Truth — The property of what conforms to reality or to what is asserted; one of philosophy’s central concepts, whose nature is disputed by several rival theories. The Latin veritas renders the Greek alḗtheia, literally “non-concealment” or “unveiling.” The oldest and most influential theory is that of correspondence: a proposition is true if it agrees with the facts. Aristotle formulates it in the Metaphysics — to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; the Scholastic tradition crystallizes it in the formula adaequatio rei et intellectus (the adequation of thing and intellect). In the twentieth century, Alfred Tarski gave it logical rigor with his semantic theory, on which “‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.” Competing conceptions include the coherence theory, championed by British idealism, for which truth is the consistency of a proposition with an integrated system of beliefs; the pragmatic theory, which takes distinct forms: for Charles Peirce, a belief is true if it is the opinion to which all investigators would ultimately converge at the end of indefinitely prolonged inquiry (the “ideal limit of inquiry”); for William James, the true is what proves useful and works in practice, bearing fruit in conduct; and deflationary theories, for which saying “p is true” adds nothing to simply asserting p, so that truth is no substantive property. Martin Heidegger, for his part, recovers the Greek sense and holds that originary truth is alḗtheia — the unconcealment of being, prior to truth understood as the mere agreement of statement and thing. Closely related concepts are those of proposition and fact.
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