A Short History of Truth and Related Matters

Abstract

All theories of truth share a remarkable feature: they are all relatively young. As George Pitcher says: ‘the great philosophers of history, although they had something to say about the concept of truth, said surprisingly little: they were far more interested in truths than in “truth”’ (Pitcher, 1964, 1). Pitcher suggests that the interest in theories of truth was triggered by the ‘apparently outrageous things which the Absolute Idealists of the middle and late nineteenth century said about truth’. But he does not tell us why such a central concept for philosophy was not considered worthy of more attention before this. Perhaps, only the nineteenth century yielded problems that urged for a philosophical account of truth. It is pointless, even in philosophy, to account for something that is not in any sense controversial. The relatively late attention given to theories of truth may indicate that truth has only quite recently become problematical.