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Questions tagged [truth]

Theories of truth deal with questions such as: what are truths? what makes them true? what is the relation between truths and the things that makes them true?

Not to be confused with "what is the truth", which is a completely different matter.

Truth has long been a central subject in philosophy. Theories of truth deal with questions such as: what are truths? what makes them true? what is the relation between truths and the things that makes them true?

Not to be confused with "what is the truth", which is a completely different matter.

The main conceptions of truth, briefly, are:

  • Correspondence theories, that hold that things are true in virtue of their correspondence to facts in reality.
  • Coherentism, that holds that beliefs are true in virtue of taking part in some coherent system of beliefs.
  • Pragmatism, that holds that beliefs are true in virtue of being useful in some sense.
  • Deflationism, that holds that truth has no metaphysical significance at all.

Theories of truth may have great implications with respect to , , and .

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Why do some people care so much about "empirical truth"?

Whenever you discuss philosophy, inevitably you will come across a type of person who holds empirical truth above all else, and will blatantly ridicule any discussion which has its onset in a paradigm that emphasizes other aspects than just…
geowo
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Is everything just an opinion?

I read some people don't believe in truth but do believe there is always a chance that x. I have a question about such thought. I recently heard an anecdote that says nobody can ever prove I ate yoghurt this morning, even when there are thousand…
Mark Knol
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Is 'truth' abstract or concrete?

I'm reading Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning. The authors make what is to me a surprising claim: To put it briefly, truth is concrete; and it is particularly important to remember this fact with respect to mathematics, exactly …
Gavin
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Is to be able to describe something to be able to judge that it's true or not?

Unicorns don't exist, but I can still describe unicorns as "unicorns have four legs". Does the statement "unicorns have four legs" have no truth-value or is it always false, similar to how Russell says "the king of France is bald" and "the king of…
user68943
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Truth and wavefunction

Well to be honest, my major is physics. And I only started some low level philosophy recently. So please criticize my opinions so that I can advance more quickly. :-) My problem started with Russell's paradox. My philosophy teacher introduced…
Ezekiel Chen
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Why do we need to know the truth?

I think it is safe to assume that most people go about their lives with an incomplete knowledge of the world. All humans have a short life full of questions without any absolute answer. Question 1: Would it be accurate to use the word “truth” to…
SKLTFZ
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What is taken as truth in philosophy?

First and foremost I should say that I am not educated in Philosophy; I study Mathematics. Essentially, the job of a mathematician is to prove theorems by logical deduction from axioms, which are statements considered to be true in advance. The…
preferred_anon
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How can there be any necessarily true propositions?

How can any proposition be necessarily true when there always seems to be a possible world in which it may be false? For example the proposition that "4+4=8" is given to be a necessarily true proposition, but there could be some world where…
Richard Bamford
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What does it mean for T-biconditionals to be derivable unrestrictedly?

I have been reading Leitgeb's What Theories of Truth Should be Like, and one of the desiderata for a theory of truth, he argues, is to have unrestricted derivable T-biconditionals. But I am having trouble understanding what he meant exactly by the…
Constantly confused
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Does saying of something that it is 'true' really not add anything to statements as deflationary theorists say?

A common argument in deflationary theories of truth is that no content is added to a statement by adding 'is true' to the end. We can say "That turkeys do a jive on Saturdays is true" and mean only that "Turkeys do a jive on Saturday." On the pure…
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What's the difference between deflationism and correspondence theories of truth?

To my knowledge, the correspondence theory of truth posits that a proposition is true iff there are states of affairs that reflect what the proposition indicates. E.g. "Snow is white" is true iff snow is actually white; truth becomes a property that…
Apodictic Apple Juice
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How does one experientially know if his analysis on any subject is correct?

I will limit this question to matters in which there does seem to be a correct answer, and will leave matters that are subjective in its nature such as morality aside. In matters that involve getting to the truth of something, like say figuring out…
user62907
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Are there philosophical or cognitive theories about "creating truth by defining"?

Are there philosophical or cognitive theories about "creating truth by defining"? Particularly, I refer to a phenomenon of saying something and then having it become true, because of how it's said. It's a bit like "pure a prioric reasoning", but…
mavavilj
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A non question pertaining to the the law of identity (axiom)

The Law of Identity states "That every thing is the same with itself and different from another." A is A and not ~A. This seems to assume a perspective which facilitates this conclusion (hence an axiom). If I were to chose a perspective P1 on A for…
val
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What are the categories of exact truth?

Most apparent facts are irremediably vague. For instance: "The chair in this room is red" may appear at first glance to be a statement that is either true or false. But in fact the meanings of the words "chair", "room", and "red" are all matters of…
Daniel Asimov
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