Philosophers still cannot agree on what makes something true
Everyone uses the word truth, and a working definition sounds easy: matching reality. Yet philosophers have defended at least half a dozen rival accounts, from correspondence with facts to whatever survives endless inquiry, and one camp argues truth has no deep nature at all. The English word originally meant loyalty.
At its simplest, truth is conformity to fact, the opposite of falsehood or misrepresentation. It is usually treated as a property of truthbearers, things capable of being true or false. Candidates include sentences, propositions and beliefs, and each creates problems. Sentences are public and clearly structured, but their meaning can shift with context or ambiguous words, and they belong to particular languages. Propositions, the abstract meanings behind statements, avoid those issues but are harder to pin down, and some doubt abstract objects exist. Beliefs connect truth directly to the mind, yet they are private and awkward to study.
The theories diverge sharply. Correspondence says a statement is true when it matches the facts. Coherence says a belief is true when it fits with and is supported by other beliefs. Pragmatists tie truth to what works or would withstand unlimited inquiry. The semantic approach spells out the conditions under which a sentence would be true, while deflationists hold that there is nothing more to grasp than how the word true functions in speech. Pluralists let the definition vary by subject, and relativists allow a statement to be true from one viewpoint and false from another.
Logical puzzles complicate every account, above all the liar paradox. Some philosophers also ask whether truth values beyond true and false exist, and whether certain statements have no truth value at all.
The question is old and global, raised in ancient Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Greek thought, and later by Christian and Islamic philosophers relating truth to God. Philosophers separate kinds of truth, such as necessary, moral, aesthetic and scientific. The empirical sciences pursue it through observation and experiment, the formal sciences through deduction. The word itself descends from Old English trēowth, fidelity, which survives in phrases like a true friend.
Source: Truth
