What is Truth?

We, almost every time, try to find the truth, but where do we look for it. It is not something we can pick up at the neither of the departmental store’s sections. In this blog we we’ll know where to look for those answers.

Introduction

We know that, in the previous blog, we saw that a justified belief is not necessarily truth. That is, someone may hold a belief that happens to be true, yet not actually possess knowledge. Imagine someone saying that there are exactly 304 pigeons flying over the White House right now without having any evidence. By pure coincidence, there really are 304 pigeons. Although the person believed something true, it was simply a lucky guess rather than knowledge. Truth alone is not enough; the belief must also be properly justified.

We can see this more clearly in another example. Students must take exams. Some study hard and get their results by virtue of the effort they put in, others guess entirely. Picture a test of ten multiple choice questions. One student studies for weeks, the other guesses randomly on every question and by luck, gets all ten answers right. The guessing student does not know; he just happened to arrive at the correct answers by chance. The student who studied after even if he made mistakes, genuinely knew the material. His success was because of the knowledge he possessed rather than chance.

The Three Theories

We will start by defining each theory.

The correspondence theory of truth states that a statement is true if it corresponds to the way the world actually is. For example, the statement “the sky is blue” is true if the sky really is blue. At first nothing seems wrong with it. However, a difficult thing soon appears. How do we know that our perception, that is what we truly see perfectly matches to the real world or reality? We experience the world through our senses which is unreliable for something such as truth, and our senses can sometimes deceive us. The theory tells us what truth is—a correspondence with reality—but it does not fully explain how we can be certain that our beliefs genuinely correspond to that reality.

Next, the coherence theory states that a belief is true if it fits logically within a system of other beliefs. To say it in another manner, a statement is considered true if it is consistent with the system of beliefs or the coherent network of beliefs. But here lies a problem. A complete system can be perfectly logical while still being unconnected to reality. Think of a fictional world. Every event, character, and rule within that world may fit together without contradiction, yet the world itself does not exist. A belief may cohere with every other belief in a system and still fail to describe the real world. Thus, coherence alone cannot fully account for truth.

Finally, the pragmatic theory says that something is true if it works or proves useful in practice. A belief is said to be true if it helps us solve problems, make predictions, or go through everyday life. Yet being useful alone does not always mean that it is the truth. Throughout history, people have had beliefs that seemed practical and effective for a time but were later discovered to be false. What works today may not withstand future evidence. Practical success may guide us toward truth, but it cannot by itself determine what truth ultimately is.

Each theory of truth is important. None of them can fully explain what truth is on its own. The correspondence theory reminds us that truth has to be related to reality. The coherence theory emphasizes that our thoughts have to be consistent with each other. The pragmatism theory says that truth is about what works in life.

Each of these theories is valuable. None of them can give us the complete picture of what truth is. So we need to ask ourselves if none of these theories can fully explain truth then where can we find the truth and how can we get closer to it.

Now that we have looked at all three theories we can see that they each only explain one part of the truth. They give us some ideas but none of them can completely answer the question of what truth really is. So now we are going to look at an approach, which is called foundationalism.

Foundationalism

Foundationalism says that our knowledge has to be based on some beliefs that do not need other beliefs to support them. These basic beliefs are like the starting point for all our beliefs. We use these beliefs to build up a larger system of knowledge. If the basic beliefs are correct then the other beliefs that are based on them are more likely to be true. Of just believing things without any good reason foundationalism tries to find a solid starting point that we can use to build up all our other knowledge.

This leads us to the question if we build our knowledge on a foundation how do we know that the foundation is secure and where does it take us from there. To use foundationalism we have to deal with a problem, which is called the regress problem. Foundationalism is trying to solve this problem. The problem is, why do we stop at some belief instead of just keeping on questioning forever. We. Keep on questioning forever or we go around in circles or we stop at some basic belief.

This is where foundationalism is helpful. We have already looked at coherentism and infinitism. They do not fully explain things. Instead we can follow the example of a man named René Descartes. Descartes doubted everything he could his own senses and the world around him until he found something he could not doubt which was his own thoughts. He said, “I think, therefore I am.” For Descartes this was a foundation that he could not shake.

Once we have this foundation it is not about guessing or being consistent for no reason. Instead we can use this foundation, which is our own thoughts to build up all our other knowledge. This leads us to a question once we have this foundation is it easy to find all the other truths or can we still be wrong. We will look at this question next.

Conclusion

Many people who criticize Descartes say that he found something important with “I think therefore I am.” This idea is hard to argue with because even if you try to say that you do not think, the fact that you are trying to say that proves that you do think. This is a foundation.

These critics also say that even though Descartes found this foundation he had trouble building on it. They say that once we have a belief we need to make sure that all our other beliefs are consistent with it.In short this was a brief look, at what truth is. We did not fully define what truth is we just found a way to get to it. In the blog we will look more closely at Descartes and his idea “I think therefore I am”.