire you:

"Is there a single person in the world who has never told a lie throughout life? Excluding Jesus Christ and some other saints from the Bible, everyone has experienced lies from both sides - telling and being told. A completely honest person is a myth. It's not because all people are bad and insincere. In my essay, I'm going to prove that telling lies in some situations may save one's life."

Importance of Being Frank in Our Life

Here, you should provide enough arguments against lying. You may recall some episodes from your favorite movies or just depict real-life examples when telling lies ended up dramatically for both sides. One of the good examples could be Evan Hansen from the "Dear Evan Hansen" musical. There, the socially anxious boy pretended to be the friend of his classmate who committed suicide to make friends with his family. Then, he becomes a hero in the eyes of other people. It all resulted in a big confusion, and the boy was left with nothing.

Truth Essays for Kids

Such an essay for kids should explain what the matter of truth is from a childish perspective. Avoid using difficult, complex terms from philosophy or other science as your target audience won't understand the text. Try to explain what each complex term means.

"In human frankness, there is essential and biggest virtue. Sincerity refers to speaking exactly what you think and feel, and an honest man never tells a lie. We should start telling only the true things since our early days, and here, a lot depends on our parents. You might have had these conversations with them already. Lying to parents is the biggest sin, so practice being honest with them and people around. You may tell lies only in sporadic cases, ensuring that no one will suffer from it, but benefit."

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• The Nature of Truth

The Nature of Truth , second edition

Classic and contemporary perspectives.

Edited by Michael P. Lynch , Jeremy Wyatt , Junyeol Kim and Nathan Kellen

ISBN: 9780262542067

Pub date: March 16, 2021

• Publisher: The MIT Press

768 pp. , 7 x 9 in , 4

ISBN: 9780262362092

• 9780262542067
• Published: March 2021
• 9780262362092
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• Description

The definitive and essential collection of classic and new essays on analytic theories of truth, revised and updated, with seventeen new chapters.

The question “What is truth?” is so philosophical that it can seem rhetorical. Yet truth matters, especially in a “post-truth” society in which lies are tolerated and facts are ignored. If we want to understand why truth matters, we first need to understand what it is. The Nature of Truth offers the definitive collection of classic and contemporary essays on analytic theories of truth. This second edition has been extensively revised and updated, incorporating both historically central readings on truth's nature as well as up-to-the-moment contemporary essays. Seventeen new chapters reflect the current trajectory of research on truth.

Highlights include new essays by Ruth Millikan and Gila Sher on correspondence theories; a new essay on Peirce's theory by Cheryl Misak; seven new essays on deflationism, laying out both theories and critiques; a new essay by Jamin Asay on primitivist theories; and a new defense by Kevin Scharp of his replacement theory, coupled with a probing critique of replacement theories by Alexis Burgess. Classic essays include selections by J. L. Austin, Donald Davidson, William James, W. V. O. Quine, and Alfred Tarski.

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

Jeremy Wyatt is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Junyeol Kim is Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

Nathan Kellen is Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Kansas State University.

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Essay on Truth

Students are often asked to write an essay on Truth in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Truth

What is truth.

Truth is something that is real and accurate. It is the opposite of a lie. Truth is important because it helps us understand the world around us. It also helps us make good decisions.

Why is Truth Important?

Truth is important for many reasons. First, it helps us to understand the world around us. When we know the truth about something, we can make better decisions. For example, if we know the truth about a product, we can decide whether or not to buy it.

Truth and Trust

Truth is also important for building trust. When we are honest with people, they are more likely to trust us. Truth is the foundation of all good relationships. Without truth, there can be no trust.

Truth is important for many reasons. It helps us to understand the world around us, make good decisions, and build trust. In a world where it can be difficult to know what is true, it is more important than ever to seek out the truth.

Also check:

• Speech on Truth

250 Words Essay on Truth

Truth is something that is real and accurate. It is the opposite of a lie. It is important to tell the truth because it helps us to build trust and relationships with others. When we tell the truth, people know that they can rely on us and that we are honest.

Truth is important because it allows us to make informed decisions. When we know the truth, we can make choices that are based on facts and evidence. This can help us to avoid making mistakes and to achieve our goals.

How Can We Find the Truth?

Sometimes it can be difficult to find the truth. There may be a lot of different opinions about something, and it can be hard to know which one is correct. However, there are a few things we can do to try to find the truth.

Be Open-Minded

One of the best ways to find the truth is to be open-minded. This means being willing to consider different viewpoints and to change your mind if you are presented with new evidence.

Do Your Research

Another way to find the truth is to do your research. This means gathering information from a variety of sources and evaluating it carefully. The more information you have, the better equipped you will be to make an informed decision.

Be Skeptical

Finally, it is important to be skeptical. This means being critical of information and not accepting everything you hear at face value. Always ask questions and try to find out more about a topic before you make a judgment.

500 Words Essay on Truth

Truth is a concept that has been studied and debated by philosophers for centuries. In simple terms, truth is the quality of being in accordance with reality or actuality. It is the opposite of a lie or falsehood.

Truth is Objective

One of the most important things to understand about truth is that it is objective. This means that it is not dependent on our individual beliefs or opinions. For example, the statement “the Earth is round” is true regardless of whether or not you believe it is true. This is because the Earth is round regardless of what we think about it.

Truth Can be Difficult to Find

Unfortunately, truth is not always easy to find. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest reasons is that we are often biased in our thinking. We tend to see things in ways that confirm our existing beliefs, and we are often reluctant to consider evidence that contradicts those beliefs. This can make it difficult to see the truth, especially when it is something that we don’t want to believe.

Truth is Important

Despite the challenges, it is important to seek out the truth. This is because truth is essential for making good decisions. If we do not know the truth, we cannot make informed choices about our lives. We may end up making decisions that are based on false information or beliefs, and this can lead to negative consequences.

How to Find the Truth

There are a number of things we can do to try to find the truth. One important thing is to be open-minded and willing to consider evidence that contradicts our existing beliefs. We should also be critical of information that we come across, and we should not be afraid to ask questions. Finally, we should seek out multiple sources of information and try to get a well-rounded view of any issue.

Truth is a complex and challenging concept, but it is also an essential one. By seeking out the truth and being open to new information, we can make better decisions and live more fulfilling lives.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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• Essay on Trustworthy Friend
• Essay on Trust And Honesty
• Essay on Trust

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Essay Samples on Truth

Universal truth: the importance of good explanations.

Introduction As a young child, I remember believing in the fictitious story of Santa Claus based purely on imagination. Every Christmas, my friends, and family would celebrate “Santa” coming from the North Pole to bring presents to all children who behaved well. Eighty-four percent of...

Implementing the Four Noble Truths in Everyday Life

Introduction One of the fundamental doctrines of Buddhism set forth by Buddha himself are the Four Noble Truths. These contain the very essence of the Buddha's pragmatic teachings. The Buddha is known to attain enlightenment only after the realization of these four truths during his...

Maintaining Trust: Importance of Telling the Truth

Have you ever wondered if lying is right or wrong? Have you ever lied and been tricked into telling the truth? Most people have been tricked by pretty much everyone. Lying according to research is always wrong. Most people feel guilty about lying and almost...

• Communication

Evaluation of Truth in Life with Doubt and Skepticism

Skepticism brings us to doubt everything in our lives that we once perceived as true. David Hume, Rene Descartes, and Sextus Empiricus have all made a contribution with their stance on skepticism through their writings Discourse on the method of rightly conducting the reason, and...

Uncovering The True Fiction Behind Ishmael Beah’s Recount of His Life Story

What settles the difference between nonfiction and fiction? The specifics. In a nonfiction novel, the author is recounting on purely true events. However, in a fictional text, the author has a wide range of possibilities and can be very subjective. The specifics can be used...

• A Long Way Gone

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The Effects of Sincerity on Our Lives

Whoever Sows Truth does not always Reap Confidence Whoever usually sows truth, as amazing as it may seem, does not always receive confidence. When we talk about sincerity, we are undoubtedly facing a double-edged sword before which many feel uncomfortable and even threatened, because sometimes...

• Human Behavior

Why Facts Are the Enemy of Truth: Facts and Misrepresented Context

The definition of truth is the quality or state of being true. The word truth is used in everyone’s life, whether it is a mom teaching their kid to always tell the truth, or a kid learning that telling the truth can hurt someone’s feelings....

The Perception of Reality and Truth by People

Truth, the property of sentences, assertions, beliefs, thoughts, or propositions in metaphysics and philosophy are said to agree with the facts or state what is the case in normal discourse. Truth is the object of the belief; logical error is a mistake. Individuals need to...

Understanding the Power of Truth from the Perspective of Philosophy

The word 'truth' originates from the Anglo-Saxon word 'tree' meaning 'believed'. 'Belief' itself is from the word 'glycan', which means 'to esteem dear'. Etymologically, ‘truth' would be something accepted to be of some value, instead of essentially being right. 'Believe' is used in the more...

• Personal Philosophy

Understanding the Power of Truth and why it is so Important for Us

For as long as human beings have been able to think, they’ve had the desire to understand the truths of life. In ‘The Allegory of the Cave’, when referring to these desires Plato states, “God knows whether it is true”. When trying to answer many...

Development of Science in Postmodernistic Era

This “post-truth” phenomenon is essentially an extension of postmodernism. Postmodernism attacks the ideal of truth and embraces indeterminacy. The prevalence of postmodernism is a reaction to the flaws of the modern world since the 18-th century Enlightenment. In the Age of Enlightenment, one of what...

• Postmodernism

A Lie: Social and Philosophical Definiton of Lying

Someone could argue that from an early age, the parents, the school teachers and everyone who is being involved with children, advise them that lying is evil and they should not use it as a practice. However, is it always bad to lie? What if...

• Immanuel Kant

Edmund's Quest for Recognition in Shakespeare's "King Lear"

King Lear, one of William Shakespeare's most celebrated works, is a tragedy that explores the theme of revenge against society. The play follows the story of Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, who seeks vengeance against those who have wronged him due...

Lying or Withholding the Truth in the Medical Setting

Withholding the truth about a patient’s health, health outcomes, or treatment can be taxing for families and medical providers. Doing so could also be in direct violation of a patient’s autonomy, their right to make rational decisions and choices regarding one’s overall well-being (Vaughn, 2013,...

Best topics on Truth

1. Universal Truth: the Importance of Good Explanations

2. Implementing the Four Noble Truths in Everyday Life

3. Maintaining Trust: Importance of Telling the Truth

4. Evaluation of Truth in Life with Doubt and Skepticism

5. Uncovering The True Fiction Behind Ishmael Beah’s Recount of His Life Story

6. The Effects of Sincerity on Our Lives

7. Why Facts Are the Enemy of Truth: Facts and Misrepresented Context

8. The Perception of Reality and Truth by People

9. Understanding the Power of Truth from the Perspective of Philosophy

10. Understanding the Power of Truth and why it is so Important for Us

11. Development of Science in Postmodernistic Era

12. A Lie: Social and Philosophical Definiton of Lying

13. Edmund’s Quest for Recognition in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”

14. Lying or Withholding the Truth in the Medical Setting

• Ethics in Everyday Life
• John Stuart Mill
• Existence of God

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Essay on Truth

"A KNOWLEDGE OF TRUTH IS BEST FOR HUMAN WELFARE,

To Observe Enquire Read and Think in order to find Truth is the Highest Duty of Man."

It would appear to a careless observer, on glancing at the above text, that there is very little left to say upon the subject beyond what is there stated; but if we take a more minute notice of the ideas contained in it, we shall see that in such few words, thoughts lay hidden which would, if fully explained and commented on, fill volumes. We shall carefully proceed to analyse the motto—first of all asking ourselves the oft repeated question, "What is Truth?" Various have been the definitions given of its character, and many the thinkers who have striven to describe it. We do not intend to dictate to the reader of this essay what Truth actually is, for we consider that there is far more to be learnt before man can give an approximately correct definition of its real character in all its varied phases. Our intention is merely to show that if we want to find the truth of anything or everything, we must search it out for ourselves; not merely asking another what we wish to know and then resting satisfied with the answer but making ass of the information to test its real value, and discarding it if it does not harmonise with our reason after being carefully weighed in our minds without bias or headstrong aversion.

This great question has puzzled many a wise head, ​ and so varied and important are its bearings, that we hesitate not to say it will be food for philosophers of all time. It is a subject of such vast extent that what little progress we may make in its acquirement is scarcely noticeable, for it seems to keep continually beyond our grasp; and, in fact, so apparent was this to the ancient philosophers that many of them actually declared that it was not within man's power to find; that try hard as he may he never could obtain truth; and even allowing that he could do so, he would not then be certain that he had possession of it. This is going to extremes indeed, but we must remember that extreme views help to extend and develope human thought, and are equally as beneficial as the most impartial views to the proper understanding of truth. We hold the opinion that although man may not be capable of knowing all truth, still when he has the truth he is capable of appreciating its presence, or what would be the use of his senses? We know full well that nothing in nature is made without a purpose, and our perceptive faculties are no exception to this universal rule. For this reason it is man's duty to analyse carefully everything with which his ideas are brought in contact. This brings us to the first proposition of our text, "A knowledge of Truth is best for human welfare." It will be observed that the statement does not simply say that truth is best; but it goes on to say that a knowledge of truth is best. It is no use having a machine without knowing how to use it, nor an electric telegraph without knowing how to communicate through its agency—the knowledge of its method of working and general management, is what is required. And the same argument applies to truth. Truth is of little or no use to man unless he has a knowledge of its existence and the proper method of applying it. For instance, of what use would be the truths revealed to us by the telescope if we did not properly understand their significance, and the uses to which discoveries effected by their aid might be put for the benefit of humanity? We shall further illustrate our remarks by noting one or two of the benefits conferred on the race by the discoveries of Astronomy.

​ The science of astronomy has played an imporant part in the history of man's civilizatlon—both for good and evil—eventually for the former alone. In early times the study of astronomy was confined to a few, and not a remarkably sensible few either. It was then used (under the name of astrology) as a means of divining a person's future welfare—an extensive system of fortune telling. In this stage of its history it plunged man into a state of ignorance and superstition; the weakest of mankind were played upon by the more enlightened and avaricious, merely for the sake of pecuniary gain and generally as a system of earning a livelihood. Knowledge was hindered and superstition reigned. Men did not trouble about the affairs of life, beyond obtaining their daily bread, and asking their future lot of a set of men almost as ignorant and superstitious as themselves. We are told that in those times ignorance was almost universal, and that the little knowledge that existed was confined to a select few—a small portion of the aristocracy. Out of the ignorance which then existed many strange beliefs have sprung, some of which exist even to his day; for instance: in some foreign lands eclipses are viewed as an omen of evil. Amongst the Chinese an eclipse is a cause for great alarm, for they believe that the sun and moon are being devoured by dragons, and make all possible noise with drums, gongs, and brass kettles to frighten the monsters away. In many uncivilized lands similar views are held. But these beliefs, singular as they are, are not confined to the uncivilized alone; we find superstition rampant amongst ourselves. it is a common belief that the moon is the cause of lunacy; that scientific discoveries are often the work of the devil; and many more notions equally absurd. But, as we have before said, these beliefs chiefly exist amongst the ignorant, and astrology is almost a thing of the past. We have mentioned the state of society when ignorance reigned supreme. Let us now calmly watch Truth, which, like the rising sun, gently ascends from the horizon of superstition through which it has almost passed. Watching carefully, we note the gradual development of intellect in its attempts to unravel the mysteries of the stars. First a few shepherds mark the ​ relative positions of the stars on the soft sands. Presently, more interest appears to be taken in a study, so sublime; and men give more thought to it. Chaldean shepherds are superseded by the cultured. One after another discoveries are made, upsettlng false theories and giving correct and useful ones in their places. The Governments of Greece and Egypt give their aid to its development. Great men arise who attempt to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies upon the theory that the world is fixed in the centre of space, and that the stars are moving round it; but this theory, founded, as it is, on fiction, has to give way before the searching glance of a Coperuicus, who, in spite of the persecution and hatred with which he is received makes the bold assertion that the world is moving with the planets around the sun. People cannot believe it. They ask how it is, if the world is turning round, that they do not, fall off when it is turned upside down. Now, with a spirit almost unequalled, the brave Kepler comes to the front, and proves after years of toilsome and unceasing labour that the theory of Copernicus is correct. But all is not yet finished. It still waits to be accounted for how the earth manages to keep its inhabitants from falling to oblivion. Kepler, who applies a theory of attraction to certain phenomena of nature, leaves it to the master mind of Newton to apply this rule, without discrimination to every particle of matter in existence; and after mathematical demonstration of the correctness of his reasoning, proclaims it to the world. And thus truth rises. But, the reader may ask, "What good has all this done to man?" It has done this! It has taught him, in the first place, that a thing is not necessarily true because someone has said it is so. Further, that the truth cannot be arrived at without labour—that it is man's duty to try and find the truth; and when found, not to hoard it to himself as a miser does his gold, but to give it to the world for the benefit of humanity, so that his knowledge may be a foundation for other minds to build their knowledge upon. The force of our remarks are amply exemplified in the case of the question as to the fixity of the earth. What have been the consequences of these grand discoveries? ​ Why! the trading of priestcraft upon human credulity has been nipped in the bud and almost annihilated, not withstanding the vain efforts of the early Fathers, consequeutly giving man that liberty of thought which his nature so unsparingly demands.

Scientific discovery has also been greatly assisted by the disclosures of Geology. It is mainly by this science that most of the old legends connected with the history of this earth have been swept away. (In remarking upon these myths, or what we believe to be such, we know that we are treading upon dangerous ground; for many have their cherished fancies, and if anyone attempts to upset them, it wounds llke an arrow but we ask from such nothing more than an impartial and unprejudiced hearing, hoping for correction if we state anything wrongly, and the credit which we deserve if we speak the truth. Our intention is to state what we honestly believe to be the truth, and to show others the way to do the same, for

"The Truth is Truth, where'er 'tis found, On Christian or on heathen ground").

One of the old myths we shall more particularly notice, it being a common feature amongst the beliefs of various nations. We refer to the story of an unversal deluge. A short time back anyone attempting to deny the truth of this legend in a Christian community would have been stigmatised as a blasphemer and an opponent of the Word of God. This state of things is happily departing, and mankind are gradually discarding those old stories which cannot stand the test of reason—stories so ancient that they have no reliable records of who the real authors of them were, and which, by the searches made by modern theologists and scientists, are in many cases distinctly proved to be of different authorship than that ascribed to them. This legend of the universal deluge has a seat, as is now well known, amongst most of the nations of the world. We find it amongst the Chaldeans, the Jews, (the Christian and Mahometan stories being derived from the latter), and in America, and various parts of the world. Many works have been written upon the subject, both antagonistic and ​ defensive; amongst the former being the works of such eminent men as Lyell, Clodd, Bishop Colenso (of the Church of England), who, in spite of his being in such a high position, was, out of love for the truth, compelled to openly avow his total disbelief of these stories; and so ably has he defended his position that no one but the most prejudiced or ill-informed could possibly believe in the story after hearing the arguments that have been brought forward by himself and others to refute it.

Many other foolish beliefs have been uprooted by the revelations of Geology, amongst which are the ridiculous stories told in connection with the creation of the world, the origin of life upon its surface, the time which has elapsed since the creation, and the antiquity of man. In past times, when science was in its infancy, it was the common idea to believe that the world was created in a strange manner, only five or six thousand years ago, and that man suddenly appeared on its surface a few days later. The revelations of science, however, have taught man to be in this matter, as in everything else, cautious and enquiring, and have shown him conclusively that man has existed on this earth hundreds of thousands of years—the time of his first appearance being generally estimated at one million of years! It has shown, also, that the world could not have been created in one week, the time usually supposed to have elapsed, but that, like everything else in nature, its growth has been slow and orderly, and that it must have taken millions of years to perform its varied evolutions of matter. There are still many who doubt these statements; but one thing is certain—although they may be wrong in some minor points, they are built upon the strong foundations of truth; and though a few useless ornaments may crumble away, the edifice itself still remains ready to be re-adorned with facts more substantial and incontrovertible; and though men may close their ears to the voice of reason, they do themselves more harm than good, and stifle those glorious faculties for research with which nature has so plentifully endowed them.

"The proper study of mankind is man," is a ​ well-worn maxim, and one that, although quoted o'er and o'er, is always welcome to the ear. When man can properly appreciate the value of this study his progress will be far more rapid and beneficial. The more Physiology is understood the happier does man live. A great many valuable lessons can be learnt from it. He can learn how to save his fellow-creatures from agony, and often prevent a premature death; can discover the injurious effects of poisonous stimulants upon his constitution; can analyse every part of his body in order to have a better knowledge of its functions than he could by merely watching its effects; and, finally, can make laws—laws in accordance with nature's workings, which shall keep his health intact, and cause him to find that "life is real, life is earnest," and that it can only be properly enjoyed and appreciated by being assisted instead of being misunderstood. Medicine was tolerably well understood amongst the ancients, and they paid especial attention to the benefits to be derived from healthful exorcises. Later on, however, in the Middle Ages, people did not pay proper attention to their bodies; they were uncleanly and intemperate in their habits, and did not pay any attention to the ventilation of their houses, nor the sanitary conditions generally of the towns and villages in which they dwelt. And what was the result? They were visited on all sides by famine, disease, and fever; and in the fourteenth century were visited with the terrible Black Death, the horrors of which the pen of a Milton could not describe, nor the pencil of a Doré illustrate. But men are now living in an age of science and they have reason to be thankful for their good fortune. A man may now live in comparative happiness with very little chance of unknowingly infringing the laws of his nature; if he is sick, the means are in his reach to procure relief; if he suffers from fever, he knows that it is caused by bad drainage, or some other careless oversight—maybe insufficient ventilation and stifled atmosphere; if he be a drnnkard, the blame is upon himself, even thongh he be led into it by others, for he has perfect freedom of his will in such a case, and must be well aware from the experience gained by others, ​ that his sin will be visited on himself, This aptly illustrates the statement put forth in the conditions in reference to this essay, that it is man's duty to constantly exercise his intellectual faculties, and the consequent sin of not doing so can be seen accurately illustrated every day (we are sorry to say) in the streets of our city, by noticing the pernicious effects of so vile a practice on the poor inebriated fools who so frequently parade our streets in a sort of zigzag march, lowering themselves below the four-footed brutes, and making themselves despised by their fellow-creatures. If they studied the truths of Physiology and health, and spent their money on literature, or any other kind of useful knowledge, instead of buying the poisonous "nobbler," that their depraved tastes so eagerly long for, they might become model men and women and a benefit to mankind.

History, so called, gives an account of mankind in the collective sense; Biography gives an account of each man individually. Let us now turn our attention to the latter, and see what lessons of truth await us there, remembering that Biography requires the same careful study that History does. In all countries, and in all ages, we find lovers of mankind, eager to benefit their suffering brethren, and teaching such truths as their knowledge made them aware of. It is these that ​ we shall notice, for two reasons; firstly, they are more to the point for our subject; and secondly, the short space at our disposal prevents our noticing more. These saviours of mankind may be traced back to the remotest regions of antiquity. Going far before the time at which our own era begins, and, in fact, in almost prehistoric times, we take the reader back to about the year 628 B.C. This is the period generally assigned to the birth of Budda. We commence with him because he is the first, in chronological order, of the great moral leaders of mankind of whom we have any particular knowledge. Budda was born in India, of royal parents (so say the accounts). His mother died not long after his birth, and he took to spending his life in thoughtful reverie, his mind being chiefly occupied with thoughts upon life and death. Often would he stroll alone in the forests, thinking of the misery and wickedness of mankind, and wondering how he could help to better his fellow creatures. He went about preaching good morals, and spurring his hearers up to benevolent actions. He is said to have been very handsome, and of extensive wisdom; be this as it may, his teachings, written by his disciples (he never having written anything himself), show with what good thoughts he was inspired. We shall give a few examples of his utterances, though they must not be considered in any way complete; like every other good man he had his failings, but "taking him all in all" he was a worthy example for man to follow. He says, when asked by Alvaka (the devil), "of savoury things which is indeed the most savoury?" "Truth is indeed the most savoury of all savoury things." Again, he says, "Let the wise man guard his thoughts, they are difficult to perceive, very artful, and they rush wherever they list; thoughts well guarded bring happiness." "Let no man think lightly of evil." "Let us live happily then, not hating those that hate us .... free from greed among the greedy .... and though we call nothing our own." "Not to commit any sin; to do good, and to purify one's mind, that is the teaching of the Awakened" Budda lived to see his doctrines preached throughout India, and died in the eightieth year of his age. His ​ followers number at the present time upwards of four hundred million souls: a significant fact, showing how the truth can be spread by perseverance and devotion to its cause. Ascending the ladder of time we come next to Zoroaster. We cannot here say much of him. We shall merely remark that he was born about 513 years B.C., that he lived about 76 years, and that the docrines which he taught were widely spread throughout Persia. Very little is known of him, as his history (like that of Pythagoras) is so enveloped in fable and mystery. In his Zend-Avesa, or Bible, he says, Hear with your ears what is best, perceive with your mind what is pure, so that every man may choose his tenets." "Let us then be of those who further this world. . . ,. Oh! bliss. whose history is almost lost in fable, the next great thinker we come to is Confucius . He was born 550 years B.C. He is the leading light amongst the Chinese. He was very fond of learning, and showed great veneration to the aged; he also showed great respect for the laws of his country. "His life was given to teaching a few great truths, obedience to which would bring happiness to every man." Some of his sayings are very telling. "To see what is right, and not to do it, is the want of courage," and "Have no depraved thoughts," are two of his sayings. Pope says:—

"Superior and alone Confucius stood, Who taught that noble science—be good."

Socrates, born 469 B.C., was a great pioneer of truth. He taught that man should use his judgment in all things; and he was the first Greek philosopher on record who taught the value of scepticism. He talked with the youth of Greece upon all subjects, questioning them in a style not unlike the cross-questioning of the present day. "He talked with everyone, no matter how low in life they were nor how apparently ignorant; his theory being that every man knew something better than he did." He heretically taught that there was but one God, and that man was guided by an inward monitor (no doubt alluding to Conscience); but the people of ​ his day did not share that opinion, but said that he was possessed of a devil. He was therefore condemned to death, and drank the fatal cup of hemlock, the usual mode of death in those days. Thus through Ignorance of the Truth, and its offshoot, Bigotry, the world lost one of its greatest thinkers and philosophers. Plato, the disciple of Socrates, lived to preach his doctrines, and helped greatly to benefit his fellow creatures. We now come to one, of whom the reader of this essay has, no doubt, heard. We refer to Jesus Christ. This good man and true philanthropist (for a man he undoubtedly was, or his example would have been useless for man to try and imitate), whose history will be found in almost every Christian library, has done a great deal to alleviate the sufferings of mankind, and to teach them the doctrine of brotherly love; and, although respect for the truth prevents us from saying that we agree with many as to his Divine origin, we cannot but look upon him as one of those great and good minds, whose sympathies have ever been with their suffering fellow-creatures and who have always been averse to seeing the rich and powerful tramping down the weak. His teachings may be summed up in his two great moral precepts—"Do unto others as you would have that they should do unto you," and "Love one another." If men obey this there will be very little selfish feeling between them, and they will learn to respect the rights of others. In reference to our denying the Divinity of Jesus, we may mention that Buddists, Zoroastrians, Confucians, &c., might all put in a similar claim, and, of course, would do so, but we cannot grant it to them all, and if all but one be untrue, who is to say which is the true one? Coming to later times we meet with such men as Mahomet, King Alfred the Great, that earnest-hearted reformer, Martin Luther, who set the noble example of free thought to his followers—an example which few of them have imitated, and many other good souls; these we must, however pass over. In conclusion we must say, that it is by studying the lives of those that have lived before us, that man can best benefit himself and others; and that those whose names we have mentioned should all be classed in the same category, namely, saviours of mankind;— ​ when we speak of saviours, we mean those who have endeavoured to enlighten and benefit mankind. But whilst noticing their good qualities we must not overlook their faults, nor place blind faith in every story that human cunning, or human credulity, has affixed to their names.

Let Truth flash like the lightning, on, on, from shore to shore; Let all assist its progress, till time shall be no more.

We can scarcely mention a discovery of any importance whatever, that has not turned of advantage to man. Each new invention or discovery leads to another; the discoveries of electricity led to the electric telegraph; the electric telegraph led to the telephone, and evolved from this we have had the phonograph, microphone, and other great triumphs, the bare supposition of which, a few years back, would have been looked upon as the mental wanderings of a maniac, or at least, as "castles building in the air." Man has far more opportunities of aiding in the advancement of truth at the present time than he has ever had before. With the aid of the printing press and the newspapers, ideas can be exchanged between one party and another, and he who searches for the truth may find it by these means in many things; but as we have before remarked, he must not think himself infallible, but must use extreme care in drawing his conclusions; above all, he must avoid that great enemy to truth—Prejudice; let him overcome this, and he need not fear the results. Those modern outgrowths of civilization and experience, namely; Business, Commerce, Politics, and Law, are always capable of improvement and extension. We find them now, not applied to the advantages of one party and the disadvantages of another, to anything like the extent that they formerly were; for man is gradually, though surely, recognising the rights of others besides himself. And we hope, and believe, a time will come when prejudice shall be almost forgotten, and man's mind shall be free to wander through the broad paths of knowledge and enlightenment.

Reviewing what we have said, we note, that a correct knowledge of truth, as we have endeavoured to show, is absolutely necessary to man's welfare; we have shown the evil results of his not exercising his intellectual faculties, by reference to his state during the Middle Ages. We have shown that it is necessary he should observe, carefully taking note of the smallest particulars, enquiring far and wide amongst parties of every ​ opinion, either verbally, or by the use of books and papers; and that when he does get the information, he should carefully consider in his mind what value it has, and whether he cannot, if it be imperfect, supplant it by something better, or, at least, endeavour to improve it, that the truth may be more certain, and more reliable for future ages to build their knowledge upon.

If, as we believe, we have given a reasonably fair exposition of our text, our labours will not be in vain. We have honestly stated what we believe to be the truth, hoping earnestly that others may follow in our footsteps, finishing that which we may not have completed,and correcting any errors of our judgment by careful and impartal investigation, and thorough enquiry into the Truth.

E, Purton & CO., Printers, 106 Elizabeth-st., Melbourne

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.

The longest-living author of this work died in 1928, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 95 years or less . This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works .

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Is It Better to Tell The Truth Or Lie

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Essay on Truth is Lived, not Taught

August 10, 2021 by Sandeep

500+ Words Essay on Truth is Lived, not Taught

Tring-tring, tring-tring! Akash answered the phone, only to hear the voice of an unknown stranger, speaking in a very formal tone.

“Good afternoon. This is the Express Bank calling. May I speak to Mr. Mehta?”

Akash turned towards his father, who was standing right beside him, carefully overhearing the phone call. He vehemently refused to come towards the phone, wringing his hands, and instead whispered, “Tell them I’m out of town.” Why it was too hot to get into a long conversation about finances so early in the morning!

Putting on his most grown-up voice, Akash repeated the same to the man on the other side and then politely ended the call. But that wasn’t the end of the matter! The very next day, Mr. Mehta was urgently phoned to school, and he hurried along, wondering what had gone wrong and hoping against hope that nothing had happened to his son.

Akash’s teacher met him. She was a rather firm and strict woman. She said, “Akash bunked two lectures this morning. He instructed his friends to tell us he was sick while he wandered around in the corridors. We maintain a very strict no-lying policy in school. Is this the behaviour he is being taught?”

Mr. Mehta was shocked, not to mention embarrassed. “Akash, what is this that I’m hearing? Why are you lying? Have not your mother and I taught you that lying is bad?”

But with all the innocence of a doe-eyed deer, Akash smiled calmly and replied, “Daddy, it was too hot to study mathematics so early in the morning. Besides, I thought we were allowed to lie as you did to the Express Bank man yesterday?”

‘Akash’s of Everyday

Children are innocent and pure. They imitate and mimic the things they see their elders, and especially their parents, do. We often see them playing with toy cell phones, holding long conversations, just like when they see their father talking to his boss.

The girls observe how their mother keeps the house clean or maybe gives tea parties, and they incorporate that in keeping their dollhouses neat and giving their teddy bears a party.

So much so that a friend of mine used to remove the shoes off her dolls and line them up neatly outside the doll-house before allowing them to enter, which was a habit practised in her home.

The Akash of our story represents all the naive children of the world. He did not lie to teach his father a lesson, nor was his answer supposed to be sarcastic in any way. He was stating what he had observed. Children learn not through words but actions.

So when his parents had tried to teach him not to lie, and when his father unwittingly instructed him to lie, Akash observed and repeated the action over the words. This is because the Truth is lived, not taught.

Origin & Meaning of the Quote

Hermann Karl Hesse was a German born poet, author, and painter. He believed that the deity is within a person, not in books or ideas. Almost all of his works explored an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality.

He acknowledged publicly that the truth must be experienced, not just taught. His books included Siddhartha, Demian, Beneath the Wheel, Narcissus and Goldmund, and several others.

Hermann was the one responsible for this quote. He penned it down in his book “The Glass Bead Game.” In the context of the book, the main character, Joseph Knecht, is conversing with a great master. He asks for an understanding, a real and valid doctrine, and complains about how everything is contradictory and tangential.

The master responds to him with an offer of truth. He advises him not to wait for a perfect doctrine but instead to long for the perfection of himself. Truth is lived, not taught, and hence he must be prepared for conflicts.

Difference between Teaching and Living

As Roy T. Bennett, the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, had once said, “Some things can never be taught; they must be experienced. You never learn the most valuable lessons in life unless you go through your own journey.”

A taught thing will never have life in it. It will always remain non-living. What we learn gains life only when it is lived in actuality. When we live a truth, we can understand it completely. We undergo those circumstances, and we discern the matter ourselves.

Whether or not the matter or happening at hand is true or false, it is always better understood when it has been lived through. We can teach a child that fire is hot, but we cannot teach what ‘hot’ exactly is. We could say it burns, but then again, the child won’t know what that is without experiencing it.

Unless the child lives through it and feels the heat radiating out of the fire, they will never really learn that fire is hot. Just as a qualitative term needs to be lived through to be understood, so must the truth be lived in that regard.

Truth of Teachers and Masters

The truth is not some information or, rather, some bookish knowledge that teachers can force in, or more likely, crammed into our heads. Instead, it is an experience that is learned by implementing it in our everyday behaviours and personality, which, in short, is living it.

Truth, when lived, can have an ever-lasting influence. For example, a child can be taught alphabets, numbers, and rhymes. But in their life, they regularly use alphabets and numbers.

They live through it, and it will remain in their minds forever. However, the same cannot be said for the rhymes, for they are taught the rhymes only once.

It does not remain in their minds for too long because they do not recall it regularly. Though a child must be taught everything, they absorb the thing only when they start living with it.

A sage, who practices his life by the truth, will always refuse to teach others. Why might you ask? It is simply because the truth can never be taught. The sage will never be a teacher. He might be a master, certainly, but he will never make himself a teacher.

Suffering, or the loss of any precious thing, is not the truth to be lived. The truth to be lived is to face the hardships that come from spiritual learning. Truth, like knowledge, is surprisingly difficult to define. We seem to rely on it almost every moment of every day, and it is very close to us.

Yet, it isn’t easy to define the truth because as soon as you think you have it pinned down, some case or counterexample immediately shows the other possibilities.

The truth is a process from the womb to the tomb, the cradle to the grave. The Greek word for “truth” is Aletheia, which means to “un-hide” or “hiding nothing.” It conveys the thought that truth is always there, always open and available for all to see, with nothing being hidden or obscured.

The Hebrew word for “truth” is emeth, which means “firmness,” “constancy,” and “duration.” Such a definition implies an everlasting substance and something that can be relied upon.

To conclude, I would like to quote Shakespeare, in Hamlet, wherein he wrote, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

The simple translation says that above all things, be true to yourself. And by the laws of nature, just as night follows day, the fact follows that you will be true to your fellow-men too.

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On Truth and Lie in the Object-Oriented Sense

This article begins with a treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.” The essay is often read, in the deconstructive tradition, as a showcase example of the impossibility of making a literal philosophical claim: is Nietzsche’s claim that all truth is merely metaphorical itself a true statement, or merely a metaphorical one? The present article claims that this supposed paradox relies on the groundless assumption that all philosophy must ultimately be grounded in some unshakeable literal truth. From here, we turn to Edmund Gettier’s famous critique of the widespread notion of knowledge as “justified true belief.” Expanding on Gettier’s point, it is argued that there can only be “justified untrue belief” or “unjustified true belief,” never a belief that is both justified and true at once.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense” (hereafter, “Truth and Lie”) in early career, though it remained unpublished until the final years of his insanity. [1] Famous for its claim that all perceptions, statements, and concepts are metaphors and thus cannot directly communicate truths about reality, it has been treated by critics as one of the early inspirations for an empty postmodernist relativism. One might wonder whether Nietzsche’s sweeping vision has anything to do with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), which also places strong emphasis on metaphor, as in Chapter 2 of my book Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything . [2] Stephen Mulhall wrote a critical review of that work in the London Review of Books which, among other things, raised the question of whether Nietzsche’s essay was the inspiration for my treatment of the topic. [3] It was not. The OOO theory of metaphor was inspired instead by José Ortega y Gasset’s own early-career treatment of metaphor in “An Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface,” which I first discussed in print in 2005 in Guerrilla Metaphysics . [4] But while Mulhall’s guess at the backstory of my theory was incorrect, he does raise a question of considerable interest: what are the points of overlap and conflict between the respective theories of metaphor in OOO and “Truth and Lie”? This article aims to settle that question.

1 The central theses of “Truth and Lie”

Whatever one thinks of his philosophy per se , Nietzsche is generally – and rightly – regarded as one of the greatest literary talents in the history of Western philosophy. Perhaps only Plato has a comparable reputation for excellence as a writer. Cicero’s reference to Aristotle’s “golden” dialogues is certainly impressive, given the scale of that ancient Roman’s own stylistic gifts. But unless these lost Aristotelian works resurface someday from a monastery or the dry sands of Egypt, we have no independent basis for placing him on the same literary plane as his teacher. Giordano Bruno was another immensely talented writer, though somewhat limited in his repetitive comic formula: a Latin-spouting pedant repeatedly smacked down by a clever buffoon, as two serious thinkers debate in the foreground. Henri Bergson was another great philosophical stylist – indeed, the recipient of a Nobel Prize for Literature that was denied to his relative by marriage Marcel Proust – but one would hesitate to place his smoothly flowing prose on the same plane as Nietzsche and Plato. There is also one of Nietzsche’s own favorites, Arthur Schopenhauer, a sophisticated and cosmopolitan essayist and heckling sage, but one dogged too frequently by his resentments and outbursts of temper. In any case, Nietzsche’s power as a writer is so profound that we can imagine him being just as influential if he had been a mainstream Christian or socialist rather than the eternal Dionysian hero of rebellious youth.

We should affirm the nullity of all human things.

The human account of the world is naively anthropomorphic.

Our entire lived world is merely a translation.

Humans are fundamentally liars at every level of existence.

Our sense of truth is dominated by power struggles and social factors.

Science is just a derivative form of metaphor.

Human experience is basically aesthetic and therefore untrue.

In a sense, these seven points also summarize the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, meaning that the present article might be expanded beyond “Truth and Lie” into a judgment on his entire written corpus. Nonetheless, it is not the case that all seven points necessarily come as a package: one could easily affirm some of them – at least partially – while denying one or more of the others. Beyond this, there are internal cracks in each of the points taken individually. Let’s begin by covering them one by one before proceeding, in the next section, to reflect on their various strengths and weaknesses.

1. We should affirm the nullity of all human things . Although the futility of all human effort is not the primary claim of “Truth and Lie,” it is certainly the keynote of the article from its earliest lines: “In some remote corner of the cosmos, dispersed into countless flickering solar systems, there was once a star where clever animals invented knowledge… After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star froze, and the clever beasts had to die.” (2) And again: “There were eternities during which [the human intellect] did not exist; and when it comes to an end, nothing will have happened.” (7) The main influence on this passage was no doubt the pessimistic Schopenhauer, who still cast a long shadow over the early Nietzsche. [5] In present-day philosophy it is Nietzsche’s fellow Schopenhauer admirer, Ray Brassier, who expresses this sense of the worthlessness of all human endeavor most passionately. [6] The difference is that while Brassier has a profound respect for science as our means of grasping this worthlessness, Nietzsche takes science to be just one more piece of illusion. In any case, “Truth and Lie” is pitched from the start as a “critical” approach to the human condition, despite Nietzsche’s firm awareness of the respective drawbacks of the critical mode of writing history along with its two alternatives: the antiquarian and the monumental. [7]

2. The human account of the world is naively anthropomorphic . For all our pretensions to knowledge, we remain forever trapped in a human bubble, encountering nothing but ourselves. Whereas empirical approaches in philosophy and elsewhere like to pride themselves on superior parsimony and greater honesty than other intellectual strategies, for Nietzsche, “the entire empirical world… [is] the anthropomorphic world.” (162) Knowledge claims to go beyond the interior of our experience, but in the end human thought “has no additional mission leading beyond human life.” (7) It is not even that “man is the measure of all things,” as Protagoras held, since for Nietzsche we are the measure of all things only for ourselves. After all, animals probably consider themselves to sit at the center of the universe as well, and our only difference from them is our “ability to volatilize visible perception in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept,” (91–97) though image and concept turn out to be nothing more than two different stages of metaphor. The notion that humans are trapped in a human conception of things is, of course, the core of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. And while Nietzsche’s contempt for Kant is proverbial, they agree on at least this much. The probable indirect source of this affinity is once again Schopenhauer, who admired Kant as deeply as Nietzsche despised him. Although Kant has come under a great deal of fire from various quarters for more than two centuries, he made a permanent addition to our intellectual vocabulary that remains in full force today: as in the systems theory idea that any system is closed off from its environment, whether in the ecological theories of Jakob von Uexküll, the autopoietic biology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, or the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann that borrowed so much from their work. [8] OOO itself seems to confine humans to the “sensual” in comparable fashion, although there are complications to this view to be considered below.

3. Our entire world is merely a translation . Whatever we humans encounter in the world can only be what the empiricists called “secondary” rather than “primary” qualities, and we cannot even be sure that primary qualities exist in the first place. For “how could we possibly say ‘the stone is hard,’ as if ‘hard’ were somehow otherwise known than through a purely subjective irritation!” (48–54) It is even worse when we pass from the purported “hardness” of a particular stone and reflect on the concept “hardness” more generally, divorced from any specific case. For then we are yet another step further from the concrete and the immediate, as in Plato’s doctrine of perfect forms. In British Empiricism, John Locke deduces the existence of a substance (“I know not what”) that supports all secondary qualities, George Berkeley rejects primary qualities outright with the idea that everything other than minds is merely an image, and David Hume takes a skeptical distance toward the question of whether substances or minds are real things behind their tangible qualities. [9] The Nietzsche of “Truth and Lie” is certainly no Lockean, and he also seems closer to Hume than to Berkeley: Nietzsche’s theory of metaphors leaves open the possibility of an inaccessible world apart from the human one. That is to say that unlike German Idealism, he takes the position that saying either that a world outside perception exists or that it does not exist are two equally groundless claims: much like Quentin Meillassoux’s “correlationist.” [10] For to say that such a world exists “would be a dogmatic assertion, and to this extent just as unprovable as its opposite.” (78) We can now replace the three British Empiricists with the names of German philosophers so as to obtain a helpful analogy. Kant is like Locke, deducing the existence of the thing-in-itself from that of the phenomena; German Idealism is like Berkeley, denying that an inaccessible thing-in-itself can possibly exist; Nietzsche is more like Hume, asserting that the question is unanswerable, and that one must remain an agnostic about the thing-in-itself just as about primary qualities.

4. Humans are fundamentally liars at every level of existence . One of the most memorable sentences in “Truth and Lie” runs as follows:

In human life… deception, flattery, lying and deceiving, backstabbing, posturing, stolen glory, the wearing of masks, hiding behind convention, acting before others and before oneself – in short, a continuous fluttering to and fro around the single flame called vanity – is so much the rule and the law that nearly nothing is harder to grasp than how a pure and honest drive for truth could ever have arisen. (19)

Lying and pretense, then, are at the heart of the human vocation. Not only do we merely glide over the surface of things and grasp nothing but their superficial aspects, but for a third of our lives we are lost in dreams, cut off even from the actual state of our bodies. But aside from this ubiquitous character of illusion, the real difference between truth and lie arises for the first time in language: “a designation for things is invented that is both valid and binding, and the legislation of language also gives the first laws of truth: here, for the first time, there arises a contrast between truth and lie.” (37) In language, says Nietzsche, there are only two kinds of statements: sheer tautology and mere illusion. Here we are reminded of Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, where the former are simply tautologous and the latter bring two different terms together. While Kant is confident in our ability to make a priori synthetic judgments that contain necessary truth, synthetic judgments for Nietzsche are always loaded with falsity.

5. Our sense of truth is dominated by power struggles and social factors . There are lies, and then there are lies. Along with the symphony of deceptions served up by our senses and intellect alike, we also need social stability. For this reason, a distinction is drawn between socially acceptable lies and those aggravated falsehoods that are deemed unacceptable: “The liar uses these valid designations, words, in order to make the unreal appear real. He says for example ‘I am rich,’ though ‘poor’ would be the proper designation for his state.” (37) The social use of “truth” is to distinguish the good citizen from the liar, and what we call truth is really just a matter of “caste order and class rank.” (103) Yet even this holds good only on the interior of any given society, not between different societies. For in Nietzsche’s words:

Just as the Romans and Etruscans carved up the sky with rigid mathematical lines and bound a god in each demarcated space as if in a temple, so too does every people have such a mathematically apportioned conceptual heaven above it. What such a people understands by “the requirements of truth” is simply that each conceptual god should remain in its own sphere. (103–108)

Here, Nietzsche allies himself with an extreme form of ontologized cultural relativism, as seen today in Philippe Descola’s anthropological thesis that all human societies must take one of four incommensurable forms: rationalism, animism, totemism, or analogism. [11] Although our rationalism thinks itself superior to the other three “primitive” forms, we have simply made one of the four possible choices as to the question of whether humans and nonhumans share the same kinds of minds and bodies. Our particular rationalist choice is that all things are made of the same physical material but that only humans have minds in the strict sense of the term. But for Descola – and Nietzsche would no doubt go along with him – the other three permutations are equally possible and equally valid.

6. Science is just a derivative form of metaphor . What we call “science” purports to be a form of access to reality different in kind from all myth, religion, and poetry. Bruno Latour argues that this attitude stems from the uniquely modern claim that nature and society should be mutually purified from each other, with the former speaking only of causally independent events unaffected by human thought, and the latter referring solely to a realm of arbitrary power struggles. [12] The tendency of Latour’s career is to argue that such purified realms do not really exist, since science assembles heterogeneous actors to reach powerful results and society takes account of reality in establishing and modifying its institutions. “Truth and Lie” adopts a far more extreme position than Latour’s, treating both science and politics as differing forms of illusion. Science proclaims its interest solely in truth, but for Nietzsche, truth is nothing more than “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in brief, a sum of human relations that are poetically and rhetorically amplified, transmitted, and decorated, and which after long use seem to a people to be steady, canonical, and binding.” (78–85) As we have seen, rationality merely takes the already metaphorical character of perceptual images and places them at a second remove by turning them into abstract concepts. Above all, science is a mathematizing operation, and combined with our already vague sense of space and time, it gives rise to the so-called “laws of nature,” an impossible notion given that everything that happens is individual, such that no event is quite like any other. Science is thus “the burial ground of perceptions.” (162) Stated differently, “the fact that a metaphor hardens and becomes rigid guarantees nothing at all concerning the necessity and exclusive justification of this metaphor.” (139) We only know things relationally, not as they are in themselves. Scientific truth is thus “a truth of limited value… [for] it is thoroughly anthropomorphic and contains not a single point that would be ‘true in itself’ or really and generally valid apart from man.” (114) There is simply no way to mirror an object in a subject accurately. And perhaps most alarming of all, “he who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds in defending against misfortune, without gaining any happiness from these abstractions.” (210)

7. Human experience is basically aesthetic and therefore untrue . All of the previous sections have led up to this one. Everything is metaphor; all is aesthetic and hence untrue. “For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression, but at most an aesthetic relation: I mean an allusive transfer, a stuttering translation into an entirely foreign tongue[…]” (127–133). This might seem not to go much further than the thoughts of Descartes or Spinoza on the incommensurability of different substances or attributes, if not for our awareness of Nietzsche’s later view that the will to power introduces translation or distortion even between distinct physical things. [13] Nothing happens directly, since everything is mediated through some sort of translation of forces. Hegel holds too that everything is mediated, but his confidence in the nonexistence of the thing-in-itself makes him correspondingly confident in reason’s ability to attain absolute knowing through the course of history. [14] By contrast, translation for Nietzsche means that something is always left out, and thus he remains secure in his aesthetic skepticism. After all, “the very relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is itself not necessary.” (133) For this reason, “the drive to form metaphors [is the] basic human drive, which we cannot for an instant explain away, for that would mean explaining away human being itself.” (168) All perceptions, conceptualizations, and actions are equally metaphorical whether they be undertaken by artists, scientists, or craftspeople. The devotion of early civilizations to myth and art expresses nothing more than a fundamental human metaphorical drive. The pleasure of the creative thinker is simply that of “blending metaphors together and displacing the boundary stones of abstraction.” (186) And furthermore, when intellectual talent “smashes [the existing] framework to pieces, mixes it into confusion, and ironically reassembles it, pairing itself with the strangest things and repelling the most familiar, it is revealed that it… will now be guided not by concepts but by intuitions.” (192–198) It is easy to see why Mulhall and others recognize OOO in this portrait, given the well-known slogan of our philosophical school that “aesthetics is first philosophy.” [15]

2 How the theses fit together

The first thesis of “Truth and Lie,” the one concerning the pitifulness of human existence, can easily be detached from its other principal ideas. For even if we were to agree that humans cannot grasp the in-itself, that we are limited to translations and metaphorical displacements internal to the human sphere, a pessimistic result would not necessarily follow. Kant does not give us much more of a foothold than Nietzsche in grasping the thing-in-itself, and yet, the Kantian critical philosophy is suffused with hope. Kant even engages in a certain amount of self-congratulation for having spared humans any further effort on metaphysical questions that cannot be answered even in principle. There is the additional problem, in Nietzsche’s case, that his view on the inevitable extinction of the human race itself draws on fairly recent cosmological hypotheses. In Brassier’s contemporary hymn to extinction, we find the same difficulty in even more pronounced form: humans are not only destined to die, but are “already dead,” since none of our thoughts or actions can leave any symbolic trace following the ultimate evaporation of the universe itself. [16] Yet the specter of our individual deaths, already well established through millennia of human history and reinforced by ongoing experience of accident and illness, is already sufficiently forlorn that we need not jump to the hypothetical end of the universe to frighten ourselves. It is perhaps depressing enough to imagine five or ten thousand years into the future, when any existing human race will probably differ so greatly from the current one in cultural and perhaps physical reality that our present-day actions might seem futile on that basis alone. But even this is a different issue from the more immediate challenge raised by Nietzsche: the inherently metaphorical character of all human thought and action. Compared to this pressing question, raising the specter of the end of the universe is like interrupting a chess match between grand masters by knocking the board off the table. To stand up at a wedding and call it a pointless ceremony, given the inevitable heat-death of the universe, puts one in a superior position only in the crassest possible sense.

We turn now to the second thesis, to the effect that we are trapped in a human bubble and therefore cannot reach truth. This is simply the thesis of Kant, to whom Nietzsche is here indebted despite his lack of respect for the great German master. [17] Kant’s primary interest, as Heidegger emphasizes, is human finitude. [18] The world is experienced according to our pure intuitions of time and space and the twelve categories of the understanding, which need not apply elsewhere than the phenomenal realm of appearance. Meillassoux’s related starting point – his admiration for the correlationism he opposes is still missed by most commentators – is the thesis that “correlationism rests on an argument as simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and no theory about X without a positing of X.” [19] While there have been many attempts to get beyond Kant’s outlook, they boil down to a few basic types, most of them arguing that the thing-in-itself is not inaccessible as Kant assumes. There is the approach of German Idealism, which holds that the purportedly transcendent in-itself is actually immanent, since we are at least able to think it; therefore, the supposed absolute transcendence of the noumena is really just a relative inaccessibility to be overcome by the movement of thought, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit . [20] There are the differing phenomenological efforts of Husserl and Heidegger, the former arguing that we are already outside ourselves in intending objects, with the latter countering that our unconscious practical use of tools is enough to place us outside the mind. [21] Meillassoux critiques these approaches as remaining confined with a “transparent cage,” and his own technique is to establish a mathematical means of access to the in-itself, which he redefines as that which can preexist or outlast the human species, rather than as something inaccessible here and now as Kant holds. There are also the various forms of scientific realism, which rely ultimately on the claim that modern science is more successful than the discourses of uncivilized tribes. [22] OOO is one of the few contemporary schools that embraces Kant’s thing-in-itself, objecting only to his view that this Ding an sich is a problem limited to human cognition rather than applicable to every relation between any two things. In this respect, OOO is closer to the Nietzsche of “Truth and Lie” than the other standpoints just mentioned.

The third thesis of “Truth and Lie” was that the world we experience is merely a translation, not the direct presence of reality. This is obviously rejected by German Idealism, Husserl, Meillassoux, and scientific realism, all of them holding either that the thing-in-itself is already immanent (the first two) or that it is transcendent but accessible by various rational means (the latter two). But perhaps the most powerful recent assertion of Kant’s basic point comes in the differing critiques of “onto-theology” or “presence” by Heidegger and Derrida. In Heidegger’s case, the basic idea is that we do not have direct access to the being of beings. Being is that which hides, withdraws, or remains partially veiled and is never directly present-at-hand for consciousness. [23] Elsewhere, I have argued that this amounts to a critique of relationism, against Nietzsche’s thesis that everything we encounter is relational. [24] In any case, Heidegger holds that being is able to poke through the circle of presence and give us a glimpse of something deeper than our world of representations. Derrida gives a more “secularized” version of the critique, doing away with any Heideggerian notion of depth. [25] Beings are always contextual in a sense more sweeping than their present actual contexts; for this reason, there is no identity to things at all, which is surely closer to Nietzsche’s own position than Heidegger is. But it is safe to say that the other standpoints just mentioned (German Idealism, Husserl, Meillassoux, scientific realism) do not pass the test of the Heideggero-Derridean critiques of presence.

The fourth and fifth theses can be handled together. We have seen that since everything is a translation rather than direct evidence of a reality external to humans, everything is to be considered a lie. Yet Nietzsche distinguishes further between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable lies. It is a matter of caste and class rank, for which each culture possesses its own criteria. But this is essentially just the modern distinction between rational truth and political power that Latour challenged so forcefully in We Have Never Been Modern . Nietzsche’s assumption, in other words, is that “power” is a self-contained and arbitrary sovereign force ungrounded in anything we might be able to call real. In the dispute over an air-pump between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, covered in classic fashion by the historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Nietzsche could be linked with Hobbes and thus with Shapin and Schaffer as well. Social power trumps scientific knowledge because it is society that determines the definition of good science. [26] Latour’s answer to this position is – or ought to be – legendary: “No, Hobbes was wrong.” Latour continues:

[Shapin and Schaffer] offer a masterful deconstruction of the evolution, diffusion and popularization of the air pump. Why, then, do they not deconstruct the evolution, diffusion and popularization of “power” or “force”? Is “force” less problematic than the air’s spring [in Boyle’s air-pump]? If nature and epistemology are not made up of transhistoric entities, then neither are history and sociology[…] [27]

The same critique strikes Nietzsche as well. He assumes that “power” is something immediately intelligible, without making as searching an analysis of this notion as he does of truth. Granted, Nietzsche has already given reasons for discarding truth: we only have translations, never reality itself. Yet it remains to be seen whether translation actually has no contact with a reality apart from perception.

Before moving on to Nietzsche’s final two theses, it will be useful to dwell a bit longer on Latour, so as to avoid any possible misunderstandings. When the latter intones that “Hobbes was wrong,” he takes a principled and overlooked stand against a thesis that is often wrongly imputed to his actor–network theory, to the effect that everything in the cosmos is simply a power struggle among various actors. We should first note that this is a different sort of challenge to the reign of power than we find in the response of Socrates to Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic , or in the objection that Leo Strauss levies against Carl Schmitt: power is worthless unless it is guided by knowledge. [28] These classical responses to the proclaimed supremacy of power have much in their favor, yet they accept the very opposition between truth and power that Latour assaults in We Have Never Been Modern . This is not because Latour is more enamored of power than of truth – his sudden 1991 conversation to an anti-Hobbesian position testifies to the contrary – but because he wishes to derive both science and society from a unified underlying conception: the assemblage of human and nonhuman actors in networks, with some of the networks successful in extending further than others. [29] This must not be caricatured as just another power struggle, since for Latour both experiments and bona fide physical entities are actors capable of overturning any amount of social power, as long as they can be made to form a solid and stable network.

We return to Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lie,” whose sixth and seventh theses can also be treated jointly. The sixth was that scientific knowledge is just another metaphor, even if one more distant than everyday language from the reality it describes. Here again, the assumption is that there is no means of access to anything transcending our ever-present sphere of translations, mediations, and other lies. Yet this does not follow even if we accept the idea of ubiquitous translation, which OOO does no less than Latour. The difference between the latter two positions, we saw, is that for Latour there is no original thing behind the actions of an actor, though for OOO there is. And while for OOO – which accepts the Heideggerian version of the critique of presence – there is no way for the thing to manifest itself directly, it can do so indirectly by highlighting a gap in presence itself. This is not meant in the sense of Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the real appears as a breakdown in the symbolic order and the objet a of desire is retroactively projected by the one who desires; instead, for OOO, there is a bona fide real that does not just traumatize humans and is not just a formless unity but deploys itself in cases where real meets real, though of course in mediated fashion. [30] Stated differently, there is still hope for science to provide more than “lies,” even if it can never provide us with reality directly in the flesh. While the latter point is enough for some to accuse OOO of an “anti-science” stance, it really places Object-Oriented Ontology among many other fallibilist positions in the philosophy of science (those of Karl Popper or Imre Lakatos) and even among certain realist ones (that of Roy Bhaskar). [31] A similar situation holds with respect to Nietzsche’s claim that everything is aesthetic: after all, he views science as simply a more pallid and anemic genre of art. Just as science has no hope of reaching anything that transcends our usual mass of lying metaphors, the same holds for aesthetics, which can lead us to nothing but a pleasurable play of illusions, and perhaps the even more pleasurable sensation of destroying all existing metaphorical coordinates and setting up new ones. “Power” would be the only criterion for what makes one metaphor better than another. But here again, Nietzsche simply assumes that there is no way for metaphor to do anything more than transmute already existing lies into new ones. He allows for no way to produce suggestive gaps or signs of absence that might be something different in kind from our usual template of illusions.

Here we should speak briefly of one of the most frequent critiques of “Truth and Lie,” since it bears on more than Nietzsche’s brief early essay. The critique in question pertains to the apparent self-reflexivity of the central claim of “Truth and Lie.” Namely, is Nietzsche’s essay itself to be taken as “true” or as a “lie”? If we believe what he writes in the essay, then it – like everything else, Nietzsche argues – can only be a lie. But if it is a lie, then it refutes itself and need not be taken seriously in the first place. This is simply a version of the old Cretan Liar’s Paradox: “I am lying” can neither be true nor a lie, since both options entail contradiction. This same logic governs many other paradoxes and can also be deployed against more philosophers than Nietzsche, if sometimes in milder form. For example, Heidegger holds that “truth” always appears to human beings against a specific historical background or “thrownness” and is therefore not “true” in the sense of correspondence. Yet Heidegger is writing from a specific historically thrown standpoint and therefore what he says about the historicity of truth is every bit as suspect as other historically grounded statements, including those historically grounded statements which claim that truth is absolute and trans-historical. Attempts have been made to apply the same critique to OOO: if we claim that all statements belong merely to the “sensual” realm rather than the “real,” it follows that OOO itself is merely a sensual exercise and hence no better than any other theory that produces mere appearance.

Such an argument about Nietzsche was made by the recently deceased J. Hillis Miller, one of America’s most venerable literary critics. [32] As Miller writes: “In Nietzsche’s case the binary oppositions, on which [‘On Truth and Lie’] is built, ultimately collapse in such a way that the essay turns back on itself and no longer makes consistent sense.” [33] In the final paragraph of his article, Miller even turns his guns against the reader: “This dangerous incoherence is repeated by the reader of Nietzsche’s essay. An interpretation of it can never be clear or complete… Insofar as [the reader] thinks he has a clear, distinct, and coherent reading of the essay, he has forgotten some important part of it.” [34] The argument concludes with a textbook example of deconstructive reading: “This impotence of both author and reader is the primary evidence of the presence as non-presence, everywhere in the text, of the unknown X which it wrestles, unsuccessfully, to locate and name.” [35] In short, Nietzsche has purportedly been tamed by the Cretan Liar’s Paradox, and rather than an impossible attempt to force a reading of “Truth and Lie” as either truthful or lying, we – and not just Nietzsche himself – are led into an undecidable oscillation between both options.

Let it be said that I am no admirer of such attempts to break down texts by inscribing them in their own stated rules of discourse. My objection is not merely stylistic, but philosophical in character. Miller’s claim that Nietzsche’s essay “collapses” amounts to the view that the philosopher is actually a Cretan Liar. The essay “Truth and Lie” is read as equivalent to the statement “I am lying” and is thus interpreted as a bundle of rhetorical figures masking a logical paradox. Yet this claim is itself strikingly similar to another famous conundrum: Meno’s Paradox. In Plato’s Meno , the title character ventures the complaint that we cannot look for something if we already have it, and cannot look for it if we do not , since in the latter case we would be unable to recognize it when we find it. [36] Socrates gives the classic response – which is in fact the very core of philosophia  – that we neither have nor do not have what we seek in any unambiguous sense, but always have partial possession of it. For instance, we have some idea of what justice is, and this vague preliminary conception at least enables us to make a closer approach to justice in its own right. Any theory which accepts Meno’s view that we either simply have or simply do not have the truth is ipso facto unphilosophical, however well-intentioned or however illuminating in other respects. Few are willing to stand up for Meno in this connection, simply because he is outmatched by our disciplinary hero Socrates. Yet philosophers do creep back to Meno’s defense in other, more respectable contexts. A fine example concerns the fabled debate over the thing-in-itself. Expressed in terms of the Meno , one position is essentially that “we can’t look for the thing-in-itself because we don’t have it” while another is “we can’t look for the thing-in-itself because we already have it.”

Stated differently, there is either a gap between reality and appearance that cannot be bridged, or there is no gap at all and therefore no bridge needs to be built in the first place. Socrates would ask instead for a bridge that can be built without illegally relocating the further shore to where we stand: in all the Dialogues of Plato, Socrates never achieves an adequate definition of anything. We are not forced to choose between the two Sophistical formulae “nothing is true” or “everything is true.” What we seek, as Socrates sought, is some way of inscribing the real into appearance without making the impossible claim that it can be directly present. If this sounds hopeless, it is enough to realize – contra Wittgenstein in the final words of the Tractatus  – that language itself is not split between clear propositional speech on the one hand and brooding silence on the other. [37] In OOO terms, we are not forced to choose between the “undermining” or “overmining” approach to any topic, since we have indirect ways of getting at it. [38] The attempt to produce a deadlock between the claims that truth is either inaccessible or accessible rests, in the end, on the unjustified view that truth must be supported by some final literal statement on which all the others are based. Yet there is nothing actually wrong with making the historically situated claim that all truth is historical (Heidegger) or the metaphorical claim that presence is impossible (OOO). Language is filled in advance with insinuation, innuendo, implications, hints, and proper names that merely point without making their bearer directly present. [39] It also has at its disposal the powerful tools of metaphor and metonymy, and we will see that Nietzsche is wrong to assume that these tools only have traffic with the realm of illusion.

3 The new position of the literal

The words “literal” and “literally” do not occur in “Truth and Lie,” though throughout the essay they are tacitly present as the impossible counterpart to the metaphorical. Hence it is not surprising that Miller uses these words no fewer than eight times in his commentary. Literal truth, it seems, would mean that reality itself is made directly present in perception, speech, or concept, and this is something that Nietzsche regards as beyond the scope of possibility. The same sentiment can be found in Derrida’s argument that literalism is impossible, and hence that there is no difference between literal and metaphorical statement: everywhere there is nothing but metaphor. [40] The main difference between Derrida’s position and that of “Truth and Lie” is – we have seen – that Nietzsche takes an agnostic stance on the existence of an independent reality and merely denies that we would be able to say anything about it, while Derrida denies the existence of any autonomous “self-present” reality at all. Heidegger’s position is distinct from both, since – contra Derrida’s misinterpretation in Of Grammatology  – there is no Heideggerian philosophy without a real and never fully accessible depth. This allows Heidegger to reverse the terms of Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s positions: if there is anything literal, it is merely at the surface in the form of present-at-hand experience, ignorant of the concealed depths from which it emerges. This is why metaphorical language does have a special status for Heidegger by contrast with the literal, since it is aware of the concealment of that about which it speaks.

Nonetheless, all three authors – Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida – see the relation between the literal and the metaphorical as playing out along a single dualism between an autonomous reality (whether affirmed or denied) on the one hand and the accessibility of appearance on the other. This gives us another version of the recurring triad encountered above: Heidegger deduces the existence of the real (Locke, Kant), Derrida denies it (Berkeley, Hegel), and Nietzsche remains unsure while denying its importance either way (Hume, Nietzsche himself in another context). What all of them miss, and what OOO endorses, is an additional axis of division that turns out to be the genuine position of the literal. It finds this in a little-noticed aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl is justly celebrated as the critic par excellence of “psychologism,” the view that logical laws have no transcendent validity but are really just laws of human psychology: it is “psychologically impossible” to think that A is both A and not-A, for instance. What is less well understood is that Husserl was even more importantly the critic par excellence of British Empiricism. Phenomenology is based on the notion of “intentionality,” a term handed down from the medieval writings of Avicenna and famously revived in the work of Husserl’s teacher, Franz Brentano. [41] But Husserl adds an important new dimension to Brentano’s version of the concept. For Brentano, all forms of intentionality are grounded in its primordial form: representation. I cannot make judgments about something, or feel positively or negatively toward it, unless it is first present before my mind. At first this sounds no different from Husserl’s own approach, which is equally rooted in the idea that philosophy can study only that which is given to the mind, rather than hypothetical scientific objects or some “absurd” thing-in-itself. Husserl is well aware of his difference from his teacher. Namely, for Brentano, intentionality aims at “experienced contents.” By contrast, Husserl tells us that intentionality consists primarily in “object-giving acts.” Although Husserl does not put it quite this way, the distinction hinges ultimately on their respective relations to British Empiricism. As concerns the central question, Brentano and Hume basically occupy the same terrain: to say that I experience an apple means that I experience all the qualities of that apple. Brentano is disappointingly vague as to whether there is an apple “behind” all its encountered qualities or whether it consists in nothing more than those very qualities. But within the phenomenal sphere, at least, Brentano leaves no room for the apple to be anything other than a Humean bundle: all content is on the same footing, which means that the red of the apple, its stem, and the glistening light on its surface are all on precisely the same level as the apple in its own right, assuming there even is such a thing.

What distinguishes Husserl from this position is his clear conviction that the apple is something distinct from its various sensual qualities; otherwise, the phenomenological method of eidetic reduction would make no sense. What the phenomenologist asks us to do is vary our numerous perceptions of the apple, noticing that it appears in each moment according to a specific “adumbration”: in every instant, the apple appears in precisely one way and not others. We can move the apple around the room, view it from different angles and distances, and catalog the various subtleties of its appearance in the shifting light of afternoon and evening. If the apple were really nothing more than a “bundle of qualities,” it would follow that it is not the same apple in the wake of even the tiniest shift in its qualities. This is a crucial Empiricist trope that would later seep into the rather different philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and through him into Latour, who declares explicitly that a thing happens once only rather than enduring unaltered across any span of time: “everything happens only once, and at one place.” [42]

But for Husserl, it is beyond question that the apple remains the same apple despite countless variations in its visual and tactile properties. If we ask who can judge this, Husserl’s answer would be that we ourselves are the judges: since we are dealing only with the sphere of the given, it is we who grasp that we continue to regard the apple as the same thing across a series of perceptual adventures. There is no external criterion, since by definition we are speaking only of what each of us takes to be one and the same object across multiple changes. Since Husserl not only “brackets” the question of whether the apple is a real object existing independently of us, but also denies as absurd the very notion of a Kantian thing-in-itself, we are confined to a purely sensual level. But this level is not made of simple bundles of qualities compressed together by “habit” or “customary conjunction” (in Hume’s famous terminology). Instead, there is always a rift in play between sensual objects and their sensual qualities. We are fully aware that an apple is something different from any “bundle” of apple-appearances in a given instant. One of the first tasks of phenomenology is to become aware of that rift so as to distinguish between the essential and accidental qualities of the apple. In OOO terminology, the first rift noticed by Husserl is that between sensual objects and their sensual qualities, or SO-SQ.

But what about the “essential” qualities of the apple? It cannot be the case that all of the apple’s features are dispensible or accidental, because then the apple itself would merely be what analytic philosophers call a “bare particular”: a featureless pole of unity interchangeable with any other bare object in the room. [43] The only difference between the apple and the lamp would be that they currently bear different accidental surface properties, which for Husserl would be insufficient. Yet it is here that he makes his great rationalist mistake, even if a fruitful one that enables us to grasp what he himself missed. As Husserl sees it, there is no way for the senses to capture anything more than fleeting accidental adumbrations of a thing. This task must be assigned instead to the intellect , which by varying all the appearances of the apple can finally capture the essential features that it truly needs in order to be this very apple. [44] The problem, as Heidegger saw straightaway, is that the difference between the senses and the intellect is not as great as Husserl thinks: both the senses and the mind convert the thing into something present-at-hand for consciousness, lying directly before us and cut off from the deeper root from which it emerges. Stated differently, Heidegger would not accept that Husserl’s procedure is able to give us any genuine distinction between the essential and accidental qualities of a thing. Essence can only lie in the depths, beyond all human access. The first hundred or so pages of Heidegger’s Marburg Lecture Course History of the Concept of Time criticizes Husserlian intentionality on precisely this basis, making it one of Heidegger’s most valuable works (though a relatively neglected one). [45]

What Heidegger’s critique shows, among other things, is that it cannot be the case that the senses give us the sensual qualities of things while the intellect gives us the real ones. The real ones, by Heideggerian standards, would be the qualities linked with the being of the apple, meaning that the apple’s real qualities would have to be withdrawn from all direct access. Husserl tries to deny such a possibility with his thesis that the thing-in-itself is a philosophically ridiculous notion, which also happens to be his key point of similarity with Hegel. Today, many Husserlians continue to argue that their hero was a “realist” nonetheless, but this succeeds only if we adulterate the definition of “realism” to such an extent that to agree that we encounter intentional objects is all it takes to be a realist, even if we deny that they have any existential status outside their encounter with us. This, however, bears no resemblance to any plausible definition of realism. And we can easily see that there is no thing-in-itself in Husserl: in OOO terminology, phenomenology acknowledges no real object . Nonetheless, Husserl unwittingly backs into two parallel forms of realism that have not been generally noticed:

1. First, even if the apple were to exist only in its encounter with us, that apple still has qualities that are necessary for it to exist, and not just the swirling surface patterns encountered by the senses and  – according to Heidegger’s critique – by the intellect. Stated differently, even a sensual object must have real qualities, SO-RQ. That is to say, even a purely illusory thing must generate its own real background, a private je ne sais quoi that makes it that very thing despite our inability to put a finger on exactly what it is. A sensual object cannot be paraphrased; nor can it be reduced to the sum total of experiences we have of it, despite Merleau-Ponty’s incorrect notion that to view a house from everywhere would give us the house itself. [46] In this respect, despite Husserl’s failed attempt to intellectualize the essence of the apple, he makes room for “submarine” essential qualities of the apple that can never be reached. This does not yet imply any existence of a real apple – we could be hallucinating, after all – but only of inscrutable real qualities that belong to the sensual apple.

2. But second, Husserl also produces a further reality from above. For even if my living room is filled with nothing but phantasms, if I am an outright psychotic of the order of Judge Schreber, it is nonetheless true that I myself am actually experiencing these things. [47] This is similar to Descartes’s discovery of “I think, therefore I am,” with the difference that Descartes artificially separated the immediate certainty of the ego side from the derivative uncertainty of the object side. [48] But we need not do the same: after all, I can be just as uncertain of my own identity as I am about the identity of an apple. Descartes’s ego is not just an ego, but also a correlated ego that encounters certain things rather than others, even if all of them turn out to be delusions. It makes a great difference in Schreber’s life, after all, whether he thinks that God is trying to impregnate him with sunbeams or that the chattering birds are doing so instead. One of Brentano’s major inconsistencies was to claim that intentionality happens in the mind while also claiming that intentionality involves the meeting of the mind with its objects. The mind cannot simultaneously be one pole in opposition to the object and also the encompassing whole in which mind and object are counterposed. [49] In short, every intentional relation must itself be a new object, different from either the mind or the object in isolation. This becomes clear from the fact that such relations are units that can be commented upon by others (“You really seem fascinated by that apple!”) or by ourselves in retrospect (“What, precisely, was going on in my mind when was I observing that apple yesterday?”) Just as there are submarine qualities in the heart of the sensual apple, there is a hybrid “supermarine” real object composed of me as the real observer and the sensual apple as the target of my awareness.

Restated differently, despite Husserl’s efforts to confine himself rigorously to the phenomenal realm (OOO’s “sensual”), he unknowingly backs into two separate forms of the in-itself. Sensual objects generate their own real background beneath the experience, while the very act of intending the apple generates a new real object above it. These same points would apply to the positions of both Derrida and “Truth and Lie” if only they were to accept Husserl’s unforeseen horizontal split – which I hold he was the first to notice – between objects and qualities, rather than just the familiar vertical difference between truth and lie.

Best of all, this gives OOO a new place to locate literalism. Since object-oriented thought accepts the critique of presence, of the idea that the real could ever be dragged kicking and screaming (by science or some other means) into the sensual realm, it also agrees that the concept of literalism as a direct presence of the real must be rejected. On this point we side with Heidegger, Derrida, and “Truth and Lie.” Yet there remains the option of indirect presence, and this is the method not only of art, but even of philosophia in the Socratic sense. First, let me say a word about why I think presence must be rejected. It boils down to a question of whether the form of a thing can be brought directly and unscathed into the mind without information loss. No one thinks that when we know an apple, the apple itself comes into our minds. The “physical” apple is one thing, and our idea of it quite another; all are in agreement on this point. The problem is that those who uphold this apparently obvious truth still need to explain in what the difference consists. The usual answer, generally left unstated, is that the apple itself is a physical thing made of atoms and molecules, and that for this reason, it is able to nourish animals or even – through its seeds – to create another apple tree. The apple can also fall from a tree and damage objects lying beneath it. Obviously, none of these things is true of our idea or knowledge of an apple. The standard implicit theory is that the apple is a concrete thing, and that our mind somehow “extracts” various important features from that thing and brings them into the mind while leaving its physical “matter” behind. One problem here is that such matter is simply an unverified commonsensical notion; in fact, the main reason it exists is to prop up the weak theory of knowledge just described. After all, no one has ever encountered something called formless matter. Another problem is that no reason is given why the form of the apple should be able to change places in this way when it is admitted that its matter cannot. Nietzsche is surely right that the human sensory and conceptual apparatus is just one type of animal cognition among many others, and there is no reason to think that humans alone can capture the form of the world without deformation. In fact, the form of the apple and the form of my knowledge of it are two different things. Kant may have been right that there is nothing in my “concept” of 100 imaginary crowns that is not also there in my “concept” of 100 real ones, but this teaches us only that our concepts of both are inadequate. For in fact, the form of 100 imaginary crowns is very different from the form of 100 real ones, which is precisely why one can be spent and the other cannot.

On that note, we return to the notion of literalism. Both Derrida and “Truth and Lie” must of course call literalism impossible, since both take presence to be so. But our introduction of the second axis in reality, by way of Husserl, opens up another place for literalism to be located. Namely, I define literalism as any experience, perception, or concept that reduces a thing to a bundle of qualities. This happens in normal experience when we simply observe an apple and take no phenomenological notice of the difference between the object and its qualities. It happens with concepts when we lazily assume that our definition of a thing suffices to exhaust that thing, forgetting the inadequacy of all such definitions. Most of our lives involves literalism (not metaphor, contra Nietzsche and Derrida) and most of the time it suffices for the purposes of human survival and development. But the way to overcome literalism is to become aware of the gap between objects and their qualities: the idea that a thing both has and does not have its qualities, the very distinction that allows Socrates to subvert every definition that is offered to him. Although Aristotle is often wrongly portrayed as a boring old literalist, the very opposite is the case. His strange sense of humor is one recurring index of this. But more importantly, it was Aristotle who formulated the notion that a substance can have different qualities at different times: Socrates happy and Socrates sad are both Socrates, in an early version of Husserl’s inquiry into adumbrations. It was Aristotle too who pointed to an unbridgeable crevice between things and whatever we might say about them: substances are always concrete and specific, while definitions must employ universals. And again, it was Aristotle who said – for the same reason – that there is no way to define a thing. [50] And if he is right – as I hold – that the world is composed primarily of concrete individual substances, while this would certainly place thought and language in a difficult position, it would hardly be the same difficulty that faces “Truth and Lie.”

4 On knowledge

The previous section contended that Husserl tacitly discovered not one but two forms of literalism in human experience, precisely by discovering two separate tensions completely missed by Hume. Namely, Hume’s theory of objects as “bundles of qualities” treats entities – including the human mind – as sum totals of perceptual experience, and this fails in two separate ways. First, the apple is a unit that remains what it is for us despite a constantly shifting patina of qualities. The objection sometimes made to these “intentional objects” is that we cannot have such trust in our powers of introspection: how do we know that I am seeing the apple as one and the same thing beneath its multiple adumbrations? Perhaps we should study the matter scientifically, measuring brain patterns in order to determine whether one and the same object is actually being perceived. The problem with this objection should be clear. Any attempt to trump Husserlian introspection with science faces the immediate difficulty that scientific measurements are just as reliant on introspective identity as a simple phenomenological statement like this one: “I see the same apple as before, but the room has become darker.” The validity of any experiment attempting to judge this statement relies on its own presupposed identities: those of the experimental apparatus, the graphs and other output it generates, or even the stability of one’s memories from one moment to the next. Introspection leads to the discovery that the apple is one and the same, and this is an unsurpassable horizon, even if certain memory lapses or confusions might occasionally interfere with our perceptions and recollections. Whether or not Hume might have discovered this himself, the fact is that he did not. Husserl showed that the bundle of qualities theory is false, and thus phenomenology works on a plane that Hume – and even Brentano – never managed to inhabit. Husserl discovers that there are two terms rather than one (in the tension we have called SO-SQ) and that they can easily be split by recognizing the rift in our minds between the object and its various swirling qualities. This is already a step beyond literalism.

Hume’s second failure consists in his equivalent inability to distinguish the given perceptual qualities of an object at any given moment from the essential qualities that it needs in order for us to continue to acknowledge the apple as one and the same thing over time. Or rather, let’s call these the eidetic qualities of the apple, due both to Husserl’s own use of the term “eidos” for these deeper and necessary qualities, and to our own need to preserve the term “essence” for a different segment of the object–quality schema. Literalism fails here again: to experience a unified apple that differs from its shifting qualities is not yet to realize that the apple has other, more necessary qualities buried in its breast. If we are in an especially dark room, or have serious vision problems, we might suddenly realize that we have a Macintosh apple before us rather than the red delicious we had thought was there; perhaps it is even a peach or an orange instead, so that better illumination helps us to realize that we can no longer recognize this object as an apple at all. But as long as nothing leads us to think we were wrong about it being a red delicious, its tacit eidetic qualities have not changed, and we are dealing with the same sensual object as we were all along. But in a sense, Husserl himself also fails in a literal direction here, since he proceeds to identify the sensual qualities of the apple with those apprehended by the senses, and the eidetic qualities as those grasped by the intellect, a distinction that Heidegger unmasked as insufficient: both senses and the mind, after all, reduce the apple to something present-at-hand for consciousness, neglecting that deeper and darker being on which both perception and theory are equally dependent. Stated differently, Husserl might be inclined to agree with us that phenomenological description splits the perception of an object into SO-SQ, and that eidetic reduction (capturing the essence of the apple) splits the object into SO-RQ. Yet his view that the intellect is enough to grasp RQ does not pass the Heideggerian test for reality: for it misses the being of those qualities, and whatever Heidegger might mean by such a phrase, the real in his conception is accessible only to indirect allusion.

This leads to a certain ambiguity concerning literalism. Can we overcome it simply by splitting the sensual object from its two kinds of qualities, or does the absence of an inaccessible real object leave us stranded in the literal domain? Stated differently: does Husserl remain a literalist despite his discovery of two separate rifts between objects and qualities? Peter Wolfendale’s polemical critique of OOO argues, among other things, that there need not be a “qualitative” excess in the properties of things but only a “quantitative” one. [51] What this would mean in practice is that our inability to know the eidetic qualities of a thing means simply that we may not know all of these qualities at any given moment but in principle we could . Husserl surely recognizes that his view of the essence of an apple could be improved by further analysis, and any honest scientist would admit that we can still learn something about neutrons and even more so about obscurer objects such as neutron stars. But is this sort of helpful scientific hesitation in proclaiming that the work is never finished, that we might turn out to be so wrong about neutrons that a sweeping new theory of them is possible and necessary – is this sort of hesitation enough to overcome literalism as defined above, as the ultimately Humean notion that an object is really nothing more than a bundle of qualities? The question is important because it amounts to a decision about whether both phenomenological and scientific knowledge are always literal in character.

My provisional answer is that both remain literal, and I would like to give some reasons for this claim. Both Husserlian phenomenology and modern science regard themselves as forms of knowledge. Although Husserl is fully aware that any of his phenomenological descriptions and eidetic reductions may be lacking in certain respects, and might always be improved, he continues to see his entire enterprise in the form of “philosophy as rigorous science.” If Husserl were try to categorize what he is still missing, he would clearly place it in Wolfendale’s “quantitative” basket: given the labor of thousands of phenomenologists, we could eventually master the true eidos of the apple. Our failure is temporary at best. The same would hold for a typical natural scientist, who would not consider anything still unknown as a priori “mysterious,” despite the lingering mysteries of quantum theory. In principle, all questions might be settled in terms of accurate equations or clear propositional prose. Knowledge is essentially a form of “paraphrase,” accurately explaining a thing in words or numbers that mirror it more or less adequately. Elsewhere I have argued that there are really only two kinds of knowledge, which consist either of asking what a thing is made of or asking what it does. [52] Husserl gives us both kinds of answers. He tells us what the apple is “made of” through his intellectual efforts to grasp its eidos, those qualities that it needs to go on being what it is. Along this path, the apple is explained in the form of what I call “undermining.” The defect of all undermining is that it cannot explain what is emergent in things beyond a proper paraphrastic account of their underlying properties or causal backstories. Insofar as Husserl claims to bring the eidetic properties of an apple to the surface of the world, in the form of a clear propositional statement of those properties, he loses sight of the tension between those qualities and the specific way they combine in the sensual apple. If he tries instead to stay on the surface and account for the difference between the sensual object as an unvarying core and the multitude of appearances it has – which means the various effects that it has on our mind – he ends up with an “overmining” knowledge of the apple. Stated differently, he loses all sense of the tension between a sensual object that is always less than its manifestations, since the latter can and should be scraped away in the name of getting at the object itself. Like all overmining gestures, it leaves us with no sense of surplus beneath or above the givenness of things to perception; hence, we lose the root of what enables things to change: the fact that the sensual object is never fully expressed in any specific adumbration.

But we need to ask if there is not an important difference between the two cases SO-RQ and SO-SQ. Husserl himself is responsible for suppressing the first of these tensions. If he had followed Heidegger’s implicit critique and recognized that the eidetic qualities of the apple are not intellectual but real , he would have seen that the critique of literalism requires the positing of occult qualities (scorned by Nietzsche) that can only be alluded to rather than made directly present. This would have taken him beyond his usual intellectualist prejudice, and hence beyond any claim to “paraphrase” the apple’s eidos in clear propositional statements. Now, it might seem that SO-SQ is a different case, one in which there is no way to deliteralize either of the terms. Both terms are directly given to the mind, after all, and thus neither contains the tiniest degree of haunting residue. However, it is easy to imagine an artist or architect achieving a split between them that is much more tense than Husserl’s remarking that the apple remains the same despite numerous variations in surface qualities. Certain sculptures intrigue us with their highly different aspects when viewed from different angles, as if they were stringing together a number of essentially unlike appearances. The same holds for many architectural objects, which create different perceptual experiences on an even vaster scale while nonetheless remaining one and the same edifice all along. My response is that these are examples of aesthetic experiences, the exact opposite of literal ones, and we will see that aesthetics must traffic in some way with the real and not just the sensual.

One of the most frequently encountered philosophical definitions of knowledge is “justified true belief.” The meaning of “true” in this case is that the content in our mind is adequate to what exists in the world. The word “justified” is added to ensure that one does not have true beliefs by mere luck, as if I were to randomly (and correctly) answer a stranger’s question that the road to Larissa is the left fork at the crossroads, despite my having no idea of the correct route. [53] In this account, a person “knows” when they give the correct answer and has good reasons for giving it. The problem in Husserl’s case, given his truncation of reality to “whatever thought is able to encounter,” is that knowledge is effectively all justification and no truth. Phenomenology makes no contact with the real except through arbitrarily dismissing the possibility that it is anything different from what appears in what OOO calls sensual experience (which is not limited to the senses, but includes intellectual experience as well). With suitable Husserlian training, Judge Schreber might give us an excellent phenomenology of the strange voices speaking incomplete sentences to him in the “root-language” (as he calls it), and of the sun rays with which God attempts to impregnate him. But Schreber is a delusional paranoid psychotic, and hence it is obvious that none of these fine phenomenologies would have the slightest contact with anything we would want to call real. Now, Husserl was certainly no psychotic, but under the influence of certain drugs, he might well have found himself in a living room filled with nothing but hallucinations of apples, lemons, and blackbirds. Under this hallucinatory scenario, he would still be perfectly justified in his phenomenologies, assuming they were properly carried out, while still producing nothing but untrue statements insofar as the objects of his analysis would –  ex hypothesi  – not even exist.

In 1963, Edmund Gettier published a famous three-page article to the effect that justified true belief is not always knowledge. [54] He offered a far-fetched but intriguing scenario in which a man named Smith is informed that his rival applicant Jones will be offered the job. For some unknown reason, Smith had previously counted the coins in Jones’ pocket and found that they number exactly ten. On this basis, he makes the perfectly justified assertion – in light of what he knows – that “the man who will be hired has ten coins in his pocket.” But something mysterious happens, and at the last minute, the company decides to hire Smith himself rather than Jones. Smith now finds, to his surprise, that he too has exactly ten coins in his pocket. Therefore, the statement “the man who will be hired has ten coins in his pocket” turned out to be not only justified, but even true, although the hiring outcome was the opposite of what Smith expected. Gettier rightly notes that this is a case where we have “justified true belief” without anything that could convincingly be called knowledge. He therefore concludes that there is a gap between justified true belief and knowledge; something more is needed for what is called “knowledge” to occur.

For my part, I am not so sure that anything more is needed for knowledge to occur. It seems to me that knowledge ought to be defined simply as “justified belief,” or perhaps even as “justified untrue belief.” Seekers of knowledge are essentially seekers of justification, not of truth. For example, working natural scientists typically scorn such notions as ghosts and even God, although it is perfectly conceivable that future breakthroughs might be able to detect or even measure paranormal or outright supernatural influences on the sphere of nature. Given this possibility, we can only describe the contemporary scientist’s scorn for ghosts and God as “justified” by the available physical evidence, but still not as “true.” If this seems too implausible for many of my readers to swallow, consider the following historical example. Today, thanks to Einstein, we take it to be both “justified” and “true” that gravity is essentially a powerful curvature of space–time. But of course, any scientist in the 1700s who proposed in advance such an Einsteinian theory may well have been dismissed as a crackpot: not because such a thing is a priori impossible – it is the currently reigning theory of gravity, after all – but because at the time there seemed to be no sufficient evidence for such an extravagant hypothesis. Newton’s theory of gravity was basically doing very well and was certainly not yet in need of being revolutionized out of existence. The history of science is enough to show that what sounds preposterous in one decade or century can often become conventional wisdom in the next. The serial endosymbiosis theory (SET) of Lynn Margulis, which is now found in biology textbooks, was the object of some mockery during her graduate student years in the 1960s. [55]

We would certainly not call Newton a crackpot for not being an Einsteinian during his lifetime, for there was simply no evidence for such a theory in his day, despite G.W. Leibniz’s suggestive argument for the relational character of space and time. [56] In Imre Lakatos, we have a formidable theorist who thinks that the same falsifying process holds even for mathematics, though this is a more controversial view. [57] In short, scientists of the present day might turn out to be terribly wrong about the universe while some lucky dime store crank might be “right” with his guesses once quantum theory and relativity are eventually unified with theories of dark matter and dark energy by the next great physical theory. But no future historian would call that crank a “great scientist” simply because he turned out to have stumbled upon scientifically correct content in the eyes of a later stage of scientific history. Scientists are supposed to be those who provide justifications according to the available evidence, and the same is true of phenomenologists. Knowledge must be justified, but it can never be true, since there is no direct access to the real. To say this we need not be Kantian believers in the thing-in-itself, but need only believe in the ongoing advent of scientific and philosophical revolutions, which have already occurred often enough. This is the respect in which the scientific mainstream of any given era can be said to have knowledge, despite the eventual overthrow of most or all of what it thinks it currently knows. Knowledge is justified untrue belief and therefore belongs to the realm of what Nietzsche calls “lies.”

5 On aesthetics

In recent continental thought, there has been a new tendency to couple “truth” not with knowledge, but with a heightened form of subjective relation to the world. This holds for instance of Alain Badiou’s theory of events, in which a truth is not a truth except insofar as a subject remains performatively faithful to it: a revolution has not really happened except in the heart of the one who harks back to it while anticipating the next revolution. [58] Badiou’s ally Slavoj Žižek has a similar conception: “the truth that articulates itself is the truth about the failures, gaps, and inconsistencies of the big other,” where “big other” is Lacan’s terme d’art for the existing symbolic order, which includes – among other things – all that we call knowledge. [59] String theory in physics sat around mostly unused for decades, until it became the topic of a collective movement that eventually grew to dominate its field. The first exhibition of fauvist painting was heckled almost to death by the public, yet Matisse and his circle remained faithful believers in the deliriously bright-colored palette they had discovered. The reader will easily think of innumerable further examples of this sort.

The word “truth” is usually employed to refer to a “submarine” state of affairs in the world that is accurately mirrored in the mind, although the story of new truths always involves an initially small group of ardent defenders of a new idea, or even one person defending it alone. Kierkegaard’s major objection to Hegel is that his system ignores the “leap of faith” required to embrace a new outlook. [60] What all this means is that the emergence of a truth requires that someone adhere to a new idea that is considered entirely unjustified in terms of the current order of knowledge. New theories are often dismissed as crackpot productions, and this is why: existing mainstream theories have always had plenty of time to amass giant machineries and institutions of justification, staffed by figures of competent mediocrity, while new theories have difficulty competing in such an environment unless they present themselves in understated fashion as harmless modifications of existing orthodoxy. If knowledge works by way of convincing justifications, what I have called truth (using the term in a Badiouan sense) often proceeds in the opposite direction, employing fake justifications to defend strange breakthroughs. As the literary critic Harold Bloom puts it:

What intimately allies… [Ernest] Hemingway, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, and [William] Faulkner… is that all of them emerge from Joseph Conrad’s influence but temper it cunningly by mingling Conrad with an American precursor – Mark Twain for Hemingway, Henry James for Fitzgerald, Herman Melville for Faulkner… [S]trong writers have the wit to transform [their] forerunners into composite and therefore partly imaginary beings. [61]

That is to say, it is initially better for a new novelist – or new figure in any field – to justify innovations by inscribing them in a circle of already recognized achievements. If a writer entirely without forerunners were even possible, they would undoubtedly fail for lack of an audience. The subjective component in philosophical truth is what Badiou calls “anti-philosophy,” and he holds that philosophy must work as close to anti-philosophy as possible. [62]

If there is a truth in opposition to knowledge, it consists in discovering a hole or gap in existing theories, and of discovering something there that cannot be paraphrased, or at least not yet. A new theory initially does nothing more than allude to that which escapes easy definition. Heidegger’s notion of “being” as that which has always been forgotten in Western philosophy is one such case, and the same holds for the essentially negative Socratic method of undercutting every attempted definition of a thing. Let’s stay with the case of Heidegger for a moment. We have seen that he rejects both the senses and the intellect as delivering nothing but present-at-hand caricatures of the being of a thing. We do not grasp the apple by looking at it, analyzing its eidetic qualities, or physicalizing it as a mass located at a distinct point in space–time. These are all what Nietzsche would call “relational” conceptions of the thing, but Heidegger thinks we can gain access to something more. The Heidegger of Being and Time thinks we can do this, initially, by focusing on the apple insofar as it is not directly present to us. The apple or hammer or floor in a room are, for the most part, taken for granted and therefore not present to the mind at all. Instead, they combine into a vast environmental background that enables our more explicit perceptions or thoughts in any given moment. “Taken strictly,” Heidegger writes, “there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is.” [63] That is to say, Heidegger tries to undercut the literal presence of individual things by arguing that they emerge not only from a background that is non-present, but from one that is holistically unified.

As argued extensively in my first book, this analysis fails even on Heidegger’s own terms. [64] The problem is that Heidegger is not only the philosopher of unconsciously used tools, but of broken tools as well. When something goes wrong – and not only in this case – we are able to become aware of individual items of equipment. And even if this awareness unfolds in the sphere of what is given to us, it requires a prior being of the things that is in no way given. For instance, Heidegger thinks that a hammer can become directly visible to us in such experiences as “this hammer is too heavy.” What this means is that individual items of equipment are never sleekly inscribed in the “totality of equipment” in which they participate silently before something goes wrong. What contains the inconvenient quality “too heavy” is not the system of equipment as a whole, but the hammer alone. As a result, the fact that the tool-system is unconsciously taken for granted is not yet enough to escape presence-at-hand, any more than perception or the intellect were in Husserl’s case. Just as the difference between perception and theory turned out to be not all that great, the same holds for the difference between our conscious relations with things and the unconsciously relied-upon ones encountered in our practical dealings with the world. Individual items like hammers, in their non-relational being that can never be fully integrated into a system, precede any of the relational aspects of things. Here, Heidegger allows us to catch sight of something that – contra Nietzsche – is not purely relational. While it is true that we see this by the grace of advanced philosophical theory, these withdrawn individual things are not paraphrasable, and to that extent they go beyond any literalist conception.

Furthermore, this allows us to grasp that individual entities are an unactualized surplus in relation to each other as well, even when no humans are anywhere near the scene. The key difference is neither between theory and perception (Husserl) nor between praxis on the one side and both theory and perception on the other (Heidegger). Instead, the key difference is that between objects and their relations. Kantian philosophy has ruled it impossible to speak about object–object relations apart from any observer, insofar as to speak about objects colliding with objects is already to bring them into the sphere of the human observer. The argument is not as strong as it looks. Note that in Kantian philosophy we do not encounter even our own finitude directly . We simply experience what we experience, while a further deduction is needed to argue that there is something behind this experience: a deduction Kant hides with the facile-sounding assertion that there cannot be appearances without something that appears. But if we can deduce human finitude this way – and I think we can – then we can also deduce the finitude of nonhuman entities. A red billiard ball need not be “conscious” of a blue one in order to be in a finite relation with it. All that is needed is the deduction that any interaction between two billiard balls (or two of anything else) fails to exhaust their full reality, since each turns the other into a caricature just as human experience does whenever it makes contact with something.

It is in such cases, where the surplus of the in-itself hints at its existence when something goes askew on the surface, that we can speak of “truth” in opposition to knowledge. As Žižek put it in the passage cited earlier: “the truth that articulates itself is the truth about the failures, gaps, and inconsistencies of the big other.” [65] Badiou would say that certain elements belong to a situation without being included in it, and that truth occurs through an “event” in which these non-included yet still belonging elements rise up and demand to be counted: such as when a political underclass demands recognition, when a new artistic movement speaks a new truth that is not yet allowed by the current situation, or when an amorous event shatters our existing world. In this respect, both Badiou and Žižek speak of the retroactive constitution of reality: that which is only counted later will have been there all along . The problem with this retroactive conception is that it verges on idealism. Badiou claims that individual things (which he terms “consistent multiplicities”) retroactively generate their own surplus (“inconsistent multiplicity”) rather than this surplus having been there beforehand. Likewise, Žižek gives an arch-retroactive interpretation of Hegel in which each new dialectical figure emerges ex nihilo from a free choice at each stage, rather than having been implicitly contained in the dialectic’s starting point. Among other difficulties, this encourages an ultra-voluntarist politics that thinks itself entirely free of prior historical or geographical determinations. [66] “Submarine” reality, as we have called it, is thus defined out of existence, and the subject’s own positing of gaps and fissures in the big other is deemed sufficient to generate all the details of history. Events require a subject and cannot occur in pre-subjective nature itself, whose very existence is vaguely conceded by the retroactivists mostly as a device for not sounding crazy. [67] Latour takes a similar risk when he says that the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses cannot have died of tuberculosis as present-day medical experts claim: since tuberculosis was clinically unknown in those ancient times, it can only be posited retroactively as what killed Ramses “all along.” [68]

The positive side of the paradox of truth and justification can be expressed as follows. If knowledge is to be defined as “justified untrue belief,” then what we have called truth must be defined in the opposite way as “unjustified true belief.” The reason is that truth – in the sort of conception for which Badiou has so interestingly argued, following Kierkegaard – has now been separated from any search for step-by-step justification and takes the form of an immediate personal contact with some hole, gap, or fissure in the current state of knowledge. If we call such contact “surprise,” then surprise becomes “that which does not deceive,” as Lacan says of anxiety, and as Badiou thinks is the case for every form of “anti-philosophy.” [69] Truth needs no justification, and hence is not a form of knowledge, but needs only a personal anchor in the experience of something astonishing that does not fit the current situation. I have often written that metaphor provides such a case as well. If we experience a sea that is not simply the sea of perception, theory, or practice, but a sea – reading Homer – that is “wine-dark,” we are immediately carried beyond the level of SO-SQ, assuming that the metaphor is effective for a given reader. Instead of a literal wine with wine-dark qualities, we are asked to think a sea with such qualities. This proves impossible, and the sea withdraws as something inherently ungraspable, leaving us with nothing but wine-dark qualities. But there is no such thing as either objects or qualities existing without the other term, and thus some real object is needed as the support for the wine-dark qualities that would otherwise be left floating in empty space. That real object cannot be the sea, which has already been repelled into outer darkness by the impossibility of literally combining it with wine-qualities. Thus it is I myself, the reader of the poem, who must function as the substrate for wine-dark qualities, and the difficulty of doing this is what makes the aesthetic experience occur: the real I performs the sensual wine-qualities, which is precisely the perverse form of crossing that we needed. The term “perform” is no accident: speech act theory has long distinguished between “constantive” statements that convey literal content and “performative” ones that commit our very being to what is said, whether in promises or (in my view) outright aesthetic experience. [70]

This brings us back to the following comparison. What we call knowledge is what Nietzsche calls “lies,” since knowledge entails phenomena grounded in more basic phenomena, though without any contact with the real ever occurring along this path. But the truth that Nietzsche calls impossible is possible indeed, with the strange implication that aesthetics is one of the primary seats of truth rather than lies. The movable army of metaphors and metonymies does not distance us from any presence of the thing-in-itself, but it does give us a direct experience of truth. Granted, such “truth” can only be supermarine; there is no guarantee that a “wine-dark sea” really exists, or that this an accurate description of the Mediterranean. The submarine reality that Nietzsche regards as inaccessible is truly inaccessible, since reality itself is not isomorphic with any trace of it that can be brought into the mind. Instead of such impossible presence, we are left with truth, which deforms the space of a given situation by alluding to that which lies outside it.

Appendix: In response to some criticisms

Both of the anonymous reviewers of this article made valuable critical comments that have been incorporated into the preceding pages. But Reviewer #2 in particular made a number of more general objections that struck at a level too basic to address in passing above. Thus I will briefly respond here, in this newly appended section of the article, and will take the liberty of sometimes paraphrasing their critiques rather than quoting directly. The criticisms fall into three basic categories: (a) those concerning my remarks about science, (b) those that pertain to the difference between real and sensual, and (c) those bearing on the distinction between justification and truth.

A1 Concerning science

Reviewer #2 first remarks that while they are persuaded that scientists seek justification, they are “less persuaded that [scientists] do not seek truth” or thinks that “perhaps [they] have a different sense of justification than the very minimally defined justification of Gettier.” This is certainly true, and of course there are many philosophers of science who insist that justification is never enough. However, the many nuances of this issue are not germane to this level of my argument. I claim that the only two basic avenues open to such philosophers would be either to insist that truth can be present to the mind in some sort of “direct realist” fashion, or to supplement science with some further mechanism of awareness that justification is never sufficient. The first path is rendered impossible by OOO’s metaphysical position, which does not permit the forms of things to be extracted from them and brought into the mind without alteration; hence, no model of knowledge as adaequatio is possible. But if the second path is adopted instead, then the central point of OOO – its affirmation of a gap between reality and our knowledge of it – is already conceded. One such case is posed by Ray Brassier, whose visceral denunciations of OOO in the name of science too often overshadow our crucial point of agreement: the severe asymmetry between reality and any knowledge we can have of it. This axiom of Brassier complicates his triumphalistic scientism, especially when we add his general misanthropy concerning the ultimate worthlessness of all human effort. [71] Examples of a more simpatico variety would include scientific fallibilisms such as Popper’s falsificationism, and Lakatos’s modified version of Popper in which research programs can survive numerous piecemeal falsifications before they are abandoned at some point in favor of a more progressive program. [72] Needless to say, such fallibilisms are not counterexamples to my claims, but fully match the OOO view that science is not a matter of producing true content: every scientific theory or research program is subject to challenge. More than this, there is no hint in these authors that the process might eventually come to a stop in some final true content after an unspecified number of scientific breakthroughs. If there is any valid conception of “truth” in Popper, for instance, it is a truth surprisingly close to the sort described by Badiou: truth in a performative or existential sense that pertains to a researcher’s level of commitment, rather than to the accurate or inaccurate character of their statements. See, for example, Popper’s eye-opening insistence that attempts to falsify a scientific theory must be “sincere.” [73]

Second, Reviewer #2 wonders whether the OOO notion of translation is really as threatening to the accurate replication of forms as the present article suggests. They give the example of pouring plaster into a cube-shaped mold, removing the finished cube, grinding it into powder, then liquifying the powder and pouring it into the mold again, thereby yielding essentially the same cube as the first one. They might also have added that one could do the same thing with completely different powder, thereby producing the “same” cube with an entirely new batch of matter. Note that these examples basically put us in the same position as the two usual stances on the Ship of Theseus of paradox. Namely, if we gradually replace each piece of wood of the ship with a new one, at the end of the process is it really still the same ship? And what if the old pieces, after being removed, are used to assemble a new Ship of Theseus with the old wood? Doesn’t this second ship have an even better case to be considered the “real” Ship of Theseus than the first one? Alternatively, one might adopt the position of Peter Simons and argue that both ships are equally legitimate successors, so that there are in fact now two distinct Ships of Theseus. [74] But there are least two complementary problems with the cube-from-the-mold example, which is what inspired our turn to the Ship of Theseus. First, all this example proves is that we can use the mold to produce a second cube that is more or less the same as the first: a cube that could fool pretty much anyone into thinking it was the same. It would be a sort of “Turing Test” for plaster cubes. Yet this sort of practical trickery will never come close to guaranteeing the identity of the two cubes, and despite the gross physical similarity of these cubes to the naked eye, they would no doubt be as distinct for a researcher as two different bullets would be for a skilled ballistics technician. The second problem is the assumption, a central dogma of nearly all approaches to the Ship of Theseus, that it is more likely for two things to be the “same” if we preserve as much detail of the first in the second as possible. Here the “formalist” simply prefers the ship that preserves a continuous physical structure with the original, while the “materialist” prefers the one that is made of the same pieces of wood. Against these assumptions, I have recently argued that the real Ship of Theseus would instead be a shipwrecked version on the ocean floor, one in which many needless details and operations of the ship have been stripped away in favor of something more skeletally suggestive. [75] In short, translation in the OOO sense is not just a matter of loss from the original, but is just as much a way of securing the original by refusing to identify it with the excessive data found in any physical instantiation of it.

Reviewer #2 also wished there had been more elaboration on what a OOO philosophy of science would look like. I will content myself with sketching three basic features of such a theory. First, OOO is a realism and hence requires that science be realist in character rather than empiricist, for example. [76] Second, and as already discussed, the object-oriented insistence on the gap between reality and our knowledge of it requires a committed fallibilism. Third and finally, the OOO version of the fourfold structure entails that insofar as science concerns reality, it is a matter of real qualities rather than real objects: that is to say, science is a matter of eidos rather than essence. [77] But on this note we must turn to Reviewer #2’s questions about the real and the sensual.

A2 Concerning the real and the sensual

The reviewer first wants to know how we can distinguish between real and sensual qualities in the first place. To offer an example of my own, what are the criteria enabling us to distinguish between a person’s merely “sensual” friendliness and the “real” sneakiness that eventually turns out to be more characteristic of them? The question is one I frequently receive, and it reflects a misconception of the difference between real and sensual. The difference, namely, is not equivalent to that between genuine and fake. Instead, it is an ontological distinction between the qualities we directly encounter in a thing and those that it has without our being able to access them in the flesh. Stated by analogy with Kantian terms, real qualities can be considered as qualities-in-themselves, while sensual qualities are qualities as appearance. And the fact is that anything we experience of something is an appearance, not a quality-in-itself. Even if we find the aforementioned person sneaky from the moment we first lay eyes on them, and with long experience they do in fact turn out to be irredeemably sneaky, that does not make the sneakiness we encounter in them “real” any more than the person we encounter as a whole is “real.” That is to say, just as the real object (the thing-in-itself) is something to which we gain access only through indirect or allusive means, the same holds for real qualities: hence, my criticism in this article of Husserl’s (and not just Husserl’s) ontologically fruitless distinction between the senses and the intellect. To perceive something and to think it are both cases of dealing with the sensual. The existence of real qualities in things can be deduced, but they cannot be made directly present. This is why the best prose descriptions of anything usually partake of a bit of poetic allusiveness, as in the work of wine tasters or theater critics.

The reviewer now asks why “a purely illusory thing must generate its own background,” as I put it in the article. And furthermore, do the supposed eidetic (i.e., real) qualities of a sensual object belong to the object itself, to the observer, or to some combination of the two? The answer to the first question is as follows. A sensual object is an object because it is a unit capable of bearing different qualities at different times. It is sensual (rather than real) because it does not exist autonomously, but disappears as soon as I stop paying attention to it. This is obvious in the case of private fantasies, since perhaps no one else is even aware of my imaginary friends who are extinguished once I am distracted for even a moment. It is still true of collectively shared fantasies, such as the characters on the popular television series The Lincoln Lawyer , which my wife and I were watching during dinner a few hours ago. Even if millions of Netflix subscribers around the world are watching this show at any given moment, qua sensual objects the characters are slightly different objects for every viewer of the series, and therefore my own version of the lead defense attorney is not there even for the many others now watching the show. But finally, the same holds true even of entities that definitely exist. No sane person doubts the existence of President Joe Biden, even if many are crazily convinced that he achieved his office through electoral fraud. But the sensual objects called “Biden” that exist for each of us are simply not the same thing as the real Biden, which may harbor mysterious depths that will never be deployed. For instance, perhaps Biden’s temperament is ideally suited for world-historic heroism in the face of some possible catastrophe that simply never occurs during his time in office, and thus we never become familiar with that possible side of him. Perhaps Bill Clinton was uniquely suited to address the 9/11 attacks in a responsible manner, though we will never know the answer to that since he had been replaced as President eight months earlier. Likewise, without the Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps President Zelensky would have been remembered as just another short-term figurehead rather than as a Churchillian stalwart of democracy.

But the reviewer’s question was why a sensual object must generate a real background, not why a real object has such a background. All right, then. Consider the case of an object that nearly everyone would agree is merely sensual and without a real counterpart: a centaur, not a rare example in Husserl’s writings. We can imagine or outright hallucinate such a beast, perhaps even experiencing the centaur from numerous different angles and under many varying circumstances as we do so, imagining different stories in which this mythical creature participates. In one respect, this sensual object has shifting sensual qualities that alter in the manner of Husserlian adumbrations. But it also has certain vaguely defined qualities that it needs in order for us to continue regarding it as this very centaur. If certain ill-defined limits are transgressed, we declare the centaur to be something else altogether. The point of eidetic analysis in phenomenology is to determine what those limits are: what are the integral features that any given intentional object requires in order to be what it is? I hold that those features are real rather than sensual, simply because no bundle of sensual data can account for the objecthood of an object: not even if that object is purely sensual. If an apple is real, we cannot define it in Humean fashion as a bundle of qualities; if an apple is sensual, then the same holds and for the same reasons. This is why even a sensual object has real qualities, and Husserl is simply wrong to think that the intellect is capable of accessing those qualities in a way that the senses cannot. For even the intellect gets at the eidos of things only by way of allusion.

As for where the real qualities of an object are found, the answer is that they belong to the sensual object itself. Once a sensual object exists for me, I have limited ability to modify its real qualities, though I can easily modify its sensual ones through bodily movements or mental reflections that put that object in a new light. It is easy to see different sides of a lemon, but it would take immense mental effort to shift my tacit criteria for when it has crossed the borderlands so as no longer to be this lemon. An object, even a sensual one, proposes its own standards for how it is to be judged. The complicating factor here is that although the real qualities of a sensual object belong to that object itself, I the observer am partly responsible for generating that object in the first place. The sensual lemon is not something “emitted” by the real lemon, as the reviewer’s comments wrongly suppose, but instead is produced by the mediated interaction between the real lemon and the real me with my specific neurological constitution. But all this means is that I am one of the ingredients (along with the real lemon) that produces the sensual lemon; it does not follow that the sensual lemon is merely my puppet and can be made to do whatever I please. This is the case with all objects in the human world: although two members of a married couple are both crucial ingredients of the marriage, it does not follow that either of them truly understands the dynamics of the marriage, or that they can change its rules freely without experiencing pushback either from their partner or from other aspects of reality that bear upon the relationship. I am as much a part of the United States as any other American living or dead, yet my personal impact on the customs, usages, and laws of this country are limited in the extreme, and I disobey them at my peril.

A final question raised by Reviewer #2 here concerns the OOO notion that aesthetic experience involves a split between objects and their qualities. Which object is being split, and from which qualities? The best way to answer this is to note where we reside before any such splitting occurs: within literal experience. I have defined such experience as the sort in which objects are not encountered as distinct from their bundles of qualities. In other words, literalism is a question of undifferentiated sensual experience in which there is no awareness even of a difference between sensual objects and sensual qualities, let alone of the pertinence of anything real stationed outside the sensual realm altogether. For an aesthetic split to occur, it is not necessary for the real to intervene: any object–quality split is sufficient, including SO-SQ. Consider the special fascination of children for objects that are especially multifarious, or for buildings or landscapes of sufficient complexity that they can be explored as hideouts. This is already a form of aesthetic experience, in which an object seems to have a certain magic or charisma above and beyond its known (and even unknown) catalog of properties.

A3 Concerning justification and truth

We turn in closing to Reviewer #2’s remarks on the conceptions of justification and truth. They first want to know if it is fair when I speak of justification as if it were a binary yes/no question. Is it not the case that we can be more or less confident in the justifying evidence supporting this or that belief? Of course. We could even develop an asymptotic model of truth, as Heidegger does with his model of truth as aletheia or gradual uncovering rather than a yes/no judgment about the factual accuracy of statements. However, such gradations are irrelevant to my main point, which concerned the absolute difference between truth and any form of justification. Since no amount of justifying evidence can ever put us in direct contact with reality, there will always be an insurmountable gap between truth and any amount of evidence. This is the very intuition that lies at the basis of fallibilist conceptions of science. It is also Kierkegaard’s intuition when he argues for the necessity of leaps of faith, and Badiou’s when he speaks of truth as always being a kind of wager , a term obviously borrowed in turn from Pascal. [78] This is not to say that all leaps of faith are equally prudent, wise, or respectable, only that such assessments cannot be made with the benefit of a reliably existing corpus of truth. In fact, I prefer the word “reality” to “truth” simply because experience has taught me that those who speak most quickly of truth are usually those who think they already have it at their disposal, and who have summarily moved on to the enforcement phase of the operation. To speak instead of reality is to take the side of events, falsifications, gaps, ruptures, and other instances that emphasize genuinely gripping problems over hastily forced solutions.

In Section 4 of this article, I imagined a drugged Edmund Husserl hallucinating nonexistent apples, lemons, and blackbirds and proposed that it would be possible for such a Husserl to perform perfectly justified phenomenologies of these objects even if they could not possibly be true ones. Reviewer #2 asks whether it is possible to say such a thing, for “it seems a stretch to state that a perfect justification would not include [the] requirement [of] any external validation or verification.” Here I disagree. It is clearly possible to give better and worse descriptions or interpretations of things that do not exist, despite their nonexistence. Indeed, from a OOO standpoint, all knowledge is in this same predicament, since knowledge is about trying to determine the real qualities of sensual objects, which by definition are not real even though some may correspond more closely than others to real objects. Einsteinian gravity will surely turn out to be a false model, but there is good reason to hold that it has more purchase on reality than Newtonian gravity does. Human beings (and not only humans) do not have the luxury of comparing our models of reality directly with reality itself, and this is why justification plays out on what I have called the sensual level. By contrast, the intermittent disruptions of justification by ill-defined resistance from the outside is part of the very different process I have called “truth.”

When I say above that “there is never a belief that is both justified and true at once,” Reviewer #2 counters that it “does not seem clear why a truth is dissipated or destroyed by its justification.” Indeed, there is no reason that it should be dissipated or destroyed. Someone can experience a religious conversion and then try to explain that conversion in terms of “arguments,” but no number of convincing arguments is sufficient to produce a conversion. The works of St. Thomas Aquinas have presumably never “dissipated or destroyed” the faith of any Roman Catholic, but neither are they sufficient in their own right to bring about such faith, although they have often paved the way for it. The same is true of science. The Double Helix is one of the classic works in this respect, showing us how the discovery of the structure of DNA came from a mixture of rational formulations, improvised hunches, and outright lucky accidents. [79] Much of the “rational argumentation” made by Watson and Francis Crick in their famous Nature article had nothing to do with their own reasons for confidence in their discovery. [80] The point, in short, is not that justification and truth are inimical to one another with respect to the same belief, but that they live parallel lives that can never fully intersect: thousands of people can think that Derrida was a genius while thousands more think he was a fraud. However rock solid the arguments for a belief might seem to you, such conviction is an additional step distinct from the steps of the arguments themselves.

A final point raised by Reviewer #2 suggests that the priority granted by OOO to aesthetics is inconsistent with its general hostility toward anthropocentrism. If human perception and thought are to be treated as no longer central to the cosmos – as OOO proposes – then how can the human experience of the gap between objects and qualities be something special nonetheless? I would make several points in response. First, OOO does not think that human experience is needed for aesthetic phenomena to occur; it seems clear that many animals and plants are involved in aesthetic production or appreciation, and for the object-oriented ontologist, causation itself has an aesthetic structure. [81] Second, what is important even in human aesthetic experience is not our awareness of the object–quality gap, but our productive role as an ingredient of it. That is to say, in the case of Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” there is the sea as object forcibly fused with qualities drawn from the wine. But that gap only functions insofar as the reader of Homer steps in for the withdrawn real sea and performs in its stead the union with the wine-qualities. That is why there is no aesthetic experience without some level of emotional or personal involvement, though this need not occur in literalist cases such as knowledge.

I thank Reviewer #2 for their comments and ask for indulgence in those cases where their remarks had to be truncated or simplified so as to keep my responses to a reasonable length.

Conflict of interest: The author is Editor-in-Chief of the journal. The evaluation process was handled by another editor and the peer reviews were double blind. The manuscript was anonymized for the purposes of review.

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I spent a day as a 'Truthsayer' on Truth Social — it was a bizarre mix of conspiracy theories and Biden hate

• The company behind Truth Social went public last week.
• The move has boosted Donald Trump's wealth, but many think the media company is overvalued. 
• I spent a day on the social-media platform to find out what goes on there.

The company behind Donald Trump's far-right social-media platform, Truth Social, made its stock-market debut last week.

Truth Social's parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group, merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp. and began trading under the ticker DJT on Tuesday. The company's market valuation hit as much as $13 billion on one measure, with small investors powering the surge.

The deal has made Trump a whole lot richer , but several experts warned the company is hugely overvalued .

I decided to take a daylong visit to its core platform, Truth Social, to see what goes on.

Trump's 'Truthsayers'

I signed up without a problem and was welcomed as a "Truthsayer."

After opening the app, I was greeted with the platform's "Trending Topics" of the day — #Truth, #NBC, #MAGA, and #Trump2024. Before even getting to my main feed, I had an idea of what I might be in for.

The layout of Truth Social is pretty standard: The main feed follows a similar structure to Elon Musk's X. My feeds were split into three tabs: Following, For You, and Groups.

My For You page was dominated by far-right influencers, including Libs of TikTok, and Trump himself. It was also littered with posts, memes, and videos supporting the former president.

Like most platforms, Truth Social was populated by the big stories of the week, including the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore . However, some "Truthsayers" had more unique takes on the tragic event.

"Is there a better encapsulation of Biden's America," one Truther mused in a post that shared a video of a ship colliding with the bridge.

Conspiracy theories

Another key feature of my For You feed was fierce hatred of President Joe Biden.

I clocked at least 10 anti-Biden posts in my first few minutes scrolling the app.

"Today is March 28th, and Joe Biden is the WORST president in US history," one user posted without much context.

"Biden, certified imbecile," another read, along with a link to the conservative news and politics site RedState.

Most of the content on Truth Social is highly political, and my feed was littered with fellow "Truthsayers" spouting conspiracy theories. Almost all the news articles shared by users were from conservative outlets like the Washington Examiner.

News events, such as the collapse of the Baltimore bridge, were often used as springboards for political commentary. One user linked the bridge — along with recent aviation issues — to the debate around the problems supposedly caused by DEI policies.

Amateur production

Truth Social is still a relatively new platform — and it shows. First launched in February 2022, it's been facing financial and regulatory issues for most of its existence.

According to Similarweb, a web-traffic research firm, it had about 5 million active members in February, CBS News reported.

The platform still feels like an amateur production compared to its more established rivals. It's got a busy layout and is overpopulated with sponsored ads.

In short, I won't be running back.

Unless you have a burning desire to fill your days with conservative political content and conspiracy theories, Truth Social might not be the social-media platform for you.

If you enjoyed this story, be sure to follow Business Insider on Microsoft Start.

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