Philosophy Stack Exchange
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Questions tagged [truth]

Theories of truth deal with questions such as: what are truths? what makes them true? what is the relation between truths and the things that makes them true? Not to be confused with "what is the truth", which is a completely different matter.

Truth has long been a central subject in philosophy. Theories of truth deal with questions such as: what are truths? what makes them true? what is the relation between truths and the things that makes them true?

Not to be confused with "what is the truth", which is a completely different matter.

The main conceptions of truth, briefly, are:

  • Correspondence theories, that hold that things are true in virtue of their correspondence to facts in reality.
  • Coherentism, that holds that beliefs are true in virtue of taking part in some coherent system of beliefs.
  • Pragmatism, that holds that beliefs are true in virtue of being useful in some sense.
  • Deflationism, that holds that truth has no metaphysical significance at all.

Theories of truth may have great implications with respect to , , and .

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Why do I accept some inconsequential claims as "obviously true" without evidence? E.g. "Most people don't like to be hit on the head with a hammer."

There are certain claims that I accept as obviously true without (much) evidence. For example: Most people don't like to be hit on the head with a hammer. Donald Trump ate dinner some time last week. There has yet to be a whale on the moon. I…
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Why do some people care so much about "empirical truth"?

Whenever you discuss philosophy, inevitably you will come across a type of person who holds empirical truth above all else, and will blatantly ridicule any discussion which has its onset in a paradigm that emphasizes other aspects than just…
geowo
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What is the difference (if any) between "not true" and "false"?

A fairly simple question I hope someone can help me with.
Heynow
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What is the difference between Fact and Truth?

I'm curious about the difference between Fact and Truth. I was searching on the internet if I could find it. But still I'm confused about the exact meaning. I first read the forum discussion here Fact and Truth where an author has given two examples…
NullPointer
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What are the philosophical implications of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem?

Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem states Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that…
Joseph Weissman
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Is mathematics truth? As in the sense of that which is manifest or possible in reality?

In mathematics there are imaginary numbers which cannot be represented directly in reality (the physical world). For example, you can't have i apples where i = √-1 (square root of -1) Can we then say that in some sense mathematics is not…
michael
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Is scientism a self defeating epistemology?

Some who have argued against the validity of scientism have argued that the view that only science can uncover truth is not a scientific discovery but rather a epistemology. Hence it has been claimed that it is self refuting. Is this a valid…
Neil Meyer
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Motivations for dialetheism?

At the request of the moderators, I've reformulated this question to change the emphasis of the question to something perhaps a little more broad-ranging: Question. What are the major modern motivations for Dialetheism? Context. According to the…
Niel de Beaudrap
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How can we reason about "if P then Q" or "P only if Q" statements in propositional logic?

When you have a propositional sentence of the form P ⊃ Q  — which we might read as "if P, then Q" — how can you tell when it is true, or false, based on the truth-values of P and Q in classical logic? When is this different from Q ⊃ P? And what is…
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Is the truth a privative?

A privative is the absence of something, and as such doesn't exist. So cold is a privative, as it is merely the absence of heat. This question is inspired by this answer about a single noun for an honest person. It seems to me that the truth is…
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Is everything just an opinion?

I read some people don't believe in truth but do believe there is always a chance that x. I have a question about such thought. I recently heard an anecdote that says nobody can ever prove I ate yoghurt this morning, even when there are thousand…
Mark Knol
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Is "This sentence is written in English" nonsense?

Wittgenstein and many others have said that our language gives the appearance of truth to some nonsense. Do you think the very simple "This sentence is written in English." is such nonsense which seems true? It seems true, but if you translate it…
François
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When it is correct to use Tarski's undefinability theorem versus Gödel's incompleteness theorem?

Smullyan (1991, 2001) has argued forcefully that Tarski's undefinability theorem deserves much of the attention garnered by Gödel's incompleteness theorems. That the latter theorems have much to say about all of mathematics and more…
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Does every truth have to be provable based on evidence?

I know the answer is "no" in general due to Gödel's Theory of Incompleteness, but I mean this question in a more real-world sense (i.e. scientific sense). In other words, I am talking about empirical rather than mathematical truths. Can there be…
Lavie
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How do quantifiers work in predicate logic?

Predicate logic is somewhat like propositional logic, except that where propositional logic only works on the level of whole sentences (e.g. A = "Socrates is mortal", B = "All Scottish people eat their porridge plain"), it allows you to talk about…
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