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 logic, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy-of-language.
