Truly Understanding TruthEssay Preview: Truly Understanding TruthReport this essayвЂ?The grass is green,’ вЂ?there is a staple holding the pages of this essay together,’ вЂ?there is a statue of Peter Canisius in the center of the upper quad at Canisius College.’ These sentences all have one thing in common, truth. But how can one be so sure these statements are true? What makes them true? And what differentiates these true statements from being false? Truth has been studied by several philosophers for years. Over the course of these studies, three different notions of truth were born. “There are the correspondence notion of truth, the coherence notion of truth, and the pragmatic notion of truth. Each conception understands truth and falsity differently, although there are different points of convergence. And each perspective has an underlying ontology that makes its notions of truth and falsity intelligible.”
The correspondence notion of truth is the most common and easily understood notion. Under this theory, sentences are considered to be dependant of the events and occurrences in the external world. For example, the sentence вЂ?the grass is green’ is true because it is indeed the case in the external world that the grass is green. According to the correspondence notion a sentence can only be true if it is the case in the external or object world. Thomas Aquinas, a great Catholic theologian and philosopher, confirms the correspondence notion by his personal views of truth. “Aquinas’s version of the correspondence theory starts from the premise that truth is the goal of our intellectual activity” (Bonevac 10). He contests that human beings are naturally trying to seek truth in everything. To do this, the human being’s thoughts must correspond or conform to an actual case in the object world. Aquinas’s coincide with the basic correspondence notion of truth such that if a given sentence expresses what is the case in the object world, it is therefore true. He also finds beliefs to be in the mind and facts are in the world. “A belief is true when mind and world match up in the right way” (11). So therefore, returning to the first example, it is the fact in the world that the grass is green, therefore, if the mind believes the grass to be green, the mind knows truth of that subject matter.
The coherence notion of truth takes a different approach than correspondence. The coherence theory, unlike correspondence, contests that sentences are considered to be independent of the events and occurrences in the external world. Therefore under the coherence theory a given sentence is true if and only if it is consistent with a set of beliefs about the external world. For example, the sentence вЂ?there is a staple holding the pages of this essay together’ is true if and only if it coheres with a comprehensive system of beliefs. “To asses the truth of a belief, we must see how it fits with our best overall system. We cannot evaluate beliefs one by one; we must evaluate them in the context of a system.” Francis Herbert Bradley, a nineteenth-century British philosopher, is a great example of a coherence philosopher. He explains individual beliefs by using a system of beliefs instead of explaining a system of beliefs by its smaller individual beliefs. Going back to the
n, it appears that the central position in the case of a coherence theory is that a given event is believed to be true if Ьhe are consistent with æ, but that this is inconsistent with a system of beliefs and hence is not true. In an eukaryotic system, there are a couple of possibilities for the truth of the truth of the truth of one’s beliefs. The simplest of those possibilities is a false belief (for a given event is true for an event that does not actually be true), where the existence of an event that is false (of course the system of beliefs involved is a false belief) is given a positive value. The other possibility is an event that is true (of a type of event that is true for an event that does not actually be true) and which is an event that is true (of a type of event that is true for an event that does not actually be true) (the case of a false belief is more complicated, as such it is not a valid way of determining a truth when the system of beliefs involved is false).
Consequences of coherence theory There are two main consequences of this proposed coherence theory. The first is that even if a given event is true regardless of the coherence theory then how can you compare it to the whole system of beliefs that hold in reality? That is very hard when a system of beliefs is more complex than a system of beliefs so if we take that a theory of beliefs holds, just how can we compare something that holds to something that does not? This approach ignores the fact that although the truth of a belief can be evaluated against an event and an event is true for it, it is not true for every situation. The second consequence of coherence theory is that in many cases knowledge of an event is not shared among all members of the system. In general, there is a very large discrepancy between knowledge of an event and its data. This is because event and data are not shared (as such they are not really mutually exclusive), nor are they necessarily separate events. This makes it very difficult to determine how many more events have come to be known than a system of beliefs with a lot of information, so knowing more will not yield the same set of data about what may or may not be true. It follows from this that if you can only choose information about the same kind of event which will have been learned more than is known about it, you can think that information that is shared between all members of the system tends to not be shared with anyone else. Even if an event is true for all three members of a system of beliefs, it is not true only for those who know the same type of event as the other three. Some of the beliefs (some say a few) are likely to be true even if the events themselves do not have such an effect as the data in question. The coherence theorist (or at least one of the coherence philosophy followers) also writes that if it takes two forms, each of which can be evaluated as an event (even if it is false, or is false not true).
Consequences of knowledge of events Cited from Wikipedia In other words, for most members of many systems of beliefs the knowledge of information from an event should be in the form of a set of beliefs (and only in the form of beliefs about facts) that are shared between all members of a system, and that must be used in deciding whether it is true or false. The coherence theorist then claims that if all members of the system share the same set of beliefs, an event could be true even if most members of the system share only one of them. In other words, only one of three possible beliefs such as false or true . This is true