What is the axiological basis of the preference of truth to falsity?

Question

Axiologically speaking, why is truth the preferred logical value by humans? In general, why do we prefer true statements to false ones? What about the value of true makes a statement "right," while false is "wrong?" Specifically, why do true statements seem to be valued higher than false statements and why does our day-to-day language seem to favor factual statements?

Answer 1

The short answer from a naturalized epistemology is obvious. Truth in the state of affairs of the physical world has survival value and is a strategy for biological organisms with cognition to survive in accordance with evolution. The obvious proof of this would be what I call argument by defenestration. If you want to know what a person believes, ask them to do something that has value-laden consequences. If a person tells you the world is a simulation or that they believe in incarnation, ask them to prove it by throwing themselves out a window (not high enough to kill themselves as that would be unethical). Just high enough to sustain a reasonably painful injury. If they don't, it's likely their beliefs are in conflict.

Truth in perception means one is free of illusions. Truth in memory means one is free of confabulation. Truth in reason means one is free of fallacy. Lastly, truth in testimony means one is free of deception. Generally speaking, a human who is free of illusion, confabulation, fallacy, and testimony is better adjusted to survival in the world historically speaking. In fact, an arms race in deception is largely suspected to be the guiding force in self-deception among some evolutionary psychologists. From the WP article:

Evolutionary psychology approaches self-deception as an adaptation that can improve one's results in social exchanges.

Ferreting out truth from deception is a survival imperative in social transactions historically.

Answer 2

Every false statement corresponds to a fact that the statement is false. More precisely, the concept of falsity depends on a prior concept of truth (false = antitrue, but to make truth into mere antifalsity would be metaphysically confused).

Axiologically, goodness is similar to truth, and evil to falsity (not just the absence of good, but its opposite). So the concept of good is logically prior to the concept of evil. There is an illusion in standard deontic logic, which is an inference from the formal interchangeability of the definitional scheme to the actual possibility of justifiably ordering deontic concepts using evil/the forbidden first---but this is abstract evil (it is wrong to base one's concepts of ethics on the concept of wrongness).

If, moreover, goodness is something like "acting according to the truth" (Kant says somewhere that this is analytically true but otherwise vacuous), then focusing on false statements would be congruent with focusing on evil.

Answer 3

U can't really reason or understand or define about an unknown thing or known thing using false statement can you? Even when using proof by contraction u are still trying to validate a truth statement, people value truth more cause truths work like staircase, you proof step 1 then you can further proofs things in that staircase, like maths uses this axiomatic reasoning, whereas false statements are false because of true statements, for example if you have a bag which have digits 1-8 and i say that bag contains digits more than 8, but you know that it's not true therefore it's false, we can always make assumptions but we can't tell about false statements until we have truth statements, and their is nothing life absolute truth or false, it true or false in a certain system but can be false somewhere else.