The Nature of Truth

Abstract

What is truth? What character is it that we ascribe to an opinion or a statement when we call it ‘true’? This is our first question, but before trying to answer it let us reflect for a moment on what it means. For we must distinguish one question, “what is truth?”, from the quite different question “what is true?” If a man asked what was true, the sort of answer he might hope for would either be as complete an enumeration as possible of all truths, i.e., an encyclopaedia, or else a test or criterion of truth, a method by which he could know a truth from a falsehood. But what we are asking for is neither of these things, but something much more modest; we do not hope to learn an infallible means of distinguishing truth from falsehood but simply to know what it is that this word ‘true’ means. It is a word which we all understand, but if we try to explain it, we can easily get involved, as the history of philosophy shows, in a maze of confusion.¹