However, the ‘agreement’ or ‘matching’ on which correspondence rests is difficult to explain. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), perhaps the last great statement of the correspondence theory, treated sentences or propositions as pictures: if the elements of the world depicted correspond to the elements of the picture, which accurately represents them in their relations to one another – if picture matches fact – then the proposition is true. In some sense, for Kant, truth is the agreement of cognition with itself, or with its own involuntary constructions, rather than with an external reality. Immanuel Kant puts it like this: ‘Truth is the agreement of cognition with its object.’ That seems fairly clear until you start pressing, since Kant thinks that empirical facts are produced within the forms of human consciousness. ‘Truth is the agreement between intellect and object,’ says Thomas Aquinas, explaining ‘agreement’ by means of near-synonyms such as ‘concord’ or ‘conformity’. The correspondence theory has been formulated and reformulated over the centuries. On the other hand, every formulation seems beset by redundancy, and the terrifying question looms: is that definition of ‘truth’ itself true? Characteristically, Aristotle is more grounded than his teacher, Plato, when he gave the classic formulation of the correspondence theory: ‘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.’ That’s fairly crisp if somewhat bewildering, but this definition, like many characterisations of truth, appears oddly redundant, notably uninformative. Philosophical reflection has not always treated truth as a god, but it was certainly a central concept, commitment and question for some 2,500 years. Jesus agrees, proclaiming himself at John 14:6 to be the way, the truth and the life. ‘It is there that true being dwells, without colour or shape, that cannot be touched reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof.’ Plato’s truth is identical not only with the beautiful, but with the good and the just. ‘Assuredly we must be bold to speak what is true, above all when our discourse is upon truth ,’ Socrates says in the Phaedrus. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,’ declares John Keats, very Grecianly, or at least Platonically, Plato having anointed truth as the goal of philosophy, the goal of human life. If truth is a problem now for everyone, if the idea seems empty or useless in ‘the era of social media’, ‘science denialism’, ‘conspiracy theories’ and suchlike, maybe that just means that ‘everyone’ has caught up to where philosophy was in 1922.īefore the 20th century, reflection on truth in Western intellectual and spiritual traditions usually exalted it. But philosophy of pragmatist, analytic and continental varieties lurched into the post-truth era a century ago. One might have hoped to turn to philosophy for a clarification of the nature of truth, and maybe even a celebration of it. And, of course, it’s often at stake in practical political debates and policy decisions, with regard to climate change or vaccines, for example, or who really won the election, or whom we should listen to about what. Truth is, plausibly, central to thought and communication in every case. To assert it is to claim that it is true. To believe that masks prevent the spread of COVID-19 is to take it to be true that they do. ![]() But truth is one of our central concepts – perhaps our most central concept – and I don’t think we can do without it. ![]() It is often said, rather casually, that truth is dissolving, that we live in the ‘post-truth era’.
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