One of the most simple and yet most complicated
concepts man ever has thought out is “truth”. Everybody knows what it means,
namely that statements are according to what they say. Or as Aristotle
formulated it in his Metaphysics: “To
say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to
say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”
(1011b25) Nevertheless everybody also knows how difficult it can be to
determine whether a statement is truly true. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says it: “The problem of truth
is in a way easy to state: what truths are, and what (if anything) makes them
true. But this simple statement masks a great deal of controversy. Whether
there is a metaphysical problem of truth at all, and if there is, what kind of
theory might address it, are all standing issues in the theory of truth.” (from
the entry “Truth”) No wonder that there are many theories that explain what
“truth” involves and a lot more secondary books and articles about these
theories. Here I cannot treat even a little section of this literature and do justice
to what has been written about “truth”. Nevertheless I want to say a little bit
about it.
I start with an example that I also used when I discussed
the so-called Gettier problem in one of my blogs, although I have changed it a
bit (see my blog dated Nov. 12, 2012):
I am worried whether my best cow Betsy hasn’t been
stolen from the field where she is supposed to be at pasture. I walk from my
farm to the field, where I see a cow in the middle of the herd that exactly looks
like Betsy and I am 100% convinced that she is Betsy. Therefore I don't find it
necessary to walk to her and check her earmark. I walk home again and say to my
wife: “Betsy is in the field”. However, I often confuse Betsy with Jane, when I
look from a distance to her, and also now I actually saw Jane. Nevertheless,
Betsy is also in the field, and I have seen her, too, for Betsy was grazing
left of Jane, and I have seen both cows. However, I thought that the cow left
of the cow I mistook for Betsy was Jane.
The Gettier problem is about whether I know whether Betsy is in the field. When
talking about truth we have a related problem: Is it true that Betsy is in the field? Or rather, since truth is about
statements: Is what I say to my wife – namely “Betsy is in the field” – true?
I think that according to most theories of truth –
whether it be the correspondence theory of truth, the coherence theory of
truth, the consensus theory of truth, or whichever – the statement that Betsy
is in the field is true, if taken as such. And when I said to my wife “Betsy is
in the field”, I wanted to say that the cow with earmark HW123 is in the field
– since HW123 is Betsy’s earmark – and so that Betsy, the cow with earmark
HW123, is in the field. That’s true, indeed. Nevertheless, at the moment that I
am saying this statement to my wife, in my mind “Betsy” refers to a cow at a
certain place in the field right of the cow I had mistakenly identified as
Jane. Let’s suppose that Jane has earmark HW122, and that when I utter to my
wife the statement “Betsy is in the field”, I have an image of two cows in my
mind and I mean to say that the right cow is in the field. In this statement “Betsy” refers to the cow
with earmark HW122 and this statement
is false, even though Betsy is in the field, and Jane is also in the field, and
even though also the cows HW122 and HW123 are in the field, and even though I
have seen both cows in the field (but had unknowingly mistaken the one for the
other). As we see: Statements can be true, even if they are false. What we see and
say is not always as it appears to us.
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