Truth

"The truth" redirects here. For other uses of "The truth", see The Truth (disambiguation). For other uses of "Truth", see Truth (disambiguation).

Truth or verity is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences.

True statements are usually held to be the opposite of false statements. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, law, and science. Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion, including journalism and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself. Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth.

Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. There are many different questions about the nature of truth which are still the subject of contemporary debates. These include the question of defining truth; whether it is even possible to give an informative definition of truth; identifying things as truth-bearers capable of being true or false; if truth and falsehood are bivalent, or if there are other truth values; identifying the criteria of truth that allows people to identify it and to distinguish it from falsehood; the role that truth plays in constituting knowledge; and, if truth is always absolute or if it can be relative to one's perspective.

Definition

Truth is conformity to facts or accordance with reality. It is often understood as a property of statements or beliefs that present the world as it is, or as a relation between language or thought and how things actually are. However, its precise definition is disputed, with different theories focusing on elements such as correspondence, coherence, or practical usefulness. In a slightly different sense, the term can also refer to genuineness, as in "a true friend" or "true gold", spiritual teachings, like "the truth of the scriptures", or facts themselves, such as "in truth, the product was defective."

Truth contrasts with falsehood or falsity, which encompasses misrepresentations that do not meet this standard and fail to align with reality. The negation of a true statement is a falsehood. Truth plays a central role in many human endeavors. It acts as a goal of inquiry when deciding what to believe and as a standard to which right conduct should conform by being responsive to how things actually are. People refer to truth to indicate reliable information, mark scientific findings well supported by evidence, distinguish accurate legal testimony from misrepresentation, and emphasize honesty and sincerity in personal life. Truth is typically regarded as a positive value, either because of its beneficial consequences or as an intrinsic good pursued for its own sake.

The word truth comes from the Old English trēowth, meaning 'fidelity'. It entered Modern English via the Middle English term trewthe.

Basic concepts

Truthbearers

Main article: Truthbearer

Truth is commonly treated as a feature of truthbearers—entities that can be true or false. Philosophers discuss which entities serve as truthbearers, including sentences, propositions, and beliefs. Sentences are concrete linguistic entities composed of strings of words, like "It's raining in Nairobi." Their public nature and clear structure can aid philosophical analysis of truth-related phenomena. However, it is not always possible to establish a straightforward relation between a sentence and its truth value since its meaning can be context-dependent and may also be influenced by ambiguous terms. As a result, a sentence may be true under one interpretation and false under another. Another difficulty is that sentences belong to specific languages, with the danger of limiting philosophical analysis to language-specific features rather than articulating universal principles.

Propositions are typically understood as abstract entities that serve as the meanings of declarative sentences, mitigating the difficulties of context dependence, ambiguity, and language specificity. However, their abstract nature can make philosophical discussions less tangible, and there is disagreement about the existence of abstract objects. Beliefs and related mental states are concrete psychological entities, taking the form of subjective attitudes about what is the case. They establish a direct link between truth and cognition but are difficult to study because of their private nature.

Monists argue that there is only a single kind of truthbearer, while pluralists accept different kinds. Some identify one kind as primary, explaining the truth values of secondary truthbearers in terms of the primary one. For example, one proposal reduces the truth of beliefs to sentences since sentences can be used to express beliefs.

Truthmakers and truth conditions

Main articles: Truthmaker and Truth condition

Various theories rely on the concept of truthmakers as the counterpart of truthbearers. A truthmaker is a real entity whose existence makes a truthbearer true, establishing a link between language or thought and the world. For example, an orange carrot could act as a truthmaker of the sentence "the carrot is orange". Truthmakers are often treated as sufficient conditions: the existence of a truthmaker is enough for the sentence to be true, independent of other factors. Philosophers discuss which entities function as truthmakers, with candidates including facts or states of affairs, tropes, and particular objects.

Truthmakers are closely related to truth conditions, which are ways or circumstances under which a statement is true. Truth conditions are requirements of how the world must be for a statement to be true. For instance, one truth condition of the sentence "it is raining" is that raindrops are falling. Truth conditions are often treated as necessary conditions: if a truth condition does not obtain, then the sentence cannot be true, independent of other factors. A key motivation for truthmakers and truth conditions is the idea that truth depends on reality: truth is not a free-floating convention but is anchored in how things are.

Others

Truthfulness is a virtue associated with honesty and consistency among one's words, beliefs, and behavior. It is closely related to speaking the truth but differs in some key aspects. For example, if a person sincerely states a belief, they may be truthful even if the belief is false. Conversely, someone may state a truth with the intent to deceive, or a liar may accidentally tell a truth. In both cases, truth alone is insufficient for truthfulness. Truthfulness contrasts with deception and dishonesty. Lying occurs when a speaker intentionally says something they believe to be false. Bullshitting is a related phenomenon in which a speaker is indifferent to truth or falsehood, for instance, because they only care about persuading or manipulating their audience. Truthiness, a similar term, refers to the tendency to prioritize intuition and gut feelings over evidence and rational analysis. Deception can also take non-verbal forms, such as edited photographs, deepfakes, and AI-generated content intended to mislead or fabricate events.

Truthlikeness or verisimilitude is a concept applied to theories or statements that are close to the truth. It is often used in the context of inquiry to indicate that a theory is not fully true but approximates this goal better than others. For example, heliocentrism is a model of the Solar System that is correct in certain aspects, like that planets orbit around the sun, and wrong in others, like claiming that the orbits are perfect circles. As a result, heliocentrism is not true in a strict sense but truthlike. Truthlikeness comes in degrees. For instance, heliocentrism is more truthlike than geocentrism, which places the Earth at the center of the universe. Different philosophical approaches to truthlikeness have been proposed. Some look at logical consequences, arguing that a theory's degree of truthlikeness depends on the number of its true and false consequences. Others focus on resemblance, comparing how similar the theory's description is to the actual world. According to some suggestions, truth itself also comes in degrees, an idea found in fuzzy logics. However, the traditional view is that truth is bivalent: an assertion is either true or false with nothing in between.

Truth is closely related to justification and evidence with some key differences. A belief is justified if it meets certain epistemic norms, for example, by resting on good reasons or strong evidence. Evidence for a proposition is something that supports its truth, such as observation or reliable testimony. Justification and evidence separate warranted beliefs from superstition and lucky guesses but do not guarantee truth: even well-founded beliefs can be false in unfavorable circumstances. If a justified belief is true, it may amount to knowledge, which, unlike justification on its own, has truth as a core component. Epistemologists discuss various sources of knowledge or how people may arrive at truth, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.

Theories

Walter Seymour Allward's Veritas (Truth) outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Theories of truth aim to identify what all truths have in common. Their goal is not to list true statements but to clarify the concept of truth, discern its essential features, and explain truth-related phenomena. There are disagreements about whether such features exist and whether a given feature is an essential component or an external criterion only indicating the presence of truth.

Correspondence

Main article: Correspondence theory of truth

The correspondence theory asserts that a belief or statement is true if it corresponds to facts. This view emphasizes the relation between thought or language and reality, arguing that truth matches how things are. It is one of the oldest and most influential theories of truth.

Correspondence theorists distinguish truthbearers from the reality they represent, but the precise relation between the two is disputed. Various suggestions have been made regarding the nature of truthbearers, like seeing them as propositions, sentences, or beliefs. The classical view analyzes their relation to reality in terms of objects and properties. It assumes that truthbearers have a subject-predicate structure, in which the subject refers to an entity and the predicate denotes a property. According to this view, a statement corresponds to reality if it refers to an entity that carries the denoted property. Fact-based theories, by contrast, hold that a statement expresses a fact, and it is true if the fact obtains. One version asserts a one-to-one correlation between truths and facts, while another understands correspondence more broadly as a structural similarity that does not require a perfect one-to-one mirroring.

Truthmaker theory is closely related to correspondence theory and is often treated as a modern version of it. Truthmaker theory stresses that truth depends on reality and analyzes the relation between truths and their truthmakers. Its most comprehensive form is truthmaker maximalism, which asserts that every truth has a truthmaker. Atomic truthmaker theory, by contrast, limits this view to simple statements and analyzes the truth of complex statements in terms of simpler ones.

A key motivation for the correspondence theory is its intuitive appeal and its ability to ground truth in objective reality. A key challenge is to clarify how exactly truths relate to facts. Critics hold that the correspondence theory is uninformative or circular because it fails to explain what correspondence means. They argue that it assumes an implicit understanding of the relation without offering an independent account. Another objection asserts that the correspondence theory is too narrow because it is unable to explain truth in fields like mathematics, logic, and morality, where it is more difficult to identify independent facts corresponding to statements.

Coherence

Main article: Coherence theory of truth

The coherence theory understands truth as a relation between beliefs rather than between a belief and a fact. It asserts that a belief is true if it is part of a coherent web of beliefs. Coherence theorists typically stress that beliefs do not occur in isolation but are part of a broader perspective on reality since they depend on conceptual frameworks and background assumptions not explicitly represented in the content of each belief. For example, the belief that neutrinos lack mass rests on a network of ideas from particle physics that ground its meaning and ramifications. Accordingly, coherence theory is associated with a form of holism that privileges comprehensive perspectives over individual beliefs.

Different suggestions for the nature of coherence have been proposed. A minimal requirement is usually that the beliefs are logically consistent: they do not contradict each other. Another often-discussed condition is that the beliefs support each other, meaning that a collection of unrelated but consistent beliefs is not sufficient for coherence. In the strongest form, coherentism requires that all beliefs cohere. Less demanding versions assert that only the majority of beliefs need to cohere or that coherence is required within specific domains, such as scientific or moral beliefs, but not across domains.

One criticism acknowledges that coherence is relevant for testing or verifying what is true but contends that coherence theory confuses criteria of verification with truth itself. Another objection argues that there can be competing coherent sets of beliefs where one set contradicts the other, meaning that coherence alone cannot determine which set is correct. For example, a fictional story does not become true just because it is coherent.

Pragmatic

Main article: Pragmatic theory of truth

The pragmatic or pragmatist theory is a family of views that understand truth in terms of practical consequences and epistemic practices. They characterize truth by the role it plays in human affairs, seeing it as embedded in communal practices, epistemic commitments, or norms of discourse. One version asserts that a belief is true if it is practically useful because holding it and acting in accordance with it has beneficial consequences. This view argues that truth is what works, emphasizing real-life outcomes over speculative abstractions. Pragmatists discuss whether this outlook should focus on individual beliefs or comprehensive belief systems assessed over long periods.

A central difficulty for utility-based theories is that practical consequences and usefulness depend on situations and desires. This can lead to subjectivism or relativism since what is useful in one case may not be in another. Another challenge is that although practical consequences often align with truth, this is not always the case: a false belief may have good consequences in certain situations.

A different version of pragmatism defines truth from the perspective of scientific research. It holds that truth is the ideal limit of inquiry or what researchers would believe after unlimited investigation. Other pragmatist approaches define truth as beliefs that have withstood thorough examination or as statements that fulfill discourse norms and can be asserted with warrant.

Semantic

Main article: Semantic theory of truth

The semantic theory characterizes truth in terms of truth conditions. It distinguishes between an object language, which contains true sentences that are being analyzed, and a meta-language to express their truth conditions using so-called T-sentences. T-sentences have the form: '"$S$" is true in $L$ if and only if $p$' where $L$ is the object language, $S$ is a sentence of the object language, and $p$ is a sentence of the meta-language describing truth conditions. For example, '"La nieve es blanca." is true in Spanish if and only if snow is white' is a T-sentence with Spanish as the object language and English as the meta-language. The semantic theory was originally formulated by Alfred Tarski, who limited it to the analysis of formal languages. Subsequent philosophers, such as Donald Davidson, have also applied it to natural languages. The semantic theory is often combined with the idea that truth conditions can be analyzed by studying the components of sentences, such as names and predicates, which are then interpreted to refer to certain entities or situations described in the truth conditions.

A key motivation for the semantic theory is its ability to characterize truth in a precise manner without introducing metaphysical assumptions concerning the existence and nature of facts, correspondence, or coherence. By talking about truth in the object language through a metalanguage, it also avoids paradoxes that arise if a language contains its own truth-predicate, such as the liar paradox. However, it is controversial to what extent the semantic theory offers substantial insights into the nature of truth rather than only providing a formal device for analyzing truth.

Deflationary

Main article: Deflationary theory of truth

Deflationary theories argue that truth has no significant or interesting intrinsic nature. They hold that attempts by substantive or robust theories, such as correspondence theory and coherence theory, misconstrue truth by assuming a deep metaphysical structure, engaging in pseudoproblems where trivial answers would suffice. Deflationists typically analyze how truth-related expressions are used in language, holding that understanding their linguistic roles exhausts the concept of truth.

Different deflationary theories propose distinct accounts of the linguistic function of truth-related terms. The redundancy theory asserts that the predicate "is true" is superfluous and does not contribute to meaning. According to this view, the sentences 'Snow is white.' and '"Snow is white" is true.' have the same meaning. Disquotationalism holds that the predicate "is true" acts as a linguistic device to remove quotation marks and make generalizations. The performative theory treats truth as a performative expression that speakers can use to endorse statements, like when saying "That's true." Prosententialism treats truth not as a regular predicate but as an operator. This operator can be applied to expressions that refer to other statements, as in "What Smith said is true." Minimalism understands truth as a logical property whose role is expressed in T-sentences.

Various criticisms of deflationism target specific versions of it, such as criticisms of the redundancy theory or minimalism. However, there are also broader objections that seek to undermine deflationism in general. One argument holds that deflationism fails to explain key aspects of truth, like that truth serves as the aim of beliefs or that theoretical truth can lead to practical success.

Others

Pluralists hold that there is no unified concept of truth that covers all cases. Instead, they argue that truth is a heterogeneous notion and that different theories apply to different domains. For example, a pluralist may accept the correspondence theory for empirical truths but adopt the coherence theory for mathematical truths.

Absolutism asserts that truth is the same for everyone, meaning that what is true does not depend on individual standpoints, opinions, or contexts. It contrasts with relativism, which maintains that the same statement can be true in one perspective or context and false in another. Local relativism limits this dependency to particular domains, such as moral truth. Global relativism, by contrast, extends this view to all truths. Critics argue that global relativism is self-defeating theory that undermines its own authority: applied to itself, it holds that it is only true in some perspectives that all truths are relative. Nihilism or skepticism about truth presents a more radical view that rejects the existence of truth.

One common categorization divides theories of truth into realism and anti-realism. Realists see truth as an objective feature that is determined by what the world is like and exists independently of thoughts and descriptions. Anti-realists argue that truth depends in part or entirely on the epistemic situation or how beliefs relate to justification, verification, inquiry, or one another. Realism is typically associated with absolutism, while anti-realism is more closely linked to relativism.

Verificationism argues that a statement is true if it is verifiable. It maintains that the procedures for confirming or disconfirming claims are not external tests of truth but constitutive norms. Verificationists typically assert that there are different verification procedures for different claims, for example, that scientific claims about empirical phenomena require observation and experimentation, whereas mathematical claims are established through deductive proof. What is verifiable or falsifiable depends on the situation and the abilities of investigators, meaning that verificationist truth is not purely objective. Additionally, some statements may be neither verifiable nor falsifiable, raising the question of whether verificationism requires a third truth value or truth-value gaps. Verificationism is sometimes grouped with coherentism as an epistemic theory. Epistemic theories define truth in terms of epistemic concepts, including coherence, verifiability, justification, and rationality.

The identity theory holds that something is true if it is identical to reality. This view rejects the distinction between truthbearers and truthmakers, arguing that truths are facts rather than representations. Axiomatic theories are deductive theories based on a small number of fundamental principles. Instead of providing explicit definitions, they treat truth as a primitive or undefined concept and formulate general rules of how it behaves. According to the consensus theory, proposed by Jürgen Habermas, truth is what people would agree upon under ideal circumstances. The term folk theory of truth refers to widely held beliefs of ordinary people about truth, like the idea that a proposition is true if its negation is false.

Theories of truth are challenged by various paradoxes in which basic intuitions or principles yield contradictory conclusions. The liar paradox involves a statement with an inconsistent truth assignment, like the claims "I am lying" or "This statement is false": if the statement is true, it follows that it is false, and if it is false, it follows that it is true. Other paradoxes include the Curry paradox, the Russell-Myhill paradox, and Grelling's paradox. Some paradoxes arise if a language contains its own truth predicate. Tarski sought to avoid this problem by analyzing formal languages that do not have truth predicates. Saul Kripke proposed a different approach that limits how truth predicates can be used within a language without excluding them.

Types

Various types of truth are distinguished in the academic discourse by domain, content, and epistemic access. For some types, it is controversial whether they exist in a strict sense. The difference between a posteriori and a priori truths rests on the source of knowledge. A posteriori truths require sensory experience, such as observing that water boils at 100°C. A priori truths can be known through pure reasoning, such as a proof of a mathematical theorem. A related distinction is between synthetic and analytic truths, based on the source of the truth. A sentence is synthetic if its truth depends on what the world is like, such as "Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth". A sentence is analytic if its truth depends only on the meanings of its terms, as in "all bachelors are unmarried". Logical truths are a special class of analytic truths. Their truth is determined by the logical form of statements, regardless of concrete contents, as in statements of the form "if $P$, then $P$". The negation of a logical truth is a logical falsity or contradiction. Contradictions can take the form of affirming and denying the same idea within a single statement, as in "the light is on and the light is not on". Most logicians consider all contradictions to be false to avoid absurdity. One exception is the school of dialetheism, which holds that some contradictions are true, arguing that reality itself can be contradictory.

A truth is necessary if it could not have been otherwise, meaning that it is true under all conceivable circumstances. A sentence is actually true if it correctly describes the actual world. A sentence is possibly true if there are conceivable circumstances where it is true, regardless of whether these circumstances obtain in the actual world.

Evaluative truths are about what is good or bad in some sense. They include ethical truths, which assess the moral status of principles, actions, and persons, such as the claim "murder is wrong". Aesthetic truths are about the appeal of entities, including judgments about what is beautiful and about the meanings of artworks. Axiological nihilists and error theorists challenge the existence of evaluative truths, arguing that no values exist or that all value statements are false. Subjectivism, another view, holds that they are subjective truths. A subjective truth depends on individual attitudes or personal preferences, meaning that a statement may be true from the perspective of one person and false from another. They contrast with objective truths, which are verifiable and hold regardless of individual attitudes or perspectives.

The concept of religious truth encompasses core teachings and doctrines within religious traditions, addressing not only how things are but also how people relate to the world. They typically concern the meaning of life, the nature of ultimate reality and the divine, and the values and practices that should guide human conduct. Some traditions distinguish between absolute and relative truth, with absolute truth pointing to a transcendent, divine reality while relative truth refers to conventional or context-dependent teachings for everyday life. Religious truths are often grounded in faith, drawing rationalist and scientific criticisms for lacking substantial empirical evidence.

Various forms of truth are distinguished by the field of inquiry they belong to. Scientific truths are well-established theories in the scientific community, validated through rigorous application of the scientific method. In studying the empirical world, scientists often employ mathematical truths, which are abstract theorems or principles demonstrated through deductive reasoning from basic principles. Philosophers of mathematics discuss whether mathematical truths should be interpreted as insights into mind-independent abstract objects or as human constructions arising from formal frameworks and symbolic manipulation. Historical truth refers to the accurate presentation of past events, but it is controversial to what extent historians can achieve this ideal. Difficulties arise from the subjective nature of interpretation and the influence of personal values and biases when integrating evidence from diverse sources to arrive at a coherent narrative. Personal historical truth plays a role in psychoanalysis as a factor shaping an individual's identity, such as the lasting effects of traumatic childhood experiences. The remembered events may diverge from objective reality due to distortions introduced by repression and confabulation.

In logic and semantics, truth simpliciter is sometimes distinguished from truth relative to a certain context, such as truth in a possible world or in a model. A possible world is a way of how things could have been. For example, the dinosaurs went extinct in the actual world, but there are possible worlds where they survived. Accordingly, the sentence "the dinosaurs were wiped out" is true in the actual world but false in some possible worlds. Similarly, model theory uses models—abstract mathematical structures—to represent the meanings of logical terms and expressions. In this context, the truth value of a formula can depend on the model: it may be true in one model and false in another. A related problem in the philosophy of literature concerns truth in fiction, referring to statements that accurately describe events or characters in the imagined universe of a work of fiction, such as the claim that Harry Potter wears glasses.

In various fields

Science and philosophy

Truth is central to many disciplines. It is often considered a goal of inquiry that guides scientific research and intellectual life. Empirical scientists formulate testable hypotheses to explain phenomena. They rely on observation and experimentation to collect objective data, comparing results with initial hypotheses to confirm or disconfirm theories. The natural sciences engage in quantitative research, employing precise numerical measurements, often to arrive at exact general laws that can predict future outcomes. Qualitative research is more common in the social sciences, where researchers examine cultural phenomena, social processes, and subjective experiences that may resist purely numerical interpretation.

The formal sciences demonstrate the truth of theories through more abstract methods, usually based on deductive reasoning. For example, mathematicians employ several proof methods to establish theorems, such as direct proof, proof by contradiction, and mathematical induction. Formal logic studies the nature of deductive reasoning and the rules of inference it follows. A key principle in this field is that deductive inferences preserve truth: if all premises are true, then the conclusion cannot be false. Logicians develop formal systems—abstract frameworks that precisely encode forms of deductive reasoning—and examine which truths can and cannot be proven within a given formal system. Truth tables, another tool in logic, express how the truth values of compound propositions depend on those of their constituent propositions.

Many issues concerning the relation between truth and inquiry are addressed by epistemology, which studies the nature, origins, and limits of knowledge. This field treats truth as a central aspect of knowledge and examines the ways of attaining it, including the approaches of the empirical and formal sciences. The philosophy of language and semantics regard truth as an aspect of the meaning of sentences. They are interested in the relation between words, ideas, and the world and analyze phenomena that complicate this relation, such as ambiguity, vagueness, and context dependence. They also address the problem of truth-value gaps: the question of whether some statements are neither true nor false.

Ethics is concerned with right behavior, including truth-related behavior. For example, Immanuel Kant argued that people have a duty to tell the truth and are prohibited from lying. In metaethics, philosophers discuss whether moral statements and principles can be true, as cognitivists claim, or not, as non-cognitivists contend.

Religion and art

Truth plays a central role in many religions. The Abrahamic traditions stress the importance of truthfulness and closely link truth to the divine, as reflected in the Jewish description of God as El Emet (God of truth), Jesus's statement "I am the way, the truth, and the life" in Christianity, and the Islamic term Al-Haqq (the Truth) as one of Allah's names. Philosophers in these traditions have debated the relationship between the religious truths of faith and the philosophical truths of reason. They typically argue that apparent tensions are resolvable through right interpretation. An alternative approach relies on the doctrine of double truth, according to which divergent truths can coexist in different domains.

In Hinduism, truth or satya is a key virtue to be practiced in thought, speech, and action, and is considered a source of individual and societal well-being. For example, it is one of the five moral restraints in Patanjali's Yoga. In Buddhism, the concept of truth is closely related to Buddha's teachings, such as the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths about the causes of suffering and the path to liberation. Buddhists also hold the theory of two truths, according to which conventional truth, associated with the phenomenal world and everyday experience, differs from ultimate truth, which concerns the fundamental nature of reality and is required for attaining liberation. A related contrast in Jainism distinguishes between relative truth, which is limited to a particular time, place, and perspective, and absolute truth, which transcends individual viewpoints but cannot be fully expressed in language. A form of perspectivism is also found in Taoism, which argues that knowledge is shaped by a person's interests and engagement with the world, with each perspective providing only a partial view of reality.

Truth can also be expressed in the field of art by manifesting ideas or understanding through aesthetic phenomena. The meanings of artworks are not always directly accessible and may require interpretation to uncover. For example, a novel exploring the feelings and choices of fictional characters may reveal deeper truths about human nature and moral dilemmas. Artworks may also evoke experiences that a person has not felt before, showing them new perspectives, familiarizing them with alternative ways of life, or preparing them for possible future challenges. Aesthetic philosophers discuss whether or how the truths expressed in an artwork shape aesthetic experience and contribute to its overall value.

Others

Truth plays a central role in law as a guiding norm to which legal processes and decisions should align. Because of difficulties in reconstructing what happened, this field relies on various standards of proof and evidentiary rules to ascertain pertinent facts. Consequently, truth by itself can be insufficient if it cannot be proven in court, contrasting factual truth with legal truth.

Similarly, truth is a key element in journalism, where reporters seek information from reliable sources and fact-check claims to accurately inform the public. Media theorists discuss obstacles to this process, such as the spread of misinformation, misleadingly edited photographs, AI-generated images, political propaganda, and algorithmic biases on social media platforms.

Psychologists and cognitive scientists study cognitions as truth-related mental processes that acquire, transform, or use information. They examine different types of cognitive processes, like perception, memory, and thought, and investigate how biases and distortions affect these processes.

In computer science, true and false are values of constants and variables belonging to the Boolean data type. One of their key applications happens in control structures that determine the flow of code execution, such as conditional expressions that execute a code path only if a test condition evaluates to true.

Probability theory deals with uncertain information. It uses numbers between 0 and 1 to represent the probability that a statement is true and provides rules for calculating how the probabilities of different statements influence each other.

Ancient Greek philosophy

See also: Aletheia

Socrates', Plato's and Aristotle's ideas about truth are seen by some as consistent with correspondence theory. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle stated: "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy proceeds to say of Aristotle:

... Aristotle sounds much more like a genuine correspondence theorist in the Categories (12b11, 14b14), where he talks of "underlying things" that make statements true and implies that these "things" (pragmata) are logically structured situations or facts (viz., his sitting, his not sitting). Most influential is his claim in De Interpretatione (16a3) that thoughts are "likenesses" (homoiosis) of things. Although he nowhere defines truth in terms of a thought's likeness to a thing or fact, it is clear that such a definition would fit well into his overall philosophy of mind. ...

Similar statements can also be found in Plato's dialogues (Cratylus 385b2, Sophist 263b).

Some Greek philosophers maintained that truth was either not accessible to mortals, or of greatly limited accessibility, forming early philosophical skepticism. Among these were Xenophanes, Democritus, and Pyrrho, the founder of Pyrrhonism, who argued that there was no criterion of truth.

The Epicureans believed that all sense perceptions were true, and that errors arise in how we judge those perceptions.

The Stoics conceived truth as accessible from impressions via cognitive grasping.

Medieval philosophy

Avicenna (980–1037)

In early Islamic philosophy, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) defined truth in his work The Book of Healing, Book I, Chapter 8, as:

What corresponds in the mind to what is outside it.

Avicenna elaborated on his definition of truth later in Book VIII, Chapter 6:

The truth of a thing is the property of the being of each thing which has been established in it.

This definition is but a rendering of the medieval Latin translation of the work by Simone van Riet. A modern translation of the original Arabic text states:

Truth is also said of the veridical belief in the existence [of something].

Aquinas (1225–1274)

Reevaluating Avicenna, and also Augustine and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas stated in his Disputed Questions on Truth:

A natural thing, being placed between two intellects, is called true insofar as it conforms to either. It is said to be true with respect to its conformity with the divine intellect insofar as it fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect ... With respect to its conformity with a human intellect, a thing is said to be true insofar as it is such as to cause a true estimate about itself.

Thus, for Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth in things (ontological truth). Following this, he wrote an elegant re-statement of Aristotle's view in his Summa I.16.1:

Veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei.

(Truth is the conformity of the intellect and things.)

Aquinas also said that real things participate in the act of being of the Creator God who is Subsistent Being, Intelligence, and Truth. Thus, these beings possess the light of intelligibility and are knowable. These things (beings; reality) are the foundation of the truth that is found in the human mind, when it acquires knowledge of things, first through the senses, then through the understanding and the judgement done by reason. For Aquinas, human intelligence ("intus", within and "legere", to read) has the capability to reach the essence and existence of things because it has a non-material, spiritual element, although some moral, educational, and other elements might interfere with its capability.

Changing concepts of truth in the Middle Ages

Richard Firth Green examined the concept of truth in the later Middle Ages in his A Crisis of Truth, and concludes that roughly during the reign of Richard II of England the very meaning of the concept changes. The idea of the oath, which was so much part and parcel of for instance Romance literature, changes from a subjective concept to a more objective one (in Derek Pearsall's summary). Whereas truth (the "trouthe" of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) was first "an ethical truth in which truth is understood to reside in persons", in Ricardian England it "transforms ... into a political truth in which truth is understood to reside in documents".

Modern philosophy

Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant endorses a definition of truth along the lines of the correspondence theory of truth. Kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason: "The nominal definition of truth, namely that it is the agreement of cognition with its object, is here granted and presupposed". He denies that this correspondence definition of truth provides us with a test or criterion to establish which judgements are true. He states in his logic lectures:

... Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object.

The ancients called such a circle in explanation a diallelon. And actually the logicians were always reproached with this mistake by the sceptics, who observed that with this definition of truth it is just as when someone makes a statement before a court and in doing so appeals to a witness with whom no one is acquainted, but who wants to establish his credibility by maintaining that the one who called him as witness is an honest man. The accusation was grounded, too. Only the solution of the indicated problem is impossible without qualification and for every man. ...

This passage makes use of his distinction between nominal and real definitions. A nominal definition explains the meaning of a linguistic expression. A real definition describes the essence of certain objects and enables us to determine whether any given item falls within the definition. Kant holds that the definition of truth is merely nominal and, therefore, we cannot employ it to establish which judgements are true. According to Kant, the ancient skeptics were critical of the logicians for holding that, by means of a merely nominal definition of truth, they can establish which judgements are true. They were trying to do something that is "impossible without qualification and for every man".

Hegel (1770–1831)

G. W. F. Hegel distanced his philosophy from empiricism by presenting truth as a self-moving process, rather than a matter of merely subjective thoughts. Hegel's truth is analogous to an organism in that it is self-determining according to its own inner logic: "Truth is its own self-movement within itself."

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

For Arthur Schopenhauer, a judgment is a combination or separation of two or more concepts. If a judgment is to be an expression of knowledge, it must have a sufficient reason or ground by which the judgment could be called true. Truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself which is its sufficient reason (ground). Judgments can have material, formal, transcendental, or metalogical truth. A judgment has material truth if its concepts are based on intuitive perceptions that are generated from sensations. If a judgment has its reason (ground) in another judgment, its truth is called logical or formal. If a judgment, of, for example, pure mathematics or pure science, is based on the forms (space, time, causality) of intuitive, empirical knowledge, then the judgment has transcendental truth.

Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

When Søren Kierkegaard, as his character Johannes Climacus, ends his writings: My thesis was, subjectivity, heartfelt is the truth, he does not advocate for subjectivism in its extreme form (the theory that something is true simply because one believes it to be so), but rather that the objective approach to matters of personal truth cannot shed any light upon that which is most essential to a person's life. Objective truths are concerned with the facts of a person's being, while subjective truths are concerned with a person's way of being. Kierkegaard agrees that objective truths for the study of subjects like mathematics, science, and history are relevant and necessary, but argues that objective truths do not shed any light on a person's inner relationship to existence. At best, these truths can only provide a severely narrowed perspective that has little to do with one's actual experience of life.

While objective truths are final and static, subjective truths are continuing and dynamic. The truth of one's existence is a living, inward, and subjective experience that is always in the process of becoming. The values, morals, and spiritual approaches a person adopts, while not denying the existence of objective truths of those beliefs, can only become truly known when they have been inwardly appropriated through subjective experience. Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes all systematic philosophies which attempt to know life or the truth of existence via theories and objective knowledge about reality. As Kierkegaard claims, human truth is something that is continually occurring, and a human being cannot find truth separate from the subjective experience of one's own existing, defined by the values and fundamental essence that consist of one's way of life.

Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Friedrich Nietzsche believed the search for truth, or 'the will to truth', was a consequence of the will to power of philosophers. He thought that truth should be used as long as it promoted life and the will to power, and he thought untruth was better than truth if it had this life enhancement as a consequence. As he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, "The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment ... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding ..." (aphorism 4). He proposed the will to power as a truth only because, according to him, it was the most life-affirming and sincere perspective one could have.

Robert Wicks discusses Nietzsche's basic view of truth as follows:

... Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") as a keystone in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call "truth" is only "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." His view at this time is that arbitrariness completely prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the very artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images; "truth" is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for merely practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistence. ...

Separately Nietzsche suggested that an ancient, metaphysical belief in the divinity of Truth lies at the heart of and has served as the foundation for the entire subsequent Western intellectual tradition: "But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is Truth; that Truth is 'Divine' ..."

Moreover, Nietzsche challenges the notion of objective truth, arguing that truths are human creations and serve practical purposes. He wrote, "Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are." He argues that truth is a human invention, arising from the artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images, serving practical purposes like repose, security, and consistency; formed through metaphorical and rhetorical devices, shaped by societal conventions and forgotten origins:

"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically ..."

Nietzsche argues that truth is always filtered through individual perspectives and shaped by various interests and biases. In "On the Genealogy of Morality," he asserts, "There are no facts, only interpretations." He suggests that truth is subject to constant reinterpretation and change, influenced by shifting cultural and historical contexts as he writes in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" that "I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star." In the same book, Zarathustra proclaims, "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins."

Heidegger (1889–1976)

Other philosophers take this common meaning to be secondary and derivative. According to Martin Heidegger, the original meaning and essence of truth in Ancient Greece was unconcealment, or the revealing or bringing of what was previously hidden into the open, as indicated by the original Greek term for truth, aletheia. On this view, the conception of truth as correctness is a later derivation from the concept's original essence, a development Heidegger traces to the Latin term veritas. Owing to the primacy of ontology in Heidegger's philosophy, he considered this truth to lie within Being itself, and already in Being and Time (1927) had identified truth with "being-truth" or the "truth of Being" and partially with the Kantian thing-in-itself in an epistemology essentially concerning a mode of Dasein.

Sartre (1905–1980)

In Being and Nothingness (1943), partially following Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre identified our knowledge of the truth as a relation between the in-itself and for-itself of being - yet simultaneously closely connected in this vein to the data available to the material personhood, in the body, of an individual in their interaction with the world and others - with Sartre's description that "the world is human" allowing him to postulate all truth as strictly understood by self-consciousness as self-consciousness of something, a view also preceded by Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will (1889), the reading of which Sartre had credited for his interest in philosophy. This first existentialist theory, more fully fleshed out in Sartre's essay Truth and Existence (1948), which already demonstrates a more radical departure from Heidegger in its emphasis on the primacy of the idea, already formulated in Being and Nothingness, of existence as preceding essence in its role in the formulation of truth, has nevertheless been critically examined as idealist rather than materialist in its departure from more traditional idealist epistemologies such as those of Ancient Greek philosophy in Plato and Aristotle, and staying as does Heidegger with Kant.

Later, in the Search for a Method (1957), in which Sartre used a unification of existentialism and Marxism that he would later formulate in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre, with his growing emphasis on the Hegelian totalisation of historicity, posited a conception of truth still defined by its process of relation to a container giving it material meaning, but with specific reference to a role in this broader totalisation, for "subjectivity is neither everything nor nothing; it represents a moment in the objective process (that in which externality is internalised), and this moment is perpetually eliminated only to be perpetually reborn": "For us, truth is something which becomes, it has and will have become. It is a totalisation which is forever being totalised. Particular facts do not signify anything; they are neither true nor false so long as they are not related, through the mediation of various partial totalities, to the totalisation in process." Sartre describes this as a "realistic epistemology", developed out of Marx's ideas but with such a development only possible in an existentialist light, as with the theme of the whole work. In an early segment of the lengthy two-volume Critique of 1960, Sartre continued to describe truth as a "totalising" "truth of history" to be interpreted by a "Marxist historian", whilst his break with Heidegger's epistemological ideas is finalised in the description of a seemingly antinomous "dualism of Being and Truth" as the essence of a truly Marxist epistemology.

Camus (1913–1960)

The well-regarded French philosopher Albert Camus wrote in his famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), that "there are truths but no truth", in fundamental agreement with Nietzsche's perspectivism, and favourably cites Kierkegaard in posing that "no truth is absolute or can render satisfactory an existence that is impossible in itself". Later, in The Rebel (1951), he declared, akin to Sartre, that "the very lowest form of truth" is "the truth of history", but describes this in the context of its abuse and like Kierkegaard in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript he criticizes Hegel in holding a historical attitude "which consists of saying: 'This is truth, which appears to us, however, to be error, but which is true precisely because it happens to be error. As for proof, it is not I, but history, at its conclusion, that will furnish it.'"

Peirce (1839–1914)

Pragmatists like C. S. Peirce take truth to have some manner of essential relation to human practices for inquiring into and discovering truth, with Peirce himself holding that truth is what human inquiry would find out on a matter, if our practice of inquiry were taken as far as it could profitably go: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth ..."

Nishida (1870–1945)

According to Kitaro Nishida, "knowledge of things in the world begins with the differentiation of unitary consciousness into knower and known and ends with self and things becoming one again. Such unification takes form not only in knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs knowing, the willing that directs action, and the feeling or emotive reach that directs sensing."

Fromm (1900–1980)

Erich Fromm finds that trying to discuss truth as "absolute truth" is sterile and that emphasis ought to be placed on "optimal truth". He considers truth as stemming from the survival imperative of grasping one's environment physically and intellectually, whereby young children instinctively seek truth so as to orient themselves in "a strange and powerful world". The accuracy of their perceived approximation of the truth will therefore have direct consequences on their ability to deal with their environment. Fromm can be understood to define truth as a functional approximation of reality. His vision of optimal truth is described below:

... the dichotomy between 'absolute = perfect' and 'relative = imperfect' has been superseded in all fields of scientific thought, where "it is generally recognized that there is no absolute truth but nevertheless that there are objectively valid laws and principles".

[...] In that respect, "a scientifically or rationally valid statement means that the power of reason is applied to all the available data of observation without any of them being suppressed or falsified for the sake of the desired result". The history of science is "a history of inadequate and incomplete statements, and every new insight makes possible the recognition of the inadequacies of previous propositions and offers a springboard for creating a more adequate formulation."

[...] As a result "the history of thought is the history of an ever-increasing approximation to the truth. Scientific knowledge is not absolute but optimal; it contains the optimum of truth attainable in a given historical period." Fromm furthermore notes that "different cultures have emphasized various aspects of the truth" and that increasing interaction between cultures allows for these aspects to reconcile and integrate, increasing further the approximation to the truth.

Foucault (1926–1984)

Truth, says Michel Foucault, is problematic when any attempt is made to see truth as an "objective" quality. He prefers not to use the term truth itself but "Regimes of Truth". In his historical investigations he found truth to be something that was itself a part of, or embedded within, a given power structure. Thus Foucault's view shares much in common with the concepts of Nietzsche. Truth for Foucault is also something that shifts through various episteme throughout history.

Baudrillard (1929–2007)

Jean Baudrillard considered truth to be largely simulated, that is pretending to have something, as opposed to dissimulation, pretending to not have something. He took his cue from iconoclasts whom he claims knew that images of God demonstrated that God did not exist. Baudrillard wrote in "Precession of the Simulacra":

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

—Ecclesiastes

Some examples of simulacra that Baudrillard cited were: that prisons simulate the "truth" that society is free; scandals (e.g., Watergate) simulate that corruption is corrected; Disney simulates that the U.S. itself is an adult place. Though such examples seem extreme, such extremity is an important part of Baudrillard's theory. For a less extreme example, movies usually end with the bad being punished, humiliated, or otherwise failing, thus affirming for viewers the concept that the good end happily and the bad unhappily, a narrative which implies that the status quo and established power structures are largely legitimate.

Other contemporary positions

Truthmaker theory is "the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists". It is different from substantive theories of truth in the sense that it does not aim at giving a definition of what truth is. Instead, it has the goal of determining how truth depends on being.

See also

• Asha
• Confirmation holism
• Contextualism
• Degree of truth
• Disposition
• Eclecticism
• Epistemic theories of truth
• Imagination
• Independence (probability theory)
• Invariant (mathematics)
• McNamara fallacy
• Normative science
• On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
• Perspectivism
• Physical symbol system
• Public opinion
• Relativism
• Religious views on truth
• Revision theory
• Slingshot argument
• Subjectivity
• Tautology (logic)
• Tautology (rhetoric)
• Theory of justification
• Truth prevails
• Truthiness
• Unity of the proposition
• Verisimilitude

Other theorists

• Augustine of Hippo
• Brand Blanshard
• Hartry Field
• Gottlob Frege
• Paul Horwich
• Harold Joachim
• Karl Popper

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Further reading

• Aristotle, "The Categories", Harold P. Cooke (trans.), pp. 1–109 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, 1938.
• Aristotle, "On Interpretation", Harold P. Cooke (trans.), pp. 111–179 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, 1938.
• Aristotle, "Prior Analytics", Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, 1938.
• Aristotle, "On the Soul" (De Anima), W. S. Hett (trans.), pp. 1–203 in Aristotle, Volume 8, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, 1936.
• Audi, Robert (ed., 1999), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. 2nd edition, 1999. Cited as CDP.
• Baldwin, James Mark (ed., 1901–1905), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 3 volumes in 4, Macmillan, New York.
• Baylis, Charles A. (1962), "Truth", pp. 321–322 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ.
• Benjamin, A. Cornelius (1962), "Coherence Theory of Truth", p. 58 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ.
• Blackburn, Simon, and Simmons, Keith (eds., 1999), Truth, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Includes papers by James, Ramsey, Russell, Tarski, and more recent work.
• Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (1987), Truth and Beauty. Aesthetics and Motivations in Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
• Chang, C.C., and Keisler, H.J., Model Theory, North-Holland, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1973.
• Chomsky, Noam (1995), The Minimalist Program, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Church, Alonzo (1962a), "Name Relation, or Meaning Relation", p. 204 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ.
• Church, Alonzo (1962b), "Truth, Semantical", p. 322 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ.
• Clifford, W.K. (1877), "The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays". (Prometheus Books, 1999), infidels.org Archived 2009-12-03 at the Wayback Machine
• Dewey, John (1900–1901), Lectures on Ethics 1900–1901, Donald F. Koch (ed.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL.
• Dewey, John (1932), Theory of the Moral Life, Part 2 of John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1908. 2nd edition, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1932. Reprinted, Arnold Isenberg (ed.), Victor Kestenbaum (pref.), Irvingtion Publishers, New York, 1980.
• Dewey, John (1938), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Holt and Company, New York. Reprinted, John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 12: 1938, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1986.
• Field, Hartry (2001), Truth and the Absence of Fact, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Foucault, Michel (1997), Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow (ed.), Robert Hurley et al. (trans.), The New Press, New York.
• Garfield, Jay L., and Kiteley, Murray (1991), Meaning and Truth: The Essential Readings in Modern Semantics, Paragon House, New York.
• Gupta, Anil (2001), "Truth", in Lou Goble (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.
• Gupta, Anil and Belnap, Nuel. (1993). The Revision Theory of Truth. MIT Press.
• Haack, Susan (1993), Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1976), "What Is Universal Pragmatics?", 1st published, "Was heißt Universalpragmatik?", Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie, Karl-Otto Apel (ed.), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Reprinted, pp. 1–68 in Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Beacon Press, Boston, 1979.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1990), Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), Thomas McCarthy (intro.), MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Habermas, Jürgen (2003), Truth and Justification, Barbara Fultner (trans.), MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Hegel, Georg, (1977), The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, Oxford, ISBN 978-0-19-824597-1.
• Horwich, Paul, (1988), Truth, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• James, William (1904), A World of Pure Experience.
• James, William (1907), Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Popular Lectures on Philosophy, Longmans, Green, and Company, New York.
• James, William (1909), The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to 'Pragmatism, Longmans, Green, and Company, New York.
• James, William (1912), Essays in Radical Empiricism. Cf. Chapt. 3, "The Thing and its Relations", pp. 92–122.
• James, William (2014), William James on Habit, Will, Truth, and the Meaning of Life. James Sloan Allen (ed.), Frederic C. Beil, Publisher, Savannah, GA.
• Kant, Immanuel (1800), Introduction to Logic. Reprinted, Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (trans.), Dennis Sweet (intro.), Barnes and Noble, New York, 2005.
• Kirkham, Richard L. (1992), Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Kneale, W., and Kneale, M. (1962), The Development of Logic, Oxford University Press, London, 1962. Reprinted with corrections, 1975.
• Kreitler, Hans, and Kreitler, Shulamith (1972), Psychology of the Arts, Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
• Le Morvan, Pierre (2004), "Ramsey on Truth and Truth on Ramsey", British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12 (4) 2004, 705–718, PDF Archived 2017-08-29 at the Wayback Machine.
• Peirce, C.S., Bibliography.
• Peirce, C.S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), vols. 7–8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1931–1935, 1958. Cited as CP vol.para.
• Peirce, C.S. (1877), "The Fixation of Belief", Popular Science Monthly 12 (1877), 1–15. Reprinted (CP 5.358–387), (CE 3, 242–257), (EP 1, 109–123). Eprint Archived 2020-12-11 at the Wayback Machine.
• Peirce, C.S. (1901), "Truth and Falsity and Error" (in part), pp. 718–720 in J.M. Baldwin (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. 2. Reprinted, CP 5.565–573.
• Polanyi, Michael (1966), The Tacit Dimension, Doubleday and Company, Garden City, NY.
• Quine, W.V. (1956), "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes", Journal of Philosophy 53 (1956). Reprinted, pp. 185–196 in Quine (1976), Ways of Paradox.
• Quine, W.V. (1976), The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays, 1st edition, 1966. Revised and enlarged edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1976.
• Quine, W.V. (1980 a), From a Logical Point of View, Logico-Philosophical Essays, 2nd edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Quine, W.V. (1980 b), "Reference and Modality", pp. 139–159 in Quine (1980 a), From a Logical Point of View.
• Rajchman, John, and West, Cornel (ed., 1985), Post-Analytic Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York.
• Ramsey, F. P. (1927), "Facts and Propositions", Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 7, 153–170. Reprinted, pp. 34–51 in F. P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers, David Hugh Mellor (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
• Ramsey, F. P. (1990), Philosophical Papers, David Hugh Mellor (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Rawls, John (2000), Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Barbara Herman (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Rorty, R. (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
• Russell, Bertrand (1912), The Problems of Philosophy, 1st published 1912. Reprinted, Galaxy Book, Oxford University Press, New York, 1959. Reprinted, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1988.
• Russell, Bertrand (1918), "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", The Monist, 1918. Reprinted, pp. 177–281 in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, Robert Charles Marsh (ed.), Unwin Hyman, London, 1956. Reprinted, pp. 35–155 in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, David Pears (ed.), Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985.
• Russell, Bertrand (1956), Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, Robert Charles Marsh (ed.), Unwin Hyman, London, 1956. Reprinted, Routledge, London, 1992.
• Russell, Bertrand (1985), The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, David Pears (ed.), Open Court, La Salle, IL.
• Schopenhauer, Arthur, (1974), On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Open Court, La Salle, IL, ISBN 978-0-87548-187-6.
• Smart, Ninian (1969), The Religious Experience of Mankind, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.
• Tarski, A., Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, J.H. Woodger (trans.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1956. 2nd edition, John Corcoran (ed.), Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, IN, 1983.
• Wallace, Anthony F.C. (1966), Religion: An Anthropological View, Random House, New York.

External links

• An Introduction to Truth by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  • "Truth"
  • "Pluralist Theories of Truth"
  • "Truthmaker Theory"
  • "Prosentential Theory of Truth"
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  • Truth
  • Coherence theory of truth
  • Correspondence theory of truth
  • Deflationary theory of truth
  • Identity theory of truth
  • Revision theory of truth
  • Tarski's definition of truth
  • Axiomatic theories of truth
• Heidegger on Truth (Aletheia) as Unconcealment
• History of Truth: The Greek "Aletheia"
• History of Truth: The Latin "Veritas"