Truth Theory in Western Philosophy
Thank you for reading the first sentence of this post, given the apparently off-topic headline, and please know that I offer this post in an effort to express something I deem relevant to the big questions of our times.
When I was studying philosophy in grad school I wrote a paper whose title was that headline featured above. Now, what exactly is “truth theory?” It is the attempt to be clear about what we mean when we claim something to be true.
The paper, at least as far as I can remember it, consisted of a discussion of three of the main theories that are commonly held. Here’s a much abbreviated version:
Correspondence Theory of Truth: For every true thing in the universe, there is a corresponding statement of that. To say that a certain thing is true is to say that statement corresponds some piece of reality. That Poland lies to the east of Germany means that the statement, “Poland lies to the east of Germany” is true. What’s the matter with that? Well, it’s cumbersome, to say the least. We’re saying that we have two things for everything that we call “true”: the reality itself and the statement concerning that reality.
Coherence Theory of Truth: This means that statements of truth need to cohere, i.e., not to contradict one another. But there’s an even worse problem here, in that lots of ideas cohere, but have no bearing on truth at all. Think about those who live on a steady diet of Fox News. Of course, you could say the same about devotees of lots of different extreme and biased news sources at both ends of the political spectrum. Sources with an ax to grind are very good at presenting coherent stories to their readers, many of them totally fictitious.
FWIW, I argued at the time for the Pragmatic Theory of Truth, put forth principally by William James (pictured), whom we discuss occasionally here, which holds that a proposition is true if it is useful to believe. In other words, utility is the essential ingredient in truth. If I were standing on the eastern border of Germany and took a step east, I’d be in Poland. It’s often useful to know where one is.
As I look at it now, however, I realize that the pragmatic and coherence theories are both flawed, and in a similar way. Just as it’s useful for me to believe in progressive viewpoints in political philosophy, it’s also useful for people like George Will and my mother to look at the world through the lens of conservatism.
This is an excellent example of why, exactly 40 years after I got my degree, I spend very little of my remaining time on this planet wrestling with ideas in western philosophy. The world has real problems to solve; e.g., the planet really is warming, and this really will cause mass suffering. Solutions to issues like these come only from people making real change in human behavior, and it seems that which theory of truth one holds means very little in that regard.
