Truth is the quality of being true, and anything
that is true is a truth, the concept of truth is uncommonly complex and
variable. Thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and opinions are said to be true or false.
An idea makes a truth claim and is true when the character of what is thought
about upholds its claim. Forms of words or statements are also said to be true
or false. This can be explained by saying a set of words is true when it
expresses a true thought. “Truth” should be replaced by the “facts”, “reality”
or the “way things are.”
Truth is often imagined as consisting in a
speaker’s honesty with respect to what he believes. Occasionally truth is
rehashed, as in the doctrines of the German philosopher Gottlob Frege. Mohandas
Gandhi spoke of “The Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God” and
said, “ I worship God as Truth only.” Jesus said, “ I am the Way, and the Truth,
and the Life.” God is truth and the essence of it. All of his ways are truth
and all truth stands or falls as it is measured against Him. If we love truth
and seek after it, we cannot help but run into the outstretched arms of God. He
wants us to know the truth, which is to know him.
God places the truth
before us and gives us complete freedom to choose how to respond to the truth.
If we turn to God and ask him to instruct us in the truth and to lead us to
salvation, we will surely receive that which we ask because our prayer will be
in line with God’s desire for us. The word truth is mentioned in the bible 235
times.
Philosopher’s proposed four main theories to answer the “What is
Truth?” question. They are correspondence, pragmatic, coherence, and
deflationary theories of truth. Plato developed the earliest version of the
correspondence theory. He sought to understand the meaning of knowledge and how
it is acquired. Plato wanted to distinguish between true and false belief. His
theory was based on intuitive recognition that true statements correspond to the
facts, while false statements do not. A 20th-century British philosopher
Bertrand Russell and Plato recognized this theory unsatisfactory because it did
not allow false belief. Both Russell and Plato stated that if a belief were
false because there is no fact to prove it to be true, then it would be a belief
about nothing, or not even a belief at all. Each then thought that the grammar
of a sentence could offer a way around this problem. But how, they asked, are
the parts of a sentence related to reality? One suggestion is from the
20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He stated that the parts of a
sentence relate to the objects they describe much like the way the parts of a
picture relate to the objects pictured. But false sentences pose a problem. If a
false sentence pictures nothing, there can be no meaning in the sentence.
The correspondence theory of truth is really no more than an expression of
how the word “truth” is defined. Some criticisms focus on an epistemological
problem that is involved in knowing whether or not a proposition does indeed
agree with the facts. We clearly do classify propositions as true or false in
everyday life, but we cannot securely do so on the basis of their correspondence
to reality.
Charles S. Peirce who was an American philosopher in the 19th,
offered another answer to the question. Pragmatists like Peirce say that the
truth of our ideas must be tested through practice. He said that it is something
that experts will agree upon when their investigations are final. He believed
that our evolving species were a way to get evener closer to the truth. Some
pragmatists questioned the usefulness of the idea of truth, stating that in
evaluating our beliefs we should pay attention to the penalty that our beliefs
have.
William James defined the pragmatist theory of truth, as “an idea is
‘true’ so long as to believe it manifestly false. It is obvious to any person
that a proposition is either true or false separately of the utility of our
belief in it. Pragmatist philosophers twisted the meanings of words, so we have
to make logical sense of pragmatism. William James, qualified his attitude by
saying that a proposition’s being true consists in its being useful in the
widest possible sense.
The coherence theory also concerns the meaning of
knowledge. It states that a proposition’s truth consists in its fitting into a
coherent system of propositions. Beliefs cover everything and do not contradict
each other. The coherence theory is undoubtedly the better theory even here if
only because there is an elegant economy in having a single over-arching theory
of truth that encompasses all situations.
True has been linked with the Good
and the Beautiful as one of man’s supreme values. The pursuit of truth is
indistinguishable in practice from the pursuit of knowledge, whether about the
environment, nature, ethnical duties and ideas, or the relation to the divine.
It has been doubted whether knowledge, or known truth, is humanly
attainable. The truth is often disagreeable, because it fails to support
prejudice or myth. The pursuit of truth tends to be suppressed as a dangerously
revolutionary force.
Some philosophers reject the question “What is truth?”
with the observation that attaching the claim “it is true that” to a sentence
adds no meaning. The use of the word true is essential when making a general
claim about everything, nothing, or something, as in the statement “most of what
he says is true.”
Truth is a very simple and handy concept. It is
correspondence of a pictorial or symbolic representation to the thing being
represented. In the case of a symbolic representation, the correspondence may be
massively complicated, but it is nonetheless similar in kind to a simple
pictorial representation. References
“Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 98” on disk. 1993-1997
“Encyclopedia
Americana”, 1986 by Grolier Incorporated
“Philosophy: History and Problems.
Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Fifth Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1994