132-432: A fact is a true datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance. Standard reference works are often used to check facts . Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by experiments or other means. For example, "This sentence contains words." accurately describes a linguistic fact, and "The sun is a star" accurately describes an astronomical fact. Further, " Abraham Lincoln
264-461: A Proto-Germanic *trewwj- "having good faith ", perhaps ultimately from PIE *dru- "tree", on the notion of "steadfast as an oak" (e.g., Sanskrit [[[:wikt:दारु#Sanskrit|dā́ru]]] Error: {{Lang}}: Non-latn text/Latn script subtag mismatch ( help ) "(piece of) wood"). Old Norse trú , "faith, word of honour; religious faith, belief" (archaic English troth "loyalty, honesty , good faith", compare Ásatrú ). Thus, "truth" involves both
396-557: A continuous range, typically between 0 and 1, as with fuzzy logic and other forms of infinite-valued logic . In general, the concept of representing truth using more than two values is known as many-valued logic . There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are the model theory of truth and the proof theory of truth . Historically, with the nineteenth century development of Boolean algebra , mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity"
528-659: A fact-finding commission"). Facts may be checked by reason, experiment, personal experience, or may be argued from authority. Roger Bacon wrote "If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics." In philosophy , the concept fact is considered in the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, called epistemology and ontology , which studies concepts such as existence , being , becoming , and reality . Questions of objectivity and truth are closely associated with questions of fact. A fact can be defined as something that
660-443: A matter under discussion deemed to be true or correct, such as to emphasize a point or prove a disputed issue; (e.g., "... the fact of the matter is ..."). Alternatively, fact may also indicate an allegation or stipulation of something that may or may not be a true fact , (e.g., "the author's facts are not trustworthy"). This alternate usage, although contested by some, has a long history in standard English according to
792-576: A TOE, it would necessarily be a set of equations. He wrote, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" On a much broader and more subjective level, private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and the selectivity involved in personal interpretation of events shapes reality as seen by one and only one person and hence is called phenomenological . While this form of reality might be common to others as well, it could at times also be so unique to oneself as to never be experienced or agreed upon by anyone else. Much of
924-399: A belief or we don't have a belief") with the more permissive, probabilistic notion of credence ("there is an entire spectrum of degrees of belief, not a simple dichotomy between belief and non-belief"). Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality. On
1056-419: A certain amount. Constructivism and intuitionism are realistic about objects that can be explicitly constructed, but reject the use of the principle of the excluded middle to prove existence by reductio ad absurdum . The traditional debate has focused on whether an abstract (immaterial, intelligible) realm of numbers has existed in addition to the physical (sensible, concrete) world. A recent development
1188-415: A distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat "is real" the same way they treat "exists", one of the leading questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by analytic philosophers that it
1320-698: A firm basis for all human knowledge , including scientific knowledge , and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science". Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticised and developed by his student and assistant Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), by existentialists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), and Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977). Skeptical hypotheses in philosophy suggest that reality could be very different from what we think it is; or at least that we cannot prove it
1452-550: A modified form of the logician Alfred Tarski 's schema : proponents observe that to say that "'P' is true" is to assert "P". A version of this theory was defended by C. J. F. Williams (in his book What is Truth? ). Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims. They argue that utterances such as "that's true", when said in response to (e.g.) "it's raining", are " prosentences "—expressions that merely repeat
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#17328441681711584-400: A particular function ( Hilary Putnam ). Some have also attempted to offer significant revisions to our notion of belief, including eliminativists about belief who argue that there is no phenomenon in the natural world which corresponds to our folk psychological concept of belief ( Paul Churchland ) and formal epistemologists who aim to replace our bivalent notion of belief ("either we have
1716-455: A person who if asked about the color of snow would assert "snow is white"). There are various ways that contemporary philosophers have tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be ( Jerry Fodor ), as dispositions to act as if certain things are true ( Roderick Chisholm ), as interpretive schemes for making sense of someone's actions ( Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson ), or as mental states that fill
1848-457: A physically 'real' world". The hypothesis suggests that worlds corresponding to different sets of initial conditions, physical constants, or altogether different equations should be considered real. The theory can be considered a form of Platonism in that it posits the existence of mathematical entities, but can also be considered a mathematical monism in that it denies that anything exists except mathematical objects. The problem of universals
1980-404: A real property of sentences or propositions. This thesis is in part a response to the common use of truth predicates (e.g., that some particular thing "... is true") which was particularly prevalent in philosophical discourse on truth in the first half of the 20th century. From this point of view, to assert that "'2 + 2 = 4' is true" is logically equivalent to asserting that "2 + 2 = 4", and
2112-429: A resurgence also among several proponents of logical positivism , notably Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel . The three most influential forms of the pragmatic theory of truth were introduced around the turn of the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce , William James , and John Dewey . Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other proponents of pragmatic theory, they hold in common that truth
2244-504: A safeguard against contingencies such as res judicata that would otherwise preclude presenting a claim or defense that depends on a particular interpretation of the underlying facts and ruling of the court. Truth Truth or verity is the property of being in accord with fact or reality . In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs , propositions , and declarative sentences . Truth
2376-423: A similar analysis is applicable to all speech acts, not just illocutionary ones: "To say a statement is true is not to make a statement about a statement, but rather to perform the act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement. When one says 'It's true that it's raining,' one asserts no more than 'It's raining.' The function of [the statement] 'It's true that ...' is to agree with, accept, or endorse
2508-524: A single value be produced with certainty). A closely related term is counterfactual definiteness (CFD), used to refer to the claim that one can meaningfully speak of the definiteness of results of measurements that have not been performed (i.e. the ability to assume the existence of objects, and properties of objects, even when they have not been measured). Local realism is a significant feature of classical mechanics, of general relativity , and of classical electrodynamics ; but not quantum mechanics . In
2640-406: A special position. The founders of quantum mechanics debated the role of the observer, and of them, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg believed that quantum mechanics expressed the observers knowledge and when an experiment was completed the additional knowledge should be incorporated in the wave function, an effect that came to be called state reduction or collapse . This point of view, which
2772-428: A subconscious set of mental filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder". His ideas influenced the work of his friend Robert Anton Wilson . The status of abstract entities, particularly numbers, is a topic of discussion in mathematics. In the philosophy of mathematics, the best known form of realism about numbers
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#17328441681712904-520: A survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views which was carried out in November 2009 (taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students) 45% of respondents accept or lean toward correspondence theories, 21% accept or lean toward deflationary theories and 14% epistemic theories . Correspondence theories emphasize that true beliefs and true statements correspond to
3036-533: A systematic framework we use to structure our experience. Spatial measurements are used to quantify how far apart objects are, and temporal measurements are used to quantitatively compare the interval between (or duration of) events . Although space and time are held to be transcendentally ideal in this sense, they are also empirically real , i.e. not mere illusions. Idealist writers such as J. M. E. McTaggart in The Unreality of Time have argued that time
3168-448: A tendency: in the way that glass objects tend to break, or are disposed to break, even if they do not actually break. Likewise, the mind-independent properties of quantum systems could consist of a tendency to respond to particular measurements with particular values with ascertainable probability. Such an ontology would be metaphysically realistic, without being realistic in the physicist's sense of "local realism" (which would require that
3300-399: A useful accounting of the concept of "truth" is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas . Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation . Among the current strong critics of consensus theory is the philosopher Nicholas Rescher . Modern developments in the field of philosophy have resulted in the rise of a new thesis: that the term truth does not denote
3432-430: A whole system. Very often, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system. A pervasive tenet of coherence theories
3564-418: A word that actually equates to anything in reality. This theory is commonly attributed to Frank P. Ramsey , who held that the use of words like fact and truth was nothing but a roundabout way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic muddle". A variant of redundancy theory is the "disquotational" theory, which uses
3696-693: A work now called the EPR paradox , Einstein relied on local realism to suggest that hidden variables were missing in quantum mechanics. However, John S. Bell subsequently showed that the predictions of quantum mechanics are inconsistent with hidden variables, a result known as Bell's theorem . The predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified: Bell's inequalities are violated, meaning either local realism or counterfactual definiteness must be incorrect. Different interpretations of quantum mechanics violate different parts of local realism and/or counterfactual definiteness . The transition from "possible" to "actual"
3828-410: Is (in fact) the case if its antecedent is (in fact) true—for example, "If you drink this, it will make you well." Such sentences are important to modal logic , especially since the development of possible world semantics. In mathematics, a fact is a statement (called a theorem ) that can be proven by logical argument from certain axioms and definitions . The definition of a scientific fact
3960-429: Is Alfred Tarski , whose semantic theory is summarized further on. Proponents of several of the theories below have gone further to assert that there are yet other issues necessary to the analysis, such as interpersonal power struggles, community interactions, personal biases, and other factors involved in deciding what is seen as truth. For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within
4092-399: Is Platonic realism , which grants them abstract, immaterial existence. Other forms of realism identify mathematics with the concrete physical universe. Anti-realist stances include formalism and fictionalism . Some approaches are selectively realistic about some mathematical objects but not others. Finitism rejects infinite quantities. Ultra-finitism accepts finite quantities up to
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4224-501: Is about the fact that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Pascal Engel's version of the correspondence theory of truth explains that what makes a sentence true is that it corresponds to a fact. This theory presupposes the existence of an objective world. The Slingshot argument claims to show that all true statements stand for the same thing, the truth value true . If this argument holds, and facts are taken to be what true statements stand for, then one arrives at
4356-552: Is not a property at all, though this view has lost some ground in recent decades. On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of "reality" often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon (or, to use fashionable jargon , "constructed" out of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as cultural artifacts, such as religions and political movements , on up to
4488-400: Is "an epiphenomenal expression of the relation of material forces in a given economic arrangement". Consensus theory holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might come to be agreed upon, by some specified group. Such a group might include all human beings, or a subset thereof consisting of more than one person. Among the current advocates of consensus theory as
4620-514: Is History? argues that the inherent biases from the gathering of facts makes the objective truth of any historical perspective idealistic and impossible. Facts are, "like fish in the Ocean", of which we may only happen to catch a few, only an indication of what is below the surface. Even a dragnet cannot tell us for certain what it would be like to live below the Ocean's surface. Even if we do not discard any facts (or fish) presented, we will always miss
4752-401: Is a major topic of quantum physics , with related theories including quantum darwinism . The quantum mind –body problem refers to the philosophical discussions of the mind–body problem in the context of quantum mechanics. Since quantum mechanics involves quantum superpositions , which are not perceived by observers , some interpretations of quantum mechanics place conscious observers in
4884-454: Is a perennial topic in metaphysics. For instance, Parmenides taught that reality was a single unchanging Being, whereas Heraclitus wrote that all things flow. The 20th-century philosopher Heidegger thought previous philosophers have lost sight of the question of Being (qua Being) in favour of the questions of beings (existing things), so he believed that a return to the Parmenidean approach
5016-409: Is a proper basis for deciding how words, symbols, ideas and beliefs may properly be considered true, whether by a single person or an entire society, is dealt with by the five most prevalent substantive theories of truth listed below. Each presents perspectives that are widely shared by published scholars. Theories other than the most prevalent substantive theories are also discussed. According to
5148-410: Is a subjective attitude that a proposition is true or a state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some stance , take, or opinion about something. In epistemology , philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false . To believe something is to take it to be true; for instance, to believe that snow
5280-400: Is also an arbitrary constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". In propositional logic , these symbols can be manipulated according to a set of axioms and rules of inference , often given in the form of truth tables . In addition, from at least the time of Hilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century to the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the development of
5412-613: Is always absolute or if it can be relative to one's perspective. The English word truth is derived from Old English tríewþ, tréowþ, trýwþ , Middle English trewþe , cognate to Old High German triuwida , Old Norse tryggð . Like troth , it is a -th nominalisation of the adjective true (Old English tréowe ). The English word true is from Old English ( West Saxon ) (ge)tríewe, tréowe , cognate to Old Saxon (gi)trûui , Old High German (ga)triuwu ( Modern German treu "faithful"), Old Norse tryggr , Gothic triggws , all from
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5544-421: Is an ancient problem in metaphysics about whether universals exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties , kinds or relations , such as being male/female, solid/liquid/gas or a certain colour, that can be predicated of individuals or particulars or that individuals or particulars can be regarded as sharing or participating in. For example, Scott, Pat, and Chris have in common
5676-521: Is an illusion. As well as differing about the reality of time as a whole, metaphysical theories of time can differ in their ascriptions of reality to the past , present and future separately. Time, and the related concepts of process and evolution are central to the system-building metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne . The term " possible world " goes back to Leibniz's theory of possible worlds, used to analyse necessity, possibility , and similar modal notions . Modal realism
5808-420: Is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race , sexuality , and gender , are socially constructed. Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made. Vico's epistemological orientation unfolds in one axiom: verum ipsum factum —"truth itself is constructed". Hegel and Marx were among the other early proponents of
5940-448: Is considered to be a logical truth because of the meaning of the symbols and words in it and not because of any fact of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue. Degrees of truth in logic may be represented using two or more discrete values, as with bivalent logic (or binary logic ), three-valued logic , and other forms of finite-valued logic . Truth in logic can be represented using numbers comprising
6072-438: Is different from the definition of fact, as it implies knowledge . A scientific fact is the result of a repeatable careful observation or measurement by experimentation or other means, also called empirical evidence . These are central to building scientific theories . Various forms of observation and measurement lead to fundamental questions about the scientific method , and the scope and validity of scientific reasoning . In
6204-611: Is fundamentally immaterial (e.g. idealism ), whether hypothetical unobservable entities posited by scientific theories exist, whether a god or gods exist, whether numbers and other abstract objects exist, and whether possible worlds exist. Epistemology is concerned with what can be known or inferred as likely and how, whereby in the modern world emphasis is put on reason , empirical evidence and science as sources and methods to determine or investigate reality. A common colloquial usage would have reality mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality", as in "My reality
6336-457: Is known as direct realism when developed to counter indirect or representative realism, also known as epistemological dualism , the philosophical position that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world. Timothy Leary coined the influential term Reality Tunnel , by which he means a kind of representative realism . The theory states that, with
6468-523: Is no mind or soul over and above such mental events . Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for any view which held that the existence of some object depends upon the mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism , is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are not absolute, but at least partially cultural artifact . The nature of being
6600-479: Is not as odd as it may seem. For example, when a wedding couple says "I do" at the appropriate time in a wedding, they are performing the act of taking the other to be their lawful wedded spouse. They are not describing themselves as taking the other, but actually doing so (perhaps the most thorough analysis of such "illocutionary acts" is J. L. Austin , most notably in How to Do Things With Words ). Strawson holds that
6732-470: Is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven." Reality can be defined in a way that links it to worldviews or parts of them (conceptual frameworks): Reality
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#17328441681716864-405: Is not. Examples include: Jain philosophy postulates that seven tattva (truths or fundamental principles) constitute reality. These seven tattva are: Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world (the universe) described by science (perhaps ideal science) is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Within philosophy of science , it
6996-557: Is often framed as an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The debate over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status of entities that are not directly observable discussed by scientific theories . Generally, those who are scientific realists state that one can make reliable claims about these entities (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as directly observable entities, as opposed to instrumentalism . The most used and studied scientific theories today state more or less
7128-481: Is often summarized by his statement that "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving." By this, James meant that truth is a quality , the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to practice (thus, "pragmatic"). Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held that inquiry , whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical, or cultural,
7260-431: Is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may "know" what it means, but any translation of the word apparently fails to accurately capture its full meaning (this is a problem with many abstract words, especially those derived in agglutinative languages ). Thus, some words add an additional parameter to the construction of an accurate truth predicate . Among the philosophers who grappled with this problem
7392-579: Is possible and urge us to suspend judgment regarding ascription of truth on many or all controversial matters. More moderate forms of skepticism claim only that nothing can be known with certainty, or that we can know little or nothing about the "big questions" in life, such as whether God exists or whether there is an afterlife. Religious skepticism is "doubt concerning basic religious principles (such as immortality, providence, and revelation)". Scientific skepticism concerns testing beliefs for reliability, by subjecting them to systematic investigation using
7524-498: Is related to alethic logic : a proposition is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds, and possible if it is true in at least one. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a similar idea in science. The philosophical implications of a physical TOE are frequently debated. For example, if philosophical physicalism is true, a physical TOE will coincide with a philosophical theory of everything. The "system building" style of metaphysics attempts to answer all
7656-405: Is said not to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or any other human artifact, one can speak of "realism about " that object. A correspondence theory of knowledge about what exists claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate correspondence of statements about and images of reality with the actual reality that the statements or images are attempting to represent. For example,
7788-478: Is self-corrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine, and/or refute proposed truths. Though not widely known, a new variation of the pragmatic theory was defined and wielded successfully from the 20th century forward. Defined and named by William Ernest Hocking , this variation is known as "negative pragmatism". Essentially, what works may or may not be true, but what fails cannot be true because
7920-494: Is such a place as Paris, there is such a place as France, there are such things as capital cities, as well as that France has a government, that the government of France has the power to define its capital city, and that the French government has chosen Paris to be the capital, that there is such a thing as a place or a government , and so on. The verifiable accuracy of all of these assertions, if facts themselves, may coincide to create
8052-448: Is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in popular statements, such as "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with" ( Robert Anton Wilson ), and they indicate anti-realism – that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not. Many of
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#17328441681718184-525: Is the mathematical universe hypothesis , the theory that only a mathematical world exists, with the finite, physical world being an illusion within it. An extreme form of realism about mathematics is the mathematical multiverse hypothesis advanced by Max Tegmark . Tegmark's sole postulate is: All structures that exist mathematically also exist physically . That is, in the sense that "in those [worlds] complex enough to contain self-aware substructures [they] will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in
8316-499: Is the case" dates from the mid-16th century. Barbara J. Shapiro wrote in her book A Culture of Fact how the concept of a fact evolved, starting within the English legal tradition of the 16th century. In 1870, Charles Sanders Peirce described in his book "The Fixation of Belief" four methods which people use to decide what they should believe: tenacity, method of authority, a priori and scientific method. The term fact also indicates
8448-409: Is the case, in other words, a state of affairs . Facts may be understood as information , which makes a true sentence true: "A fact is, traditionally, the worldly correlate of a true proposition, a state of affairs whose obtaining makes that proposition true." Facts may also be understood as those things to which a true sentence refers. The statement "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system"
8580-447: Is the idea that truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence with the whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single absolute system. Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to describe
8712-430: Is the statement by the thirteenth century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas : " Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus " ("Truth is the adequation of things and intellect "), which Aquinas attributed to the ninth century Neoplatonist Isaac Israeli . Aquinas also restated the theory as: "A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality". Correspondence theory centres heavily around
8844-583: Is the totality of a system, known and unknown. Philosophical questions about the nature of reality or existence or being are considered under the rubric of ontology , which is a major branch of metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition. Ontological questions also feature in diverse branches of philosophy , including the philosophy of science , of religion , of mathematics , and philosophical logic . These include questions about whether only physical objects are real (i.e., physicalism ), whether reality
8976-404: Is the totality of all things, structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what a world view (whether it be based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately attempts to describe or map. Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism , and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such theory
9108-488: Is the view, notably propounded by David Kellogg Lewis , that all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. In short: the actual world is regarded as merely one among an infinite set of logically possible worlds, some "nearer" to the actual world and some more remote. Other theorists may use the Possible World framework to express and explore problems without committing to it ontologically. Possible world theory
9240-533: Is used in both senses in the philosophy of science. Scholars and clinical researchers in both the social and natural sciences have written about numerous questions and theories that arise in the attempt to clarify the fundamental nature of scientific fact. Pertinent issues raised by this inquiry include: Consistent with the idea of confirmation holism , some scholars assert "fact" to be necessarily "theory-laden" to some degree. Thomas Kuhn points out that knowing what facts to measure, and how to measure them, requires
9372-430: Is used, deflationary theories can be said to hold in common that "the predicate 'true' is an expressive convenience, not the name of a property requiring deep analysis." Once we have identified the truth predicate's formal features and utility, deflationists argue, we have said all there is to be said about truth. Among the theoretical concerns of these views is to explain away those special cases where it does appear that
9504-494: Is usually held to be the opposite of false statement . The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy , art , theology , law , and science . Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion, including journalism and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than
9636-592: Is verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice. Peirce defines it: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth." This statement stresses Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as fallibilism and "reference to
9768-405: Is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". However, holding a belief does not require active introspection . For example, few individuals carefully consider whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, simply assuming that it will. Moreover, beliefs need not be occurrent (e.g. a person actively thinking "snow is white"), but can instead be dispositional (e.g.
9900-495: Is wrong." Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community. Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed," because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold). Rather, perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It
10032-531: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The Oxford English Dictionary dates this use to 1729. Fact may also indicate findings derived through a process of evaluation , including review of testimony, direct observation, or otherwise; as distinguishable from matters of inference or speculation. This use is reflected in the terms "fact-find" and "fact-finder" (e.g., "set up
10164-566: The Church–Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics were generally assumed to be those statements that are provable in a formal axiomatic system. The works of Kurt Gödel , Alan Turing , and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system. Two examples of the latter can be found in Hilbert's problems . Work on Hilbert's 10th problem led in
10296-584: The Greek phainómenon , meaning "that which appears", and lógos , meaning "study". In Husserl's conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified " first person " viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide
10428-460: The absolute a positive one. The question of direct or "naïve" realism , as opposed to indirect or "representational" realism , arises in the philosophy of perception and of mind out of the debate over the nature of conscious experience ; the epistemological question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by neural processes in our brain. Naïve realism
10560-484: The natural world , empirical data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and society, especially when used without support from the other major theories of truth. Coherence theories distinguish the thought of rationalist philosophers, particularly of Baruch Spinoza , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , along with the British philosopher F. H. Bradley . They have found
10692-478: The naturalistic fallacy . Factuality —what has occurred—can also be contrasted with counterfactuality: what might have occurred, but did not. A counterfactual conditional or subjunctive conditional is a conditional (or "if–then") statement indicating what would be the case if events had been other than they were. For example, "If Alexander had lived, his empire would have been greater than Rome." This contrasts with an indicative conditional, which indicates what
10824-503: The scientific method can verify that a statement is true based on the observable evidence that a thing exists. Many humans can point to the Rocky Mountains and say that this mountain range exists, and continues to exist even if no one is observing it or making statements about it. One can also speak of anti -realism about the same objects. Anti-realism is the latest in a long series of terms for views opposed to realism. Perhaps
10956-442: The scientific method , to discover empirical evidence for them. Several of the major theories of truth hold that there is a particular property the having of which makes a belief or proposition true. Pluralist theories of truth assert that there may be more than one property that makes propositions true: ethical propositions might be true by virtue of coherence. Propositions about the physical world might be true by corresponding to
11088-414: The 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism . Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that advocated by Russell , tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there
11220-549: The Latin veritas , while the Greek aletheia , Russian pravda , South Slavic istina and Sanskrit sat (related to English sooth and North Germanic sanna ) have separate etymological origins. In some modern contexts, the word "truth" is used to refer to fidelity to an original or standard. It can also be used in the context of being "true to oneself" in the sense of acting with authenticity . The question of what
11352-527: The actual state of affairs. This type of theory stresses a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a traditional model tracing its origins to ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle . This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined in principle entirely by how it relates to "things" according to whether it accurately describes those "things". A classic example of correspondence theory
11484-523: The assertion "P" may well involve a substantial truth—it is only the redundancy involved in statements such as "that's true" (i.e., a prosentence) which is to be minimized. Attributed to philosopher P. F. Strawson is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "'Snow is white' is true" is to perform the speech act of signaling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are more actions than communicative statements
11616-441: The assumption that truth is a matter of accurately copying what is known as " objective reality " and then representing it in thoughts, words, and other symbols. Many modern theorists have stated that this ideal cannot be achieved without analysing additional factors. For example, language plays a role in that all languages have words to represent concepts that are virtually undefined in other languages. The German word Zeitgeist
11748-403: The case to be derived from a series of statements of what is the case. This is called the is–ought distinction . Those who insist there is a logical gulf between facts and values , such that it is fallacious to attempt to derive values (e.g., "it is good to give food to hungry people") from facts (e.g., "people will die if they can't eat"), include G. E. Moore , who called attempting to do so
11880-487: The comprehension of reality. Out of all the realities, the reality of everyday life is the most important one since our consciousness requires us to be completely aware and attentive to the experience of everyday life. In philosophy , potentiality and actuality are a pair of closely connected principles which Aristotle used to analyze motion , causality , ethics , and physiology in his Physics , Metaphysics , Nicomachean Ethics , and De Anima . A belief
12012-632: The concept of truth has peculiar and interesting properties. (See, e.g., Semantic paradoxes , and below.) The scope of deflationary principles is generally limited to representations that resemble sentences. They do not encompass a broader range of entities that are typically considered true or otherwise. In addition, some deflationists point out that the concept employed in "... is true" formulations does enable us to express things that might otherwise require infinitely long sentences; for example, one cannot express confidence in Michael's accuracy by asserting
12144-429: The concept of truth itself. Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth . Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. There are many different questions about the nature of truth which are still the subject of contemporary debates. These include
12276-400: The concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially . This idea was elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The Social Construction of Reality , a book about the sociology of knowledge written by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann , was published in 1966. It explained how knowledge is acquired and used for
12408-427: The content of other expressions. In the same way that it means the same as my dog in the statement "my dog was hungry, so I fed it", that's true is supposed to mean the same as it's raining when the former is said in reply to the latter. As noted above, proponents of these ideas do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is not a property; rather, they can be understood to say that, for instance,
12540-424: The counter-intuitive conclusion that there is only one fact: the truth . Any non-trivial true statement about reality is necessarily an abstraction composed of a complex of objects and properties or relations . Facts "possess internal structure, being complexes of objects and properties or relations". For example, the fact described by the true statement "Paris is the capital city of France" implies that there
12672-490: The early modern period include the Leibniz 's Monadology , Descartes 's Dualism , Spinoza 's Monism . Hegel 's Absolute idealism and Whitehead 's Process philosophy were later systems. Other philosophers do not believe its techniques can aim so high. Some scientists think a more mathematical approach than philosophy is needed for a TOE, for instance Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time that even if we had
12804-461: The endless sentence: This assertion can instead be succinctly expressed by saying: What Michael says is true . An early variety of deflationary theory is the redundancy theory of truth , so-called because—in examples like those above, e.g. "snow is white [is true]"—the concept of "truth" is redundant and need not have been articulated; that is, it is merely a word that is traditionally used in conversation or writing, generally for emphasis, but not
12936-435: The essential and intrinsic properties of formal systems in logic and mathematics. Formal reasoners are content to contemplate axiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side, for example, the various alternative geometries . On the whole, coherence theories have been rejected for lacking justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially with respect to assertions about
13068-404: The fact, that Paris is the capital of France. Difficulties arise, however, in attempting to identify the constituent parts of negative, modal, disjunctive, or moral facts. Moral philosophers since David Hume have debated whether values are objective, and thus factual. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume pointed out there is no obvious way for a series of statements about what ought to be
13200-561: The first was idealism , so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or a product of our ideas . Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley , that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. In this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since, in Berkeley's view, perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By
13332-424: The future", are essential to a proper conception of truth. Although Peirce uses words like concordance and correspondence to describe one aspect of the pragmatic sign relation , he is also quite explicit in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence are no more than nominal definitions, which he accords a lower status than real definitions. James' version of pragmatic theory, while complex,
13464-480: The general concept and analysis of fact reflects fundamental principles of jurisprudence , and is supported by several well-established standards. Matters of fact have various formal definitions under common law jurisdictions. These include: A party (e.g., plaintiff ) to a civil suit generally must clearly state the relevant allegations of fact that form the basis of a claim . The requisite level of precision and particularity of these allegations varies, depending on
13596-424: The important questions in a coherent way, providing a complete picture of the world. Plato and Aristotle could be said to be early examples of comprehensive systems. In the early modern period (17th and 18th centuries), the system-building scope of philosophy is often linked to the rationalist method of philosophy, that is the technique of deducing the nature of the world by pure a priori reason. Examples from
13728-648: The kind of experience deemed spiritual occurs on this level of reality. Phenomenology is a philosophical method developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's work. The word phenomenology comes from
13860-433: The late twentieth century to the construction of specific Diophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution, or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions. More fundamentally, Hilbert's first problem was on the continuum hypothesis . Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standard axioms of set theory . In
13992-416: The majority; the site of our fishing, the methods undertaken, the weather and even luck play a vital role in what we will catch. Additionally, the composition of history is inevitably made up by the compilation of many different biases of fact finding – all compounded over time. He concludes that for a historian to attempt a more objective method, one must accept that history can only aspire to a conversation of
14124-430: The means and assumptions used to measure them. Apart from the fundamental inquiry into the nature of scientific fact, there remain the practical and social considerations of how fact is investigated, established, and substantiated through the proper application of the scientific method. Scientific facts are generally believed independent of the observer: no matter who performs a scientific experiment, all observers agree on
14256-553: The mind. Some anti-realists whose ontological position is that objects outside the mind do exist, nevertheless doubt the independent existence of time and space. Kant , in the Critique of Pure Reason , described time as an a priori notion that, together with other a priori notions such as space , allows us to comprehend sense experience . Kant denies that either space or time are substance , entities in themselves, or learned by experience; he holds rather that both are elements of
14388-457: The more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all". The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language: Reality Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within the universe , as opposed to that which is only imaginary , nonexistent or nonactual. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence . In physical terms, reality
14520-470: The most basic sense, a scientific fact is an objective and verifiable observation, in contrast with a hypothesis or theory , which is intended to explain or interpret facts. Various scholars have offered significant refinements to this basic formulation. Philosophers and scientists are careful to distinguish between: 1) states of affairs in the external world and 2) assertions of fact that may be considered relevant in scientific analysis. The term
14652-455: The objects and properties they are about. Some of the pragmatic theories, such as those by Charles Peirce and William James , included aspects of correspondence, coherence and constructivist theories. Crispin Wright argued in his 1992 book Truth and Objectivity that any predicate which satisfied certain platitudes about truth qualified as a truth predicate. In some discourses, Wright argued,
14784-430: The one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and how they are interrelated. If a philosopher wanted to proffer a positive definition of the concept "reality", it would be done under this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw
14916-399: The other hand, is the view that universals are real entities, but their existence is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them. Nominalism and conceptualism are the main forms of anti-realism about universals. A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space have existence apart from the human mind. Idealists deny or doubt the existence of objects independent of
15048-431: The outcome. In addition to these considerations, there are the social and institutional measures, such as peer review and accreditation, that are intended to promote factual accuracy among other interests in scientific study. A common rhetorical cliché states, " History is written by the winners ". This phrase suggests but does not examine the use of facts in the writing of history. E. H. Carr in his 1961 volume What
15180-549: The phrase "is true" is—philosophically, if not practically (see: "Michael" example, below)—completely dispensable in this and every other context. In common parlance, truth predicates are not commonly heard, and it would be interpreted as an unusual occurrence were someone to utilize a truth predicate in an everyday conversation when asserting that something is true. Newer perspectives that take this discrepancy into account, and work with sentence structures as actually employed in common discourse, can be broadly described: Whichever term
15312-401: The premise that truth is, or can be, socially constructed. Marx, like many critical theorists who followed, did not reject the existence of objective truth, but rather distinguished between true knowledge and knowledge that has been distorted through power or ideology. For Marx, scientific and true knowledge is "in accordance with the dialectical understanding of history" and ideological knowledge
15444-589: The present with the past – and that one's methods of fact gathering should be openly examined. The set of highlighted historical facts, and their interpretations, therefore changes over time, and reflect present consensuses. This section of the article emphasizes common law jurisprudence as primarily represented in Anglo-American–based legal tradition. Nevertheless, the principles described herein have analogous treatment in other legal systems such as civil law systems as well. In most common law jurisdictions,
15576-714: The quality of "faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity", and that of "agreement with fact or reality ", in Anglo-Saxon expressed by sōþ (Modern English sooth ). All Germanic languages besides English have introduced a terminological distinction between truth "fidelity" and truth "factuality". To express "factuality", North Germanic opted for nouns derived from sanna "to assert, affirm", while continental West Germanic (German and Dutch) opted for continuations of wâra "faith, trust, pact" (cognate to Slavic věra "(religious) faith", but influenced by Latin verus ). Romance languages use terms following
15708-420: The question of defining truth; whether it is even possible to give an informative definition of truth; identifying things as truth-bearers capable of being true or false; if truth and falsehood are bivalent , or if there are other truth values; identifying the criteria of truth that allow us to identify it and to distinguish it from falsehood; the role that truth plays in constituting knowledge ; and, if truth
15840-445: The role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of superassertibility. Michael Lynch , in a 2009 book Truth as One and Many , argued that we should see truth as a functional property capable of being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or coherence. Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell if a proposition is true or not. Logicians use formal languages to express
15972-405: The rules of civil procedure and jurisdiction. Parties who face uncertainties regarding facts and circumstances attendant to their side in a dispute may sometimes invoke alternative pleading. In this situation, a party may plead separate sets of facts that when considered together may be contradictory or mutually exclusive. This seemingly logically-inconsistent presentation of facts may be necessary as
16104-540: The statement that 'it's raining. ' " Philosophical skepticism is generally any doubt of one or more items of knowledge or belief which ascribe truth to their assertions and propositions. The primary target of philosophical skepticism is epistemology , but it can be applied to any domain, such as the supernatural , morality ( moral skepticism ), and religion (skepticism about the existence of God). Philosophical skepticism comes in various forms. Radical forms of skepticism deny that knowledge or rational belief
16236-549: The truth always works. Philosopher of science Richard Feynman also subscribed to it: "We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong." This approach incorporates many of the ideas from Peirce, James, and Dewey. For Peirce, the idea of "endless investigation would tend to bring about scientific belief" fits negative pragmatism in that a negative pragmatist would never stop testing. As Feynman noted, an idea or theory "could never be proved right, because tomorrow's experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought
16368-505: The truth. Realism in the sense used by physicists does not equate to realism in metaphysics. The latter is the claim that the world is mind-independent: that even if the results of a measurement do not pre-exist the act of measurement, that does not require that they are the creation of the observer. Furthermore, a mind-independent property does not have to be the value of some physical variable such as position or momentum . A property can be dispositional (or potential), i.e. it can be
16500-493: The truths they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under some interpretation or truth within some logical system . A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement that is true in all possible worlds or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to a fact (also called a synthetic claim or a contingency ), which is only true in this world as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as "If p and q, then p"
16632-424: The universal quality of being human or humanity . The realist school claims that universals are real – they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate them. There are various forms of realism. Two major forms are Platonic realism and Aristotelian realism . Platonic realism is the view that universals are real entities and they exist independent of particulars. Aristotelian realism , on
16764-410: The use of other theories. For example, the age of fossils is based on radiometric dating , which is justified by reasoning that radioactive decay follows a Poisson process rather than a Bernoulli process . Similarly, Percy Williams Bridgman is credited with the methodological position known as operationalism , which asserts that all observations are not only influenced, but necessarily defined, by
16896-450: The vague notion of a common cultural world view , or Weltanschauung . The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called realism . More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about "realism about " this and that, such as realism about universals or realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify any class of object, the existence or essential characteristics of which
17028-486: The view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom. Gödel thought that the ability to perceive the truth of a mathematical or logical proposition is a matter of intuition , an ability he admitted could be ultimately beyond the scope of a formal theory of logic or mathematics and perhaps best considered in the realm of human comprehension and communication. But he commented, "The more I think about language,
17160-619: Was needed. An ontological catalogue is an attempt to list the fundamental constituents of reality. The question of whether or not existence is a predicate has been discussed since the Early Modern period, not least in relation to the ontological argument for the existence of God . Existence, that something is, has been contrasted with essence , the question of what something is. Since existence without essence seems blank, it associated with nothingness by philosophers such as Hegel. Nihilism represents an extremely negative view of being,
17292-514: Was right." Similarly, James and Dewey's ideas also ascribe truth to repeated testing which is "self-corrective" over time. Pragmatism and negative pragmatism are also closely aligned with the coherence theory of truth in that any testing should not be isolated but rather incorporate knowledge from all human endeavors and experience. The universe is a whole and integrated system, and testing should acknowledge and account for its diversity. As Feynman said, "... if it disagrees with experiment, it
17424-525: Was the 16th President of the United States" and "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated" both accurately describe historical facts. Generally speaking, facts are independent of belief and of knowledge and opinion . Facts are different from inferences , theories , values , and objects . The word fact derives from the Latin factum . It was first used in English with the same meaning: "a thing done or performed" – a meaning now obsolete. The common usage of "something that has really occurred or
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