Preview

What does truth mean?

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
929 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What does truth mean?
What does truth mean? Truth can mean many different things, to different people. I believe, that truth is what people accept as being correct when it can not be proven factually. "It is a relationship that holds that holds between a proposition and the corresponding fact"(Truth[Inernet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]). "According to, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, truth is conformity to knowledge, fact, actuality, or logic." There are three major competing theories of truth. The three theories are pragmatic, correspondence, and coherence. The remainder of this paper will discuss all three of these theories, plus which theory seems to be the most defensible to me, and why.

The first theory of truth is the pragmatic theory. The pragmatic theory is a statement that is true if it allows you to interact effectively and efficiently, or in other words and works. The least that a belief is true, the less it uses such interaction. If the pragmatic theory holds the belief, it will lead to good consequences. An example of someone who is a pragmatist would be William James. "An example of a pragmatic theory situation would be , when you do a math problem that is supposed to be done a certain way, but do it in different way and end up getting the exact same answer

anyways"(Drifty's Rants-Truth). This is possibly the easiest theory of truth, because it basically means, if it's true, it "works"! Truth is made by human adjustment. An example of an argument of the pragmatic theory, would be that not all beliefs and ideas that are useful in solving practical problems turn out to be true. Therefore, truth cannot be explained in terms of the usefulness of beliefs and ideas in solving practical problems, which means that the pragmatic theory of truth could be incorrect.

The second theory of truth is the correspondence theory. The correspondence is the truth of falsehood of a belief the depends on its relationship to something that lies outside of the belief.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    What is truth? A simply complex question, truth is what we know, what we believe, or simply what is definite. I believe that we have personal truths that drive our beliefs, both of which are ever changing. In these changing truths, there is a common attribute: to further our truth is to strain our own being. For the betterment and continuity of human thought, we must undergo personal strains in the hope of going deeper into our changing beliefs. These strains are not all internal, for looking for truth is to subject ourselves to the possible maleficence of our own findings. The truth is a dangerous necessity.…

    • 1229 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Study Guide: Truth

    • 414 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Distinguish the character and limitations of truth as derived by revelation and by the scientific method.…

    • 414 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Truth Project

    • 2135 Words
    • 9 Pages

    Truth- (In the modern dictionary) - The true or actual state of a matter or conformity with fact or reality.…

    • 2135 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Real life application: We often do not believe what people tell us if it is not communicated clearly, reflecting Plato’s theories on the importance of being able to convey knowledge to others. Justification is equally as important, which is why when parents say “Because I said so” it makes teenagers so frustrated.…

    • 1168 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Progressive Era Outline

    • 2682 Words
    • 11 Pages

    “Pragmatism”- truth doesn’t emerge from abstract theorizing, it emerges from the experience of coping w/ life’s realities; argued by William James…

    • 2682 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In the first place, it is important to keep in mind that truth is an abstract concept, meant to disqualify lie and liars by approving or not a statement. But truth is also linked to reality in the sense of it is a conformity to a fact in which one should trust, it has to be seen to be believed. Finally, it is important to dicover the “true truth” about fact and fiction, between history and the story.…

    • 2900 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In Friedrich Nietzsche's essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," he determines that language, and therefore human knowledge, is a construction of metaphors and concepts. Language is designed in order to allow individuals to understand their world and come up with what they believe to be "truth" when in all actuality; truth cannot be defined because it is based on ones personal knowledge of the world. Nietzsche says, "[the truth] in short, [is] a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding." (Nietzsche, 455) To me, truth reminds me a stories that have been passed done throughout generations but as they get passed down, the story changes…

    • 1692 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Key issues: Those who adhere to pragmatism usually believe that practical consequences or real effects are vital components of both meaning and truth. Other aspects include anti-Cartesians, radical empiricism, instrumentalism, anti-realism, verifications, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science, and fallibilism.…

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Defining truth was examined through many different lenses. Truth was looked at in the book, Philosophy through the Film, a reading from Plato, Chapter XXII, Truth and Falsehood, The film, Hilary and Jackie, and in class discussions and perception was a common thread. In the book, Philosophy Through the Film, by Mary M. Litch, truth was explained in theories. The book looked at the Correspondence Theory of Truth, which states that truth must match up with a case because falsehood would not.…

    • 870 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Different cultures have different truths”, “truth is that which can be accepted universally”. What are the implications for knowledge of agreeing with these opposing statements?…

    • 959 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Philosophy can be considered a search of truth and not an attainment of it. But, how do we know something is truly "true", when someone makes an assertion or proposition? We must test that against what we already know to be true. The search for what is true, some would argue is impossible, however philosophers continue to develop ideas within the realm of Epistemology. Due to the nature and sheer magnitude of this undertaking, there are inevitability strengths, as well as, weaknesses to all theories including the main topic of this paper: Correspondence Theory. The strengths of Correspondence Theory are: a reliance on empirical evidence, testing of beliefs, and avoiding hypothetical situations, while it's weakness's include: the ability to accurately test systemic evidence in the real world, inability to accurately correspond to things in the world, and the inability to semantically label things in a manner that can't be misconstrued.…

    • 897 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dhamma

    • 4840 Words
    • 20 Pages

    of truth, conventional truth and absolute truth, but they are not opposites. They are part of a continuum. There is a classic Buddhist gatha:…

    • 4840 Words
    • 20 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Crossword 1.04

    • 307 Words
    • 2 Pages

    14 - a theory that is often called the "Definition of the situation" which is basically if people perceive or define something as being real then it is real in its consequences.…

    • 307 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    order of operations

    • 386 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Choose one of the above theorists and his or her theory and explain how you can apply that theory to your life.…

    • 386 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    One way of defining truth is by reason, when something has been proved or studied that the thing is the way it is, and then the something has a reason to be the way it is. The process that leads to truth is different as it can be proved or studied differently. For example mathematics, which is an area of knowledge, mathematics are given by reasons and logics: 1+1 =2 , the entire world knows that, as it has been proved that it should be this way but 1+1=2 has been studied or proved differently and therefore people understand it differently as each human being is different. According to rational points of views, reasoning will be more as a shared knowledge because reasons are something that has been proven or studied by more than one person and shared knowledge is also…

    • 830 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays

Related Topics