Truth vs. reality

I believe I have just had a breakthrough in my understanding of truth. The classical (and intuitively dominant) theory of truth is probably the correspondence theory, which basically proposes that truth entails the correspondence of a statement to reality. The correspondence theory of truth, despite its intuitive appeal, is poorly regarded for a variety of reasons. One problem is defining what it means for a statement to ‘correspond’. Another problem is whether the correspondence itself represents a ‘truth’ (which leads to infinite regression). All of this I found easy enough to grasp (as in, by the end of a philosophy intensive undergraduate degree I more or less felt I had a handle on it). What I continued to struggle with was ‘if truth is not correspondence, what is it?’ There are, of course, a variety of alternatives, but explaining them will not get to the nub of my confusion. One example is the coherence theory of truth, which proposes (to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) ‘A belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent
system of beliefs.’ Maybe to some of you this makes total sense, but the notion left me entirely flummoxed. Specifically, I was flummoxed by the idea that truth was a property of relations between beliefs. Why did believes matter when determining truth? I was, of course, stuck on a a very fundamental misunderstanding of the transformation the concept of truth undergoes when it transitions from correspondence theory to a coherence theory, namely, truth ceases to be about reality.

This is the breakthrough. Truth is not necessarily about reality. When we ask ‘what is truth’, we are not necessarily asking about how the world is. We might be asking about how the world is, but not necessarily. Instead, epistemology is concerned about the criteria by which sentences are deemed true or false. Correspondence theory proposes sentences should be deemed true or false based on whether they correspond to reality, while coherence theory proposes that truth or falsity is determined by the relationship between beliefs. Coherence theories therefore draw a distinction between beliefs and the reality that those beliefs are about: the question is not whether beliefs fit with reality, but whether beliefs fit with each other.

In my next post I will explore this issue in relation to knowledge and Justified True Belief.

Thank you for reading,


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