Concept

Theories of Truth

Intro

What does it mean for something to be true? Pilate asked the question to Jesus' face (John 18:38) and walked off without waiting for an answer. Philosophy has been working on it ever since.

The major answers fall into a few families.

Correspondence theory. A statement is true if it matches the way things actually are. "The cat is on the mat" is true if and only if there is a real cat on a real mat. This is the common-sense view, the standard Christian view, and the position assumed throughout the Bible. It treats truth as a real relation between language (or belief) and the world.

Coherence theory. A statement is true if it fits consistently into a wider system of beliefs. The system has to hang together; the world out there does not directly do the work. Coherentists struggle to explain how multiple consistent systems could disagree, because consistency alone does not guarantee contact with reality.

Pragmatic theory. A statement is true if it works, if believing it pays off in practice. William James and John Dewey ran versions of this. The problem: a lot of false beliefs are useful, and a lot of true beliefs are inconvenient.

Deflationary theory. Truth is not really a substantive property at all. To say "it is true that the cat is on the mat" is just to say "the cat is on the mat" with emphasis. Useful linguistically, but it does not seem to fit the way we actually use the concept.

Constructivist theory. Truth is whatever a community agrees on; it is a social construction, often tied to power. This is the postmodern position. It cannot consistently be stated; if "truth is constructed" is itself just a construction, why should anyone listen?

Christianity has always operated with correspondence. The Bible's claims are about what actually happened (a virgin actually conceived; a man actually rose from the dead; a Word was actually with God in the beginning). The gospel becomes literally false if "true" is reduced to "what works" or "what my community accepts." Pilate could not afford the answer he was given because Jesus did not just say the truth; He said "I am the truth" (John 14:6), the correspondence between God and reality embodied in a Person.

In full

The question what is truth? (Pilate's question to Jesus, John 18:38) is one of the oldest and most contested in philosophy. A theory of truth specifies what it is for a proposition (or sentence, belief, judgment) to be true. The major theories disagree about whether truth is a substantive metaphysical property (correspondence, coherence, pragmatic), a thin logical / linguistic notion (deflationary), or a social / linguistic construction (constructivist).

The theory of truth one adopts has downstream consequences for epistemology (what is the "T" in Justified True Belief?), theology (what does it mean for Scripture or the Creed to be "true"?), and apologetics (can the gospel be true if "true" is a power-construct?).

The major theories

1. Correspondence theory

Truth is the agreement of a proposition with reality.

A proposition p is true iff what p asserts is the case. "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white.

Defenders: Aristotle (Metaphysics IV.7: "To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true"); Aquinas (De Veritate Q.1: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus, "truth is the conforming of thing and intellect"); Descartes, Locke, the early Russell and Wittgenstein (Tractatus), the early Moore, Tarski (in a deflationary-leaning sense), Bertrand Russell (Philosophical Essays 1910), J.L. Austin ("Truth," 1950).

Strengths: matches ordinary intuition; accommodates objective truth; presupposed by science; the default among working philosophers.

Weaknesses: (i) what kind of relation is "correspondence", and between what relata? (ii) hard to specify for abstract / mathematical / moral / modal truths; (iii) some claim it requires a "God's-eye view" that is unattainable.

2. Coherence theory

Truth is coherence with a specified system of propositions.

A proposition is true iff it coheres maximally with the rest of the system. Note this is the coherence theory of truth, distinct from coherentism about justification.

Defenders: F.H. Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 1893); Brand Blanshard (The Nature of Thought, 1939); Otto Neurath, the early Hempel; idealist tradition.

Strengths: captures intra-systemic mathematical, logical, and theological reasoning.

Weaknesses: the isolation objection, multiple incompatible coherent systems are possible, and a coherent system may be detached from reality (see Coherentism).

3. Pragmatic theory

Truth is what works, what provides successful guidance in inquiry and action.

Defenders: Charles Sanders Peirce ("How to Make Our Ideas Clear," 1878, the founding paper), Peirce's version is more realist: truth is what inquiry would converge on at the limit; William James (Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907, "the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief"); John Dewey (Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938); Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, neo-pragmatist deflation).

Strengths: captures truth's connection to practice and inquiry; useful for scientific theories evaluated by predictive success.

Weaknesses: utility ≠ truth (a useful false belief is still false); confuses truth with the test of truth; vulnerable to counterexamples (Nazi ideology was "useful" to its adherents).

4. Deflationary / disquotational theory

Truth is not a substantive property. To assert "p is true" is simply to assert p. The truth-predicate is a logical / expressive device, not a relation between proposition and world.

Defenders: Frank Ramsey ("Facts and Propositions," 1927, the "redundancy theory"); Alfred Tarski ("The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages," 1933), the famous T-schema:

"Snow is white" is true iff snow is white.

W.V.O. Quine (Pursuit of Truth, 1990); Paul Horwich (Truth, 1990); Hartry Field (deflationary-functionalist hybrids).

Strengths: avoids metaphysical commitments; respects the formality of the truth-predicate.

Weaknesses: arguably too thin to capture truth's normative role in inquiry; struggles with truth-aptness of vague / context-sensitive sentences; some critics charge it cannot handle generalizations ("everything Sally says is true").

5. Constructivist / relativist theory

Truth is socially / linguistically constructed, a function of community consensus, language games, or power structures.

Defenders: Wittgenstein (later, Philosophical Investigations, 1953, language games); Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962, paradigms); Michel Foucault (knowledge / power); Jacques Derrida; Richard Rorty (in his more radical moments); some strands of postmodernism.

Strengths: captures the social conditioning of belief-formation and the role of conceptual schemes.

Weaknesses: typically self-refuting (the constructivist claim "truth is constructed" must itself be either constructed, and so not universally binding, or absolute, contradicting the thesis); struggles with cross-cultural rational disagreement and reform.

6. Identity theory

A true proposition is identical with the fact it picks out.

Defenders: F.H. Bradley (early); Hornsby, McDowell (modern revivals).

Strengths: bypasses the relational difficulty of correspondence ("what kind of relation?").

Weaknesses: at risk of collapsing into either correspondence (if "fact" is a worldly entity) or deflationism (if propositions just are truths).

7. Pluralist theory

Different truth-properties operate in different domains (correspondence for empirical matters, coherence for mathematics, pragmatic for ethics, etc.).

Defenders: Crispin Wright (Truth and Objectivity, 1992); Michael Lynch (Truth as One and Many, 2009).

Strengths: respects domain-specific epistemic practice.

Weaknesses: risk of equivocation, what unifies the disparate truth-properties as "truth"?

The Christian / biblical view

The classical Christian view is realist correspondence with a distinctively personal-relational dimension:

Correspondence: Aquinas, De Veritate Q.1.1, veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. Truth is the conformity of the intellect to reality. God's intellect is the measure of all things; human intellect conforms to things created by God.
God as Truth: Truth is not merely a property of propositions; ultimately Truth is grounded in the divine nature. Jesus's self-identification: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). "Truth" is here a person, not just a property, an aspect missed by purely propositional accounts.
Revelation: Scripture is true because God speaks truly (John 17:17, "Your word is truth"); Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2, God cannot lie.
Coherence as test, not constitution: a doctrine's coherence with the rest of biblical revelation is evidence for its truth, not what makes it true.
Anti-pragmatism / anti-constructivism: Christianity rejects the notion that truth is what works (utilitarianism) or what is socially constructed (postmodern relativism).

The classical Christian position is most fully developed in: Aquinas (De Veritate; Summa Theologiae I.16); Augustine (De Vera Religione; Confessions X.23); Anselm (De Veritate); and modern: Carson, The Gagging of God (1996); McGrath, A Scientific Theology vol. 2: Reality (2002); Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011).

Cross-cutting issues

Realism vs anti-realism: most theories of truth correlate with metaphysical realism (correspondence, identity) or anti-realism (constructivism, some pragmatism); coherentism is in principle neutral.
Bivalence: are there truth-value gaps (vague predicates, future contingents, fiction)? Different theories handle these differently.
Liar paradox: "This sentence is false." Tarski's hierarchy of metalanguages is one response; others reject naive bivalence.
Truth and meaning: Davidson's program (1967) makes truth- conditions central to meaning theory, a deeply influential research program.