essay on the search for truth

The Search for Truth in Philosophy

Rorty sees his task in radically deconstructing and overcoming the traditional view of philosophy as a discipline that provides an accurate representation of being. The philosopher proposes a post-positivist concept of coherence as the correspondence of an affirmation to the principles and requirements of a particular language game operating in a specific historical community of individuals (Owens, 2019). Society is understood primarily as a linguistic community, and the philosopher considers it possible to view it as the only justification for human knowledge, norms, and standards of behavior.

According to Foucault, being inside an era, a person cannot understand its nature entirely. As Foucault emphasizes, traditional history is based on the idea of ​​a particular predetermined subject of knowledge, thanks to which the disclosure of truth is possible; Foucault’s task is to trace the formation of this subject in the depths of history. Thus, the philosopher argued that an adequate truth about love or, for example, madness is inaccessible to the cognizing subject. These objects are accessible to knowledge only through representations that change depending on the era. It is practically impossible to separate the “thing-in-itself” from the discourse in which it is enclosed.

Another point of view was proposed by the English philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar. Within the framework of critical realism, he argues that research aimed at finding truth makes sense only when its results are valid not only in the laboratory but also outside it (Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2020). The philosopher talks about the issues of perception and reality, which makes people doubt the truth of many familiar ideas and perceptions. Through this critical approach, people can rethink old beliefs and take a fresh look at the truth.

Undoubtedly, every philosophical idea has a reasonably solid foundation and scientific justification. They are based on concepts from other philosophers who have worked on these issues for centuries. Thus, any of these ideas can be accepted or refuted; however, in any case, they should be treated with respect and understanding. This will help us look at the issue from different points of view and accept the most suitable idea for ourselves or, possibly, work out a new one.

I am close to Foucault’s idea, who argued that it is difficult to understand the truth, being inside a particular era. Indeed, a person cannot always cover the entire event horizon and consider all the influencing factors to get the correct perspective. At the same time, looking back, we often understand where we made a mistake and how we should have behaved to achieve a better outcome. Thus, knowing the truth is a complex process that requires broad views and attention to detail from people.

However, I believe that any philosophical idea has some significant meaning. Thus, for example, the concepts of critical realism force people to consider reality carefully, “scientifically.” This allows us to rely on reason and draw conclusions from strict logic. Sometimes this can support correct and informed decisions, which may seem wrong from the point of view of feelings, but ultimately lead to beneficial consequences. In any case, the search for truth is a long and ongoing process. Even when looking into the past, researchers do not always agree on where exactly the truth was. Consequently, everyone should determine this issue for themselves independently, but at the same time, remember that the point of view should not be detrimental to others.

Buch-Hansen, H., & Nielsen, P. (2020). Critical realism: Basics and beyond. Macmillan Education UK.

Owens, J. (2019). Rorty, religion, and metaphysics. Lexington Books.

Cite this paper

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2022, August 7). The Search for Truth in Philosophy. https://studycorgi.com/the-search-for-truth-in-philosophy/

"The Search for Truth in Philosophy." StudyCorgi , 7 Aug. 2022, studycorgi.com/the-search-for-truth-in-philosophy/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) 'The Search for Truth in Philosophy'. 7 August.

1. StudyCorgi . "The Search for Truth in Philosophy." August 7, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/the-search-for-truth-in-philosophy/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "The Search for Truth in Philosophy." August 7, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/the-search-for-truth-in-philosophy/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "The Search for Truth in Philosophy." August 7, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/the-search-for-truth-in-philosophy/.

This paper, “The Search for Truth in Philosophy”, was written and voluntary submitted to our free essay database by a straight-A student. Please ensure you properly reference the paper if you're using it to write your assignment.

Before publication, the StudyCorgi editorial team proofread and checked the paper to make sure it meets the highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, fact accuracy, copyright issues, and inclusive language. Last updated: August 7, 2022 .

If you are the author of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal . Please use the “ Donate your paper ” form to submit an essay.

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

The correspondence theory

Coherence and pragmatist theories, tarski and truth conditions.

• Deflationism

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Truth
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - The Identity Theory of Truth
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - The Revision Theory of Truth
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - The Coherence Theory of Truth
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - The Deflationary Theory of Truth
• Table Of Contents

truth , in metaphysics and the philosophy of language , the property of sentences, assertions, beliefs , thoughts, or propositions that are said, in ordinary discourse, to agree with the facts or to state what is the case.

Truth is the aim of belief; falsity is a fault. People need the truth about the world in order to thrive . Truth is important. Believing what is not true is apt to spoil people’s plans and may even cost them their lives. Telling what is not true may result in legal and social penalties. Conversely, a dedicated pursuit of truth characterizes the good scientist, the good historian, and the good detective. So what is truth, that it should have such gravity and such a central place in people’s lives?

The classic suggestion comes from Aristotle (384–322 bce ): “To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.” In other words, the world provides “what is” or “what is not,” and the true saying or thought corresponds to the fact so provided. This idea appeals to common sense and is the germ of what is called the correspondence theory of truth. As it stands, however, it is little more than a platitude and far less than a theory. Indeed, it may amount to merely a wordy paraphrase, whereby, instead of saying “that’s true” of some assertion, one says “that corresponds with the facts.” Only if the notions of fact and correspondence can be further developed will it be possible to understand truth in these terms.

Unfortunately, many philosophers doubt whether an acceptable explanation of facts and correspondence can be given. Facts, as they point out, are strange entities. It is tempting to think of them as structures or arrangements of things in the world. However, as the Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, structures have spatial locations, but facts do not. The Eiffel Tower can be moved from Paris to Rome, but the fact that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris cannot be moved anywhere. Furthermore, critics urge, the very idea of what the facts are in a given case is nothing apart from people’s sincere beliefs about the case, which means those beliefs that people take to be true. Thus, there is no enterprise of first forming a belief or theory about some matter and then in some new process stepping outside the belief or theory to assess whether it corresponds with the facts. There are, indeed, processes of checking and verifying beliefs, but they work by bringing up further beliefs and perceptions and assessing the original in light of those. In actual investigations, what tells people what to believe is not the world or the facts but how they interpret the world or select and conceptualize the facts.

Starting in the mid-19th century, this line of criticism led some philosophers to think that they should concentrate on larger theories, rather than sentences or assertions taken one at a time. Truth, on this view, must be a feature of the overall body of belief considered as a system of logically interrelated components—what is called the “web of belief.” It might be, for example, an entire physical theory that earns its keep by making predictions or enabling people to control things or by simplifying and unifying otherwise disconnected phenomena. An individual belief in such a system is true if it sufficiently coheres with, or makes rational sense within, enough other beliefs; alternatively, a belief system is true if it is sufficiently internally coherent . Such were the views of the British idealists , including F.H. Bradley and H.H. Joachim, who, like all idealists, rejected the existence of mind-independent facts against which the truth of beliefs could be determined ( see also realism: realism and truth ).

Yet coherentism too seems inadequate, since it suggests that human beings are trapped in the sealed compartment of their own beliefs, unable to know anything of the world beyond. Moreover, as the English philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell pointed out, nothing seems to prevent there being many equally coherent but incompatible belief systems. Yet at best only one of them can be true.

Some theorists have suggested that belief systems can be compared in pragmatic or utilitarian terms. According to this idea, even if many different systems can be internally coherent, it is likely that some will be much more useful than others. Thus, one can expect that, in a process akin to Darwinian natural selection , the more useful systems will survive while the others gradually go extinct. The replacement of Newtonian mechanics by relativity theory is an example of this process. It was in this spirit that the 19th-century American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce said:

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

In effect, Peirce’s view places primary importance on scientific curiosity , experimentation, and theorizing and identifies truth as the imagined ideal limit of their ongoing progress. Although this approach may seem appealingly hard-headed, it has prompted worries about how a society, or humanity as a whole, could know at a given moment whether it is following the path toward such an ideal. In practice it has opened the door to varying degrees of skepticism about the notion of truth. In the late 20th century philosophers such as Richard Rorty advocated retiring the notion of truth in favour of a more open-minded and open-ended process of indefinite adjustment of beliefs. Such a process, it was felt, would have its own utility , even though it lacked any final or absolute endpoint.

The rise of formal logic (the abstract study of assertions and deductive arguments) and the growth of interest in formal systems (formal or mathematical languages) among many Anglo-American philosophers in the early 20th century led to new attempts to define truth in logically or scientifically acceptable terms. It also led to a renewed respect for the ancient liar paradox (attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Epimenides ), in which a sentence says of itself that it is false, thereby apparently being true if it is false and false if it is true. Logicians set themselves the task of developing systems of mathematical reasoning that would be free of the kinds of self-reference that give rise to paradoxes such as that of the liar. However, this proved difficult to do without at the same time making some legitimate proof procedures impossible. There is good self-reference (“All sentences, including this, are of finite length”) and bad self-reference (“This sentence is false”) but no generally agreed-upon principle for distinguishing them.

These efforts culminated in the work of the Polish-born logician Alfred Tarski , who in the 1930s showed how to construct a definition of truth for a formal or mathematical language by means of a theory that would assign truth conditions (the conditions in which a given sentence is true) to each sentence in the language without making use of any semantic terms, notably including truth, in that language. Truth conditions were identified by means of “T-sentences.” For example, the English-language T-sentence for the German sentence Schnee ist weiss is: “Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white. A T-sentence says of some sentence (S) in the object language (the language for which truth is being defined) that S is true if and only if…, where the ellipsis is replaced by a translation of S into the language used to construct the theory (the metalanguage ). Since no metalanguage translation of any S (in this case, snow is white ) will contain the term true, Tarski could claim that each T-sentence provides a “partial definition” of truth for the object language and that their sum total provides the complete definition.

While the technical aspects of Tarski’s work were much admired and have been much discussed, its philosophical significance remained unclear, in part because T-sentences struck many theorists as less than illuminating . But the weight of philosophical opinion gradually shifted, and eventually this platitudinous appearance was regarded as a virtue and indeed as indicative of the whole truth about truth. The idea was that, instead of staring at the abstract question “What is truth?,” philosophers should content themselves with the particular question “What does the truth of S amount to?”; and for any well-specified sentence, a humble T-sentence will provide the answer.

Seven Approaches to Finding the Truth

This blog summarizes seven different approaches to justifying the truth..

Posted September 7, 2020 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

The question of what is true resides at the very core of philosophy , especially the Greek tradition that was so powerfully shaped by the trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Perhaps more than anyone else, Socrates was responsible for founding the modern approach to philosophy. Indeed, I would argue he essentially launched what we can call "formal epistemology". This is the systematic way of addressing the questions of “How do we know?” and “In what sense are one’s claim to knowledge really justifiable?” We can appreciate the difficulty in finding truly justifiable knowledge when we consider that Socrates was considered the wisest man in the land in large part because he realized he "knew nothing”.

Since Socrates' time, there have been many different approaches to developing knowledge systems that are justified by more than one’s subjective impressions and wishes. Here are seven different approaches that attempt to ground the justification of truth.

Seven Approaches to Finding Truth

1. The Foundational Approach . This attempts to ground knowledge in deductive certainty. The most obvious systems that work from foundational truth claims are those in logic and mathematics. Consider, for example, that 1 + 1 = 2 is true by definition and mathematical proofs are derived from deductive logic. Perhaps the most famous foundationalist approach in philosophy was advanced by Rene Descartes, who argued for a substance dualist view of matter and mind that was in part grounded to the foundationalist truth claim, “I think; therefore I am”.

2. The Coherence Approach . This approach emphasizes the way concepts link up with one another and proceed to offer a clearly understandable view of the world and how one knows about it in a way that is comprehensive and ordered. A good example of coherence is when one achieves a sense of insight so that one’s perspective shifts and a number of pieces fall into place. Metatheories like the Unified Theory of Knowledge are often justified based on the coherence that they are able to achieve.

3. The Correspondence Approach . A famous quip regarding the emergence of modern empirical natural science from the rest of philosophy is that the scientists “got up out of their armchairs” and actually looked through microscopes and telescopes to see what was there. That is, they developed an empirical focus on data collection, and developed methods that tested or corresponded models that generated hypotheses that could then be examined to see if the data lined up with the predict the expected state of affairs.

4. The Phenomenological Approach . When we think of data, where does it reside? Does it reside in the world or do empirical sense impressions reside inside the perceptions of the observers? This is a powerful consideration. It was Immanuel Kant who embraced a phenomenological approach that divided the world into that which we can experience and the thing-in-itself. Other philosophers like Husserl developed a full philosophy based on phenomenology.

5. The Pragmatic Approach . Human activity, even the search for truth, can be conceptualized in terms of goals and utility, and thus is contextualized. The pragmatic approach, emphasized by American philosophers like William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, emphasizes a conception of truth as being that which works, and what is useful in the world in determining accurate from inaccurate and fostering other goals.

6. The Social Construction Approach . Where do we get our truth claims? Clearly a key determiner of our beliefs is the cultural context, where we have been socialized into various systems and then justify our truths in relationship to other ideas that exist in the context in which we reside. The remarkable plurality of different views demonstrates the influence that the explicit intersubjective consensus by groups of people have regarding what constitutes truth. The “linguistic turn” in philosophy, as well as the post-structuralists like Michael Foucault, emphasize how truth claims are intertwined with power, influence, and social context.

7. The Moral/Ethical/Aesthetic Approach. One of the most famous distinctions in modernist thinking is the separation from is and ought. The philosopher David Hume famously argued that one cannot derive what ought to be solely on the basis of what is. This led to a separation between “is” and “ought” that modern empirical natural science has only strengthened in many ways. However, it is crucial to realize that many argue that “is” and “ought” cannot be as neatly separated. It can be argued both that what is true is often seen as what is beautiful, as exemplified by mathematical equations like the Euler Identity . In addition, many argue that there are ultimate values pertaining to goodness and beauty that are as true in how they orient our embodiment as any claims to accuracy. Although they did so in different ways, philosophers as different as Kant and Aristotle both saw goodness and truth as tied together in profound ways.

These seven approaches represent the dominant ways philosophers have attempted to ground their truth claims. It seemly likely that they all have their place in helping humanity generate an understanding of that which is true in the deepest sense of that word.

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at James Madison University.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Quote Investigator®

Tracing Quotations

The Search for Truth Is More Precious Than Its Possession

Albert Einstein? Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? Alexander Grant? J. A. Turner? Apocryphal?

(1) The search for truth is more precious than its possession (2) The search for truth is more precious than truth itself (3) The pursuit of truth is more valuable than the attainment of truth (4) The pursuit of an object is more pleasurable than its possession

This saying has been attributed to the famous physicist Albert Einstein and the prominent German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Would you please explore this topic?

Quote Investigator: In 1778 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published “Eine Duplik” which contained a passage discussing the struggle to attain the truth. Below is a translation of Lessing’s remarks from German into English published in 1866 by E. P. Evans. QI believes that the family of sayings under examination were derived from Lessing’s viewpoint. Boldface added to excerpt by QI : [1] 1866, The Life and Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing From the German of Adolf Stahr by E. P. Evans Ph.D. (Professor of Modern Languages and Literature in the University of Michigan), Volume 2, Book … Continue reading

The worth of man lies not in the truth which he possesses, or believes that he possesses, but in the honest endeavor which he puts forth to secure that truth; for not by the possession of, but by the search after, truth, are his powers enlarged, wherein, alone, consists his ever-increasing perfection. Possession fosters content, indolence, and pride. If God should hold enclosed in His right hand all truth, and in His left hand only the ever-active impulse after truth, although with the condition that I must always and forever err, I would, with humility, turn to His left hand, and say, ‘Father, give me this; pure truth is for Thee alone.’

In 1940 Albert Einstein published “Considerations Concerning the Fundaments of Theoretical Physics” in the journal “Science”. Einstein employed the first instance from the family above, and he credited Lessing. Einstein did not use quotation marks, and QI believes the physicist presented an encapsulation of Lessing’s perspective and not a direct quotation: [2] 1940 May 24, Science, Volume 91, Number 2369, Considerations Concerning the Fundaments of Theoretical Physics by Dr. Albert Einstein (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey), Start Page … Continue reading

Some physicists, among them myself, can not believe that we must abandon, actually and forever, the idea of direct representation of physical reality in space and time; or that we must accept the view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance. It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving; and also every man may draw comfort from Lessing’s fine saying, that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Here is the original German passage from “Eine Duplik” which Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published in 1778: [3] 1778, Eine Duplik (A Rejoinder) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Quote Page 10 and 11, Publisher: Braunschweig, in der Buchhandlung des Fürstl, Waisenhauses. (Google Books Full View) link

Nicht die Wahrheit, in deren Besitz irgendein Mensch ist, oder zu sein vermeinet, sondern die aufrichtige Mühe, die er angewandt hat, hinter die Wahrheit zu kommen, macht den Werth des Menschen. Denn nicht durch den Besitz, sondern durch die Nachforschung der Wahrheit erweitern sich seine Kräfte, worin allein seine immer wachsende Vollkommenheit bestehet. Der Besitz macht ruhig, träge, stolz — Wenn Gott in seiner Rechten alle Wahrheit, und in seiner Linken den einzigen immer regen Trieb nach Wahrheit, obschon mit dem Zusatze, mich immer und ewig zu irren, verschlossen hielte, und spräche zu mir: wähle! Ich fiele ihm mit Demuth in seine Linke, und sagte: Vater gieb! die reine Wahrheit ist ja doch nur für dich allein!

In 1861 a piece in “The Saturday Review” of London presented a summary of Lessing’s attitude: [4] 1861 February 16, The Saturday Review, The Uses of Insincerity, Quote Page 161, Published at The Office of The Saturday Review, London, England. (Google Books Full View) link

It is a well-known saying of Lessing’s, that if he had been offered the choice between the possession of truth and the pleasure of seeking for it, he should unhesitatingly have preferred the latter.

In 1862 “The Home and Foreign Review” of Edinburgh, Scotland printed an intriguing analogy based on a succinct statement of Lessing’s outlook: [5] 1862 July, The Home and Foreign Review, Volume 1, Trollope’s North America, Start Page 111, Quote Page 122, Williams and Norgate, Edinburgh, Scotland. (Google Books Full View) link

The American, whether of the Eastern or Western States, looks upon wealth as Lessing looked upon truth. The search for it is more precious to him than the possession. He values each successful speculation mainly as the stepping-stone to a new one.

In 1866 Sir Alexander Grant published “The Ethics of Aristotle”. Grant employed the second instance from the family of sayings mentioned in the question above. Grant specified an anonymous attribution: [6] 1866, The Ethics of Aristotle: Illustrated with Essays and Notes by Sir Alexander Grant, Second Edition Revised and Completed, Volume 2 of 2, Quote Page 335, Longmans, Green, and Company. (Google … Continue reading

‘And it is reasonable to suppose that those who know pass their time more pleasantly than those who are enquiring.’ This is opposed to the often repeated saying that ‘the search for truth is more precious than truth itself.’ Thus Bishop Butler says, ‘Knowledge is not our proper happiness. Whoever will in the least attend to the thing will see, that it is the gaining, not the having of it, which is the entertainment of the mind. ’

In 1873 U.S. horticulturist John Jay Smith referred to Lessing while delivering an address in Pennsylvania: [7] 1873 March, The Gardener’s Monthly Communications, American Horticulture, Address delivered before the Germantown Horticultural Society on January 1873 by the President John Jay Smith Esq, … Continue reading

There is immense enjoyment in this science when attained; but Lessing declared that if he had been offered between the possession of truth and the pleasure of seeking for it, he would have unhesitatingly preferred the latter.

In 1874 Professor J. A. Turner of Hollins Institute delivered a speech at Richmond College in Virginia. He presented a proposition that matched instance three above, and he argued against it. He also described it as an “ever-recurring theme of debating societies”: [8] 1874 June 23, The Richmond Daily Dispatch, Commencement of Richmond College, Quote Page 1, Column 4, Richmond, Virginia. (Newspapers_com)

… the pursuit of truth is more valuable than the attainment of truth …

Numerous translations of Lessing’s words have been created over the years. In 1878 Helen Zimmern published “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life and His Works”, and she included the following rendering of the key passage: [9] 1878, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life and His Works by Helen Zimmern, Chapter 18: The ‘Wolfenbüttel Fragments’, Quote Page 361, Longmans, Green, and Company, London. (Google Books Full View) … Continue reading

Not the truth in whose possession a man is or believes himself to be, but the earnest efforts which he has made to attain truth, make the worth of the man. For it is not through the possession but through the search for truth that his powers are strengthened, in which alone his ever-growing perfection exists. Possession makes him calm, indolent, proud— If God held all truth in His right hand, and in His left the ever-living desire for truth, although with the condition that I should remain in error for ever, and if He said to me “Choose,” I should humbly incline towards His left, and say, “Father, give; pure truth is for Thee alone.”

In 1904 a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas reported on the meeting of a group called “The Invincible Society” who held a debate. The proposition discussed matched instance four above: [10] 1904 January 1, The Indian Leader, (Short item with no title), Quote Page 2, Column 2, Haskell Institute, Lawrence, Kansas. (Newspapers_com)

… debate, Resolved— “That the pursuit of an object is more pleasurable than its possession” affirmatives, Harold Barnes and Peter Venne; negatives, Paul Knapp and Frank Fish.

In 1940 Einstein published an essay in “Science” magazine, and he attributed the saying to Lessing as mentioned previously: [11] 1940 May 24, Science, Volume 91, Number 2369, Considerations Concerning the Fundaments of Theoretical Physics by Dr. Albert Einstein (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey), Start Page … Continue reading

… every man may draw comfort from Lessing’s fine saying, that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.

In conclusion, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing deserves credit for the passage he published in 1778. Other writers have attempted to express Lessing’s viewpoint succinctly, and sometimes Lessing receives credit for these compact statements. This is a known mechanism for the creation of misquotations. Albert Einstein did publish an essay in 1940 containing the first instance above, but he was summarizing Lessing, and he credited the well-known philosopher.

Image Notes: Public domain illustration of foliage shaped like a question mark on an island from qimono at Pixabay. Image has been resized and cropped.

(Special thanks to German quotation expert Gerald Krieghofer who previously explored this topic. Krieghofer located the crucial citation for Lessing in 1778. His article in German is available here . Great thanks to Victor Mair and Ben Zimmer whose inquiries inspired QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Mair posted a comment on the Language Log website asking about a different quotation attributed to Einstein that was thematically connected to this quotation. Zimmer relayed the request from Mair to QI.)

5.1 Philosophical Methods for Discovering Truth

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the role that dialectics plays in logic and reasoning.
• Define “argument” and “negation of a argument.”
• Define the laws of noncontradiction and the excluded middle.

Like most academic disciplines, the goal of philosophy is to get closer to the truth. Logic, reasoning, and argumentation are the predominant methods used. But unlike many other disciplines, philosophy does not contain a large body of accepted truths or canonical knowledge. Indeed, philosophy is often known for its uncertainty because it focuses on questions for which we do not yet have ways of definitively answering. The influential 20th-century philosopher Bertrand Russell explains that “as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, the subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science” (1912, 240).

Because philosophy focuses on questions we do not yet have ways of definitively answering, it is as much a method of thinking as it is a body of knowledge. And logic is central to this method. Thinking like a philosopher involves thinking critically about alternative possibilities. To answer the question of whether there is a God (a question for which we lack a definitive method of answering), we can look at things we believe we know and then critically work through what those ideas entail about the existence or possible characteristics of God. We can also imagine God exists or God does not exist and then reason through what either possibility implies about the world. In imagining alternative possibilities, we must critically work through what each possibility must entail. Changing one belief can set off a cascade of implications for further beliefs, altering much of what we accept as true. And so, in studying philosophy, we need to get used to the possibility that our beliefs could be wrong. We use reason to do philosophy, and logic is the study of reason. Hence, logic helps us get closer to the truth.

Dialectics and Philosophical Argumentation

Philosophers love to argue. But this love does not mean that philosophy lectures are loud, contentious events. Most people think of an argument as a verbal disagreement, and the term evokes images of raised voices, heightened emotions, and possibly bad behavior. However, in philosophy, this word does not have a negative connotation. An argument in philosophy is a reasoned position—to argue is simply to offer a set of reasons in support of some conclusion. The goal of an individual argument is to support a conclusion. However, the long-term goal of argumentation between philosophers is to get closer to the truth. In contemporary academic philosophy, philosophers are engaged in dialogue with each other where they offer arguments in the publication of articles. Philosophers also engage in argument at conferences and in paper presentations and lectures. In this way, contemporary academic philosophers are engaged in a dialectic of sorts.

A traditional dialectic is a debate or discussion between at least two people who hold differing views. But unlike debate, participants in the discussion do not have the goal of “winning,” or proving that the other view is wrong. Rather, the goal is to get closer to the truth. Thus, dialectics make use of logic and reason, while debates often use rhetorical ploys or appeal to the emotions. Because of the tendency of participants to appeal to emotion and prejudice in many modern popular debates, philosophers often qualify their words and refer to reasoned debate when discussing proper public discourse between people. But even reasoned debates can become adversarial, while dialectics are mostly collaborative. The participants in a dialectic, whom philosophers refer to as “interlocutors,” enter into discourse with the aim of trading their poor or false beliefs for knowledge.

Dialectics usually start with a question. An interlocutor offers an answer to the question, which is then scrutinized by all participants. Reasons against the answer are given, and someone may offer a counterexample to the answer—that is, a case that illustrates that the answer is wrong. The interlocutors will then analyze why the answer is wrong and try to locate its weakness. The interlocutors may also examine what made the answer plausible in the first place. Next, someone offers another answer to the question—possibly a refined version of the previous answer that has been adjusted in light of the weaknesses and strengths identified in the analysis. This process is repeated over and over, with each iteration theoretically bringing participants closer to the truth.

While dialectics aims at the truth, the creation of knowledge is not its sole function. For example, a long, deep conversation with a friend about the meaning of life should not be viewed as a failure if you do not come up with a satisfactory answer to life’s purpose. In this instance, the process has as much value as the aim (getting closer to the truth). Contemporary academic philosophers view their practice in the same way.

Indian Dialectics and Debate

Dialectics played an important role in early Indian philosophy . The earliest known philosophical writings originate in India as sections of the Vedas , which have been dated as far back as 1500 BCE (Mark 2020). The Vedas are often considered religious texts, but it is more accurate to think of them as religious and philosophical texts since they explore what it means to be a human being, discuss the purpose and function of the mind, and attempt to identify the goal of life. The Upanishads , which are the most philosophical of the Vedic texts, often take the form of dialogues. These dialogues generally occur between two participants—one who knows a truth and the other who seeks to know and understand the truth. The Vedic dialectics explore fundamental concepts such as Brahman (the One without a second, which includes the universe as its manifestation), dharma (an individual’s purpose and duty), and atman (an individual’s higher self). As in many dialectics, questioning, reasoning, and realizations that arise through the dialogue are the aim of these texts.

Buddhist philosophical texts that were part of early Indian philosophy also contain narrative dialogues (Gillon 2021). Logical argumentation is evident in these, and as time progressed, texts became more focused on argument, particularly those relying on analogical reasoning, or the use of analogies. Analogies use an object that is known to draw inferences about other similar objects. Over time, the analogical arguments used in Buddhist texts took on structure . When arguments have structure, they rely on a form that captures a specific manner of reasoning, such that the reasoning can be schematized. The structure of arguments in classical Indian texts appears slightly different than in classical Western texts of logic. Below is an example of the canonical form of an argument about the nature of the soul from the Caraka-samhita (CS 3.8.31) (Gillon 2021). First, the canonical form identifies components to the argument:

Claim: The soul is eternal. Reason: because it is unproduced. Example: Space is unproduced and it is eternal. Application: Just as space is unproduced, so is the soul. Conclusion: Therefore, the soul is eternal.

Here, the text makes an analogy between space and the soul, where space exemplifies a necessary relationship between being unproduced and being eternal. We may imagine the argument in a slightly different form:

• The soul is unproduced.
• As in the case of space, whatever is unproduced is also eternal.
• Therefore, the soul is eternal.

This argument form gives us a scheme that could be applied to many different cases:

• X has property P.
• Y is a paradigmatic example of something that has property P. Y also has property S, where P is the cause of S.
• Therefore, X has property S because it has property P.

As you will see later in the section on deductive argumentation, relying on argumentative structure is a feature of logical reasoning.

Classical Indian philosophical texts also refer to the occurrence of reasoned public debates. Public debate was a further method of rational inquiry and likely the main mode of rational inquiry that most people had access to. One mode of debate took the form of assemblies in which experts considered specific topics, including those in politics and law (Gillon 2021). Arguments are the public expression of private inferences, and only by exposing one’s private thoughts through argument can they be tested. Public arguments are a method to improve one’s reasoning when it is scrutinized by others.

Greek Dialectics and Debate

Ancient Greek philosophy is also known for its use of dialectic and debate. Socrates , perhaps the most famous ancient Greek philosopher, claimed that knowledge is true opinion backed by argument (Plato, Meno ). “Opinion” here means unjustified belief: your beliefs could be true, but they cannot count as knowledge unless you have reasons for them and can offer justifications for your beliefs when questioned by others. Furthermore, Socrates’s method of gaining knowledge was to engage in dialectics with others. All of what we know about Socrates is through the writings of others—particularly the writings of Plato . Quite appropriately, Plato uses dialogues in all his works, in which Socrates is almost always a participant.

Socrates never wrote anything down. In the Phaedrus , one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates criticizes written works as being a dead discourse of sorts. Books cannot respond to you when you ask questions. He states, “You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just the very same thing forever” ( Phaedrus , 275e). Clearly, dialectics was central to Socrates’s philosophical method.

Connections

Learn more about Socrates in the introduction to philosophy chapter .

Plato’s dialogues are a testament to the importance of public discourse as a form of rational inquiry in ancient Greece. Based on Greek philosophical writings, we can assume reasoned public debate took place and that Socrates preferred it as a method of teaching and learning. In Plato’s dialogues, many questions are asked, and Socrates’s interlocutors offer answers to which Socrates asks further clarifying questions. Through the process of questioning, false beliefs and inadequate understanding are exposed. Socrates’s goal was not simply to offer people truth. Rather, through questioning, Socrates guides people to discover the truth on their own, provided they are willing to keep an open mind and admit, when necessary, that they are in the wrong. In Plato’s dialogues, participants don’t always land on a determinate answer, but they as well as readers are always left with a clearer understanding of the correct way to reason .

If any ancient Greek philosopher most embodies the tie between dialectic and logic, it is Aristotle (c. 384–322 BCE), who was a student of Plato. Aristotle wrote books on the art of dialectic (Smith 2020). And he probably participated in gymnastic dialectic—a structured dialectic contest practiced in the Academy (the school founded by Plato, which Aristotle attended). But more importantly, Aristotle created a complex system of logic upon which skill in the art of dialectic relied. Aristotle’s logic is the earliest formal systematized account of inference we know of and was considered the most accurate and complete system until the late 19th century (Smith 2020). Aristotle’s system is taught in logic classes to this day.

The Use of Reason to Discover Truth

Reasoning allows us to hypothesize, work out consequences of our hypotheses, run thought experiments, assess the coherence of a set of beliefs, and generate plausible explanations of the world around us. As Chapter 1 explained, coherence is the property of consistency in a set of beliefs. Thus, when a set of beliefs is inconsistent, it is not possible for every belief in the set to be true. We must use reason to determine whether a set of beliefs is consistent and work out the logical implications of beliefs, given their truth. In this way, reason can be used to discover truth.

The rules of logic are like the rules of math; you cannot make 1 + 1 = 3. Indeed, math is a form of deductive reasoning that ensures truth. Answers to problems in math are derived using known functions and rules, which is also true in logic. Unlike math, however, not all of logic can guarantee correct answers. Nonetheless, logic supplies means by which to derive better answers—answers that are more likely to be true. Because logic is the study of proper reasoning, and proper reasoning is an essential tool for discovering truth, logic is foundational to the pursuit of learning.

Testing Hypotheses

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for an observed process or phenomenon. Human beings formulate hypotheses because they wish to answer specific questions about the world. Usually, the sciences come to mind when we think of the word “hypothesis.” However, hypotheses can be created on many subjects, and chances are that you have created many hypotheses without realizing it. For example, if you often come home and find that one of your outside potted plants has been knocked over, you might hypothesize that “the wind must have knocked that one over.” In doing so, you answer the question, “Why is that plant often knocked over?” Generating and testing hypotheses engages different forms of reasoning— abduction, induction, and deduction—all of which will be explained in further detail below.

Clearly, simply coming up with a hypothesis isn’t enough for us to gain knowledge; rather, we must use logic to test the truth of our supposition. Of course, the aim of testing hypotheses is to get to the truth. In testing we often formulate if–then statements: “If it is windy, then my plant will get knocked over” or “If nitrogen levels are high in the river, then algae will grow.” If–then statements in logic are called conditionals and are testable. For example, we can keep a log registering the windy days, cross-checked against the days on which the plant was found knocked over, to test our if–then hypothesis.

Reasoning is also used to assess the evidence collected for testing and to determine whether the test itself is good enough for drawing a reliable conclusion. In the example above, if on no windy days is the plant knocked over, logic demands that the hypothesis be rejected. If the plant is sometimes knocked over on windy days, then the hypothesis needs refinement (for example, wind direction or wind speed might be a factor in when the plant goes down). Notice that logic and reasoning play a role in every step of the process: creating hypotheses, figuring out how to test them, compiling data, analyzing results, and drawing a conclusion.

We’ve been looking at an inconsequential example—porch plants. But testing hypotheses is serious business in many fields, such as when pharmaceutical companies test the efficacy of a drug in treating a life-threatening illness. Good reasoning requires researchers to gather enough data to compare an experimental group and control group (patients with the illness who received the drug and those who did not). If scientists find a statistically significant difference in positive outcomes for the experimental group when compared to the control group, they can draw the reasonable conclusion that the drug could alleviate illness or even save lives in the future.

Laws of Logic

Logic, like the sciences, has laws. But while the laws of science are meant to accurately describe observed regularities in the natural world, laws of logic can be thought of as rules of thought. Logical laws are rules that underlie thinking itself. Some might even argue that it is only by virtue of these laws that we can have reliable thoughts. To that extent, laws of logic are construed to be laws of reality itself. To see what is meant by this, let’s consider the law of noncontradiction .

Noncontradiction

To understand the law of noncontradiction, we must first define a few terms. First, a statement is a sentence with truth value, meaning that the statement must be true or false. Statements are declarative sentences like “Hawaii is the 50th state to have entered the United States” and “You are reading an online philosophy book.” Sometimes philosophers use the term “proposition” instead of “statement,” and the latter term has a slightly different meaning. But for our purposes, we will use these terms as synonyms. Second, a negation of a statement is the denial of that statement. The easiest way to turn a statement into its negation is to add the qualifier “not.” For example, the negation of “My dog is on her bed” is “My dog is not on her bed.” Third, a contradiction is the conjunction of any statement and its negation. We may also say that any statement and its opposite are contradictory . For example, “My dog is on her bed” and “My dog is not on her bed” are contradictory because the second is the negation of the first. And when you combine a statement and its opposite, you get a contradiction: “My dog is on her bed and my dog is not on her bed.”

The law of noncontradiction is a law about truth, stating that contradictory propositions cannot be true in the same sense, at the same time . While my dog may have been on her bed earlier and now she’s off barking at squirrels, it cannot be true right now that my dog is both on her bed and not on her bed. However, some of you may be thinking about dogs who lie half on their beds and half on the floor (Josie, the dog belonging to the author of this chapter, is one of them). Can it not be true that such a dog is both on and not on their bed? In this instance, we must return to the phrase in the same sense . If we decide that “lying on the bed” means “at least 50% of your body is on the bed,” then we must maintain that definition when looking at propositions to determine whether they are contradictory. Thus, if Josie is half out of the bed with her head on the floor, we can still say “Josie is on the bed.” But notice that “Josie is not on the bed” remains false since we have qualified the meaning of “on the bed.”

For Aristotle, the law of noncontradiction is so fundamental that he claims that without it, knowledge would not be possible—the law is foundational for the sciences, reasoning, and language (Gottlieb 2019). Aristotle thought that the law of noncontradiction was “the most certain of all principles” because it is impossible for someone to believe that the same thing both is and is not (1989, 1005b).

The Excluded Middle

The law of the excluded middle is related to the law of noncontradiction. The law of the excluded middle states that for any statement, either that statement is true, or its negation is true. If you accept that all statements must be either true or false and you also accept the law of noncontradiction, then you must accept the law of the excluded middle. If the only available options for truth-bearing statements are that they are true or false, and if a statement and its negation cannot both be true at the same time, then one of the statements must be true while the other must be false. Either my dog is on her bed or off her bed right now .

Normativity in Logic

What if Lulu claims that she is 5 feet tall and that she is 7 feet tall? You’d think that she was joking or not being literal because this is tantamount to saying that she is both 5 feet tall and not 5 feet tall (which is implied by being 7 feet tall). The statement “I’m 5 feet tall and not 5 feet tall” is a contradiction. Surely Lulu does not believe a contradiction. We might even think, as Aristotle did, that it is impossible to believe a contradiction. But even if Lulu could believe a contradiction, we think that she should not . Since we generally believe that inconsistency in reasoning is something that ought to be avoided , we can say that logic is normative. Normativity is the assumption that certain actions, beliefs, or other mental states are good and ought to be pursued or realized. Normativity implies a standard (a norm) to which we ought to conform. Ethics is a normative discipline because it is the study of how we ought to act. And because we believe people ought to be logical rather than illogical, we label logic as normative.

While ethics is normative in the realm of actions and behavior, logic is normative in the realm of reasoning. Some rules of thought, like the law of noncontradiction, seem to be imperative (a command), so logic is a command of reasoning. Some philosophers argue that logic is what makes reasoning possible (MacFarlane 2002). In their view, logic is a constitutive norm of reasoning—that is, logic constitutes what reasoning is . Without norms of logic, there would be no reasoning. This view is intuitively plausible: What if your thoughts proceeded one after the other, with no connection (or ability to detect a connection) between them? Without logic, you would be unable to even categorize thoughts or reliably attach concepts to the contents of thoughts. Let’s take a closer look at how philosophers use special logical statements to organize their reasoning.

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Nathan Smith
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Philosophy
• Publication date: Jun 15, 2022
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/5-1-philosophical-methods-for-discovering-truth

© Dec 19, 2023 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

In Search of a Better World: Karl Popper on Truth vs. Certainty and the Dangers of Relativism

By maria popova.

“I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson lamented . Nearly half a century earlier, Hannah Arendt captured the crux of the problem in her incisive reflection on thinking vs. knowing , in which she wrote: “The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning.”

This distinction between truth and meaning is vital, especially today, as political propaganda and the “alternative facts” establishment manipulate a public that would rather know than think, preying on the desire for the certitude of ready-made meaning among those unwilling to engage in the work of critical thinking necessary for arriving at truth — truth measured by its correspondence with reality and not by its correspondence with one’s personal agendas, comfort zones, and preexisting beliefs.

This essential discipline of differentiating between truth and certitude is what the influential Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper (July 28, 1902–September 17, 1994) examined at the end of his long life throughout In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years ( public library ).

Popper writes:

All things living are in search of a better world. Men, animals, plants, even unicellular organisms are constantly active. They are trying to improve their situation, or at least to avoid its deterioration… Every organism is constantly preoccupied with the task of solving problems. These problems arise from its own assessments of its condition and of its environment; conditions which the organism seeks to improve… We can see that life — even at the level of the unicellular organism — brings something completely new into the world, something that did not previously exist: problems and active attempts to solve them; assessments, values; trial and error.

Popper argues that because the identification of error is so central to the problem-solving process, its corrective — that is, truth — is a core component of our quest for betterment:

The search for truth … no doubt counts among the best and greatest things that life has created in the course of its long search for a better world.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Carl Sagan’s insistence on science’s essential role in democracy , Popper adds:

We have made great mistakes — all living creatures make mistakes. It is indeed impossible to foresee all the unintended consequences of our actions. Here science is our greatest hope: its method is the correction of error.

Looking back on the sometimes troubled but ultimately exponential reach for a better world that had unfolded over the eighty-seven years of his life — “a time of two senseless world wars and of criminal dictatorships” — Popper writes:

In spite of everything, and although we have had so many failures, we, the citizens of the western democracies, live in a social order which is better (because more favourably disposed to reform) and more just than any other in recorded history. Further improvements are of the greatest urgency. (Yet improvements that increase the power of the state often bring about the opposite of what we are seeking.)

What often warps and frustrates our quest for betterment, Popper notes in a 1982 lecture included in the volume, is our failure to distinguish between the search for truth and the assertion of certainty:

Knowledge consists in the search for truth — the search for objectively true, explanatory theories. It is not the search for certainty. To err is human. All human knowledge is fallible and therefore uncertain. It follows that we must distinguish sharply between truth and certainty. That to err is human means not only that we must constantly struggle against error, but also that, even when we have taken the greatest care, we cannot be completely certain that we have not made a mistake… To combat the mistake, the error, means therefore to search for objective truth and to do everything possible to discover and eliminate falsehoods. This is the task of scientific activity. Hence we can say: our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. […] Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we can correct them.

In a sentiment of piercing pertinence today, as a litany of “alternative facts” attempts to gaslight an uncritical public, Popper offers a definition and admonition of elegant acuity:

A theory or a statement is true, if what it says corresponds to reality. [..] Truth and certainty must be sharply distinguished.

Condemning relativistic approaches to truth — ones that regard truth as “what is accepted; or what is put forward by society; or by the majority; or by my interest group; or perhaps by television” — he cautions:

The philosophical relativism that hides behind [Kant’s] “old and famous question” “What is truth?” may open the way to evil things, such as a propaganda of lies inciting men to hatred. […] Relativism … is a betrayal of reason and of humanity.

It is useful here to revisit Arendt’s distinction between truth and meaning , for where truth is absolute — a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects reality or does not — meaning can be relative; it is shaped by one’s subjective interpretation, which is contingent upon beliefs and can be manipulated. Certainty lives in the realm of meaning, not of truth. The very notion of an “alternative fact,” which manipulates certainty at the expense of truth, is therefore the sort of criminal relativism against which Popper so rigorously cautions — something that, as he puts it, “results from mixing-up the notions of truth and certainty.” All propaganda is in the business of manipulating certainty, but it can never manipulate truth. Arendt had articulated this brilliantly a decade earlier in her timely treatise on defactualization in politics : “No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of factuality.”

Popper argues that the ability to discern truth by testing our theories against reality using critical reasoning is a distinctly human faculty — no other animal does this. A generation before him, Bertrand Russell — perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest patron saint of reason — called this ability “the will to doubt” and extolled it as our greatest self-defense against propaganda. The cultural evolution of our species, Popper notes, was propelled by the necessity of honing that ability — we developed a language that contains true and false statements, which gave rise to criticism, which in turn catalyzed a new phase of selection. He writes:

Natural selection is amplified and partially overtaken by critical, cultural selection. The latter permits us a conscious and critical pursuit of our errors: we can consciously find and eradicate our errors, and we can consciously judge one theory as inferior to another… There is no knowledge without rational criticism, criticism in the service of the search for truth.

But this rational criticism, Popper notes, should also be applied to science itself. Cautioning that the antidote to relativism isn’t scientism — a form of certitude equally corrosive to truth — he writes:

Despite my admiration for scientific knowledge, I am not an adherent of scientism. For scientism dogmatically asserts the authority of scientific knowledge; whereas I do not believe in any authority and have always resisted dogmatism; and I continue to resist it, especially in science. I am opposed to the thesis that the scientist must believe in his theory. As far as I am concerned “I do not believe in belief,” as E. M. Forster says; and I especially do not believe in belief in science. I believe at most that belief has a place in ethics, and even here only in a few instances. I believe, for example, that objective truth is a value — that is, an ethical value, perhaps the greatest value there is — and that cruelty is the greatest evil.

Complement this particular portion of the wholly sobering and ennobling In Search of a Better World with Descartes’s twelve timeless tenets of critical thinking , Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit , and Adrienne Rich on what “truth” really means .

— Published January 26, 2017 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/01/26/karl-popper-in-search-of-a-better-world-truth-certainty/ —

www.themarginalian.org

PRINT ARTICLE

Email article, filed under, books culture karl popper philosophy science, view full site.

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy . (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)

Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth.

It would be impossible to survey all there is to say about truth in any coherent way. Instead, this essay will concentrate on the main themes in the study of truth in the contemporary philosophical literature. It will attempt to survey the key problems and theories of current interest, and show how they relate to one-another. A number of other entries investigate many of these topics in greater depth. Generally, discussion of the principal arguments is left to them. The goal of this essay is only to provide an overview of the current theories.

The problem of truth is in a way easy to state: what truths are, and what (if anything) makes them true. But this simple statement masks a great deal of controversy. Whether there is a metaphysical problem of truth at all, and if there is, what kind of theory might address it, are all standing issues in the theory of truth. We will see a number of distinct ways of answering these questions.

1.1 The correspondence theory

1.1.1 the origins of the correspondence theory, 1.1.2 the neo-classical correspondence theory, 1.2 the coherence theory, 1.3 pragmatist theories, 2.1 sentences as truth-bearers, 2.2 convention t, 2.3 recursive definition of truth, 2.4 reference and satisfaction, 3.1 correspondence without facts, 3.2 facts again, 3.3. truthmakers, 4.1 realism and truth, 4.2 anti-realism and truth, 4.3 anti-realism and pragmatism, 5.1 the redundancy theory, 5.2 minimalist theories, 5.3 other aspects of deflationism, 6.1 truth-bearers, 6.2 truth and truth conditions, 6.3 truth conditions and deflationism, 6.4 truth and the theory of meaning, 6.5 the coherence theory and meaning, 6.6 truth and assertion, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the neo-classical theories of truth.

Much of the contemporary literature on truth takes as its starting point some ideas which were prominent in the early part of the 20th century. There were a number of views of truth under discussion at that time, the most significant for the contemporary literature being the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth.

These theories all attempt to directly answer the nature question : what is the nature of truth? They take this question at face value: there are truths, and the question to be answered concerns their nature. In answering this question, each theory makes the notion of truth part of a more thoroughgoing metaphysics or epistemology. Explaining the nature of truth becomes an application of some metaphysical system, and truth inherits significant metaphysical presuppositions along the way.

The goal of this section is to characterize the ideas of the correspondence, coherence and pragmatist theories which animate the contemporary debate. In some cases, the received forms of these theories depart from the views that were actually defended in the early 20th century. We thus dub them the ‘neo-classical theories’. Where appropriate, we pause to indicate how the neo-classical theories emerge from their ‘classical’ roots in the early 20th century.

Perhaps the most important of the neo-classical theories for the contemporary literature is the correspondence theory. In spite of its importance, it is strikingly difficult to find an accurate citation in the early 20th century for the received neo-classical view. Furthermore, the way the correspondence theory actually emerged will provide some valuable reference points for contemporary debate. For these reasons, we dwell on the origins of the correspondence theory at greater length than those of the other neo-classical views, before turning to its contemporary neo-classical form.

The basic idea of the correspondence theory is that what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are—to the facts. This idea can be seen in various forms throughout the history of philosophy. Its modern history starts with the beginnings of analytic philosophy at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the work of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.

Let us pick up the thread of this story in the years between 1898 and about 1910. These years are marked by Moore and Russell's rejection of idealism. Yet at this point, they do not hold a correspondence theory of truth. Indeed Moore (1899) sees the correspondence theory as a source of idealism, and rejects it. Russell follows Moore in this regard. (For discussion of Moore's early critique of idealism, where he rejects the correspondence theory of truth, see Baldwin (1991). Hylton (1990) provides an extensive discussion of Russell in the context of British idealism.)

In this period, Moore and Russell hold a version of the identity theory of truth . They say comparatively little about it, but it is stated briefly in Moore (1902); Moore (1899) and Russell (1904). According to the identity theory, a true proposition is identical to a fact. Specifically, in Moore and Russell's hands, the theory begins with propositions, understood as the objects of beliefs and other propositional attitudes. Propositions are what are believed, and give the contents of beliefs. They are also, according to this theory, the primary bearers of truth. When a proposition is true, it is identical to a fact, and a belief in that proposition is correct.

The identity theory Moore and Russell espoused takes truth to be a property of propositions. Furthermore, taking up an idea familiar to readers of Moore, the property of truth is a simple unanalyzable property. Facts are understood as simply those propositions which are true. There are true propositions and false ones, and facts just are true propositions. There is thus no “difference between truth and the reality to which it is supposed to correspond” (Moore, 1902, p. 21). (For further discussion of the identity theory of truth, see Baldwin (1991), Cartwright (1987), and the entry on the identity theory of truth .)

Moore and Russell came to reject the identity theory of truth in favor of a correspondence theory, sometime around 1910 (as we see in Moore, 1953, which reports lectures he gave in 1910-1911, and Russell, 1910b). They do so because they came to reject the existence of propositions. Why? Among reasons, they came to doubt that there could be any such things as false propositions, and then concluded that there are no such things as propositions at all.

Why did Moore and Russell find false propositions problematic? A full answer to this question is a point of scholarship that would take us too far afield. (Moore himself lamented that he could not “put the objection in a clear and convincing way” (1953, p. 263), but see Cartwright (1987) for a careful and clear exploration of the arguments.) But very roughly, the identification of facts with true propositions left them unable to see what a false proposition could be other than something which is just like a fact, though false. If such things existed, we would have fact-like things in the world, which Moore and Russell now see as enough to make false propositions count as true. Hence, they cannot exist, and so there are no false propositions. As Russell (1956, p. 223) later says, propositions seem to be at best “curious shadowy things” in addition to facts.

As Cartwright (1987) reminds us, it is useful to think of this argument in the context of Russell's slightly earlier views about propositions. As we see clearly in Russell (1903), for instance, he takes propositions to have constituents. But they are not mere collections of constituents, but a ‘unity’ which brings the constituents together. (We thus confront the ‘problem of the unity of the proposition’.) But what, we might ask, would be the ‘unity’ of a proposition that (Samuel) Ramey sings—with constituents Ramey and singing—except Ramey bearing the property of singing? If that is what the unity consists in, then we seem to have nothing other than the fact that Ramey sings. But then we could not have genuine false propositions without having false facts.

As Cartwright also reminds us, there is some reason to doubt the cogency of this sort of argument. But let us put the assessment of the arguments aside, and continue the story. From the rejection of propositions a correspondence theory emerges. The primary bearers of truth are no longer propositions, but beliefs themselves. In a slogan:

A belief is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact .

Views like this are held by Moore (1953) and Russell (1910b); Russell (1912). Of course, to understand such a theory, we need to understand the crucial relation of correspondence, as well as the notion of a fact to which a belief corresponds. We now turn to these questions. In doing so, we will leave the history, and present a somewhat more modern reconstruction of a correspondence theory.

The correspondence theory of truth is at its core an ontological thesis: a belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity—a fact—to which it corresponds. If there is no such entity, the belief is false.

Facts, for the neo-classical correspondence theory, are entities in their own right. Facts are generally taken to be composed of particulars and properties and relations or universals, at least. The neo-classical correspondence theory thus only makes sense within the setting of a metaphysics that includes such facts. Hence, it is no accident that as Moore and Russell turn away from the identity theory of truth, the metaphysics of facts takes on a much more significant role in their views. This perhaps becomes most vivid in the later Russell (1956, p. 182), where the existence of facts is the “first truism.” (The influence of Wittgenstein's ideas to appear in the Tractatus (1922) on Russell in this period was strong.)

Consider, for example, the belief that Ramey sings. Let us grant that this belief is true. In what does its truth consist, according to the correspondence theory? It consists in there being a fact in the world, built from the individual Ramey, and the property of singing. Let us denote this < Ramey , Singing >. This fact exists. In contrast, the world (we presume) contains no fact < Ramey , Dancing >. The belief that Ramey sings stands in the relation of correspondence to the fact < Ramey , Singing >, and so the belief is true.

What is the relation of correspondence? One of the standing objections to the classical correspondence theory is that a fully adequate explanation of correspondence proves elusive. But for a simple belief, like that Ramey sings, we can observe that the structure of the fact < Ramey , Singing > matches the subject-predicate form of the that -clause which reports the belief, and may well match the structure of the belief itself.

So far, we have very much the kind of view that Moore and Russell would have found congenial. But the modern form of the correspondence theory seeks to round out the explanation of correspondence by appeal to propositions . Indeed, it is common to base a correspondence theory of truth upon the notion of a structured proposition . Propositions are again cast at the contents of beliefs and assertions, and propositions have structure which at least roughly corresponds to the structure of sentences. At least, for simple beliefs like that Ramey sings, the proposition has the same subject predicate structure as the sentence. (Proponents of structured propositions, such as Kaplan (1989), often look to Russell (1903) for inspiration, and find unconvincing Russell's reasons for rejecting them.)

With facts and structured propositions in hand, an attempt may be made to explain the relation of correspondence. Correspondence holds between a proposition and a fact when the proposition and fact have the same structure, and the same constituents at each structural position. When they correspond, the proposition and fact thus mirror each-other. In our simple example, we might have:

proposition that Ramey sings ↓ ↓ fact < Ramey , Singing >

Propositions, though structured like facts, can be true or false. In a false case, like the proposition that Ramey dances, we would find no fact at the bottom of the corresponding diagram. Beliefs are true or false depending on whether the propositions which are believed are.

We have sketched this view for simple propositions like the proposition that Ramey sings. How to extend it to more complex cases, like general propositions or negative propositions, is an issue we will not delve into here. It requires deciding whether there are complex facts, such as general facts or negative facts, or whether there is a more complex relation of correspondence between complex propositions and simple facts. (The issue of whether there are such complex facts marks a break between Russell (1956) and Wittgenstein (1922) and the earlier views which Moore (1953) and Russell (1912) sketch.)

According to the correspondence theory as sketched here, what is key to truth is a relation between propositions and the world, which obtains when the world contains a fact that is structurally similar to the proposition. Though this is not the theory Moore and Russell held, it weaves together ideas of theirs with a more modern take on (structured) propositions. We will thus dub it the neo-classical correspondence theory. This theory offers us a paradigm example of a correspondence theory of truth.

The leading idea of the correspondence theory is familiar. It is a form of the older idea that true beliefs show the right kind of resemblance to what is believed. In contrast to earlier empiricist theories, the thesis is not that one's ideas per se resemble what they are about. Rather, the propositions which give the contents of one's true beliefs mirror reality, in virtue of entering into correspondence relations to the right pieces of it.

In this theory, it is the way the world provides us with appropriately structured entities that explains truth. Our metaphysics thus explains the nature of truth, by providing the entities needed to enter into correspondence relations.

For more on the correspondence theory, see the entry on the correspondance theory of truth .

Though initially the correspondence theory was seen by its developers as a competitor to the identity theory of truth, it was also understood as opposed to the coherence theory of truth.

We will be much briefer with the historical origins of the coherence theory than we were with the correspondence theory. Like the correspondence theory, versions of the coherence theory can be seen throughout the history of philosophy. (See, for instance, Walker (1989) for a discussion of its early modern lineage.) Like the correspondence theory, it was important in the early 20th century British origins of analytic philosophy. Particularly, the coherence theory of truth is associated with the British idealists to whom Moore and Russell were reacting.

Many idealists at that time did indeed hold coherence theories. Let us take as an example Joachim (1906). (This is the theory that Russell (1910a) attacks.) Joachim says that:

Truth in its essential nature is that systematic coherence which is the character of a significant whole (p. 76).

We will not attempt a full exposition of Joachim's view, which would take us well beyond the discussion of truth into the details of British idealism. But a few remarks about his theory will help to give substance to the quoted passage.

Perhaps most importantly, Joachim talks of ‘truth’ in the singular. This is not merely a turn of phrase, but a reflection of his monistic idealism. Joachim insists that what is true is the “whole complete truth” (p. 90). Individual judgments or beliefs are certainly not the whole complete truth. Such judgments are, according to Joachim, only true to a degree. One aspect of this doctrine is a kind of holism about content, which holds that any individual belief or judgment gets its content only in virtue of being part of a system of judgments. But even these systems are only true to a degree, measuring the extent to which they express the content of the single ‘whole complete truth’. Any real judgment we might make will only be partially true.

To flesh out Joachim's theory, we would have to explain what a significant whole is. We will not attempt that, as it leads us to some of the more formidable aspects of his view, e.g., that it is a “process of self-fulfillment” (p. 77). But it is clear that Joachim takes ‘systematic coherence’ to be stronger than consistency. In keeping with his holism about content, he rejects the idea that coherence is a relation between independently identified contents, and so finds it necessary to appeal to ‘significant wholes’.

As with the correspondence theory, it will be useful to recast the coherence theory in a more modern form, which will abstract away from some of the difficult features of British idealism. As with the correspondence theory, it can be put in a slogan:

A belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent system of beliefs.

To further the contrast with the neo-classical correspondence theory, we may add that a proposition is true if it is the content of a belief in the system, or entailed by a belief in the system. We may assume, with Joachim, that the condition of coherence will be stronger than consistency. With the idealists generally, we might suppose that features of the believing subject will come into play.

This theory is offered as an analysis of the nature of truth, and not simply a test or criterion for truth. Put as such, it is clearly not Joachim's theory (it lacks his monism, and he rejects propositions), but it is a standard take on coherence in the contemporary literature. (It is the way the coherence theory is given in Walker (1989), for instance.) Let us take this as our neo-classical version of the coherence theory. The contrast with the correspondence theory of truth is clear. Far from being a matter of whether the world provides a suitable object to mirror a proposition, truth is a matter of how beliefs are related to each-other.

The coherence theory of truth enjoys two sorts of motivations. One is primarily epistemological. Most coherence theorists also hold a coherence theory of knowledge; more specifically, a coherence theory of justification. According to this theory, to be justified is to be part of a coherent system of beliefs. An argument for this is often based on the claim that only another belief could stand in a justification relation to a belief, allowing nothing but properties of systems of belief, including coherence, to be conditions for justification. Combining this with the thesis that a fully justified belief is true forms an argument for the coherence theory of truth. (An argument along these lines is found in Blanshard (1939), who holds a form of the coherence theory closely related to Joachim's.)

The steps in this argument may be questioned by a number of contemporary epistemological views. But the coherence theory also goes hand-in-hand with its own metaphysics as well. The coherence theory is typically associated with idealism. As we have already discussed, forms of it were held by British idealists such as Joachim, and later by Blanshard (in America). An idealist should see the last step in the justification argument as quite natural. More generally, an idealist will see little (if any) room between a system of beliefs and the world it is about, leaving the coherence theory of truth as an extremely natural option.

It is possible to be an idealist without adopting a coherence theory. (For instance, many scholars read Bradley as holding a version of the identity theory of truth. See Baldwin (1991) for some discussion.) However, it is hard to see much of a way to hold the coherence theory of truth without maintaining some form of idealism. If there is nothing to truth beyond what is to be found in an appropriate system of beliefs, then it would seem one's beliefs constitute the world in a way that amounts to idealism. (Walker (1989) argues that every coherence theorist must be an idealist, but not vice-versa.)

The neo-classical correspondence theory seeks to capture the intuition that truth is a content-to-world relation. It captures this in the most straightforward way, by asking for an object in the world to pair up with a true proposition. The neo-classical coherence theory, in contrast, insists that truth is not a content-to-world relation at all; rather, it is a content-to-content, or belief-to-belief, relation. The coherence theory requires some metaphysics which can make the world somehow reflect this, and idealism appears to be it. (A distant descendant of the neo-classical coherence theory that does not require idealism will be discussed in section 6.5 below.)

For more on the coherence theory, see the entry on the coherence theory of truth .

A different perspective on truth was offered by the American pragmatists. As with the neo-classical correspondence and coherence theories, the pragmatist theories go with some typical slogans. For example, Peirce is usually understood as holding the view that:

Truth is the end of inquiry.

(See, for instance Hartshorne et al., 1931-58, §3.432.) Both Peirce and James are associated with the slogan that:

Truth is satisfactory to believe.

James (e.g., 1907) understands this principle as telling us what practical value truth has. True beliefs are guaranteed not to conflict with subsequent experience. Likewise, Peirce's slogan tells us that true beliefs will remain settled at the end of prolonged inquiry. Peirce's slogan is perhaps most typically associated with pragmatist views of truth, so we might take it to be our canonical neo-classical theory. However, the contemporary literature does not seem to have firmly settled upon a received ‘neo-classical’ pragmatist theory.

In her reconstruction (upon which we have relied heavily), Haack (1976) notes that the pragmatists' views on truth also make room for the idea that truth involves a kind of correspondence, insofar as the scientific method of inquiry is answerable to some independent world. Peirce, for instance, does not reject a correspondence theory outright; rather, he complains that it provides merely a ‘nominal’ or ‘transcendental’ definition of truth (e.g Hartshorne et al., 1931-58, §5.553, 5.572), which is cut off from practical matters of experience, belief, and doubt (§5.416). (See Misak (1991) for an extended discussion.)

This marks an important difference between the pragmatist theories and the coherence theory we just considered. Even so, pragmatist theories also have an affinity with coherence theories, insofar as we expect the end of inquiry to be a coherent system of beliefs. As Haack also notes, James maintains an important verificationist idea: truth is what is verifiable. We will see this idea re-appear in section 4.

James' views are discussed further in the entry on William James . Peirce's views are discussed further in the entry on Charles Sanders Peirce .

2. Tarski's theory of truth

Modern forms of the classical theories survive. Many of these modern theories, notably correspondence theories, draw on ideas developed by Tarski.

In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that his seminal work on truth (1935) is very much of a piece with other works in mathematical logic, such as his (1931), and as much as anything this work lays the ground-work for the modern subject of model theory—a branch of mathematical logic, not the metaphysics of truth. In this respect, Tarski's work provides a set of highly useful tools that may be employed in a wide range of philosophical projects.

Tarski's work has a number of components, which we will consider in turn.

In the classical debate on truth at the beginning of the 20th century we considered in section 1, the issue of truth-bearers was of great significance. For instance, Moore and Russell's turn to the correspondence theory was driven by their views on whether there are propositions to be the bearers of truth. Many theories we reviewed took beliefs to be the bearers of truth.

In contrast, Tarski and much of the subsequent work on truth takes sentences to be the primary bearers of truth. This is not an entirely novel development: Russell (1956) also takes truth to apply to sentence (which he calls ‘propositions’ in that text). But whereas much of the classical debate takes the issue of the primary bearers of truth to be a substantial and important metaphysical one, Tarski is quite casual about it. His primary reason for taking sentences as truth-bearers is convenience, and he explicitly distances himself from any commitment about the philosophically contentious issues surrounding other candidate truth-bearers (e.g., Tarski, 1944). (Russell (1956) makes a similar suggestion that sentences are the appropriate truth-bearers “for the purposes of logic” (p. 184), though he still takes the classical metaphysical issues to be important.)

We will return to the issue of the primary bearers of truth in section 6.1. For the moment, it will be useful to simply follow Tarski's lead. But it should be stressed that for this discussion, sentences are fully interpreted sentences, having meanings. We will also assume that the sentences in question do not change their content across occasions of use, i.e., that they display no context-dependence. We are taking sentences to be what Quine (1960) calls ‘eternal sentences’.

In some places (e.g., Tarski, 1944), Tarski refers to his view as the ‘semantic conception of truth’. It is not entirely clear just what Tarski had in mind by this, but it is clear enough that Tarski's theory defines truth for sentences in terms of concepts like reference and satisfaction, which are intimately related to the basic semantic functions of names and predicates (according to many approaches to semantics).

Let us suppose we have a fixed language L whose sentences are fully interpreted. The basic question Tarski poses is what an adequate theory of truth for L would be. Tarski's answer is embodied in what he calls Convention T :

An adequate theory of truth for L must imply, for each sentence φ of L

⌈ φ ⌉  is true if and only if φ .

(We have simplified Tarski's presentation somewhat.) This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. Given the assumption that L is fully interpreted, we may assume that each sentence φ in fact has a truth value. In light of this, Convention T guarantees that the truth predicate given by the theory will be extensionally correct , i.e., have as its extension all and only the true sentences of L .

Convention T draws our attention to the biconditionals of the form

⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ ,

which are usually called the Tarski biconditionals for a language L .

Tarski does not merely propose a condition of adequacy for theories of truth, he also shows how to meet it. One of his insights is that if the language L displays the right structure, then truth for L can be defined recursively. For instance, let us suppose that L is a simple formal language, containing two atomic sentences ‘snow is white’ and ‘grass is green’, and the sentential connectives ∨ and ¬.

In spite of its simplicity, L contains infinitely many distinct sentences. But truth can be defined for all of them by recursion.

• ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.
• ‘Grass is green’ is true if and only if grass is green.
• ⌈ φ ∨ ψ ⌉ is true if and only if ⌈ φ ⌉ is true or ⌈ ψ ⌉ is true.
• ⌈ ¬φ ⌉ is true if and only if it is not the case that ⌈ φ ⌉ is true.

This theory satisfies Convention T.

This may look trivial, but in defining an extensionally correct truth predicate for an infinite language with four clauses, we have made a modest application of a very powerful technique.

Tarski's techniques go further, however. They do not stop with atomic sentences. Tarski notes that truth for each atomic sentence can be defined in terms of two closely related notions: reference and satisfaction . Let us consider a language L ′ , just like L except that instead of simply having two atomic sentences, L ′ breaks atomic sentences into terms and predicates. L ′ contains terms ‘snow’ and ‘grass’ (let us engage in the idealization that these are simply singular terms), and predicates ‘is white’ and ‘is green’. So L ′ is like L , but also contains the sentences ‘Snow is green’ and ‘Grass is white’.)

We can define truth for atomic sentences of L ′ in the following way.

• ‘Snow’ refers to snow.
• ‘Grass’ refers to grass.
• a satisfies ‘is white’ if and only if a is white.
• a satisfies ‘is green’ if and only if a is green.
• For any atomic sentence ⌈ t is P ⌉ : ⌈ t is P ⌉ is true if and only if the referent of ⌈ t ⌉ satisfies ⌈ P ⌉ .

One of Tarski's key insights is that the apparatus of satisfaction allows for a recursive definition of truth for sentences with quantifiers , though we will not examine that here. We could repeat the recursion clauses for L to produce a full theory of truth for L ′.

Let us say that a Tarskian theory of truth is a recursive theory, built up in ways similar to the theory of truth for L ′. Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. A Tarskian theory of truth for a language L can be used to show that theories in L are consistent. This was especially important to Tarski, who was concerned the Liar paradox would make theories in languages containing a truth predicate inconsistent.

For more, see the entry on Tarski's truth definitions .

3. Correspondence revisited

The correspondence theory of truth expresses the very natural idea that truth is a content-to-world or word-to-world relation: what we say or think is true or false in virtue of the way the world turns out to be. We suggested that, against a background like the metaphysics of facts, it does so in a straightforward way. But the idea of correspondence is certainly not specific to this framework. Indeed, it is controversial whether a correspondence theory should rely on any particular metaphysics at all. The basic idea of correspondence, as Tarski (1944) and others have suggested, is captured in the slogan from Aristotle's Metaphysics Γ 7.27, “to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true” (Ross, 1928). ‘What is’, it is natural enough to say, is a fact, but this natural turn of phrase may well not require a full-blown metaphysics of facts.

Yet without the metaphysics of facts, the notion of correspondence as discussed in section 1.1 loses substance. This has led to two distinct strands in contemporary thinking about the correspondence theory. One strand seeks to recast the correspondence theory in a way that does not rely on any particular ontology. Another seeks to find an appropriate ontology for correspondence, either in terms of facts or other entities. We will consider each in turn.

Tarski himself sometimes suggested that his theory was a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Whether his own theory is a correspondence theory, and even whether it provides any substantial philosophical account of truth at all, is a matter of controversy. (One rather drastic negative assessment from Putnam (1985-86, p. 333) is that “As a philosophical account of truth, Tarski's theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.”) But a number of philosophers (e.g., Davidson, 1969; Field, 1972) have seen Tarski's theory as providing at least the core of a correspondence theory of truth which dispenses with the metaphysics of facts.

Tarski's theory shows how truth for a sentence is determined by certain properties of its constituents; in particular, by properties of reference and satisfaction (as well as by the logical constants). As it is normally understood, reference is the preeminent word-to-world relation. Satisfaction is naturally understood as a word-to-world relation as well, which relates a predicate to the things in the world that bear it. The Tarskian recursive definition shows how truth is determined by reference and satisfaction, and so is in effect determined by the things in the world we refer to and the properties they bear. This, one might propose, is all the correspondence we need. It is not correspondence of sentences or propositions to facts; rather, it is correspondence of our expressions to objects and the properties they bear, and then ways of working out the truth of claims in terms of this.

This is certainly not the neo-classical idea of correspondence. In not positing facts, it does not posit any single object to which a true proposition or sentence might correspond. Rather, it shows how truth might be worked out from basic word-to-world relations. However, a number of authors have noted that Tarski's theory cannot by itself provide us with such an account of truth. As we will discuss more fully in section 4.2, Tarski's apparatus is in fact compatible with theories of truth that are certainly not correspondence theories.

Field (1972), in an influential discussion and diagnosis of what is lacking in Tarski's account, in effect points out that whether we really have something worthy of the name ‘correspondence’ depends on our having notions of reference and satisfaction which genuinely establish word-to-world relations. (Field does not use the term ‘correspondence’, but does talk about e.g., the “connection between words and things” (p. 373).) By itself, Field notes, Tarski's theory does not offer an account of reference and satisfaction at all. Rather, it offers a number of disquotation clauses , such as:

These clauses have an air of triviality (though whether they are to be understood as trivial principles or statements of non-trivial semantic facts has been a matter of some debate). With Field, we might propose to supplement clauses like these with an account of reference and satisfaction. Such a theory should tell us what makes it the case that the word ‘snow’ refer to snow. (In 1972, Field was envisaging a physicalist account, along the lines of the causal theory of reference.) This should inter alia guarantee that truth is really determined by word-to-world relations, so in conjunction with the Tarskian recursive definition, it could provide a correspondence theory of truth.

Such a theory clearly does not rely on a metaphysics of facts. Indeed, it is in many ways metaphysically neutral, as it does not take a stand on the nature of particulars, or of the properties or universals that underwrite facts about satisfaction. However, it may not be entirely devoid of metaphysical implications, as we will discuss further in section 4.1.

There have been a number of correspondence theories that do make use of facts. Some are notably different from the neo-classical theory sketched in section 1.1. For instance, Austin (1950) proposes a view in which each statement (understood roughly as an utterance event) corresponds to both a fact or situation, and a type of situation. It is true if the former is of the latter type. This theory (which has been developed by situation theory (e.g., Barwise and Perry, 1986) rejects the idea that correspondence is a kind of mirroring between a fact and a proposition. Rather, correspondence relations to Austin are entirely conventional. As an ordinary language philosopher, Austin grounds his notion of fact more in linguistic usage than in an articulated metaphysics, but he defends his use of fact-talk in Austin (1961b).

In a somewhat more Tarskian spirit, formal theories of facts or states of affairs have also been developed. For instance, Taylor (1976) provides a recursive definition of a collection of ‘states of affairs’ for a given language. Taylor's states of affairs seem to reflect the notion of fact at work in the neo-classical theory, though as an exercise in logic, they are officially n -tuples of objects and intensions .

There are more metaphysically robust notions of fact in the current literature. For instance, Armstrong (1997) defends a metaphysics in which facts (under the name ‘states of affairs’) are metaphysically fundamental. The view has much in common with the neo-classical one. Like the neo-classical view, Armstrong endorses a version of the correspondence theory. States of affairs are truthmakers for propositions, though Armstrong argues that there may be many such truthmakers for a given proposition, and vice versa. (Armstrong also envisages a naturalistic account of propositions as classes of equivalent belief-tokens.)

Armstrong's primary argument is what he calls the ‘truthmaker argument’. It begins by advancing a truthmaker principle , which holds that for any given truth, there must be a truthmaker—a “something in the world which makes it the case, that serves as an ontological ground, for this truth” (p. 115). It is then argued that facts are the appropriate truthmakers.

In contrast to the approach to correspondence discussed in section 3.1, which offered correspondence with minimal ontological implications, this view returns to the ontological basis of correspondence that was characteristic of the neo-classical theory.

The truthmaker principle is often put as the schema:

If φ , then there is an x such that necessarily, if x exists, then φ .

(Fox (1987) proposed putting the principle this way, rather than explicitly in terms of truth.)

The truthmaker principle expresses the ontological aspect of the neo-classical correspondence theory. Not merely must truth obtain in virtue of word-to-world relations, but there must be a thing that makes each truth true.

The neo-classical correspondence theory, and Armstrong, cast facts as the appropriate truthmakers. However, it is a non-trivial step from the truthmaker principle to the existence of facts. There are a number of proposals in the literature for how other sorts of objects could be truthmakers; for instance, tropes (called ‘moments’, in Mulligan et al., 1984). Parsons (1999) argues that the truthmaker principle (presented in a somewhat different form) is compatible with there being only concrete particulars.

As we saw in discussing the neo-classical correspondence theory, truthmaker theories, and fact theories in particular, raise a number of issues. One which has been discussed at length, for instance, is whether there are negative facts . Negative facts would be the truthmakers for negated sentences. Russell (1956) notoriously expresses ambivalence about whether there are negative facts. Armstrong (1997) rejects them, while Beall (2000) defends them.

4. Realism and anti-realism

The neo-classical theories we surveyed in section 1 made the theory of truth an application of their background metaphysics (and in some cases epistemology). In section 2 and especially in section 3, we returned to the issue of what sorts of ontological commitments might go with the theory of truth. There we saw a range of options, from relatively ontologically non-committal theories, to theories requiring highly specific ontologies.

There is another way in which truth relates to metaphysics. Many ideas about realism and anti-realism are closely related to ideas about truth. Indeed, many approaches to questions about realism and anti-realism simply make them questions about truth.

In discussing the approach to correspondence of section 3.1, we noted that it has few ontological requirements. It relies on there being objects of reference, and something about the world which makes for determinate satisfaction relations; but beyond that, it is ontologically neutral. But as we mentioned there, this is not to say that it has no metaphysical implications. A correspondence theory of truth, of any kind, is often taken to embody a form of realism .

The key features of realism, as we will take it, are that:

• The world exists objectively, independently of the ways we think about it or describe it.
• Our thoughts and claims are about that world.

(Wright (1992) offers a nice statement of this way of thinking about realism.) These theses imply that our claims are objectively true or false, depending on how the world they are about is. The world that we represent in our thoughts or language is an objective world. (Realism may be restricted to some subject-matter, or range of discourse, but for simplicity, we will talk about only its global form.)

It is often argued that these theses require some form of the correspondence theory of truth. (Putnam (1978, p. 18) notes, “Whatever else realists say, they typically say that they believe in a ‘correspondence theory of truth’.”) At least, they are supported by the kind of correspondence theory without facts discussed in section 3.1, such as Field's proposal. Such a theory will provide an account of objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and show how these determine the truth or falsehood of what we say about the world. Field's own approach (1972) to this problem seeks a physicalist explanation of reference. But realism is a more general idea than physicalism. Any theory that provides objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and builds up a theory of truth from them, would give a form of realism. (Making the objectivity of reference the key to realism is characteristic of work of Putnam, e.g., 1978.)

Another important mark of realism expressed in terms of truth is the property of bivalence . As Dummett has stressed (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1983; 1991), a realist should see there being a fact of the matter one way or the other about whether any given claim is correct. Hence, one important mark of realism is that it goes together with the principle of bivalence : every truth-bearer (sentence or proposition) is true or false. In much of his work, Dummett has made this the characteristic mark of realism, and often identifies realism about some subject-matter with accepting bivalence for discourse about that subject-matter. At the very least, it captures a great deal of what is more loosely put in the statement of realism above.

Either the approach makes the theory of truth—or truth-and-reference—the primary vehicle for an account of realism. A theory of truth which substantiates bivalence, or a determinate reference relation, does most of the work of giving a realistic metaphysics. It might even simply be a realistic metaphysics.

We have thus turned on its head the relation of truth to metaphysics we saw in our discussion of the neo-classical correspondence theory in section 1.1. There, a correspondence theory of truth was built upon a substantial metaphysics. Here, we have seen how articulating a theory that captures the idea of correspondence can be crucial to providing a realist metaphysics. (For another perspective on realism and truth, see Alston (1996). Devitt (1984) offers an opposing view to the kind we have sketched here, which rejects any characterization of realism in terms of truth or other semantic concepts.)

In light of our discussion in section 1.1.1, we should pause to note that the connection between realism and the correspondence theory of truth is not absolute. When Moore and Russell held the identity theory of truth, they were most certainly realists. The right kind of metaphysics of propositions can support a realist view, as can a metaphysics of facts. The modern form of realism we have been discussing here seeks to avoid basing itself on such particular ontological commitments, and so prefers to rely on the kind of correspondence-without-facts approach discussed in section 3.1. This is not to say that realism will be devoid of ontological commitments, but the commitments will flow from whichever specific claims about some subject-matter are taken to be true.

For more on realism and truth, see the entry on realism .

It should come as no surprise that the relation between truth and metaphysics seen by modern realists can also be exploited by anti-realists. Many modern anti-realists see the theory of truth as the key to formulating and defending their views. With Dummett (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1991), we might expect the characteristic mark of anti-realism to be the rejection of bivalence.

Indeed, many contemporary forms of anti-realism may be formulated as theories of truth, and they do typically deny bivalence. Anti-realism comes in many forms, but let us take as an example a (somewhat crude) form of verificationism. Such a theory holds that a claim is correct just insofar as it is in principle verifiable , i.e., there is a verification procedure we could in principle carry out which would yield the answer that the claim in question was verified.

So understood, verificationism is a theory of truth. The claim is not that verification is the most important epistemic notion, but that truth just is verifiability. As with the kind of realism we considered in section 4.1, this view expresses its metaphysical commitments in its explanation of the nature of truth. Truth is not, to this view, a fully objective matter, independent of us or our thoughts. Instead, truth is constrained by our abilities to verify, and is thus constrained by our epistemic situation. Truth is to a significant degree an epistemic matter, which is typical of many anti-realist positions.

As Dummett says, the verificationist notion of truth does not appear to support bivalence. Any statement that reaches beyond what we can in principle verify or refute (verify its negation) will be a counter-example to bivalence. Take, for instance, the claim that there is some substance, say uranium, present in some region of the universe too distant to be inspected by us within the expected lifespan of the universe. Insofar as this really would be in principle unverifiable, we have no reason to maintain it is true or false according to the verificationist theory of truth.

Verificationism of this sort is one of a family of anti-realist views. Another example is the view that identifies truth with warranted assertibility. Assertibility, as well as verifiability, has been important in Dummett's work. (See also works of McDowell, e.g., 1976 and Wright, e.g., 1976; 1982; 1992.)

Anti-realism of the Dummettian sort is not a descendant of the coherence theory of truth per se . But in some ways, as Dummett himself has noted, it might be construed as a descendant—perhaps very distant—of idealism. If idealism is the most drastic form of rejection of the independence of mind and world, Dummettian anti-realism is a more modest form, which sees epistemology imprinted in the world, rather than the wholesale embedding of world into mind. At the same time, the idea of truth as warranted assertibility or verifiability reiterates a theme from the pragmatist views of truth we surveyed in section 1.3.

Anti-realist theories of truth, like the realist ones we discussed in section 4.1, can generally make use of the Tarskian apparatus. Convention T, in particular, does not discriminate between realist and anti-realist notions of truth. Likewise, the base clauses of a Tarskian recursive theory are given as disquotation principles, which are neutral between realist and anti-realist understandings of notions like reference. As we saw with the correspondence theory, giving a full account of the nature of truth will generally require more than the Tarskian apparatus itself. How an anti-realist is to explain the basic concepts that go into a Tarskian theory is a delicate matter. As Dummett and Wright have investigated in great detail, it appears that the background logic in which the theory is developed will have to be non-classical.

For more on anti-realism and truth, see the entry on realism .

Many commentators see a close connection between Dummett's anti-realism and the pragmatists' views of truth, in that both put great weight on ideas of verifiability or assertibility. Dummett himself stressed parallels between anti-realism and intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics.

Another view on truth which returns to pragmatist themes is the ‘internal realism’ of Putnam (1981). There Putnam glosses truth as what would be justified under ideal epistemic conditions. With the pragmatists, Putnam sees the ideal conditions as something which can be approximated, echoing the idea of truth as the end of inquiry.

Putnam is cautious about calling his view ant-realism, preferring the label ‘internal realism’. But he is clear that he sees his view as opposed to realism (‘metaphysical realism’, as he calls it).

5. Deflationism

We began in section 1 with the neo-classical theories, which explained the nature of truth within wider metaphysical systems. We then considered some alternatives in sections 2 and 3, some of which had more modest ontological implications. But we still saw in section 4 that substantial theories of truth tend to imply metaphysical theses, or even embody metaphysical positions.

One long-standing trend in the discussion of truth is to insist that truth really does not carry metaphysical significance at all. It does not, as it has no significance on its own. A number of different ideas have been advanced along these lines, under the general heading of deflationism .

Deflationist ideas appear quite early on, including a well-known argument against correspondence in Frege (1918-19). However, many deflationists take their cue from an idea of Ramsey (1927), often called the equivalence thesis :

⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true ⌉ has the same meaning as φ.

(Ramsey himself takes truth-bearers to be propositions rather than sentences. Glanzberg (2003b) questions whether Ramsey's account of propositions really makes him a deflationist.)

This can be taken as the core of a theory of truth, often called the redundancy theory . The redundancy theory holds that there is no property of truth at all, and appearances of the expression ‘true’ in our sentences are redundant, having no effect on what we express.

The equivalence thesis can also be understood in terms of speech acts rather than meaning:

To assert that ⌈ φ ⌉ is true is just to assert that φ.

This view was advanced by Strawson (1949); Strawson (1950), though Strawson also argues that there are other important aspects of speech acts involving ‘true’ beyond what is asserted. For instance, they may be acts of confirming or granting what someone else said. (Strawson would also object to my making sentences the bearers of truth.)

In either its speech act or meaning form, the redundancy theory argues there is no property of truth. It is commonly noted that the equivalence thesis itself is not enough to sustain the redundancy theory. It merely holds that when truth occurs in the outermost position in a sentence, and the full sentence to which truth is predicated is quoted, then truth is eliminable. What happens in other environments is left to be seen. Modern developments of the redundancy theory include Grover et al. (1975).

The equivalence principle looks familiar: it has something like the form of the Tarski biconditionals discussed in section 2.2. However, it is a stronger principle, which identifies the two sides of the biconditional—either their meanings or the speech acts performed with them. The Tarski biconditionals themselves are simply material biconditionals.

A number of deflationary theories look to the Tarski biconditionals rather than the full equivalence principle. Their key idea is that even if we do not insist on redundancy, we may still hold the following theses:

• For a given language L and every φ in L , the biconditionals ⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ hold by definition (or analytically, or trivially, or by stipulation …).
• This is all there is to say about the concept of truth.

We will refer to views which adopt these as minimalist . Officially, this is the name of the view of Horwich (1990), but we will apply it somewhat more widely. (Horwich's view differs in some specific respects from what is presented here, such as predicating truth of propositions, but we believe it is close enough to what is sketched here to justify the name.)

The second thesis, that the Tarski biconditionals are all there is to say about truth, captures something similar to the redundancy theory's view. It comes near to saying that truth is not a property at all; to the extent that truth is a property, there is no more to it than the disquotational pattern of the Tarski biconditionals. As Horwich puts it, there is no substantial underlying metaphysics to truth. And as Soames (1984) stresses, certainly nothing that could ground as far-reaching a view as realism or anti-realism.

If there is no property of truth, or no substantial property of truth, what role does our term ‘true’ play? Deflationists typically note that the truth predicate provides us with a convenient device of disquotation . Such a device allows us to make some useful claims which we could not formulate otherwise, such as the blind ascription ‘The next thing that Bill says will be true’. (For more on blind ascriptions and their relation to deflationism, see Azzouni, 2001.) A predicate obeying the Tarski biconditionals can also be used to express what would otherwise be (potentially) infinite conjunctions or disjunctions, such as the notorious statement of Papal infallibility put ‘Everything the Pope says is true’. (Suggestions like this are found in Leeds, 1978 and Quine, 1970.)

Recognizing these uses for a truth predicate, we might simply think of it as introduced into a language by stipulation . The Tarski biconditionals themselves might be stipulated, as the minimalists envisage. One could also construe the clauses of a recursive Tarskian theory as stipulated. (There are some significant logical differences between these two options. See Halbach (1999) and Ketland (1999) for discussion.) Other deflationists, such as Beall (forthcoming) or Field (1994), might prefer to focus here on rules of inference or rules of use, rather than the Tarski biconditionals themselves.

There are also important connections between deflationist ideas about truth and certain ideas about meaning. These are fundamental to the deflationism of Field (1986); Field (1994), which will be discussed in section 6.3. For an insightful critique of deflationism, see Gupta (1993).

For more on deflationism, see the entry on the deflationary theory of truth .

6. Truth and language

One of the important themes in the literature on truth is its connection to meaning, or more generally, to language. This has proved an important application of ideas about truth, and an important issue in the study of truth itself. This section will consider a number of issues relating truth and language.

There have been many debates in the literature over what the primary bearers of truth are. Candidates typically include beliefs, propositions, sentences, and utterances. We have already seen in section 1 that the classical debates on truth took this issue very seriously, and what sort of theory of truth was viable was often seen to depend on what the bearers of truth are.

In spite of the number of options under discussion, and the significance that has sometimes been placed on the choice, there is an important similarity between candidate truth-bearers. Consider the role of truth-bearers in the correspondence theory, for instance. We have seen versions of it which take beliefs, propositions, or interpreted sentences to be the primary bearers of truth. But all of them rely upon the idea that their truth-bearers represent the world. It is in virtue of representing the world that truth-bearers are able to enter into correspondence relations. Truth-bearers are things which represent, and are true or false depending on whether they correctly represent the facts in the world.

Exactly the same point can be made for the anti-realist theories of truth we saw in section 4.2, though with different accounts of how truth-bearers represent, and what the world contributes. Though it is somewhat more delicate, something similar can be said for coherence theories, which usually take beliefs, or whole systems of beliefs, as the primary truth-bearers. Though a coherence theory will hardly talk of beliefs representing the facts, it is crucial to the coherence theory that beliefs are contentful beliefs of agents, and that they can enter into coherence relations. Noting the complications in interpreting the genuine classical coherence theories, it appears fair to note that this requires truth-bearers to be representations, however the background metaphysics (presumably idealism) understands representation.

Though Tarski works with sentences, the same can be said of his theory. The sentences to which Tarski's theory applies are fully interpreted, and so also are representations. They characterize the world as being some way or another, and this in turn determines whether they are true or false. Indeed, Tarski needs there to be a fact of the matter about whether each sentence is true or false (abstracting away from context dependence), to ensure that the Tarski biconditionals do their job of fixing the extension of ‘is true’. (But note that just what this fact of the matter consists in is left open by the Tarskian apparatus.)

We thus find the usual candidate truth-bearers linked in a tight circle: interpreted sentences, the propositions they express, the belief speakers might hold towards them, and the acts of assertion they might perform with them are all connected by providing representations. This makes them reasonable bearers of truth. For this reason, it seems, contemporary debates on truth have been much less concerned with the issue of truth-bearers than were the classical ones. Some issues remain, of course. Different metaphysical assumptions may place primary weight on some particular node in the circle, and some metaphysical views still challenge the existence of some of the nodes. Perhaps more importantly, different views on the nature of representation itself might cast doubt on the coherence of some of the nodes. Notoriously for instance, Quineans (e.g., Quine, 1960) deny the existence of intensional entities, including propositions. Even so, it increasingly appears doubtful that attention to truth per se will bias us towards one particular primary bearer of truth.

There is a related, but somewhat different point, which is important to understanding the theories we have canvassed.

The neo-classical theories of truth start with truth-bearers which are already understood to be representational, and explain how they get their truth values. But along the way, they often do something more. Take the neo-classical correspondence theory, for instance. This theory, in effect, starts with a view of how propositions represent the world. They do so by having constituents in the world, which are brought together in the right way. There are many complications about the nature of representation, but at a minimum, this tells us what the truth conditions associated with a proposition are. The theory then explains how such truth conditions can lead to the truth value true , by the right fact existing .

Many theories of truth are like the neo-classical correspondence theory in being as much theories of how truth-bearers represent as of how their truth values are fixed. Again, abstracting from some complications about representation, this makes them theories both of truth conditions and truth values . The Tarskian theory of truth can be construed this way too. This can be seen both in the way the Tarski biconditionals are understood, and how a recursive theory of truth is understood. As we explained Convention T in section 2.2, the primary role of a Tarski biconditional of the form ⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ is to fix whether φ is in the extension of ‘is true’ or not. But it can also be seen as stating the truth conditions of φ. Both rely on the fact that the unquoted occurrence of φ is an occurrence of an interpreted sentence, which has a truth value, but also provides its truth conditions upon occasions of use.

Likewise, the base clauses of the recursive definition of truth, those for reference and satisfaction, are taken to state the relevant semantic properties of constituents of an interpreted sentence. In discussing Tarski's theory of truth in section 2, we focused on how these determine the truth value of a sentence. But they also show us the truth conditions of a sentence are determined by these semantic properties. For instance, for a simple sentence like ‘Snow is white’, the theory tells us that the sentence is true if the referent of ‘Snow’ satisfies ‘white’. This can be understood as telling us that the truth conditions of ‘Snow is white’ are those conditions in which the referent of ‘Snow’ satisfies the predicate ‘is white’.

As we saw in sections 3 and 4, the Tarskian apparatus is often seen as needing some kind of supplementation to provide a full theory of truth. A full theory of truth conditions will likewise rest on how the Tarskian apparatus is put to use. In particular, just what kinds of conditions those in which the referent of ‘snow’ satisfies the predicate ‘is white’ are will depend on whether we opt for realist or anti-realist theories. The realist option will simply look for the conditions under which the stuff snow bears the property of whiteness; the anti-realist option will look to the conditions under which it can be verified, or asserted with warrant, that snow is white.

There is a broad family of theories of truth which are theories of truth conditions as well as truth values. This family includes the correspondence theory in all its forms—classical and modern. Yet this family is much wider than the correspondence theory, and wider than realist theories of truth more generally. Indeed, virtually all the theories of truth that make contributions to the realism/anti-realism debate are theories of truth conditions. In a slogan, for many approaches to truth, a theory of truth is a theory of truth conditions.

Any theory that provides a substantial account of truth conditions can offer a simple account of truth values: a truth-bearer provides truth conditions, and it is true if and only if the actual way things are is among them. Because of this, any such theory will imply a strong, but very particular, biconditional, close in form to the Tarski biconditionals. It can be made most vivid if we think of propositions as sets of truth conditions. Let p be a proposition, i.e., a set of truth conditions, and let a be the ‘actual world’, the condition that actually obtains. Then we can almost trivially see:

p  is true if and only if  a ∈ p .

This is presumably necessary. But it is important to observe that it is in one respect crucially different from the genuine Tarski biconditionals. It makes no use of a non-quoted sentence, or in fact any sentence at all. It does not have the disquotational character of the Tarski biconditionals.

Though this may look like a principle that deflationists should applaud, it is not. Rather, it shows that deflationists cannot really hold a truth-conditional view of content at all. If they do, then they inter alia have a non-deflationary theory of truth, simply by linking truth value to truth conditions through the above biconditional. It is typical of thoroughgoing deflationist theories to present a non-truth-conditional theory of the contents of sentences: a non-truth-conditional account of what makes truth-bearers representational. We take it this is what is offered, for instance, by the use theory of propositions in Horwich (1990). It is certainly one of the leading ideas of Field (1986); Field (1994), which explore how a conceptual role account of content would ground a deflationist view of truth. Once one has a non-truth-conditional account of content, it is then possible to add a deflationist truth predicate, and use this to give purely deflationist statements of truth conditions. But the starting point must be a non-truth-conditional view of what makes truth-bearers representational.

Both deflationists and anti-realists start with something other than correspondence truth conditions. But whereas an anti-realist will propose a different theory of truth conditions, a deflationists will start with an account of content which is not a theory of truth conditions at all. The deflationist will then propose that the truth predicate, given by the Tarski biconditionals, is an additional device, not for understanding content, but for disquotation. It is a useful device, as we discussed in section 5.3, but it has nothing to do with content. To a deflationist, the representational properties of truth-bearers have nothing to do with truth.

It has been an influential idea, since the seminal work of Davidson (e.g., 1967), to see a Tarskian theory of truth as a theory of meaning. At least, as we have seen, a Tarskian theory can be seen as showing how the truth conditions of a sentence are determined by the semantic properties of its parts. More generally, as we see in much of the work of Davidson and of Dummett (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1983; 1991), giving a theory of truth conditions can be understood as a crucial part of giving a theory of meaning. Thus, any theory of truth that falls into the broad category of those which are theories of truth conditions can be seen as part of a theory of meaning.

A number of commentators on Tarski (e.g., Etchemendy, 1988; Soames, 1984) have observed that the Tarskian apparatus needs to be understood in a particular way to make it suitable for giving a theory of meaning. Tarski's work is often taken to show how to define a truth predicate. If it is so used, then whether or not a sentence is true becomes, in essence, a truth of mathematics. Presumably what truth conditions sentences of a natural language have is a contingent matter, so a truth predicate defined in this way cannot be used to give a theory of meaning for them. But the Tarskian apparatus need not be used just to explicitly define truth. The recursive characterization of truth can be used to state the semantic properties of sentences and their constituents, as a theory of meaning should. In such an application, truth is not taken to be explicitly defined, but rather the truth conditions of sentences are taken to be described. (See Heck, 1997 for more discussion.)

Inspired by Quine (e.g., 1960), Davidson himself is well known for taking a different approach to using a theory of truth as a theory of meaning than is implicit in Field (1972). Whereas a Field-inspired approach is based on a causal account of reference, Davidson (e.g., 1973) proposes a process of radical interpretation in which an interpreter builds a Tarskian theory to interpret a speaker as holding beliefs which are consistent, coherent, and largely true.

This led Davidson (1986) to argue that most of our beliefs are true—a conclusion that squares well with the coherence theory of truth. This is a weaker claim than the neo-classical coherence theory would make. It does not insist that all the members of any coherent set of beliefs are true, or that truth simply consists in being a member of such a coherent set. But all the same, the conclusion that most of our beliefs are true, because their contents are to be understood through a process of radical interpretation which will make them a coherent and rational system, has a clear affinity with the neo-classical coherence theory.

At the same time, Davidson insists that this observation is compatible with a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Indeed, insofar as the Tarskian theory of truth provides a correspondence theory, radical interpretation builds a correspondence theory of truth into its account of content. As we have seen, whether or not this really amounts to a correspondence theory is disputed. As we saw in section 3.1, the Tarskian theory by itself is weaker than the kind of theory proposed by Field (1972); as we saw in section 4.2, it is compatible with anti-realist views of truth. Nonetheless, the Tarskian clauses themselves state more of about the relation of word-to-world than the neo-classical coherence theory anticipated, which leads Davidson to the conclusion that coherence results in correspondence.

For more on Davidson, see the entry on Donald Davidson .

The relation between truth and meaning is not the only place where truth and language relate closely. Another is the idea, also much-stressed in the writings of Dummett (e.g., 1959), of the relation between truth and assertion. Again, it fits into a platitude:

Truth is the aim of assertion.

A person making an assertion, the platitude holds, aims to say something true.

It is easy to cast this platitude in a way that appears false. Surely, many speakers do not aim to say something true. Any speaker who lies does not. Any speaker whose aim is to flatter, or to deceive, aims at something other than truth.

The motivation for the truth-assertion platitude is rather different. It looks at assertion as a practice, in which certain rules are constitutive . As is often noted, the natural parallel here is with games, like chess or baseball, which are defined by certain rules. The platitude holds that it is constitutive of the practice of making assertions that assertions aim at truth. An assertion by its nature presents what it is saying as true, and any assertion which fails to be true is ipso facto liable to criticism, whether or not the person making the assertion themself wished to have said something true or to have lied.

Dummett's original discussion of this idea was partially a criticism of deflationism (in particular, of views of Strawson, 1950). The idea that we fully explain the concept of truth by way of the Tarski biconditionals is challenged by the claim that the truth-assertion platitude is fundamental to truth. As Dummett there put it, what is left out by the Tarski biconditionals, and captured by the truth-assertion platitude, is the point of the concept of truth, or what the concept is used for. (For further discussion, see Glanzberg, 2003a and Wright, 1992.)

Whether or not assertion has such constitutive rules is, of course, controversial. But among those who accept that it does, the place of truth in the constitutive rules is itself controversial. The leading alternative, defended by Williamson (1996), is that knowledge, not truth, is fundamental to the constitutive rules of assertion. Williamson defends an account of assertion based on the rule that one must assert only what one knows.

• Alston, William P., 1996, A Realistic Conception of Truth , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Armstrong, David M., 1997, A World of States of Affairs , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Austin, J. L., 1950, “Truth”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 24: 111-129. Reprinted in Austin (1961a).
• Austin, J. L., 1961a, Philosophical Papers , Oxford: Clarendon Press. Edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock.
• Austin, J. L., 1961b, “Unfair to facts”, in Philosophical Papers , J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, eds., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 102-122.
• Azzouni, Jody, 2001, “Truth via anaphorically unrestricted quantifiers”, Journal of Philosophical Logic , 30: 329-354.
• Baldwin, Thomas, 1991, “The identity theory of truth”, Mind , 100: 35-52.
• Barwise, Jon and Perry, John, 1986, Situations and Attitudes , Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Beall, J. C., 2000, “On truthmakers for negative truths”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 78: 264-268.
• Beall, J. C., forthcoming, “Transparent disquotationalism”, in Deflationism and Paradox , J. C. Beall and B. Armour-Garb, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Blanshard, Brand, 1939, The Nature of Thought , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Cartwright, Richard, 1987, “A neglected theory of truth”, in Philosophical Essays , Cambridge: MIT Press, 71-93.
• Davidson, Donald, 1967, “Truth and meaning”, Synthese , 17: 304-323. Reprinted in Davidson (1984).
• Davidson, Donald, 1969, “True to the facts”, Journal of Philosophy , 66: 748-764. Reprinted in Davidson (1984).
• Davidson, Donald, 1973, “Radical interpretation”, Dialectica , 27: 313-328.
• Davidson, Donald, 1984, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Davidson, Donald, 1986, “A coherence theory of truth and knowledge”, in Truth and Interpretation , E. Lepore, ed., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 307-319.
• Devitt, Michael, 1984, Realism and Truth , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Dummett, Michael, 1959, “Truth”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 59: 141-162. Reprinted in Dummett (1978).
• Dummett, Michael, 1976, “What is a theory of meaning? (II)”, in Truth and Meaning , G. Evans and J. McDowell, eds., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted in Dummett (1993).
• Dummett, Michael, 1978, Truth and Other Enigmas , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Dummett, Michael, 1983, “Language and truth”, in Approaches to Language , Roy Harris, ed., Oxford: Pergamon, 95-125. Reprinted in Dummett (1993).
• Dummett, Michael, 1991, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Dummett, Michael, 1993, The Seas of Language , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Etchemendy, John, 1988, “Tarski on truth and logical consequence”, Journal of Philosophical Logic , 43: 51-79.
• Field, Hartry, 1972, “Tarski's theory of truth”, Journal of Philosophy , 69: 347-375.
• Field, Hartry, 1986, “The deflationary conception of truth”, in Fact, Science and Value , C. Wright and G. MacDonald, eds., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 55-117.
• Field, Hartry, 1994, “Deflationist views of meaning and content”, Mind , 103: 249-285.
• Fox, John, 1987, “Truthmaker”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 65: 188-207.
• Frege, Gottlob, 1918-19, “Der gedanke”, Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus , 1: 58-77. Translated by P. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff as “Thoughts” in Frege (1984).
• Frege, Gottlob, 1984, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy , Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Edited by B. McGuiness.
• Glanzberg, Michael, 2003a, “Against truth-value gaps”, in Liars and Heaps , J. C. Beall, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 151-194.
• Glanzberg, Michael, 2003b, “Minimalism and paradoxes”, Synthese , 135: 13-36.
• Grover, Dorothy L., Kamp, Joseph L., and Belnap, Nuel D., 1975, “A prosentential theory of truth”, Philosophical Studies , 27: 73-125.
• Gupta, Anil, 1993, “A critique of deflationism”, Philosophical Topics , 21: 57-81.
• Haack, Susan, 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 27: 231-249.
• Halbach, Volker, 1999, “Disquotationalism and infinite conjunctions”, Mind , 108: 1-22.
• Hartshorne, C., Weiss, P., and Burks, A. W. (eds.), 1931-58, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce , vol. 1-8, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Heck, Richard, 1997, “Tarski, truth, and semantics”, Philosophical Review , 106: 533-554.
• Horwich, Paul, 1990, Truth , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Hylton, Peter, 1990, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• James, William, 1907, “Pragmatism's conception of truth”, in Pragmatism , New York: Longmans, 197-236.
• Joachim, H. H., 1906, The Nature of Truth , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kaplan, David, 1989, “Demonstratives”, in Themes From Kaplan , J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 481-563. First publication of a widely circulated manuscript dated 1977.
• Ketland, Jeffrey, 1999, “Deflationism and Tarski's paradise”, Mind , 108: 69-94.
• Lackey, Douglas (ed.), 1973, Essays in Analysis , New York: George Braziller.
• Leeds, Stephen, 1978, “Theories of reference and truth”, Erkenntnis , 13: 111-129.
• McDowell, John, 1976, “Truth-conditions, bivalence, and verificationism”, in Truth and Meaning , G. Evans and J. McDowell, eds., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 42-66.
• Misak, Cheryl J., 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Moore, George Edward, 1899, “The nature of judgment”, Mind , 8: 176-193.
• Moore, George Edward, 1902, “Truth”, in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology , J. M. Baldwin, ed., London: Macmillan, vol. 2, 716-718.
• Moore, George Edward, 1953, Some Main Problems of Philosophy , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Mulligan, Kevin, Simons, Peter, and Smith, Barry, 1984, “Truth-makers”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 44: 287-321.
• Parsons, Josh, 1999, “There is no ‘truthmaker’ argument against nominalism”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 77: 325-334.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1978, Meaning and the Moral Sciences , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1981, Reason, Truth and History , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1985-86, “A comparison of something with something else”, New Literary History , 17: 61-79. Reprinted in Putnam (1994).
• Putnam, Hilary, 1994, Words and Life , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Quine, W. V. O., 1960, Word and Object , Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Quine, W. V. O., 1970, Philosophy of Logic , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Ramsey, Frank P., 1927, “Facts and propositions”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 7: 153-170. Reprinted in Ramsey (1931).
• Ramsey, Frank P., 1931, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Ross, W. D. (ed.), 1928, The Works of Aristotle Translated into English , Oxford: Clarendon Press, second ed.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1903, Principles of Mathematics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, first ed.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1904, “Meinong's theory of complexes and assumptions I, II, III”, Mind , 13: 204-219, 336-354, 509-524. Reprinted in Lackey (1973).
• Russell, Bertrand, 1910a, “The monistic theory of truth”, in Philosophical Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin, 131-146.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1910b, “On the nature of truth and falsehood”, in Philosophical Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin, 147-159.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1912, The Problems of Philosophy , London: Oxford University Press.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1956, “The philosophy of logical atomism”, in Logic and Knowledge , R. C. Marsh, ed., London: George Allen and Unwin, 177-281. Originally published in The Monist in 1918.
• Soames, Scott, 1984, “What is a theory of truth?”, Journal of Philosophy , 81: 411-429.
• Strawson, Peter F., 1949, “Truth”, Analysis , 9: 83-97.
• Strawson, Peter F., 1950, “Truth”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 24. Reprinted in Strawson (1971).
• Strawson, Peter F., 1971, Logico-Linguistic Papers , London: Methuen.
• Tarski, Alfred, 1931, “Sur les ensembles définissables de nombres réels. I.”, Fundamenta Mathematicae , 17: 210-239. References are to the translation by J. H. Woodger as “On Definable Sets of Real Numbers” in Tarski (1983).
• Tarski, Alfred, 1935, “Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalizierten Sprachen”, Studia Philosophica , 1: 261-405. References are to the translation by J. H. Woodger as “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages” in Tarski (1983).
• Tarski, Alfred, 1944, “The semantic conception of truth”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 4: 341-375.
• Tarski, Alfred, 1983, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics , Indianapolis: Hackett, second ed. Edited by J. Corcoran with translations by J. H. Woodger.
• Taylor, Barry, 1976, “States of affairs”, in Truth and Meaning , G. Evans and J. McDowell, eds., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 263-284.
• Walker, Ralph C. S., 1989, The Coherence Theory of Truth , London: Routledge.
• Williamson, Timothy, 1996, “Knowing and asserting”, Philosophical Review , 104: 489-523.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
• Wright, Crispin, 1976, “Truth-conditions and criteria”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 50: 217-245. Reprinted in Wright (1993).
• Wright, Crispin, 1982, “Anti-realist semantics: The role of criteria”, in Idealism: Past and Present , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 225-248. Reprinted in Wright (1993).
• Wright, Crispin, 1992, Truth and Objectivity , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Wright, Crispin, 1993, Realism, Meaning and Truth , Oxford: Blackwell, second ed.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Davidson, Donald | James, William | Peirce, Charles Sanders | realism | Tarski, Alfred: truth definitions | truth: axiomatic theories of | truth: coherence theory of | truth: correspondence theory of | truth: deflationary theory of | truth: identity theory of

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Josh Parsons for advice on metaphysics, and to JC Beall, Justin Khoo, Jason Stanley, and Paul Teller for very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

• DOI: 10.1111/J.0013-2004.2005.00006.X
• Corpus ID: 55594470

The integrity of learning and the search for truth

• Pádraig Hogan
• Published 1 May 2005
• Educational Theory

9 Citations

Welcoming confusion, embracing uncertainty: educating teacher candidates in an age of certitude, education, risk and ethics.

• Highly Influenced

Reply to Avi I. Mintz’s Review of Discontinuity in Learning: Dewey, Herbart, and Education as Transformation

Markets and higher education: a regime of truth, multiple intelligences, the mozart effect, and emotional intelligence: a critical review, how religious education teachers understand and implement a multi-faith curriculum : case studies from botswana, how can i develop integrity in practice through the teaching and learning of ethics in management : an action research enquiry, discontinuity in learning: pedagogical tact: learning to teach “in-between”, index to volume 55, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

• Advanced Search
• All new items
• Journal articles
• Manuscripts
• All Categories
• Metaphysics and Epistemology
• Epistemology
• Metaphilosophy
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Religion
• Value Theory
• Applied Ethics
• Meta-Ethics
• Normative Ethics
• Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
• Philosophy of Law
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Value Theory, Miscellaneous
• Science, Logic, and Mathematics
• Logic and Philosophy of Logic
• Philosophy of Biology
• Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Philosophy of Computing and Information
• Philosophy of Mathematics
• Philosophy of Physical Science
• Philosophy of Social Science
• Philosophy of Probability
• General Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Science, Misc
• History of Western Philosophy
• Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
• Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy
• 17th/18th Century Philosophy
• 19th Century Philosophy
• 20th Century Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophical Traditions
• African/Africana Philosophy
• Asian Philosophy
• Continental Philosophy
• European Philosophy
• Philosophy of the Americas
• Philosophical Traditions, Miscellaneous
• Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies
• Philosophy, General Works
• Teaching Philosophy
• Philosophy, Miscellaneous
• Other Academic Areas
• Natural Sciences
• Social Sciences
• Cognitive Sciences
• Formal Sciences
• Arts and Humanities
• Professional Areas
• Other Academic Areas, Misc
• Submit a book or article
• Upload a bibliography
• Personal page tracking
• Archives we track
• Information for publishers
• Introduction
• Submitting to PhilPapers
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Subscriptions
• Editor's Guide
• The Categorization Project
• For Publishers
• For Archive Admins
• PhilPapers Surveys
• Bargain Finder
• About PhilPapers
• Create an account

The search for truth

Reprint years, call number, other versions.

No versions found

Buy this book

PhilArchive

External links.

• Available at Amazon.com

Through your library

• Sign in / register and customize your OpenURL resolver
• Configure custom resolver

Similar books and articles

Citations of this work.

No citations found.

References found in this work

No references found.

Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, searching for truth.

I recently received a correspondence from a reader who has rejected her former religious beliefs in favor of a more scientifically based worldview. This process was evidently long and painful and she has now embarked on her own quest for truth. But where might such a trek lead? Here are some brief thoughts about her forthcoming journey.

I’ll begin by referring readers to my entry “ Outgrowing Religion .” Perhaps knowing how this played out for me would help others. Next, I’ll reiterate these words from Walt Whitman which a high school teacher shared with me 50 years ago. They still resonate within me,

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.

Later I discovered the following words from Whitman’s friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson . They confirmed the value of the search for truth,

[Life] offers every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, — you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets, — most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.

So we must travel these roads mostly by ourselves (although friends can accompany us) and we will have to accept ambiguity. After all, the Buddha said you must be a lamp unto yourself and William James argued that we are all beggars when it comes to truth—which is why you should be skeptical of those who claim to possess it. As for me, I’m uncertain about things that ignorant people seem sure of.

Let me also say this to fellow travelers in the search for truth.

I did my doctoral dissertation on Jean Piaget . When asked about religion, Piaget said that every search is a religion, by which he meant that his scientific inquiries were his religion. And, in a published conversation between Piaget and Bringuier, you find this piece of dialogue which served as the epigram for my book on Piaget .

Bringuier – I wonder if what you attack in philosophy isn’t what is called metaphysics?

Piaget – Yes, of course …

Bringuier – But isn’t metaphysics, like the religious turn of mind or mysticism, a sign of one’s longing for unity? That’s what I meant about philosophy. One can’t turn up one’s nose at it too quickly, because the need exists. People have a need for unity.

Piaget – But, to me, the search for unity is much more substantial than the affirmation of unity; the need and the search, and the idea that one is working at it …

So anyone can say they have the truth—that Jesus is their savior or Mohammed the last prophet. That’s easy. It seems like an insurance policy. But of course, it isn’t. Perhaps the gods reward those who use their minds, by proportioning their assent to the evidence. And maybe the gods reject those who accept on faith alone, thereby defaulting on the use of their reason. The fact is that we don’t know the metaphysical structure of the world. So even if our eternal salvation depends on having the right beliefs (although performing the right actions seems more just) there is no sure way to know what those beliefs are.

To reiterate, it’s easy to accept the first ideas you’re taught and be done with it. What’s hard is to keep searching and growing and changing, never anchoring as Kazantzakis put it. The search for truth is just so much nobler and humbler than simply affirming the first ideas you encountered.

Share this:

One thought on “ searching for truth ”.

Christ (or Paul) said Do not suppose I came to bring peace, I came with a sword…

This appears to negate the message of forgiveness and love; however, many apologetics concerning these verses, Matthew 34- 36, exist. This is one link https://www.gotquestions.org/Jesus-sword.html

At any rate, such sophistry can be used to rationalize any act of violence. Thus, one might well doubt the verses as being suspect– not attrubutable to historical Jesus.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of new posts by email.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

The Search for Truth: Early Photography, Realism, and Impressionism Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

An Art Reborn

The poetic science of color.

Moving away from escapism, the community sought Enlightenment rationality and searched for truth in various areas – from politics to economics, which led to realism. Positivism , a philosophical course that seeks an objective and empirical approach to human experience, has gained popularity.

The desire for accuracy prompted the development of photography, and in 1839 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre created the Daguerreotype , a technology capable of creating a fixed tonal image.

Other photography techniques included combination prints – combining several negatives to create an image proposed by Oscar Rejlander and William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype – exposing silver chloride to light (Arnason & Mansfield, 2013).

Anna Atkins applied cyanotype – placed objects on photosensitive paper, exposing them to light.

Julia Margaret Cameron became famous for close-ups with blur and photos related to Orientalism.

European colonialism led to the popularity of ethnography and the emergence of Orientalism – the Western representation of the Middle East visually or literary.

Display of war became an important photography direction in the 19th – Matthew Brady is the famous representative of the trend.

French artist Auguste Rodin contributed to the revival of the sculpture, combining Symbolism and Realism through the display of physical bodies while revealing thoughts and emotions. His famous works are The Age of Bronze, the Gates of Hell, and Burghers of Calais. He influenced other artists – Camille Claudel and Medardo Rosso, artists, who worked with sculpture and influenced this direction.

Georges Seurat became interested in the principles of organizing colors and their influence on each other at different locations, which is reflected in his works. His unusual drawing technique was named Divisionism, Pointillism, and Neo-Impressionism . Moreover, his use of points is also comparable to mosaic.

Paul Signac continued Seurat’s tradition by paying more attention to harmony and the combination of colors. His work reflects the neo-impressionist idea that absolute creative freedom can lead to social change.

Arnason, H. H., & Mansfield, E. C. (2013). History of modern art . Pearson.

• The Late Baroque Style in Music
• Primitivism and the Avant-Garde
• The Uniqueness of Extraordinary Dali
• The Garden Where Reality and Idea Fuse: The Kiss and The Thinker
• Works of Art
• Henri Matisse's Art and Life: Analysis
• Pantheon and Parthenon Historical Monuments
• How Has Technology Influenced the Creation of Art?
• Art, Its Functions and Purposes
• Pteranodon Heads Pictures as Museum Objects
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, June 21). The Search for Truth: Early Photography, Realism, and Impressionism. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-search-for-truth-early-photography-realism-and-impressionism/

"The Search for Truth: Early Photography, Realism, and Impressionism." IvyPanda , 21 June 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-search-for-truth-early-photography-realism-and-impressionism/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The Search for Truth: Early Photography, Realism, and Impressionism'. 21 June.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The Search for Truth: Early Photography, Realism, and Impressionism." June 21, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-search-for-truth-early-photography-realism-and-impressionism/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Search for Truth: Early Photography, Realism, and Impressionism." June 21, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-search-for-truth-early-photography-realism-and-impressionism/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Search for Truth: Early Photography, Realism, and Impressionism." June 21, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-search-for-truth-early-photography-realism-and-impressionism/.

Democracy, Social Media, and Freedom of Expression: Hate, Lies, and the Search for the Possible Truth

• Share Chicago Journal of International Law | Democracy, Social Media, and Freedom of Expression: Hate, Lies, and the Search for the Possible Truth on Facebook
• Share Chicago Journal of International Law | Democracy, Social Media, and Freedom of Expression: Hate, Lies, and the Search for the Possible Truth on Twitter
• Share Chicago Journal of International Law | Democracy, Social Media, and Freedom of Expression: Hate, Lies, and the Search for the Possible Truth on Email
• Share Chicago Journal of International Law | Democracy, Social Media, and Freedom of Expression: Hate, Lies, and the Search for the Possible Truth on LinkedIn

Download PDF

This Essay is a critical reflection on the impact of the digital revolution and the internet on three topics that shape the contemporary world: democracy, social media, and freedom of expression. Part I establishes historical and conceptual assumptions about constitutional democracy and discusses the role of digital platforms in the current moment of democratic recession. Part II discusses how, while social media platforms have revolutionized interpersonal and social communication and democratized access to knowledge and information, they also have led to an exponential spread of mis- and disinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories. Part III proposes a framework that balances regulation of digital platforms with the countervailing fundamental right to freedom of expression, a right that is essential for human dignity, the search for the possible truth, and democracy. Part IV highlights the role of society and the importance of media education in the creation of a free, but positive and constructive, environment on the internet.

I. Introduction

Before the internet, few actors could afford to participate in public debate due to the barriers that limited access to its enabling infrastructure, such as television channels and radio frequencies. 1 Digital platforms tore down this gate by creating open online communities for user-generated content, published without editorial control and at no cost. This exponentially increased participation in public discourse and the amount of information available. 2 At the same time, it led to an increase in disinformation campaigns, hate speech, slander, lies, and conspiracy theories used to advance antidemocratic goals. Platforms’ attempts to moderate speech at scale while maximizing engagement and profits have led to an increasingly prominent role for content moderation algorithms that shape who can participate and be heard in online public discourse. These systems play an essential role in the exercise of freedom of expression and in democratic competence and participation in the 21st century.

In this context, this Essay is a critical reflection on the impacts of the digital revolution and of the internet on democracy and freedom of expression. Part I establishes historical and conceptual assumptions about constitutional democracy; it also discusses the role of digital platforms in the current moment of democratic recession. Part II discusses how social media platforms are revolutionizing interpersonal and social communication, and democratizing access to knowledge and information, but also lead to an exponential spread of mis- and disinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories. Part III proposes a framework for the regulation of digital platforms that seeks to find the right balance with the countervailing fundamental right to freedom of expression. Part IV highlights the role of society and the importance of media education in the creation of a free, but positive and constructive, environment on the internet.

II. Democracy and Authoritarian Populism

Constitutional democracy emerged as the predominant ideology of the 20th century, rising above the alternative projects of communism, fascism, Nazism, military regimes, and religious fundamentalism . 3 Democratic constitutionalism centers around two major ideas that merged at the end of the 20th century: constitutionalism , heir of the liberal revolutions in England, America, and France, expressing the ideas of limited power, rule of law, and respect for fundamental rights; 4 and democracy , a regime of popular sovereignty, free and fair elections, and majority rule. 5 In most countries, democracy only truly consolidated throughout the 20th century through universal suffrage guaranteed with the end of restrictions on political participation based on wealth, education, sex, or race. 6

Contemporary democracies are made up of votes, rights, and reasons. They are not limited to fair procedural rules in the electoral process, but demand respect for substantive fundamental rights of all citizens and a permanent public debate that informs and legitimizes political decisions. 7 To ensure protection of these three aspects, most democratic regimes include in their constitutional framework a supreme court or constitutional court with jurisdiction to arbitrate the inevitable tensions that arise between democracy’s popular sovereignty and constitutionalism’s fundamental rights. 8 These courts are, ultimately, the institutions responsible for protecting fundamental rights and the rules of the democratic game against any abuse of power attempted by the majority. Recent experiences in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Venezuela, and Nicaragua show that when courts fail to fulfill this role, democracy collapses or suffers major setbacks. 9

In recent years, several events have challenged the prevalence of democratic constitutionalism in many parts of the world, in a phenomenon characterized by many as democratic recession. 10 Even consolidated democracies have endured moments of turmoil and institutional discredit, 11 as the world witnessed the rise of an authoritarian, anti-pluralist, and anti-institutional populist wave posing serious threats to democracy.

Populism can be right-wing or left-wing, 12 but the recent wave has been characterized by the prevalence of right-wing extremism, often racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic. 13 While in the past the far left was united through Communist International, today it is the far right that has a major global network. 14 The hallmark of right-wing populism is the division of society into “us” (the pure, decent, conservatives) and “them” (the corrupt, liberal, cosmopolitan elites). 15 Authoritarian populism flows from the unfulfilled promises of democracy for opportunities and prosperity for all. 16 Three aspects undergird this democratic frustration: political (people do not feel represented by the existing electoral systems, political leaders, and democratic institutions); social (stagnation, unemployment, and the rise of inequality); and cultural identity (a conservative reaction to the progressive identity agenda of human rights that prevailed in recent decades with the protection of the fundamental rights of women, African descendants, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ communities, indigenous populations, and the environment). 17

Extremist authoritarian populist regimes often adopt similar strategies to capitalize on the political, social, and cultural identity-based frustrations fueling democratic recessions. These tactics include by-pass or co-optation of the intermediary institutions that mediate the interface between the people and the government, such as the legislature, the press, and civil society. They also involve attacks on supreme courts and constitutional courts and attempts to capture them by appointing submissive judges. 18 The rise of social media potentializes these strategies by creating a free and instantaneous channel of direct communication between populists and their supporters. 19 This unmediated interaction facilitates the use of disinformation campaigns, hate speech, slander, lies, and conspiracy theories as political tools to advance antidemocratic goals. The instantaneous nature of these channels is ripe for impulsive reactions, which facilitate verbal attacks by supporters and polarization, feeding back into the populist discourse. These tactics threaten democracy and free and fair elections because they deceive voters and silence the opposition, distorting public debate. Ultimately, this form of communication undermines the values that justify the special protection of freedom of expression to begin with. The “truth decay” and “fact polarization” that result from these efforts discredit institutions and consequently foster distrust in democracy. 20

III. Internet, Social Media, and Freedom of Expression 21

The third industrial revolution, also known as the technological or digital revolution, has shaped our world today. 22 Some of its main features are the massification of personal computers, the universalization of smartphones and, most importantly, the internet. One of the main byproducts of the digital revolution and the internet was the emergence of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and messaging applications like WhatsApp and Telegram. We live in a world of apps, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and innovation occurring at breakneck speed where nothing seems truly new for very long. This is the background for the narrative that follows.

A. The Impact of the Internet

The internet revolutionized the world of interpersonal and social communication, exponentially expanded access to information and knowledge, and created a public sphere where anyone can express ideas, opinions, and disseminate facts. 23 Before the internet, one’s participation in public debate was dependent upon the professional press, 24 which investigated facts, abided by standards of journalistic ethics, 25 and was liable for damages if it knowingly or recklessly published untruthful information. 26 There was a baseline of editorial control and civil liability over the quality and veracity of what was published in this medium. This does not mean that it was a perfect world. The number of media outlets was, and continues to be, limited in quantity and perspectives; journalistic companies have their own interests, and not all of them distinguish fact from opinion with the necessary care. Still, there was some degree of control over what became public, and there were costs to the publication of overtly hateful or false speech.

The internet, with the emergence of websites, personal blogs, and social media, revolutionized this status quo. It created open, online communities for user-generated texts, images, videos, and links, published without editorial control and at no cost. This advanced participation in public discourse, diversified sources, and exponentially increased available information. 27 It gave a voice to minorities, civil society, politicians, public agents, and digital influencers, and it allowed demands for equality and democracy to acquire global dimensions. This represented a powerful contribution to political dynamism, resistance to authoritarianism, and stimulation of creativity, scientific knowledge, and commercial exchanges. 28 Increasingly, the most relevant political, social, and cultural communications take place on the internet’s unofficial channels.

However, the rise of social media also led to an increase in the dissemination of abusive and criminal speech. 29 While these platforms did not create mis- or disinformation, hate speech, or speech that attacks democracy, the ability to publish freely, with no editorial control and little to no accountability, increased the prevalence of these types of speech and facilitated its use as a political tool by populist leaders. 30 Additionally, and more fundamentally, platform business models compounded the problem through algorithms that moderate and distribute online content. 31

B. The Role of Algorithms

The ability to participate and be heard in online public discourse is currently defined by the content moderation algorithms of a couple major technology companies. Although digital platforms initially presented themselves as neutral media where users could publish freely, they in fact exercise legislative, executive, and judicial functions because they unilaterally define speech rules in their terms and conditions and their algorithms decide how content is distributed and how these rules are applied. 32

Specifically, digital platforms rely on algorithms for two different functions: recommending content and moderating content. 33 First, a fundamental aspect of the service they offer involves curating the content available to provide each user with a personalized experience and increase time spent online. They resort to deep learning algorithms that monitor every action on the platform, draw from user data, and predict what content will keep a specific user engaged and active based on their prior activity or that of similar users. 34 The transition from a world of information scarcity to a world of information abundance generated fierce competition for user attention—the most valuable resource in the Digital Age. 35 The power to modify a person’s information environment has a direct impact on their behavior and beliefs. Because AI systems can track an individual’s online history, they can tailor specific messages to maximize impact. More importantly, they monitor whether and how the user interacts with the tailored message, using this feedback to influence future content targeting and progressively becoming more effective in shaping behavior. 36 Given that humans engage more with content that is polarizing and provocative, these algorithms elicit powerful emotions, including anger. 37 The power to organize online content therefore directly impacts freedom of expression, pluralism, and democracy. 38

In addition to recommendation systems, platforms rely on algorithms for content moderation, the process of classifying content to determine whether it violates community standards. 39 As mentioned, the growth of social media and its use by people around the world allowed for the spread of lies and criminal acts with little cost and almost no accountability, threatening the stability of even long-standing democracies. Inevitably, digital platforms had to enforce terms and conditions defining the norms of their digital community and moderate speech accordingly. 40 But the potentially infinite amount of content published online means that this control cannot be exercised exclusively by humans.

Content moderation algorithms optimize the scanning of published content to identify violations of community standards or terms of service at scale and apply measures ranging from removal to reducing reach or including clarifications or references to alternative information. Platforms often rely on two algorithmic models for content moderation. The first is the reproduction detection model , which uses unique identifiers to catch reproductions of content previously labeled as undesired. 41 The second system, the predictive model , uses machine learning techniques to identify potential illegalities in new and unclassified content. 42 Machine learning is a subtype of artificial intelligence that extracts patterns in training datasets, capable of learning from data without explicit programming to do so. 43 Although helpful, both models have shortcomings.

The reproduction detection model is inefficient for content such as hate speech and disinformation, where the potential for new and different publications is virtually unlimited and users can deliberately make changes to avoid detection. 44 The predictive model is still limited in its ability to address situations to which it has not been exposed in training, primarily because it lacks the human ability to understand nuance and to factor in contextual considerations that influence the meaning of speech. 45 Additionally, machine learning algorithms rely on data collected from the real world and may embed prejudices or preconceptions, leading to asymmetrical applications of the filter. 46 And because the training data sets are so large, it can be hard to audit them for these biases. 47

Despite these limitations, algorithms will continue to be a crucial resource in content moderation given the scale of online activities. 48 In the last two months of 2020 alone, Facebook applied a content moderation measure to 105 million publications, and Instagram to 35 million. 49 YouTube has 500 hours of video uploaded per minute and removed more than 9.3 million videos. 50 In the first half of 2020, Twitter analyzed complaints related to 12.4 million accounts for potential violations of its rules and took action against 1.9 million. 51 This data supports the claim that human moderation is impossible, and that algorithms are a necessary tool to reduce the spread of illicit and harmful content. On the one hand, holding platforms accountable for occasional errors in these systems would create wrong incentives to abandon algorithms in content moderation with the negative consequence of significantly increasing the spread of undesired speech. 52 On the other hand, broad demands for platforms to implement algorithms to optimize content moderation, or laws that impose very short deadlines to respond to removal requests submitted by users, can create excessive pressure for the use of these imprecise systems on a larger scale. Acknowledging the limitations of this technology is fundamental for precise regulation.

C. Some Undesirable Consequences

One of the most striking impacts of this new informational environment is the exponential increase in the scale of social communications and the circulation of news. Around the world, few newspapers, print publications, and radio stations cross the threshold of having even one million subscribers and listeners. This suggests the majority of these publications have a much smaller audience, possibly in the thousands or tens of thousands of people. 53 Television reaches millions of viewers, although diluted among dozens or hundreds of channels. 54 Facebook, on the other hand, has about 3 billion active users. 55 YouTube has 2.5 billion accounts. 56 WhatsApp, more than 2 billion. 57 The numbers are bewildering. However, and as anticipated, just as the digital revolution democratized access to knowledge, information, and public space, it also introduced negative consequences for democracy that must be addressed. Three of them include:

a) the increased circulation of disinformation, deliberate lying, hate speech, conspiracy theories, attacks on democracy, and inauthentic behavior, made possible by recommendation algorithms that optimize for user engagement and content moderation algorithms that are still incapable of adequately identifying undesirable content;

b) the tribalization of life, with the formation of echo chambers where groups speak only to themselves, reinforcing confirmation bias, 58 making speech progressively more radical, and contributing to polarization and intolerance; and

c) a global crisis in the business model of the professional press. Although social media platforms have become one of the main sources of information, they do not produce their own content. They hire engineers, not reporters, and their interest is engagement, not news. 59 Because advertisers’ spending has migrated away from traditional news publications to technological platforms with broader reaches, the press has suffered from a lack of revenue which has forced hundreds of major publications, national and local, to close their doors or reduce their journalist workforce. 60 But a free and strong press is more than just a private business; it is a pillar for an open and free society. It serves a public interest in the dissemination of facts, news, opinions, and ideas, indispensable preconditions for the informed exercise of citizenship. Knowledge and truth—never absolute, but sincerely sought—are essential elements for the functioning of a constitutional democracy. Citizens need to share a minimum set of common objective facts from which to inform their own judgments. If they cannot accept the same facts, public debate becomes impossible. Intolerance and violence are byproducts of the inability to communicate—hence the importance of “knowledge institutions,” such as universities, research entities, and the institutional press. The value of free press for democracy is illustrated by the fact that in different parts of the world, the press is one of the only private businesses specifically referred to throughout constitutions. Despite its importance for society and democracy, surveys reveal a concerning decline in its prestige. 61

In the beginning of the digital revolution, there was a belief that the internet should be a free, open, and unregulated space in the interest of protecting access to the platform and promoting freedom of expression. Over time, concerns emerged, and a consensus gradually grew for the need for internet regulation. Multiple approaches for regulating the internet were proposed, including: (a) economic, through antitrust legislation, consumer protection, fair taxation, and copyright rules; (b) privacy, through laws restricting collection of user data without consent, especially for content targeting; and (c) targeting inauthentic behavior, content control, and platform liability rules. 62

Devising the proper balance between the indispensable preservation of freedom of expression on the one hand, and the repression of illegal content on social media on the other, is one of the most complex issues of our generation. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right incorporated into virtually all contemporary constitutions and, in many countries, is considered a preferential freedom. Several reasons have been advanced for granting freedom of expression special protection, including its roles: (a) in the search for the possible truth 63 in an open and plural society, 64 as explored above in discussing the importance of the institutional press; (b) as an essential element for democracy 65 because it allows the free circulation of ideas, information, and opinions that inform public opinion and voting; and (c) as an essential element of human dignity, 66 allowing the expression of an individual’s personality.

The regulation of digital platforms cannot undermine these values but must instead aim at its protection and strengthening. However, in the digital age, these same values that historically justified the reinforced protection of freedom of expression can now justify its regulation. As U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres thoughtfully stated, “the ability to cause large-scale disinformation and undermine scientifically established facts is an existential risk to humanity.” 67

Two aspects of the internet business model are particularly problematic for the protection of democracy and free expression. The first is that, although access to most technological platforms and applications is free, users pay for access with their privacy. 68 As Lawrence Lessig observed, we watch television, but the internet watches us. 69 Everything each individual does online is monitored and monetized. Data is the modern gold. 70 Thus, those who pay for the data can more efficiently disseminate their message through targeted ads. As previously mentioned, the power to modify a person’s information environment has a direct impact on behavior and beliefs, especially when messages are tailored to maximize impact on a specific individual. 71

The second aspect is that algorithms are programmed to maximize time spent online. This often leads to the amplification of provocative, radical, and aggressive content. This in turn compromises freedom of expression because, by targeting engagement, algorithms sacrifice the search for truth (with the wide circulation of fake news), democracy (with attacks on institutions and defense of coups and authoritarianism), and human dignity (with offenses, threats, racism, and others). The pursuit of attention and engagement for revenue is not always compatible with the values that underlie the protection of freedom of expression.

IV. A Framework for the Regulation of Social Media

Platform regulation models can be broadly classified into three categories: (a) state or government regulation, through legislation and rules drawing a compulsory, encompassing framework; (b) self-regulation, through rules drafted by platforms themselves and materialized in their terms of use; and (c) regulated self-regulation or coregulation, through standards fixed by the state but which grant platform flexibility in materializing and implementing them. This Essay argues for the third model, with a combination of governmental and private responsibilities. Compliance should be overseen by an independent committee, with the minority of its representatives coming from the government, and the majority coming from the business sector, academia, technology entities, users, and civil society.

The regulatory framework should aim to reduce the asymmetry of information between platforms and users, safeguard the fundamental right to freedom of expression from undue private or state interventions, and protect and strengthen democracy. The current technical limitations of content moderation algorithms explored above and normal substantive disagreement about what content should be considered illegal or harmful suggest that an ideal regulatory model should optimize the balance between the fundamental rights of users and platforms, recognizing that there will always be cases where consensus is unachievable. The focus of regulation should be the development of adequate procedures for content moderation, capable of minimizing errors and legitimizing decisions even when one disagrees with the substantive result. 72 With these premises as background, the proposal for regulation formulated here is divided into three levels: (a) the appropriate intermediary liability model for user-generated content; (b) procedural duties for content moderation; and (c) minimum duties to moderate content that represents concrete threats to democracy and/or freedom of expression itself.

A. Intermediary Liability for User-Generated Content

There are three main regimes for platform liability for third-party content. In strict liability models, platforms are held responsible for all user-generated posts. 73 Since platforms have limited editorial control over what is posted and limited human oversight over the millions of posts made daily, this would be a potentially destructive regime. In knowledge-based liability models, platform liability arises if they do not act to remove content after an extrajudicial request from users—this is also known as a “notice-and-takedown” system. 74 Finally, a third model would make platforms liable for user-generated content only in cases of noncompliance with a court order mandating content removal. This latter model was adopted in Brazil with the Civil Framework for the Internet (Marco Civil da Internet). 75 The only exception in Brazilian legislation to this general rule is revenge porn: if there is a violation of intimacy resulting from the nonconsensual disclosure of images, videos, or other materials containing private nudity or private sexual acts, extrajudicial notification is sufficient to create an obligation for content removal under penalty of liability. 76

In our view, the Brazilian model is the one that most adequately balances the fundamental rights involved. As mentioned, in the most complex cases concerning freedom of expression, people will disagree on the legality of speech. Rules holding platforms accountable for not removing content after mere user notification create incentives for over-removal of any potentially controversial content, excessively restricting users’ freedom of expression. If the state threatens to hold digital platforms accountable if it disagrees with their assessment, companies will have the incentive to remove all content that could potentially be considered illicit by courts to avoid liability. 77

Nonetheless, this liability regime should coexist with a broader regulatory structure imposing principles, limits, and duties on content moderation by digital platforms, both to increase the legitimacy of platforms’ application of their own terms and conditions and to minimize the potentially devastating impacts of illicit or harmful speech.

B. Standards for Proactive Content Moderation

Platforms have free enterprise and freedom of expression rights to set their own rules and decide the kind of environment they want to create, as well as to moderate harmful content that could drive users away. However, because these content moderation algorithms are the new governors of the public sphere, 78 and because they define the ability to participate and be heard in online public discourse, platforms should abide by minimum procedural duties of transparency and auditing, due process, and fairness.

1. Transparency and Auditing

Transparency and auditing measures serve mainly to ensure that platforms are accountable for content moderation decisions and for the impacts of their algorithms. They provide users with greater understanding and knowledge about the extent to which platforms regulate speech, and they provide oversight bodies and researchers with information to understand the threats of digital services and the role of platforms in amplifying or minimizing them.

Driven by demands from civil society, several digital platforms already publish transparency reports. 79 However, the lack of binding standards means that these reports have significant gaps, no independent verification of the information provided, 80 and no standardization across platforms, preventing comparative analysis. 81 In this context, regulatory initiatives that impose minimum requirements and standards are crucial to make oversight more effective. On the other hand, overly broad transparency mandates may force platforms to adopt simpler content moderation rules to reduce costs, which could negatively impact the accuracy of content moderation or the quality of the user experience. 82 A tiered approach to transparency, where certain information is public and certain information is limited to oversight bodies or previously qualified researchers, ensures adequate protection of countervailing interests, such as user privacy and business confidentiality. 83 The Digital Services Act, 84 recently passed in the European Union, contains robust transparency provisions that generally align with these considerations. 85

The information that should be publicly provided includes clear and unambiguous terms of use, the options available to address violations (such as removal, amplification reduction, clarifications, and account suspension) and the division of labor between algorithms and humans. More importantly, public transparency reports should include information on the accuracy of automated moderation measures and the number of content moderation actions broken down by type (such as removal, blocking, and account deletion). 86 There must also be transparency obligations to researchers, giving them access to crucial information and statistics, including to the content analyzed for the content moderation decisions. 87

Although valuable, transparency requirements are insufficient in promoting accountability because they rely on users and researchers to actively monitor platform conduct and presuppose that they have the power to draw attention to flaws and promote changes. 88 Legally mandated third-party algorithmic auditing is therefore an important complement to ensure that these models satisfy legal, ethical, and safety standards and to elucidate the embedded value tradeoffs, such as between user safety and freedom of expression. 89 As a starting point, algorithm audits should consider matters such as how accurately they perform, any potential bias or discrimination incorporated in the data, and to what extent the internal mechanics are explainable to humans. 90 The Digital Services Act contains a similar proposal. 91

The market for algorithmic auditing is still emergent and replete with uncertainty. In attempting to navigate this scenario, regulators should: (a) define how often the audits should happen; (b) develop standards and best practices for auditing procedures; (c) mandate specific disclosure obligations so auditors have access to the required data; and (d) define how identified harms should be addressed. 92

2. Due Process and Fairness

To ensure due process, platforms must inform users affected by content moderation decisions of the allegedly violated provision of the terms of use, as well as offer an internal system of appeals against these decisions. Platforms must also create systems that allow for the substantiated denunciation of content or accounts by other users, and notify reporting users of the decision taken.

As for fairness, platforms should ensure that the rules are applied equally to all users. Although it is reasonable to suppose that platforms may adopt different criteria for public persons or information of public interest, these exceptions must be clear in the terms of use. This issue has recently been the subject of controversy between the Facebook Oversight Board and the company. 93

Due to the enormous amount of content published on the platforms and the inevitability of using automated mechanisms for content moderation, platforms should not be held accountable for a violation of these duties in specific cases, but only when the analysis reveals a systemic failure to comply. 94

C. Minimum Duties to Moderate Illicit Content

The regulatory framework should also contain specific obligations to address certain types of especially harmful speech. The following categories are considered by the authors to fall within this group: disinformation, hate speech, anti-democratic attacks, cyberbullying, terrorism, and child pornography. Admittedly, defining and consensually identifying the speech included in these categories—except in the case of child pornography 95 —is a complex and largely subjective task. Precisely for this reason, platforms should be free to define how the concepts will be operationalized, as long as they guide definitions by international human rights parameters and in a transparent manner. This does not mean that all platforms will reach the same definitions nor the same substantive results in concrete cases, but this should not be considered a flaw in the system, since the plurality of rules promotes freedom of expression. The obligation to observe international human rights parameters reduces the discretion of companies, while allowing for the diversity of policies among them. After defining these categories, platforms must establish mechanisms that allow users to report violations.

In addition, platforms should develop mechanisms to address coordinated inauthentic behaviors, which involve the use of automated systems or deceitful means to artificially amplify false or dangerous messages by using bots, fake profiles, trolls, and provocateurs. 96 For example, if a person publishes a post for his twenty followers saying that kerosene oil is good for curing COVID-19, the negative impact of this misinformation is limited. However, if that message is amplified to thousands of users, a greater public health issue arises. Or, in another example, if the false message that an election was rigged reaches millions of people, there is a democratic risk due to the loss of institutional credibility.

The role of oversight bodies should be to verify that platforms have adopted terms of use that prohibit the sharing of these categories of speech and ensure that, systemically, the recommendation and content moderation systems are trained to moderate this content.

V. Conclusion

The World Wide Web has provided billions of people with access to knowledge, information, and the public space, changing the course of history. However, the misuse of the internet and social media poses serious threats to democracy and fundamental rights. Some degree of regulation has become necessary to confront inauthentic behavior and illegitimate content. It is essential, however, to act with transparency, proportionality, and adequate procedures, so that pluralism, diversity, and freedom of expression are preserved.

In addition to the importance of regulatory action, the responsibility for the preservation of the internet as a healthy public sphere also lies with citizens. Media education and user awareness are fundamental steps for the creation of a free but positive and constructive environment on the internet. Citizens should be conscious that social media can be unfair, perverse, and can violate fundamental rights and basic rules of democracy. They must be attentive not to uncritically pass on all information received. Alongside states, regulators, and tech companies, citizens are also an important force to address these threats. In Jonathan Haidt’s words, “[w]hen our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.” 97

• 1 Tim Wu, Is the First Amendment Obsolete? , in The Perilous Public Square 15 (David E. Pozen ed., 2020).
• 2 Jack M. Balkin, Free Speech is a Triangle , 118 Colum. L. Rev. 2011, 2019 (2018).
• 3 Luís Roberto Barroso, O Constitucionalismo Democrático ou Neoconstitucionalismo como ideologia vitoriosa do século XX , 4 Revista Publicum 14, 14 (2018).
• 4 Id. at 16.
• 7 Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?: Principles for a New Political Debate xii (2006); Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously 181 (1977).
• 8 Barroso, supra note 3, at 16.
• 9 Samuel Issacharoff, Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts i (2015).
• 10 Larry Diamond, Facing up to the Democratic Recession , 26 J. Democracy 141 (2015). Other scholars have referred to the same phenomenon using other terms, such as democratic retrogression, abusive constitutionalism, competitive authoritarianism, illiberal democracy, and autocratic legalism. See, e.g. , Aziz Huq & Tom Ginsburg, How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy , 65 UCLA L. Rev. 91 (2018); David Landau, Abusive Constitutionalism , 47 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 189 (2013); Kim Lane Scheppele, Autocratic Legalism , 85 U. Chi. L. Rev. 545 (2018).
• 11 Dan Balz, A Year After Jan. 6, Are the Guardrails that Protect Democracy Real or Illusory? , Wash. Post (Jan. 6, 2022), https://perma.cc/633Z-A9AJ; Brexit: Reaction from Around the UK , BBC News (June 24, 2016), https://perma.cc/JHM3-WD7A.
• 12 Cas Mudde, The Populist Zeitgeist , 39 Gov’t & Opposition 541, 549 (2004).
• 13 See generally Mohammed Sinan Siyech, An Introduction to Right-Wing Extremism in India , 33 New Eng. J. Pub. Pol’y 1 (2021) (discussing right-wing extremism in India). See also Eviane Leidig, Hindutva as a Variant of Right-Wing Extremism , 54 Patterns of Prejudice 215 (2020) (tracing the history of “Hindutva”—defined as “an ideology that encompasses a wide range of forms, from violent, paramilitary fringe groups, to organizations that advocate the restoration of Hindu ‘culture’, to mainstream political parties”—and finding that it has become mainstream since 2014 under Modi); Ariel Goldstein, Brazil Leads the Third Wave of the Latin American Far Right , Ctr. for Rsch. on Extremism (Mar. 1, 2021), https://perma.cc/4PCT-NLQJ (discussing right-wing extremism in Brazil under Bolsonaro); Seth G. Jones, The Rise of Far-Right Extremism in the United States , Ctr. for Strategic & Int’l Stud. (Nov. 2018), https://perma.cc/983S-JUA7 (discussing right-wing extremism in the U.S. under Trump).
• 14 Sergio Fausto, O Desafio Democrático [The Democratic Challenge], Piauí (Aug. 2022), https://perma.cc/474A-3849.
• 15 Jan-Werner Muller, Populism and Constitutionalism , in The Oxford Handbook of Populism 590 (Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser et al. eds., 2017).
• 16 Ming-Sung Kuo, Against Instantaneous Democracy , 17 Int’l J. Const. L. 554, 558–59 (2019); see also Digital Populism , Eur. Ctr. for Populism Stud., https://perma.cc/D7EV-48MV.
• 17 Luís Roberto Barroso, Technological Revolution, Democratic Recession and Climate Change: The Limits of Law in a Changing World , 18 Int’l J. Const. L. 334, 349 (2020).
• 18 For the use of social media, see Sven Engesser et al., Populism and Social Media: How Politicians Spread a Fragmented Ideology , 20 Info. Commc’n & Soc’y 1109 (2017). For attacks on the press, see WPFD 2021: Attacks on Press Freedom Growing Bolder Amid Rising Authoritarianism , Int’l Press Inst. (Apr. 30, 2021), https://perma.cc/SGN9-55A8. For attacks on the judiciary, see Michael Dichio & Igor Logvinenko, Authoritarian Populism, Courts and Democratic Erosion , Just Sec. (Feb. 11, 2021), https://perma.cc/WZ6J-YG49.
• 19 Kuo, supra note 16, at 558–59; see also Digital Populism , supra note 16.
• 20 Vicki C. Jackson, Knowledge Institutions in Constitutional Democracy: Reflections on “the Press” , 15 J. Media L. 275 (2022).
• 21 Many of the ideas and information on this topic were collected in Luna van Brussel Barroso, Liberdade de Expressão e Democracia na Era Digital: O impacto das mídias sociais no mundo contemporâneo [Freedom of Expression and Democracy in the Digital Era: The Impact of Social Media in the Contemporary World] (2022), which was recently published in Brazil.
• 22 The first industrial revolution is marked by the use of steam as a source of energy in the middle of the 18th century. The second started with the use of electricity and the invention of the internal combustion engine at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. There are already talks of the fourth industrial revolution as a product of the fusion of technologies that blurs the boundaries among the physical, digital, and biological spheres. See generally Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2017).
• 23 Gregory P. Magarian, The Internet and Social Media , in The Oxford Handbook of Freedom of Speech 350, 351–52 (Adrienne Stone & Frederick Schauer eds., 2021).
• 24 Wu, supra note 1, at 15.
• 25 Journalistic ethics include distinguishing fact from opinion, verifying the veracity of what is published, having no self-interest in the matter being reported, listening to the other side, and rectifying mistakes. For an example of an international journalistic ethics charter, see Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists , Int’l Fed’n of Journalists (June 12, 2019), https://perma.cc/7A2C-JD2S.
• 26 See, e.g. , New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).
• 27 Balkin, supra note 2, at 2018.
• 28 Magarian, supra note 23, at 351–52.
• 29 Wu, supra note 1, at 15.
• 30 Magarian, supra note 23, at 357–60.
• 31 Niva Elkin-Koren & Maayan Perel, Speech Contestation by Design: Democratizing Speech Governance by AI , 50 Fla. State U. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2023).
• 32 Thomas E. Kadri & Kate Klonick, Facebook v. Sullivan: Public Figures and Newsworthiness in Online Speech , 93 S. Cal. L. Rev. 37, 94 (2019).
• 33 Elkin-Koren & Perel, supra note 31.
• 34 Chris Meserole, How Do Recommender Systems Work on Digital Platforms? , Brookings Inst.(Sept. 21, 2022), https://perma.cc/H53K-SENM.
• 35 Kris Shaffer, Data versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History xi–xv (2019).
• 36 See generally Stuart Russell, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (2019).
• 37 Shaffer, supra note 35, at xi–xv.
• 38 More recently, with the advance of neuroscience, platforms have sharpened their ability to manipulate and change our emotions, feelings and, consequently, our behavior in accordance not with our own interests, but with theirs (or of those who they sell this service to). Kaveh Waddell, Advertisers Want to Mine Your Brain , Axios (June 4, 2019), https://perma.cc/EU85-85WX. In this context, there is already talk of a new fundamental right to cognitive liberty, mental self-determination, or the right to free will. Id .
• 39 Content moderation refers to “systems that classify user generated content based on either matching or prediction, leading to a decision and governance outcome (e.g. removal, geoblocking, account takedown).” Robert Gorwa, Reuben Binns & Christian Katzenbach, Algorithmic Content Moderation: Technical and Political Challenges in the Automation of Platform Governance , 7 Big Data & Soc’y 1, 3 (2020).
• 40 Jack M. Balkin, Free Speech in the Algorithmic Society: Big Data, Private Governance, and New School Speech Regulation , 51 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1149, 1183 (2018).
• 41 See Carey Shenkman, Dhanaraj Thakur & Emma Llansó, Do You See What I See? Capabilities and Limits of Automated Multimedia Content Analysis 13–16 (May 2021),https://perma.cc/J9MP-7PQ8.
• 42 See id. at 17–21.
• 43 See Michael Wooldridge, A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going 63 (2021).

Perceptual hashing has been the primary technology utilized to mitigate the spread of CSAM, since the same materials are often repeatedly shared, and databases of offending content are maintained by institutions like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and its international analogue, the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC).

• 45 Natural language understanding is undermined by language ambiguity, contextual dependence of words of non-immediate proximity, references, metaphors, and general semantics rules. See Erik J. Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do 52–55 (2021). Language comprehension in fact requires unlimited common-sense knowledge about the actual world, which humans possess and is impossible to code. Id . A case decided by Facebook’s Oversight Board illustrates the point: the company’s predictive filter for combatting pornography removed images from a breast cancer awareness campaign, a clearly legitimate content not meant to be targeted by the algorithm. See Breast Cancer Symptoms and Nudity , Oversight Bd. (2020), https://perma.cc/U9A5-TTTJ. However, based on prior training, the algorithm removed the publication because it detected pornography and was unable to factor the contextual consideration that this was a legitimate health campaign. Id .
• 46 See generally Adriano Koshiyama, Emre Kazim & Philip Treleaven, Algorithm Auditing: Managing the Legal, Ethical, and Technological Risks of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Associated Algorithms , 55 Computer 40 (2022).
• 47 Elkin-Koren & Perel, supra note 31.
• 48 Evelyn Douek, Governing Online Speech: From “Posts-as-Trumps” to Proportionality and Probability , 121 Colum. L. Rev. 759, 791 (2021).
• 53 See Martha Minow, Saving the Press: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech 20 (2021). For example, the best-selling newspaper in the world, The New York Times , ended the year 2022 with around 10 million subscribers across digital and print. Katie Robertson, The New York Times Company Adds 180,000 Digital Subscribers , N.Y. Times (Nov. 2, 2022), https://perma.cc/93PF-TKC5. The Economist magazine had approximately 1.2 million subscribers in 2022. The Economist Group, Annual Report 2022 24 (2022), https://perma.cc/9HQQ-F7W2. Around the world, publications that reach one million subscribers are rare. These Are the Most Popular Paid Subscription News Websites , World Econ. F. (Apr. 29, 2021), https://perma.cc/L2MK-VPNX.
• 54 Lawrence Lessig, They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy 105 (2019).
• 55 Essential Facebook Statistics and Trends for 2023 , Datareportal (Feb. 19, 2023), https://perma.cc/UH33-JHUQ.
• 56 YouTube User Statistics 2023 , Glob. Media Insight (Feb. 27, 2023), https://perma.cc/3H4Y-H83V.
• 57 Brian Dean, WhatsApp 2022 User Statistics: How Many People Use WhatsApp , Backlinko (Jan. 5, 2022), https://perma.cc/S8JX-S7HN.
• 58 Confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and favor information that reinforces one’s existing beliefs, presents an obstacle to critical thinking. Sachin Modgil et al., A Confirmation Bias View on Social Media Induced Polarisation During COVID-19 , Info. Sys. Frontiers (Nov. 20, 2021).
• 59 Minow, supra note 53, at 2.
• 60 Id. at 3, 11.
• 61 On the importance of the role of the press as an institution of public interest and its “crucial relationship” with democracy, see id. at 35. On the press as a “knowledge institution,” the idea of “institutional press,” and data on the loss of prestige by newspapers and television stations, see Jackson, supra note 20, at 4–5.
• 62 See , e.g. , Jack M. Balkin, How to Regulate (and Not Regulate) Social Media , 1 J. Free Speech L. 71, 89–96 (2021).
• 63 By possible truth we mean that not all claims, opinions and beliefs can be ascertained as true or false. Objective truths are factual and can thus be proven even when controversial—for example, climate change and the effectiveness of vaccines. Subjective truths, on the other hand, derive from individual normative, religious, philosophical, and political views. In a pluralistic world, any conception of freedom of expression must protect individual subjective beliefs.
• 64 Eugene Volokh, In Defense of the Marketplace of Ideas/Search for Truth as a Theory of Free Speech Protection , 97 Va. L. Rev. 595, 595 (May 2011).
• 66 Steven J. Heyman, Free Speech and Human Dignity 2 (2008).
• 67 A Global Dialogue to Guide Regulation Worldwide , UNESCO (Feb. 23, 2023), https://perma.cc/ALK8-HTG3.
• 68 Can We Fix What’s Wrong with Social Media? , Yale L. Sch. News (Aug. 3, 2022), https://perma.cc/MN58-2EVK.
• 69 Lessig, supra note 54, at 105.
• 71 See supra Part III.B.
• 72 Doeuk, supra note 48, at 804–13; see also John Bowers & Jonathan Zittrain, Answering Impossible Questions: Content Governance in an Age of Disinformation , Harv. Kennedy Sch. Misinformation Rev. (Jan. 14, 2020), https://perma.cc/R7WW-8MQX.
• 73 Daphne Keller, Systemic Duties of Care and Intermediary Liability , Ctr. for Internet & Soc’y Blog (May 28, 2020), https://perma.cc/25GU-URGT.
• 75 Decreto No. 12.965, de 23 de abril de 2014, Diário Oficial da União [D.O.U.] de 4.14.2014 (Braz.) art. 19. In order to ensure freedom of expression and prevent censorship, providers of internet applications can only be civilly liable for damages resulting from content generated by third parties if, after specific court order, they do not make arrangements to, in the scope and technical limits of their service and within the indicated time, make unavailable the content identified as infringing, otherwise subject to the applicable legal provisions. Id .
• 76 Id. art. 21. The internet application provider that provides content generated by third parties will be held liable for the violation of intimacy resulting from the disclosure, without authorization of its participants, of images, videos, or other materials containing nude scenes or private sexual acts when, upon receipt of notification by the participant or its legal representative, fail to diligently promote, within the scope and technical limits of its service, the unavailability of this content. Id .
• 77 Balkin, supra note 2, at 2017.
• 78 Kate Klonick, The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech , 131 Harv. L. Rev. 1598, 1603 (2018).
• 79 Transparency Reporting Index, Access Now (July 2021), https://perma.cc/2TSL-2KLD (cataloguing transparency reporting from companies around the world).
• 80 Hum. Rts. Comm., Rep. of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, ¶¶ 63–66, U.N. Doc A/HRC/32/35 (2016).
• 81 Paddy Leerssen, The Soap Box as a Black Box: Regulating Transparency in Social Media Recommender Systems , 11 Eur. J. L. & Tech. (2020).
• 82 Daphne Keller, Some Humility About Transparency , Ctr. for Internet & Soc’y Blog (Mar. 19, 2021), https://perma.cc/4Y85-BATA.
• 83 Mark MacCarthy, Transparency Requirements for Digital Social Media Platforms: Recommendations for Policy Makers and Industry , Transatlantic Working Grp. (Feb. 12, 2020).
• 84 2022 O.J. (L 277) 1 [hereinafter DSA].
• 85 The DSA was approved by the European Parliament on July 5, 2022, and on October 4, 2022, the European Council gave its final acquiescence to the regulation. Digital Services: Landmark Rules Adopted for a Safer, Open Online Environment , Eur. Parliament (July 5, 2022), https://perma.cc/BZP5-V2B2. The DSA increases transparency and accountability of platforms, by providing, for example, for the obligation of “clear information on content moderation or the use of algorithms for recommending content (so-called recommender systems); users will be able to challenge content moderation decisions.” Id .
• 86 MacCarthy, supra note 83, 19–24.
• 87 To this end, American legislators recently introduced a U.S. Congressional bill that proposes a model for conducting research on the impacts of digital communications in a way that protects user privacy. See Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, S. 5339, 117th Congress (2022). The project mandates that digital platforms share data with researchers previously authorized by the Federal Trade Commission and publicly disclose certain data about content, algorithms, and advertising. Id .
• 88 Yifat Nahmias & Maayan Perel, The Oversight of Content Moderation by AI: Impact Assessment and Their Limitations , 58 Harv. J. on Legis. 145, 154–57 (2021).
• 89 Auditing Algorithms: The Existing Landscape, Role of Regulator and Future Outlook , Digit. Regul. Coop. F. (Sept. 23, 2022), https://perma.cc/7N6W-JNCW.
• 90 See generally Koshiyama et al., supra note 46.
• 91 In Article 37, the DSA provides that digital platforms of a certain size should be accountable, through annual independent auditing, for compliance with the obligations set forth in the Regulation and with any commitment undertaken pursuant to codes of conduct and crisis protocols.
• 92 Digit. Regul. Coop. F., supra note 89.
• 93 In a transparency report published at the end of its first year of operation, the Oversight Board highlighted the inadequacy of the explanations presented by Meta on the operation of a system known as cross-check, which apparently gave some users greater freedom on the platform. In January 2022, Meta explained that the cross-check system grants an additional degree of review to certain content that internal systems mark as violating the platform’s terms of use. Meta submitted a query to the Board on how to improve the functioning of this system and the Board made relevant recommendations. See Oversight Board Published Policy Advisory Opinion on Meta’s Cross-Check Program , Oversight Bd. (Dec. 2022), https://perma.cc/87Z5-L759.
• 94 Evelyn Douek, Content Moderation as Systems Thinking , 136 Harv. L. Rev. 526, 602–03 (2022).
• 95 The illicit nature of child pornography is objectively apprehended and does not implicate the same subjective considerations that the other referenced categories entail. Not surprisingly, several databases have been created to facilitate the moderation of this content. See Ofcom, Overview of Perceptual Hashing Technology 14 (Nov. 22, 2022), https://perma.cc/EJ45-B76X (“Several hash databases to support the detection of known CSAM exist, e.g. the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) hash database, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) hash list and the International Child Sexual Exploitation (ICSE) hash database.”).
• 97 Jonathan Haidt, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid , Atlantic (Apr. 11, 2022), https://perma.cc/2NXD-32VM.

• Classroom Programme
• Interview Guidance
• Online Programme
• Drishti Store
• My Bookmarks
• My Progress
• Change Password
• From The Editor's Desk
• How To Use The New Website
• Help Centre

Achievers Corner

• Topper's Interview
• About Civil Services
• UPSC Prelims Syllabus
• GS Prelims Strategy
• Prelims Analysis
• GS Paper-I (Year Wise)
• GS Paper-I (Subject Wise)
• CSAT Strategy
• Previous Years Papers
• Practice Quiz
• Weekly Revision MCQs
• 60 Steps To Prelims
• Prelims Refresher Programme 2020

Mains & Interview

• Mains GS Syllabus
• Mains GS Strategy
• Mains Answer Writing Practice
• Essay Strategy
• Fodder For Essay
• Model Essays
• Drishti Essay Competition
• Ethics Strategy
• Ethics Case Studies
• Ethics Discussion
• Ethics Previous Years Q&As
• Papers By Years
• Papers By Subject
• Be MAINS Ready
• Awake Mains Examination 2020
• Interview Strategy
• Interview Guidance Programme

Current Affairs

• Daily News & Editorial
• Daily CA MCQs
• Sansad TV Discussions
• Monthly CA Consolidation
• Monthly Editorial Consolidation
• Monthly MCQ Consolidation

Drishti Specials

• To The Point
• Important Institutions
• Learning Through Maps
• PRS Capsule
• Summary Of Reports
• Gist Of Economic Survey

Study Material

• NCERT Books
• NIOS Study Material
• IGNOU Study Material
• Yojana & Kurukshetra
• Chhatisgarh
• Uttar Pradesh
• Madhya Pradesh

Test Series

• UPSC Prelims Test Series
• UPSC Mains Test Series
• UPPCS Prelims Test Series
• UPPCS Mains Test Series
• BPSC Prelims Test Series
• RAS/RTS Prelims Test Series
• Daily Editorial Analysis
• YouTube PDF Downloads
• Strategy By Toppers
• Ethics - Definition & Concepts
• Mastering Mains Answer Writing
• Places in News
• UPSC Mock Interview
• PCS Mock Interview
• Interview Insights
• Prelims 2019
• Product Promos

Make Your Note

Wisdom Finds Truth

• 07 Feb 2024

“The Only True Wisdom is in Knowing You Know Nothing”

—Socrates

In the complex fabric of human life, the timeless pursuit of wisdom has always been a constant journey. As individuals navigate the complexities of life, they are often confronted with the need to discern truth from falsehood, and clarity from ambiguity. This quest for wisdom, intertwined with the discovery of truth, forms a symbiotic relationship that has been a cornerstone of human intellectual and spiritual development throughout history. 

Wisdom, in its essence, transcends mere knowledge. While knowledge refers to the accumulation of facts and information, wisdom encompasses a deeper understanding that involves insight, discernment, and the ability to make sound judgments. It is the application of knowledge in a way that promotes a harmonious and balanced existence. Wisdom is not static but dynamic, evolving through experiences, reflections, and the continuous quest for a deeper understanding of the self and the world.

The search for truth is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. From ancient philosophical inquiries to modern scientific investigations, humans have sought to uncover the underlying principles and realities that govern existence. Truth, in this context, is not merely a collection of facts but a profound understanding of the nature of reality , ethics , and purpose . The quest for truth is a journey marked by curiosity, skepticism , and a relentless pursuit of deeper understanding .

Wisdom and truth intersect in various dimensions. Wisdom, as the application of knowledge with discernment, enables individuals to navigate the complexities of life with a profound understanding of the underlying truths that govern human existence. In turn, the pursuit of truth contributes to the development of wisdom, as the process of seeking truth involves critical thinking, self-reflection , and an openness to challenging one's preconceptions.

One avenue through which wisdom is cultivated is through lived experiences. Life's challenges and triumphs provide a fertile ground for the development of wisdom. Through facing adversity, making choices, and learning from the consequences of actions, individuals gain insights that contribute to their wisdom. Each experience becomes a lesson, shaping a person's worldview and influencing their ability to discern truth from falsehood.

Throughout the history of philosophy, thinkers from different traditions and cultures have contemplated the relationship between wisdom and truth. In ancient Greek philosophy, Socratic wisdom emphasized the acknowledgment of one's ignorance as the starting point for true understanding. Socrates' famous statement, "I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing," highlights the humility and openness to truth inherent in wisdom.

Eastern philosophies, such as Buddhism and Taoism, emphasize the cultivation of wisdom through mindfulness, meditation , and a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. The pursuit of truth in these traditions involves transcending the illusions of the ego and gaining insight into the impermanence and interdependence of existence.

Wisdom is not only about intellectual understanding but also encompasses ethical dimensions . The wise person is often characterized by virtues such as compassion, empathy, and a sense of justice. These ethical dimensions are closely linked to the pursuit of truth, as understanding the ethical implications of actions requires a deep appreciation of the truth about human nature, society, and the consequences of one's choices.

Reflection and contemplation are integral to the development of wisdom. Taking the time to ponder one's experiences, beliefs, and values allows for a deeper understanding of oneself and the world. In this process, individuals confront their biases, challenge their assumptions, and open themselves to the possibility of discovering new truths. Contemplation, whether through philosophical inquiry or spiritual practices , becomes a pathway to wisdom and truth.

In the realm of scientific inquiry, the pursuit of truth is often framed as the search for objective knowledge . The scientific method, with its emphasis on empirical observation, hypothesis testing , and peer review , seeks to uncover universal truths about the natural world. However, the scientific quest for truth is not devoid of philosophical considerations, as scientists grapple with questions about the nature of reality, causality, and the limits of human understanding.

Despite the earnest pursuit of wisdom and truth, humans are bound by the limitations of their perception and cognition. The subjective nature of individual experiences, coupled with cognitive biases and cultural influences, can impede the attainment of absolute truth. Recognizing these limitations is an essential aspect of wisdom, prompting individuals to approach truth with humility and an awareness of the inherent complexity of reality.

In the contemporary era, marked by unprecedented access to information through technology, the quest for wisdom and truth faces new challenges. The wealth of information, frequently accompanied by misinformation and disinformation , necessitates individuals to refine their abilities in critical thinking. Navigating the digital landscape calls for a discerning mind capable of sifting through the vast sea of information to extract meaningful truths.

As individuals strive for wisdom and truth, they often find themselves on a parallel journey toward virtue. Virtue, in this context, refers to the cultivation of moral excellence and ethical character . The virtuous person, guided by wisdom and an understanding of truth, seeks to live a life aligned with principles of goodness, justice, and compassion . The interconnectedness of wisdom, truth , and virtue creates a holistic framework for a meaningful and purposeful existence.

In the intricate dance between wisdom and truth, human beings embark on a journey that transcends the boundaries of time and culture. Wisdom, with its roots in the deep understanding of oneself and the world, becomes the guiding force in the pursuit of truth. Conversely, the quest for truth, whether through philosophical inquiry, scientific exploration, or lived experiences, contributes to the development of wisdom.

As individuals navigate the complexities of life, they encounter the ethical dimensions of wisdom, the transformative power of reflection , and the limitations of human perception . Philosophical perspectives from various traditions shed light on the profound connection between wisdom and truth, emphasizing humility, openness, and a continual willingness to explore the mysteries of existence.

In the digital age, where information abounds and misinformation proliferates, the need for discernment and critical thinking becomes paramount. The virtuous person, guided by wisdom and truth, seeks to navigate the complexities of the modern world with integrity, compassion, and a commitment to ethical principles.

In the journey of life, seeking wisdom is not a one-time thing but a constant exploration. Wisdom and truth mix together, forming a story of learning, discovering, and always trying to understand life better.

“Nothing will Satisfy You Until You Know the Truth for Yourself”

— Ramakrishna Paramahamsa

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The Search For Truth

Chapter 3 The Search For Truth Every time I come across the biblical passage in John 18:38, I have some feelings of regret. I would play the scenario in my mind: what if, Pilate lingered a little more to hear what would be Jesus' answer to his philosophical question? Of coure, the Bible is replete with Jesus' expositions of what truth is. And yet, I am still interested on what Jesus would have said on this ocassion. But Pilate, being a typical politician was not really interested in finding the truth. He was more concerned with pleasing the mob to improve his approval rating. So, what is truth? That's the first question that came to mind once I decided to write a book about truth. The dictionary defines truth as "the state or quality of being true." Not a very satisfying definition. So I researched some more and unknowingly entered into an unfamiliar territory, an area of knowledge called philosophy and epistemology where I encountered many exotic terminologies so foreign to me. Anyways, my brief incursions and wanderings paid off by giving me a deeper understanding about truth. Accordingly, there are quite a number of views or theories of truth. But since I am not writing a treatise on philosophy, but just a simple book for the average man on the street, I would limit our discussion to only two views of truth: (1) Correspondence View, and (2) Coherence View. Correspondence View states that a proposition must correspond with a fact or event in order to be acknowledged as truth. If I say, "two plus two equals four!" nobody will disagree with me because I can always produce two bananas and another two bananas to make it four bananas! Mathematical truths are good illustrations of this view. Another area which is a good example of this view is history.

Related Papers

Veronica Taylor

Alan Padgett

Exploring the Philosophical Terrain

Jeremiah Joven Joaquin

This article surveys different philosophical theories about the nature of truth. We give much importance to truth; some demand to know it, some fear it, and others would even die for it. But what exactly is truth? What is its nature? Does it even have a nature in the first place? When do we say that some truth-bearers are true? Philosophers offer varying answers to these questions. In this article, some of these answers are explored and some of the problems raised against them are presented.

Barry Loewer

It is a philosophical commonplace that truth is the primary norm for belief and assertion. For example, Frege held that truth is the aim of science and Dummett that" it is part of the concept of truth that we aim at making true statements". 1 Contrary to this commonplace Steve Stich has recently argued that" once we have a clear view of the matter, most of us will not find any value, either instrinisic or instrumental, in having true beliefs". 2 This is really an astonishing claim.

Arnold Ziegelaar

In this essay I introduce two theories of truth and show that we both need them to have a complete account of truth.

David Botting

Domenic Marbaniang

Practices of Truth in Philosophy: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, (eds.) P. Gori & L. Serini, (London: Routledge).

Duncan Pritchard

What does it mean for truth to be a fundamental value? I outline a way of unpacking this idea that doesn't collapse under the weight of implausible implications, including the following: that one should value all truths equally (i.e., no matter how trivial that truth might be); that one should prefer truth to knowledge or understanding; that the value of truth should trump all other considerations (including practical, ethical, aesthetic, and so on); and that there cannot be truths that one is unable accept or otherwise fully embrace. The discussion proceeds by way of reflections on, inter alia, Nietzsche's claim that the truth is terrible and Wittgenstein's contention that all rational evaluation presupposes an overarching groundless certainty.

Church, Communication and Culture

Franca d'Agostini

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Benjamin Jarvis

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Miriam Antonucci

The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language.

Panu Raatikainen

Laurent Jodoin

Giorgio Volpe

Scott A Smith

Michael P Lynch

David Bradshaw

Danielle Macbeth

Biblical truth can be known and understood

adan hernandez

Dr Leonard Polonsky thesis digitisation

Daniel Isaacson

In C. D. Wright and N. J. L. L. Pedersen (eds.): New Waves in Truth (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2010.

Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen , Cory Wright

Ferenc ANDRÁS

Journal of the Philosophy of History

Frank Ankersmit

Robin Sommers

Tom Donaldson

NICHOLAS SALAKO

Bradley Armour-Garb

Heitor Matallo Junior

Jean MacPhail

Keith Simmons

Horizons in Biblical Theology

Alice Bellis

Oxford Handbooks Online

Øystein Linnebo

Bessat Elmie

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Religion & Spirituality
• Religious Studies

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

The Search for Truth (Books with something to say) Paperback – December 31, 1974

• Print length 153 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Shanti Publications, Inc.
• Publication date December 31, 1974
• ISBN-10 0914374036
• ISBN-13 978-0914374039
• See all details

Products related to this item

Editorial Reviews

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Shanti Publications, Inc.; 6th edition (December 31, 1974)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 153 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0914374036
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0914374039
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
• #43 in Science & Religion (Books)
• #47 in Philosophy Metaphysics

About the author

Michael a. singer.

MICHAEL A. SINGER is a spiritual teacher and author of two New York Times bestsellers: The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment. In 1975, he founded the yoga and meditation center known as Temple of the Universe. In addition, he has made major contributions in the areas of business, education, health care, and environmental protection. Visit him at www.untetheredsoul.com.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 82% 8% 6% 1% 3% 82%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 82% 8% 6% 1% 3% 8%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 82% 8% 6% 1% 3% 6%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 82% 8% 6% 1% 3% 1%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 82% 8% 6% 1% 3% 3%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the book an excellent read that contains profound concepts and is full of Medicon. They also say it's very easy to read.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book an excellent, brilliant read. They also say it's worth the money.

" Amazing book , like the rest of the works written by Mr Singer. Very easy to read. The work paints an easy understanding of you as You (the Soul)...." Read more

"...reading all of his books if you can definitely worth the money and short read but full of Medicon 10" Read more

"...that would be too long , but it is a very clearly written and understandable book if one is a bit aware of some belief systems used in different..." Read more

" Incredible book for all Mickey Singer fans. His message even thirty years ago is well based in religions, science and logic...." Read more

Customers find the book easy to read and contains profound concepts that make good common sense. They also say the author is very dedicated and delightful. Readers also say it's a useful read and full of Medicon.

"...I did not finish it yet and every chapter is very deep and inspiring ...." Read more

"...books if you can definitely worth the money and short read but full of Medicon 10" Read more

"...This book is amazing for the intellectual who is curious about spirituality and how it ties into mankind in a scientific way...." Read more

"...very deep and instructional while his later books are simpler and more inspiring ." Read more

Customers find the book very easy to read and understand. They also appreciate the author's ability to convey complex subject matter and explain his wisdom well.

"Amazing book, like the rest of the works written by Mr Singer. Very easy to read . The work paints an easy understanding of you as You (the Soul)...." Read more

"Of course that would be too long , but it is a very clearly written and understandable book if one is a bit aware of some belief systems used in..." Read more

"...from Mickey, one of his earlier writings that’s very deep and instructional while his later books are simpler and more inspiring." Read more

"...however, I find the author's ability to convey such a complex subject easy too understand ...." Read more

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• Our Journey
• Our Warrior Monks
• Leadership Development
• Adventure Quests
• Erickson Coaching International
• Coaching Maturity
• Leadership Circle
• Coaching Matters
• The Art And Science of Coaching

• Press Release
• xMonks Drive Podcast
• Ebook Library

The Philosophy of Search For Truth

Table of Contents

Philosophy, as it is understood and practised, is and has been generally considered to be the search for truth. 

Man has always been on a never-ending pursuit for the truth. Religious, philosophical, and scientific schools of thought have attempted to explain the nature of reality throughout human history in a variety of cultures and civilizations. Humans have frequently become embroiled in conflicts between religious, philosophical, and scientific views, in a true labyrinth of theories and conceptions, rather than discovering it.

People cannot really be careless about whether or not what they know is true. If they find it to be false, they reject it; yet, if they can prove it to be true, they feel rewarded.

All human beings desire to know and truth is the proper object of this desire. Everyday life shows how concerned each of us is to discover for ourselves, beyond mere opinions, how things really are.

In this blog, I invite you to see yourself as a truth seeker and let yourself open to truth. 

Everyone Here Is A Truth Seeker

In one of his writings Saint Augustine says: “ I have met many who wanted to deceive, but none who wanted to be deceived”.

Every everyone in this world is a seeker of truth, regardless of their situation in life. Each of us tries to view things as they really are in every context on a daily basis, whether it be historians diving into the past, scientists trying to understand the universe, the atom, or the butterfly, or neighbours chatting over the backyard fence.

Things as they are, is a strong statement. We might use it as a working definition of truth: things-as-they-are, not what our senses and limited minds tell us they are.

Why this insistent urge for the truth? 

The quest for truth comes initially to the human being as a question: Does life have a meaning? Where is it going? 

Personal existence may appear meaningless at first look. As a result, we seek guidance from philosophers of the absurd or challenging questions found in self-help books to ponder the significance of our lives.

It appears to be a part of who we are, a craving in the heart, a yearning for a deeper understanding, a hunger that can be satisfied only by the truth. What are the ramifications of this? That we want to know what’s going on in our community, our country, and the world. We are also worried with our own mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

What causes one to get sick? What factors lead to illness? What are the many types of microorganisms that might cause disease? Is the rest of the world suffering in the same way? Can we, as human viruses, contaminate our planet? Many individuals are concerned about this. What if the Earth gets sick? If this is the case, it can’t simply be a blob of matter.

We all have a deep-seated longing to know the truth, and our ability to comprehend it is a direct result of this desire.

No one, not even the most enlightened thinker, can avoid being confronted with these questions. As a result of our responses, we will be able to assess whether or not we believe in the existence of universal and ultimate truth.

Even if it isn’t the complete truth, every truth, if it’s true, presents itself as universal. All people and all generations must agree that something is true. Beyond this, though, there is a longing for the absolute, something that may provide a foundation for everything and bring meaning and purpose to all the seeking. In other words, they’re looking for a final answer, a supreme value that doesn’t refer to anything else and ends all dispute.

Philosophers have searched for and expressed such a truth throughout time, giving rise to several philosophical systems and schools of thought. But beyond philosophical frameworks, people seek in diverse ways to build a “philosophy” of their own—through personal convictions and experiences, traditions of family and culture, or journeys in quest of life’s meaning under the tutelage of a master.

What inspires all of these is the desire to seek the certitude of truth, making everyone a truth seeker.

Philosophy As A Medium To Seek Truth

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” -Galileo

Properly speaking, the subject of philosophy is concerned with the nature of Truth, or Reality. It is quite obvious that we are not after unrealities, phantoms or things that pass away, we are not in search of these things. We require something substantial, permanent. And what is this? What do you mean by the thing that is permanent, which is the same as what you call real? The search for Reality is the subject of philosophy.

Throughout the long history of the discipline some of its most celebrated practitioners have explicitly described philosophy this way, e.g. Aristotle (1984, II, 1570), Spinoza (2007, 184) and Berkeley (2008, 68), while others have elected to characterise it as the search for knowledge or wisdom, where both ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’ are synonyms for ‘truth,’ or certain kinds of truth at least, e.g. Hobbes (1839, I, 3) and Descartes (1985, I, 186).

There have been, of course, other conceptions of philosophy throughout its long history, though arguably most of these amount to little more than variations on the truth-seeking theme. 

For example:  Various ancient thinkers such as Plato, the Stoics, and the Epicureans, inter alia, saw philosophy as first and foremost a practical discipline, as a way of life,  but in doing so all ultimately thought of it as truth-seeking, in that they believed that philosophy discloses the truths by which one should orientate one’s life. 

Under this conception, it seems more correct to say that philosophy uncovers truths rather than discovers them. & Similarly, John Locke’s notion of philosophy as the under-labourer to the sciences (2008, 6) sees philosophy’s role as assisting scientists by sweeping away the problematic notions, conceptual confusions and false hypotheses that might otherwise impede their progress in amassing knowledge. 

Common to all such conceptions of philosophy is the view that philosophy is ultimately truth-seeking. It is certainly the case that each conception differs in terms of what it holds to be the kind of truths one can attain through philosophy (e.g. truths about how one should live, about God, about our conceptual scheme(s) etc.) 

But this takes nothing away from the fact that whether philosophy is conceived as handmaiden, under-labourer or plumber, it remains the case that its practitioners hold that it is through philosophy and by means of philosophy that truths are sought out (and, it is hoped, ultimately disclosed, uncovered or discovered), and as such each conception takes philosophy to be a truth-seeking discipline. 

In words of Katherine Tingley—

“For we do not live by philosophic or theological speculations about life, but by the knowledge of life we ourselves have acquired. Truth is not intricate and remote, a thing to be led to by much discussion. It is the reality behind all these outward aspects of life, the eternal purpose ever pressing towards manifestation, that which keeps the stars in place and mankind from self-destruction.”  

Seeing Through The Illusions Of Reality

Everyone has a kind of longing to know how things really are.

But our preconceived ideas stand in our way. We see only what we are prepared to see. We approach reality with glasses already tinted. Each era and each culture tints its glasses differently. We demand that reality show itself to us as we think it should be, instead of the way it is. Our human natures are not open and flexible enough; our minds are not free of preconceptions, nor our intuitions sufficiently alive to penetrate to the heart of things. As yet we are only partly evolved or awakened.

Still, I am a part of this world, and you are a part of this world, and every atom is a part of this same world. So it must be that the urge to know springs from the essential oneness of all things; from the fact that all beings and things contribute to all other beings and things. 

This is a thought full of wonder and meaning for those whose daily round seems so circumscribed. It implies that all parts of this world, no matter how minute, are essential to the whole. That what we do within ourselves affects all else, not only in the human sphere, but throughout nature. The way we conduct ourselves inwardly and outwardly either assists the cosmic process or hinders it.

How Can We Discover Truth For Ourselves

As we are mysteries, so we can be revelations to ourselves. 

Were a man to seek truth so earnestly as to find his way into his own soul, and discover its mysterious faculties and what armies wait there at his command, he would hold in hand the key to all situations and understand every need of humanity. Every secret of human nature would be clear to him.

The Bhagavad-Gita suggests: “Seek this wisdom by doing service, by strong search, by questions, and by humility; the wise who see the truth will communicate it unto thee, and knowing which thou shalt never again fall into error.”

Whether we immerse ourselves in one particular stream of knowledge, compare a variety of approaches, or simply look within, putting into practice whatever we discover is truth. 

As James Long writes:

Our greatest hope lies in the fact that Truth does exist. Through the millennia it has come down to us like a river whose source is in the Unknown. At times its current flows strong and clear over the surface of the earth, enriching human hearts. At other times, not finding a channel of receptive minds, it disappears and moves quietly underground, and the soil it once made fertile lies fallow. But always the river flows.

There is no greater or more important truth ever taught than “ Man, know thyself ”.

Without such perception, man will remain ever blind to even many a relative, let alone absolute truth. Man has to know himself, i.e., acquire the inner perceptions which never deceive, before he can master any absolute truth.

Leave Yourself Open To Truth 

What I am trying to say is that we should leave ourselves as open, as susceptible to the inside truth as we are alert to observe and classify visible phenomena. To get the feel of things is often more important than to analyse them, to measure and to weigh them. 

The quest for truth is not an intellectual game. It is a looking within and a looking without. Nothing we see outside would mean anything unless it sparked something in us. How may we know beauty, grandeur, courage, unless these qualities are within us to respond? 

In this sense, truth lives in us as a divine potential or, as Browning phrased it: “There is an inmost centre in us all,/Where truth abides in fullness.” From this quiet centre come gleams and insights. The mystic or sage, artist or poet, expresses these glimpses, and these have the power to awaken us.

We can only conclude that truth resides in the heart of all beings, great and small. Some have unfolded more understanding of this truth. We are at the human stage of comprehension and self-expression. 

Hence truth-seeking has throughout the ages been linked with the idea of the path, the path of unfolding latent capacities. We are on this path leading to our flowering as human beings, whether or not we realize it. And when we extend our view to encompass many lives or reincarnations we realize we have the time scale needed for everyone to develop his higher potential. 

Truth needs no outside force, for it persuades by its innate veracity. 

What kind of truth are you looking for? Religious, philosophic, or scientific? It is sometimes believed that these three are incompatible. This is not the case, however, for they are facets of the one truth — in man, in nature, in the cosmos. One may approach reality from the spiritual point of view, another from the intellectual, a third from observing the physical world with all its marvels and beauty. They could no more contradict one another than the fact that I am a soul contradicts that I also have a body. 

Properly understood, the wisdom of each branch of learning can only augment and extend the others, for each approaches the same reality from a different angle.

There is no reason we must have unanimity of opinion. Truth is one, it cannot be otherwise, but the paths to it are as numerous as are the searchers.

There can be no final statement of truth.

The way to keep truth alive and growing in our hearts is to reexpress it constantly.

Truth is out there and in here. It is the way things are in us and in our world. We are urged to search for it by forces within ourselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the philosophy of search for truth.

The philosophy of search for truth is the study of reality, which seeks to understand the nature of truth and the ways to discover it. It is concerned with discovering what is real and permanent, rather than what is fleeting or illusory.

Why is the search for truth important to humans?

The search for truth is important to humans because it is a natural urge to understand the world and our place in it. The quest for truth provides meaning and purpose to our lives, and helps us make sense of our experiences and observations.

Is everyone a truth seeker?

Yes, everyone is a truth seeker, regardless of their situation in life. Every individual tries to view things as they really are, whether it be through personal convictions, traditions, or philosophical inquiry. The desire to seek the certitude of truth is what inspires everyone to be a truth seeker.

What is the role of philosophy in the search for truth?

Philosophy serves as a medium to seek truth, as it is concerned with the nature of Reality. Philosophers have attempted to understand the truth by exploring various philosophical systems and schools of thought. Philosophy helps individuals build their own understanding of truth through personal experiences and insights.

Why do people seek a final answer or supreme value in truth?

People seek a final answer or supreme value in truth because they want a foundation for everything and to bring meaning and purpose to all their seeking. The desire for an absolute, universal truth that does not refer to anything else and ends all disputes is what drives individuals to look for a supreme value in truth.

An Ecosystem that brings to you world’s leading warrior monks in their respective streams for personal transformation and leadership development.

+91-9810088509

[email protected]

137- First Floor, DLF Star Tower, Sector 30, NH-8, Opposite 32 Milestone, Gurugram, India - 122001

Latest Blog Posts

Copyright © 2024 xMonks. All Rights Reserved.

Alan Fowler

• Christadelphians Cited

Navigation menu

Page actions.

• View source

Personal tools

• Introduction
• Recent changes
• Random page
• Daily Bible Readings
• What links here
• Related changes
• Special pages
• Printable version
• Permanent link
• Page information
• What we resolved
• Many perspectives
• Christadelphians cited
• Our process
• Current topics
• Topics considered

Special Areas

• Bible Index
• QMS: Questioning Mainstream Science
• MCo: "Many Counsellors" pages

• This page was last edited on 26 June 2022, at 09:12.
• Privacy policy
• About Reconciling understandings of Scripture and Science
• Disclaimers

The Unseen Truth Discussion Guide

28 questions to use in book clubs, organizations, and classrooms to spark discussions about The Unseen Truth , the groundbreaking book that uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States—when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime.

Author - Editorial Staff

Date - 31 July 2024

Time to read - 5 min

Introduction

Does the idea of racial whiteness rest on empirical data? Why did the idea take hold? 

How does the discovery of the fiction of the Caucasus as the “homeland of whiteness” complicate racial narratives and terms we use in daily life?

How do silences and omissions enable racial myths?

Chapter One

Why was the Caucasian War so widely followed in the nineteenth century? What parallels were drawn between the Caucasian War and the American Civil War during this period? 

Why did P. T. Barnum’s Circassian Beauties resonate with the public?

President Woodrow Wilson requested a report about the appearance of women from the Caucasus region, the so-called exemplars of white racial purity. What does this anecdote reveal about the importance of the Caucasus during this period? 

Throughout the book, Lewis discusses moments in history when the idea of the Caucasus as the “homeland of racial whiteness” ruptured. What are some examples of this? Why is it important to revisit and consider these ideas today? 

Chapter Two

Why did Frederick Douglass consider images to be critical for changing perceptions and visions about the world? What does Douglass’s speech “Pictures and Progress” teach us about the work of visual culture for both regimes of racial oppression and for representational justice?

How did the photographic representations of the Circassian Beauties and their contradictions challenge racial scripts of domination and the ideologies of white supremacy?  

How did the confusion about the idea of the Caucasus enter the discourse of US courts as they attempted to legally define whiteness during the nineteenth century? In what ways were ideas about race used in legal cases, and what roles did visual culture play in these discussions about racial hierarchies? 

Chapter Three

What does Frank Duveneck’s painting A Circassian tell us about the ability to unsee—to see a racial history and then dismiss it? How does tracing the institutional history of this work change our understanding of the painting and its larger historical and cultural importance? 

How does silencing happen in research?

How are aesthetics tied to maintaining and challenging racial hierarchies?

Chapter Four

What is the role of maps in structuring racial regimes?

Lewis shows how the Caucasus was removed from map-making practices as it became illegible as a homeland of white racial identity. Has her discussion informed and/or changed your understanding of maps and the types of information they are meant to relate? 

How has cartography been used historically to instantiate certain narratives about power and how might we begin to rethink these objects and the stories they tell?  

How are maps evidence of sight as a form of racial myth-making, as Lewis describes? Can you think of other examples (historical or contemporary) when maps have been used to either construct or deconstruct certain racial ideologies?

Did this chapter raise any questions for you about your own education—about what and how you were taught about the world as a child?

Chapter Five

Why was Freeman Henry Morris Murray, a clerk working in President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, so intent on writing about aesthetics and public monuments during a period of deep segregation? 

Why did President Wilson use details—not outright decree—to implement racial segregation at the federal level? How did “racial detailing” instantiate and counter racial injustices during this period? How did this practice of detailing inform early civil rights tactics of resistance to racial oppression by overlooked leaders such as Swan Marshall Kendrick and Freeman Henry Morris Murray?

What is the relationship between “racial detailing” and the origins of racial profiling in the United States? In what ways do we still live with the legacies of this “detail-driven visual regime,” and where today can we see the legacy of the tactics used by figures like Kendrick and Murray?

During the Progressive Era, how was the term friction used, and by whom? Can you think of contemporary examples of words or phrases that operate in a similar way as code or proxy? How might we learn to recognize and begin to decode political speech and why is it important to do so?

In 1914, while serving in Woodrow Wilson’s White House, Murray came to see cultural practices like erecting public monuments as crucial in shaping political and racial policies. His realization of their power marks a significant moment. How does Murray’s book, influenced by his experience during a time of Civil War monument-building, shed light on debates about monuments and other cultural acts—such as school curriculum reform—in America today?

What strategies and methods does Lewis employ in her work to uncover stories that have been (at times) intentionally left out of history? How might you use some of these strategies to uncover absences in your own work and/or daily life? 

What most surprised you about this book? What did it teach you about how history is written? What did you learn about American history, visual culture, and/or the history of race that you did not know before? 

How does the history of sight and visual culture come to reframe our understanding of racial hierarchy in the United States? 

Throughout The Unseen Truth , Lewis relates the personal experiences of several important historical figures—from Langston Hughes’s impressions of visiting the Caucasus to Swan Marshall Kendrick’s frustration with his work in Washington, DC. She also includes anecdotes from her own life. How did her attention to the personal lives of these figures change your understanding of these larger histories?

How might you approach histories of race and representation after reading this book? What new tools do you have to understand racial scripts? 

Download The Unseen Truth Discussion Guide

Sorry, there was an error adding the item to your shopping bag.

Expired session

Sorry, your session has expired. Please refresh your browser's tab.

Main navigation

An item has been added to the cart

Added to shopping bag

• Copy to clipboard

Set your location

It looks like you're in   . Would you like to update your location?

Unavailable

Harvard University Press titles are not shipped directly to India due to local distribution arrangements.

Unavailable in country .

Shopping Bag

Your shopping bag is currently empty. Add items to your shopping bag, to complete check out.

• Share this —

• Watch Full Episodes
• Read With Jenna
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• TODAY Table
• Newsletters
• Start TODAY
• Shop TODAY Awards
• Citi Concert Series
• Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

• On The Show
• TODAY Plaza

I’m child-free by choice. It’s time to change the narrative of what that means

I’m 44 years old and I’ve known since my early 30s that motherhood was not in the cards for me. This wasn’t a choice that my adult circumstances made for me — it was a choice I made for myself. And I’m hardly alone: A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that a growing number of Americans are opting out of parenthood. And the No. 1 reason people under age 50 gave for that choice? They just don’t want to. 

I have long believed that parenting is, hands down, the most important and impactful role a person can take on. But I grew up in an unstable, financially insecure home, and as I got older, I realized that opting out of motherhood would be the wisest and kindest choice I could make for myself. 

I remember the first time I “outed” myself to my mother, revealing that I didn’t plan to have children. I wasn’t yet married, but I had been with my partner for several years at that point. He and I had talked extensively about whether parenthood was something we wanted, and each discussion made it clearer that it wasn’t the right choice for us. My soon-to-be husband and I were all for being Auntie and Uncle, just not Mom and Dad.

My soon-to-be husband and I were all for being Auntie and Uncle, just not Mom and Dad.

But while we were confident in our choice, the people around us weren’t convinced. Even in my own family, my decision to remain child-free was seen as problematic, and often questioned.

“He might just be saying that he doesn’t want kids,” my mother said. I was driving at the time, and I remember trying to keep my focus on the road as aggravation bubbled in my gut.

“Then I guess we’re going to have to disagree,” I remember responding. “Because I choose to believe that he’s not lying to me.”

“But he might just be telling you what you want to hear,” she said, doubling down. I never brought the topic up to her again. For what it’s worth, my husband and I are still on the same page 11 years later, without even a hint of a change of heart.

And my dad? He went on a diatribe about how he wanted grandchildren. I reminded him that he is free to have more children if that’s really the life he wants. He never brought it up again, which I consider a win.  

But the pushback didn’t end with family. Despite our increasing presence in this world, I know firsthand how society views women who don’t have children. Take the criticism against Vice President Kamala Harris for not having biological children, for example. My family consists of me, my spouse and our two cats. We are certified cat people, but we own it. Yet, because we don’t have kids, it sometimes feels like our needs are not viewed as important or valid. People think of us as mere DINKS — that is,   “dual income, no kids” — who go on fancy and expensive vacations and spend all of our free time on the beach. This idea of what it looks like to choose a child-free lifestyle could not be further from the truth, at least for us. 

I started my career in education as a middle school teacher. Much of my life’s work has been dedicated to children. I have seen firsthand how devastating a lack of supportive policies can be for families. I taught in a Title I district , which is code for schools serving large populations of students with financial need. I’ve witnessed children come to school sick, hungry or in dire need of mental health services that weren’t available. I’ve long believed that society has a responsibility to take care of its families.

I now work at a university, where I teach in a preparation program for future teachers. We talk often about children- and family-centered classrooms, and what it looks like to be a teacher with a humanizing approach. I instill in them that the students who will one day occupy their classrooms are other peoples’ children, and that the privilege to teach comes with extraordinary responsibility to them and their families. I may not have children of my own, but I care deeply about educating young people. I’m also an author of middle-grade novels that feature young characters who overcome some of the real-life struggles I’ve seen.

Before I began teaching, I briefly worked for a software firm. Soon after I started, a colleague welcomed his first child. I was stunned to learn that our company had no parental leave policy, and that instead he’d had to use up his vacation time — just 5 days —  to acclimate to his new life with a newborn.

“That’s it ?” I balked. He laughed in response, more so at my naivete than at the absurdity of the situation.

As a child-free person, I will never require parental leave , but I consider myself an ally to those who want to see more employer support for families. I still do not understand why this is so controversial.  

But despite my support of families, I’ve often felt like my voice isn’t welcome.

I’ve found it difficult to establish close friendships with parents of young children — they already have their parent cliques, and sometimes there does not appear to be room for child-free women and couples. It’s sad to me that they’ll never know that I want the same things they want: widespread social support for families. And they won’t know just how much our interests might intersect because it seems that our potential to connect is cut short the minute it becomes clear that I’m not a mom.

I've found it difficult to establish friendships with parents of young children ... it seems that our potential to connect is cut short the minute it becomes clear that I'm not a mom.

As a child-free woman, I’ve also learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut during conversations about parenting.  In my experience, most people do not want to accept that a child-free person can have an informed perspective about parenting and children, no matter how much our careers and education might align with issues that are relevant to families. Any social media feed on a post about parenting reveals the ugly underbelly of exactly how society views child-free women and their perspectives.

In a few short months, it’s feasible that we may not only have our first woman president, but our first president without biological children since George Washington . I hope one day that society can find a way to move past its stereotypes of child-free women, and to recognize our potential as allies. Because while my household will never expand beyond my spouse and our cats, I’ll always be passionately pro-family.

Christina Wyman is a USA Today bestselling author and teacher living in Michigan. Her new middle-grade novel, “ Slouch ,” is about a tall girl navigating friends, family, self-esteem and boundaries, and will be available fall 2024 wherever books are sold, including through local independent bookstores . Her debut novel, “ Jawbreaker ,”a middle-grade book that follows a seventh grader with a craniofacial anomaly, is a Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2023. 

I kept my first marriage a secret from my kids. I wish I'd just told them truth

Seven minutes to grieve with ‘Bluey’

I make my kids bring gifts for the flight crew when we travel. Here’s why

My wife is the default parent. When I asked her to do less, it didn’t go very well

I’m a happy mom but my favorite stories are about child-free women

I refuse to play with my kids — and it makes me a better mom

I got through breast cancer treatment by hiding it from my young children

Disney-ish: How we embraced Disney magic without setting foot inside the park

I took my kids on the vacation I hated as a girl. Now I understand my parents more than ever

I hid my postpartum depression ... until a friend got me to find help

• 我的GRE 我的班课 我的1V1 练习记录 活动中心

题目来源1 : 填空冲刺练习

provisional , useful 显示答案

登录 后才可以添加做题笔记哦，还没有账号？ 马上注册

以上解析由 考满分老师 提供。

GRE 考神 2017-12-01 12:23:23

贡献解析 122 条 贡献排行 No.6 --> 赞 200

当前为 V20170308 查看历史版本

科学做题，拒绝盲目刷题

You're reading a free article with opinions that may differ from The Motley Fool's Premium Investing Services. Become a Motley Fool member today to get instant access to our top analyst recommendations, in-depth research, investing resources, and more. Learn More

The Truth Behind GM's $129 Billion in Debt

You’re reading a free article with opinions that may differ from The Motley Fool’s Premium Investing Services. Become a Motley Fool member today to get instant access to our top analyst recommendations, in-depth research, investing resources , and more. Learn More

General Motors

GM has a ton of debt, but that may not be the problem you think it is.

General Motors ( GM -2.14% ) has $129 billion of debt on its balance sheet, which scares a lot of investors away from the stock. But is that the right way to look at the debt number?

In this video, Travis Hoium shows where that debt resides and why the core business really has a net cash position.

*Stock prices used were end-of-day prices of July 28, 2024. The video was published on July 29, 2024.

Ally is an advertising partner of The Ascent, a Motley Fool company. JPMorgan Chase is an advertising partner of The Ascent, a Motley Fool company. Travis Hoium has positions in General Motors. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends JPMorgan Chase. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors and recommends the following options: long January 2025 $25 calls on General Motors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy . Travis Hoium is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through their link , they will earn some extra money that supports their channel. Their opinions remain their own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

Related Articles

Premium Investing Services

Invest better with The Motley Fool. Get stock recommendations, portfolio guidance, and more from The Motley Fool's premium services.