Theories of Truth

In brief

Everyone uses the word "true" without difficulty. The philosophical question is not how to use it but what, if anything, it names. When you say a claim is true, are you saying it matches reality, that it hangs together with everything else you believe, that acting on it works, or nothing at all beyond simply asserting the claim again? Four families of answer have dominated. The correspondence theory holds that a proposition is true when it corresponds to a fact. The coherence theory holds that it is true when it belongs to a maximally coherent system of beliefs. The pragmatic theory holds that it is true when it proves useful in inquiry and action. Deflationary theories, including the redundancy and minimalist accounts, deny that truth has any underlying nature to discover: the whole content of "it is true that snow is white" is just that snow is white. The disagreement is not academic. What you take truth to be shapes your metaphysics, your epistemology, and your logic.

The full treatment

The problem these theories answer

Consider the sentence "snow is white." It is true. But that observation invites a demand for explanation: in virtue of what is it true? A theory of truth is an answer to that "in virtue of what." The demand is sharpened by cases that pull the intuitive answers apart. A perfectly coherent novel is not thereby true. A false belief can be useful, and a true one can be paralyzing. A statement can match the facts even when nobody could ever verify it. Each theory of truth is, in part, a bet about which of these pressures matters most and which can be explained away.

Correspondence: truth as matching the world

The oldest and most intuitive account. Aristotle put the core in the Metaphysics: to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true. A proposition is true when it corresponds to a fact, when the world is as the proposition says it is. "Snow is white" is true because snow is, in fact, white. In the twentieth century Bertrand Russell and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein gave this a structural form: a proposition is a kind of picture, and it is true when its structure mirrors the structure of a fact in the world. The appeal is obvious. It captures the plain sense in which truth answers to something outside our beliefs. Its burden is to say what "facts" are and what "correspondence" amounts to without circularity, a burden that has proved heavy.

Coherence: truth as fit within a system

Associated with the British idealists F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, and defended at length by Brand Blanshard in The Nature of Thought (1939), the coherence theory locates truth not in a relation to the world but in a relation among beliefs. A proposition is true when it coheres with a comprehensive, mutually supporting system of other propositions. The motivation is epistemic honesty: we never step outside all our beliefs to compare one directly against a bare fact. We only ever test beliefs against other beliefs. Coherence also fits domains like pure mathematics, where "correspondence to a fact" is obscure but systematic fit is everything.

Pragmatism: truth as what works

The pragmatic account, developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and given its most famous form by William James in Pragmatism (1907), ties truth to inquiry and consequences. For James, an idea is true insofar as believing it "works," insofar as it guides action successfully and coheres with experience over time. Peirce, more austere, defined truth as the opinion fated to be agreed upon by all who inquire long enough, the ideal limit of scientific investigation. Pragmatism was in part a revolt against the correspondence theory's idle "facts": it insisted that truth must make a difference you can cash out in experience. See the entry on pragmatism for the wider movement.

Deflationism: truth as no substantive property

The most radical move denies the question. Frank Ramsey argued in 1927 that "it is true that Caesar was murdered" says no more than "Caesar was murdered": the words "is true" are redundant. Later deflationists refined this. The disquotational theory notes that for any sentence, "'p' is true" is equivalent to p; truth is just a device for removing quotation marks. Paul Horwich's minimalism (Truth, 1990) holds that all there is to say about truth is captured by the instances of the schema "the proposition that p is true if and only if p," and that no deeper analysis, and no hidden property, awaits discovery. On this view truth is a useful logical tool, above all for generalizing ("everything the witness said is true"), not a substantive nature.

The one distinction that organizes the field

The deepest divide is not among the first three theories but between all of them and deflationism. Correspondence, coherence, and pragmatism are inflationary: each says truth is some real, substantive property, and they merely disagree about which. Deflationism says there is no such property at all, and that a century of dispute rests on a false presupposition. A separate technical strand runs through everything. Alfred Tarski, in his 1935 work on formalized languages, showed that any adequate definition of truth for a language must entail every instance of the schema "'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" (his Convention T). Tarski's result is claimed by nearly every side: correspondence theorists read it as vindicating their relation, deflationists as showing the schema is all there is.

Lineage

Correspondence descends from Aristotle and runs through the medieval formula "truth is the adequation of thing and intellect" (adaequatio rei et intellectus), then into Russell and the early Wittgenstein. Coherence grows from the rationalist conviction, visible in Spinoza and later Hegel, that reality is a rational whole in which each truth implies the others; the British idealists made it a theory of truth as such. Pragmatism is distinctively American, born in Peirce's Cambridge circle in the 1870s and popularized by James. Deflationism begins with Ramsey in 1927, gains logical spine from Tarski in the 1930s, and matures in the disquotationalism of W. V. O. Quine and the minimalism of Horwich. The rationalist stress on system (see Rene Descartes) and the empiricist stress on experience (see David Hume) still map onto the coherence and pragmatic instincts respectively.

The strongest case for it

Each theory earns its keep by capturing something the others strain to. Correspondence honors the realist intuition that truth is answerable to a world that does not care what we believe; it explains why inquiry can fail, why we can be wrong about everything we are most confident of. Coherence honors the fact that justification is always internal, that we test beliefs only against beliefs, and it handles mathematics and logic where correspondence to worldly facts is murky. Pragmatism honors the link between truth and success: true beliefs are, on the whole, the ones that let us predict and act well, and it refuses to let "truth" float free of any conceivable difference in experience. Deflationism honors ontological economy: it explains everything the word "true" actually does, above all its logical role in blind generalization, while positing no mysterious property and no correspondence relation nobody has ever managed to specify.

The strongest case against it

Correspondence faces the demand to say what facts are and what the correspondence relation is; critics from the coherentists onward charge that "fact" is just a shadow of the true proposition, making the theory circular, and that we can never compare a belief with an uninterpreted world. Coherence faces the plurality objection, pressed by Russell: many distinct, internally coherent systems can be built, and coherence alone cannot say which is the true one; a coherent fairy tale is not true. It also seems to sever truth from the world entirely. Pragmatism drew Russell's sharpest attack: usefulness and truth come apart, since comforting falsehoods can work and disabling truths can hurt, and to say a belief is true because it works looks either false or like a covert appeal to the correspondence it was meant to replace. Deflationism faces the objection that it cannot account for truth's apparent explanatory role: we say science succeeds because its theories are true, and treat truth as a norm inquiry aims at, roles a merely disquotational device seems too thin to play. It also strains over generalizations across languages and over propositions we cannot state. The dispute over what makes moral claims true (see moral realism) turns directly on which of these accounts one adopts.

Where it stands now

No single theory has won, and the live options have shifted. Naive correspondence has few defenders, but sophisticated versions and truthmaker theory (which asks what in the world makes a truth true) remain vigorous. Pure coherence has largely receded as a theory of truth, though it thrives as a theory of justification. Pragmatism persists, updated in the "success" and "convergence" language of scientific realism and in the neo-pragmatism of philosophers like Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom. The most active front is deflationism versus its critics: whether truth is a substantive property with an explanatory job, or a logical convenience with none. Tarski's schema is common ground almost everyone accepts; the fight is over what accepting it commits you to. The map from words to the world runs through sense and reference, and the question of when a true belief also counts as knowledge is taken up in the Gettier problem. The reminder that our representations are never the reality they track is the theme of the map is not the territory.

Test yourself

Take a belief you are sure is true, then ask why. Are you pointing at the world (correspondence), at how well the belief fits everything else you hold (coherence), at what acting on it gets you (pragmatism), or do you find, on reflection, that "it is true" adds nothing to simply asserting it (deflationism)? Notice which answer you reach for first. That instinct is already a theory of truth.