essay about truth and opinion

Of Truth, by Francis Bacon

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"Of Truth" is the opening essay in the final edition of the philosopher, statesman and jurist  Francis Bacon 's "Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral" (1625). In this essay, as associate professor of philosophy Svetozar Minkov points out, Bacon addresses the question of "whether it is worse to lie to others or to oneself--to possess truth (and lie, when necessary, to others) or to think one possesses the truth but be mistaken and hence unintentionally convey falsehoods to both oneself and to others" ("Francis Bacon's 'Inquiry Touching Human Nature,'" 2010). In "Of Truth," Bacon argues that people have a natural inclination to lie to others: "a natural though corrupt love, of the lie itself."

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly, there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free-will in thinking as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor, but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love lies where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant; but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell: this same truth is a naked and open daylight that doth not show the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves? One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum [the wine of devils] because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it that doth the hurt, such as we spake of before. But howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. The first creature of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense; the last was the light of reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of his spirit. First he breathed light upon the face of the matter, or chaos; then he breathed light into the face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth light into the face of his chosen. The poet that beautified the sect that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well, "It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below"*; so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil business: it will be acknowledged, even by those that practice it not, that clear and round dealing is the honor of man's nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent, which goeth basely upon the belly and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious; and therefore Montaigne saith prettily, when he inquired the reason why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace and such an odious charge. Saith he, "If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much as to say that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards man." For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood and breach of faith cannot possibly be so highly expressed as in that it shall be the last peal to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men: it being foretold that when Christ cometh, "He shall not find faith upon the earth."

*Bacon's paraphrase of the opening lines of Book II of "On the Nature of Things" by Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus.

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The Fact/Opinion Distinction

John Corvino argues that the claim "That's just your opinion" is pernicious and should be consigned to the flames.

When debating ethics and other controversial topics, one frequently hears the claim “That’s just your opinion.” It is a pernicious claim, devoid of clear meaning, and it should be consigned to the flames – or so I shall argue here.

In calling something an opinion, one presumably wants to contrast it with something that is not an opinion, and the obvious candidate for the contrast class is “fact”. Philosophers might be tempted to draw this contrast by identifying facts as states of affairs – occurrences that are there in the world regardless of what anyone may think about them – and identifying opinions as beliefs (or some other mental state) about states of affairs. According to this approach, we can separate facts from opinions by using what Perry Weddle has called the “Whose?” test: It always makes sense to ask “Whose opinion is it?” but never “Whose fact is it?”

But this way of drawing the contrast merely pushes the problem back further. For among the beliefs that people have about the world, there are some that people tend to put in the “fact” column and some that they tend to put in the “opinion” column. That is, they contrast factual beliefs from opinions (opinion beliefs), and it is quite appropriate to ask “Whose belief?” in either case. The same goes for expressions of belief: We can talk about statements of fact vs. statements of opinion , or factual claims vs. opinion claims , and so forth, and all of these are in the mouths of subjects.

Suppose, then, we narrow our inquiry to statements, so that when we ask, “What is the difference between facts and opinions?” what we’re really asking is “What is the difference between statements of fact and statements of opinion ?”

This seems like it should be an easy question, but it actually tends to stump most people on the street. Mind you, they have no trouble in offering examples of either, or in categorising others’ examples. So for instance, given

they’ll say that the A statements are facts and the B statements are opinions. When asked to explain the principle of distinction between the two, however – the rule that tells us how to assign statements to one category or the other – they often get tongue-tied.

Some have tried to explain the distinction to me by arguing that facts are true . This answer is not at all helpful, since opinions are typically put forth as true, and some factual claims turn out to be false. For example, most people would say that it’s true that genocide is wrong, and there may or may not be beer in my refrigerator. The fact/opinion distinction varies independently of the true/false distinction.

Others say that factual statements are “concrete” rather than “abstract”, but that answer would render all mathematical statements non-factual, since mathematics involves abstract concepts (e.g. numbers). Neither does it help, at least at first glance, to say that facts are “objective” (rather than “subjective”), since at least some statements in the “opinion” column involve matters that would be true (or false) regardless of what any particular subject believes. For example, whether or not God created the earth is an objective matter, albeit a controversial and difficult-to-prove one. If it happened, it happened whether anyone believes it or not. Ditto if it didn’t happen. (I’ll say more about the subjective/objective distinction later on.)

Perhaps the last example suggests a better answer: the difference between facts and opinions is that factual statements are uncontroversial. But this answer doesn’t seem right either, since it would make it audience-relative whether something is a fact: for example, “the earth revolves around the sun” would be a fact for modern Europeans but not for medieval ones; “God created the earth” would be a fact for believers but not for sceptics; “The earth is flat” would be a fact for Flat-Earthers but not for the rest of us. How useful would the fact/opinion distinction be if any statement could count as either one, depending on who hears it?

If everyday observers are confused about the distinction, “experts” fare little better. Curious as to the standard explanation, I Googled “facts vs. opinions”. (This is not how to conduct serious philosophical research, but it can be a useful way of gauging common thoughts on a subject.) Here’s the first result I received, from a “Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum Project” website:

“Fact: statement of actuality or occurrence. A fact is based on direct evidence, actual experience, or observation.

“Opinion: statement of belief or feeling. It shows one’s feelings about a subject. Solid opinions, while based on facts, are someone’s views on a subject and not facts themselves.”

This way of drawing the distinction makes “The earth revolves around the sun” an opinion – or at least, not a fact – since no one directly observes it happening (not even astronauts!). It also jumbles together occurrences (what we earlier called “states of affairs”), statements about occurrences, and the evidence for those statements.

Perhaps more confusing is its labelling opinions as “statement(s) of belief.” As we’ve been using the terms, all statements express beliefs, and our task is to determine which of them express factual beliefs and which express opinions.

So I looked further. Here are the second and third results from my quick internet search, from an “Education Oasis” and “Enchanted Learning” website, respectively:

“A fact is a statement that can be proven true.”

“An opinion expresses someone’s belief, feeling, view, idea, or judgment about something or someone.”

“Facts are statements that can be shown to be true or can be proved, or something that really happened. You can look up facts in an encyclopedia or other reference, or see them for yourself. For example, it is a fact that broccoli is good for you (you can look this up in books about healthy diets).

“Opinions express how a person feels about something – opinions do not have to be based upon logical reasoning. For example, it is an opinion that broccoli tastes good (or bad).”

Both of these connect fact with provability. But in common parlance, “provability” seems audience-relative as well: While one person might find Anselm’s ontological argument to be a sufficient proof for God’s existence (thus rendering “God exists” a fact for that person ); others may not.

The Education Oasis site announces that “An opinion expresses someone’s belief ... about something.” So if I believe that there’s beer in my refrigerator, is that just an opinion? The Enchanted Learning site muddies the waters even further by claiming that you can look up facts in an encyclopaedia (always? but then were there no facts before books?), and by including an evaluative notion (“good for you”) among examples of facts.

If this is “Critical Thinking”, I’d hate to see what Sloppy Thinking looks like.

Let me offer a conjecture: the fact/opinion distinction is ambiguous, and in trying to explain it, people typically conflate it with other distinctions in the neighbourhood.

Let’s consider three of those other distinctions. Take, first, the familiar philosophical distinction between belief and reality . In common understanding, there’s a world (reality), and then there are our representations of that world (beliefs: sometimes true, sometimes not). I might believe that there’s beer in the refrigerator, whether or not there’s any there. I might believe that God created the earth, whether or not God did – indeed, whether or not God exists at all. Generally, we strive to make our beliefs as accurate as possible in representing reality, but that doesn’t remove the gap (some would say “gulf”) between the two.

The problem, obviously, is that attempts to bridge that gap always proceed via our own fallible cognitive capacities. Beliefs about reality are still beliefs, and some of them, despite our best efforts, turn out to be false. That’s true whether we’re talking about beliefs that usually show up in the “fact” column (“There’s beer in the refrigerator”) or in the “opinion” column (“God created the earth”). In other words, both facts and opinions can be either successful or unsuccessful in representing reality, and thus the fact/opinion distinction is not the same as the belief/reality distinction.

Second, consider the subjective/objective distinction. Something is subjective insofar as it is mind-dependent, objective insofar as it is mind-independent. Given this definition, all beliefs (qua beliefs) are subjective, because beliefs depend on minds. And since we’ve been treating both facts and opinions as statements of belief, facts and opinions are similarly subjective: In other words, we can always ask “Whose belief?” or “Whose statement?”

Of course, there are different kinds of beliefs and statements. Some are about objective matters, such as whether there is beer in the refrigerator. Others are about subjective matters, such as whether one would enjoy a Guinness more than a Corona. Perhaps the fact/opinion distinction tracks the distinction between statements with objective content (facts?) and those with subjective content (opinions?). But if so, we would need to revise what usually gets put in each column. In particular, the statement that “God created the earth” will need to move over to the “fact” column, since whether God created the earth is an objective matter – it happened (or not) independently of whether we believe it happened. The same is true for “God exists” – not an opinion, on this schema, but a factual claim (maybe true, maybe false).

It is also by no means obvious that “Genocide is wrong” should remain in the “opinion” column. While some philosophers hold that moral beliefs are subjective, many do not. Moreover, there is a strong commonsense intuition that genocide would be wrong whether anyone believes it’s wrong, suggesting that the claim is objective, not subjective. So while the subjective/objective distinction might be useful in explaining the fact/opinion distinction, adopting this approach would require us to revise our common thinking about facts and opinions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since – as we have seen – our common thinking about facts and opinions appears rather confused.

Finally, consider the descriptive/normative distinction. Descriptive statements describe or represent the world; normative statements evaluate it. For example: the statement that thousands were killed in Darfur is descriptive; the statement that such killing was wrong is normative.

The descriptive/normative distinction is sometimes called the fact/value distinction, which might lead it to be confused with the fact/opinion distinction. But it’s controversial whether all normative claims are matters of opinion. Moreover, many of the standard “opinion” examples are not normative: consider “God exists” or “A Democrat will win the presidency in 2016”. If the fact/opinion distinction were identical to the fact/value distinction, then once again we would need to revise our common thinking about facts and opinions.

Having teased apart these various distinctions, and looking back over the several attempts to explain the difference between fact and opinion, we might propose the following definitions:

o A statement of fact is one that has objective content and is well-supported by the available evidence.

o A statement of opinion is one whose content is either subjective or else not well supported by the available evidence.

These definitions have several advantages. First, they capture some of the concerns that lead people to insist on the fact/opinion distinction in the first place – in particular, the concern that claims not be accepted without good evidence. Second, they explain why some objective matters – in particular, controversial matters such God’s existence or predictions about the future – get placed in the category of opinion, despite their objective content. And third, they avoid the sloppiness of some of the earlier proposals. That said, they are still somewhat revisionist: They do not fully capture everyday usage (since everyday usage is messy and confused), but instead serve to refine that usage.

Why worry about the fact/opinion distinction? One reason is that precise thinking is valuable for its own sake. But there’s another, more pragmatic reason. Despite its unclear meaning , the claim “That’s just your opinion” has a clear use : It is a conversation-stopper. It’s a way of diminishing a claim, reducing it to a mere matter of taste which lies beyond dispute. ( De gustibus non est disputandum : there’s no disputing taste.)

Indeed, the “opinion” label is used not only to belittle others’ stances, but also to deflate one’s own. In recognising that a personal belief differs sharply from that of other individuals and cultures, one may conclude, “I guess that’s just my opinion – no better than anyone else’s.” This conclusion may stem from an admirable humility. On the other hand, it can have pernicious effects: it leads to a kind of wishy-washiness, wherein one refrains from standing up for one’s convictions for fear of imposing “mere opinions”. Such reticence conflicts with common sense: surely some opinions are more thoughtful, more informed, more coherent, and more important than others.

This diminishment is especially troubling in moral debates. Moral debates are practical – they’re debates about what to do – and they concern our values : things that matter to us. Either we send troops to Syria or we don’t. Either we allow same-sex couples to marry or we don’t. Either we lie to our parents about what happened to the car or we don’t. Categorising these issues as “matters of opinion” doesn’t make them any less urgent or vital.

I therefore propose that we abandon the ambiguous fact/opinion distinction, and especially the dismissive retort “That’s just your opinion.” We should focus instead on whether people can offer good reasons for the claims they make – reasons that might compel us to share their views. That’s my opinion, anyway. If you think yours is better, don’t merely say so: Say why .

John Corvino is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Wayne State University, the author of What's Wrong With Homosexuality? , and the co-author (with Maggie Gallagher) or Debating Same-Sex Marriage . Read more at www.johncorvino.com .

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The Difference between Truth and Opinion

“One must not argue about opinions. A truth is a concentrated and serious procedure which must never come into competition with established opinions.” Alain Badiou, St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 15.

Sometimes incidents that are not very important in themselves can crystallize for us the importance of issues that are much more significant. That happened for me many years ago as a student at a campus mission event in Britain.

Although the mission was supported by all the different university Christian groups, whatever their theological perspective, the speaker, a bishop, chose to attack “conservative” Christianity with its requirements for defined patterns of belief and conduct. It is as absurd, he argued, as insisting that customers in a restaurant have to be committed to eating their way through every item on the menu. I liked the illustration, but not in the way the bishop intended. I knew that faith and discipleship are not like consumer choices. Ever since I have thought of myself as the kind of Christian who tries to eat everything on the menu.

Of course, age and experience have taught me that this is much easier said than done. Time and again, I too turn out to prefer consumer discipleship. It is all too easy to be committed to the authority of Scripture and the truth of the creeds in principle, but then actually to be very selective about which parts of the truth we heed. In an age of polarization between “progressives” and “conservatives” both within the church and society, it is easy for our thinking about issues to be determined less by Scripture and more by what our tribal identifications tell us to prioritize.

The challenge is to hear clearly the priorities of Scripture.

St Paul can help us here, for, perhaps unsurprisingly for a 2000-year-old apostle, he is usefully unbounded by our cultural codes. On some occasions he is unhesitatingly intransigent, refusing to brook any compromise, on others he urges setting aside personal preferences for the sake of brothers and sisters who have a different perspective.

These striking differences in the way Paul approaches issues are the outworking of his profound sense of the distinction between the truth of the gospel and opinion.

When it is a matter of the truth of the gospel and living in line with it, there are no menu choices, but when it is a matter of opinion, choices are legitimate so long as in the process neighbor is placed first.

We can see Paul discerning in this way when he confronts divisions in the Corinthian church. In 1 Cor 1:10 Paul appeals to the Corinthians to be united in the same mind and the same judgment. Clearly, he does not intend a blanket uniformity on all issues. When he comes to the issue of marriage, Paul distinguishes very clearly between his opinion (which is that those who are unmarried do better to remain as they are) and his acknowledgement that those who choose the path of marriage are nevertheless not sinning and can even be said to be doing well (1 Cor 7:38). In relation to food sacrificed to idols (1 Cor 8-10), Paul is unyielding in asserting the principle that the worship of other gods is sinful (1 Cor 10) but in contexts where one might be unsure about the provenance of food, such as at the meat market or in the home of a friend, he feels that the believer is under no obligation to ask questions (1 Cor 10:23–11:1). Others in the early church may well have considered this position lax. When it comes to the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit in worship, Paul’s concern is clearly to secure unity on the basis of diversity. The different members of the body are all necessary (1 Cor 12:12–26) precisely because they are different from each other and have been given different gifts by the Spirit.

Yet, if Paul does not mean by the same mind and same judgment a blanket uniformity, neither is he speaking about treating all perspectives on all issues as equally valid.

In no way, shape, or form, does Paul allow for a variety of valid perspectives on issues of sexual immorality such as that of the brother who is in a relationship with his father’s wife (1 Cor 5:1–11), or on that of visits to prostitutes by men in the Corinthian church (1 Cor 6:12–20). Nor are the issues of lawsuits between believers (1 Cor 6:1–11), or divisions at the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:17–34), ones on which Paul sees any room for diverse viewpoints.

Paul distinguishes between truth, which is of God and is a matter of the gospel, and opinion, where there can be legitimate diversity of perspective but where the principal concern of believers in shaping their practice should be to build up the community and to strengthen its witness. When Paul calls on them to be united in the same mind and the same judgment, he is asking neither for uniformity nor for equal regard for all perspectives, but for the Corinthians to follow him in a Spirit-empowered discernment between gospel and opinion.

It is very clear in 1 Corinthians where such discernment finds its theological resources. For all of Paul’s attempts in 1 Corinthians to address specific problems in the life of the church are book-ended by his discussion of the message of the cross and his discussion of the nature of the resurrection.

Throughout the letter, Paul urges the Corinthians to allow their life as a community to be shaped by what God has done in Christ’s death and resurrection.

For example, to allow differences in social status to be on display in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper so that those who have nothing are humiliated (1 Cor 11:23) is clearly wrong because, as Paul has already explained, in the cross “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor 1:28–29).

Or in the matter of visiting prostitutes, Paul begins his explanation of why it is wrong by reminding the Corinthians of the destiny of the bodies of believers: “God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power” (1 Cor 6:14). In a class on 1 Corinthians students commented several times that they rarely hear issues addressed in the life of the church in this kind of way. Rarely do they hear teaching that urges patterns of behavior because they conform to the truth of the cross or the truth of the resurrection. By contrast, Paul does it frequently, and this is the way that he distinguishes between truth and opinion.

I suspect many readers will broadly agree with me but feel that all I have done is to lay bare the nature of the problem. For our entire difficulty is that we are unable to tell the difference between behavior that is mandated by the truth of the gospel and that which is more properly a matter of opinion.

Our whole problem in the contemporary church is that we struggle to discern in this way.

However, I suspect that Paul would be quite robust with us. At 1 Cor 2:16, he asks, "For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” Paul would agree with us that in and of ourselves the task of discerning between truth and opinion is one beyond the power of human beings, but he would also insist that we are slighting the work of the Holy Spirit if we do not admit that, in Christ, we have been given the resources we need for the task.

I suspect he would ask us, as he implicitly asks the Corinthians again and again, whether the real problem is less that we are unable to undertake such discernment, but rather that we are uncomfortable with where it will lead us and the ways that it will unsettle and challenge our behaviors, attitudes, and values.

Stephen Chester is Lord and Lady Coggan Professor of New Testament at Wycliffe College.

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Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth.

It would be impossible to survey all there is to say about truth in any coherent way. Instead, this essay will concentrate on the main themes in the study of truth in the contemporary philosophical literature. It will attempt to survey the key problems and theories of current interest, and show how they relate to one-another. A number of other entries investigate many of these topics in greater depth. Generally, discussion of the principal arguments is left to them. The goal of this essay is only to provide an overview of the current theories.

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. We will see a number of distinct ways of answering these questions.

1.1 The correspondence theory

1.1.1 the origins of the correspondence theory, 1.1.2 the neo-classical correspondence theory, 1.2 the coherence theory, 1.3 pragmatist theories, 2.1 sentences as truth-bearers, 2.2 convention t, 2.3 recursive definition of truth, 2.4 reference and satisfaction, 3.1 correspondence without facts, 3.2 facts again, 3.3. truthmakers, 4.1 realism and truth, 4.2 anti-realism and truth, 4.3 anti-realism and pragmatism, 5.1 the redundancy theory, 5.2 minimalist theories, 5.3 other aspects of deflationism, 6.1 truth-bearers, 6.2 truth and truth conditions, 6.3 truth conditions and deflationism, 6.4 truth and the theory of meaning, 6.5 the coherence theory and meaning, 6.6 truth and assertion, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the neo-classical theories of truth.

Much of the contemporary literature on truth takes as its starting point some ideas which were prominent in the early part of the 20th century. There were a number of views of truth under discussion at that time, the most significant for the contemporary literature being the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth.

These theories all attempt to directly answer the nature question : what is the nature of truth? They take this question at face value: there are truths, and the question to be answered concerns their nature. In answering this question, each theory makes the notion of truth part of a more thoroughgoing metaphysics or epistemology. Explaining the nature of truth becomes an application of some metaphysical system, and truth inherits significant metaphysical presuppositions along the way.

The goal of this section is to characterize the ideas of the correspondence, coherence and pragmatist theories which animate the contemporary debate. In some cases, the received forms of these theories depart from the views that were actually defended in the early 20th century. We thus dub them the ‘neo-classical theories’. Where appropriate, we pause to indicate how the neo-classical theories emerge from their ‘classical’ roots in the early 20th century.

Perhaps the most important of the neo-classical theories for the contemporary literature is the correspondence theory. In spite of its importance, it is strikingly difficult to find an accurate citation in the early 20th century for the received neo-classical view. Furthermore, the way the correspondence theory actually emerged will provide some valuable reference points for contemporary debate. For these reasons, we dwell on the origins of the correspondence theory at greater length than those of the other neo-classical views, before turning to its contemporary neo-classical form.

The basic idea of the correspondence theory is that what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are—to the facts. This idea can be seen in various forms throughout the history of philosophy. Its modern history starts with the beginnings of analytic philosophy at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the work of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.

Let us pick up the thread of this story in the years between 1898 and about 1910. These years are marked by Moore and Russell's rejection of idealism. Yet at this point, they do not hold a correspondence theory of truth. Indeed Moore (1899) sees the correspondence theory as a source of idealism, and rejects it. Russell follows Moore in this regard. (For discussion of Moore's early critique of idealism, where he rejects the correspondence theory of truth, see Baldwin (1991). Hylton (1990) provides an extensive discussion of Russell in the context of British idealism.)

In this period, Moore and Russell hold a version of the identity theory of truth . They say comparatively little about it, but it is stated briefly in Moore (1902); Moore (1899) and Russell (1904). According to the identity theory, a true proposition is identical to a fact. Specifically, in Moore and Russell's hands, the theory begins with propositions, understood as the objects of beliefs and other propositional attitudes. Propositions are what are believed, and give the contents of beliefs. They are also, according to this theory, the primary bearers of truth. When a proposition is true, it is identical to a fact, and a belief in that proposition is correct.

The identity theory Moore and Russell espoused takes truth to be a property of propositions. Furthermore, taking up an idea familiar to readers of Moore, the property of truth is a simple unanalyzable property. Facts are understood as simply those propositions which are true. There are true propositions and false ones, and facts just are true propositions. There is thus no “difference between truth and the reality to which it is supposed to correspond” (Moore, 1902, p. 21). (For further discussion of the identity theory of truth, see Baldwin (1991), Cartwright (1987), and the entry on the identity theory of truth .)

Moore and Russell came to reject the identity theory of truth in favor of a correspondence theory, sometime around 1910 (as we see in Moore, 1953, which reports lectures he gave in 1910-1911, and Russell, 1910b). They do so because they came to reject the existence of propositions. Why? Among reasons, they came to doubt that there could be any such things as false propositions, and then concluded that there are no such things as propositions at all.

Why did Moore and Russell find false propositions problematic? A full answer to this question is a point of scholarship that would take us too far afield. (Moore himself lamented that he could not “put the objection in a clear and convincing way” (1953, p. 263), but see Cartwright (1987) for a careful and clear exploration of the arguments.) But very roughly, the identification of facts with true propositions left them unable to see what a false proposition could be other than something which is just like a fact, though false. If such things existed, we would have fact-like things in the world, which Moore and Russell now see as enough to make false propositions count as true. Hence, they cannot exist, and so there are no false propositions. As Russell (1956, p. 223) later says, propositions seem to be at best “curious shadowy things” in addition to facts.

As Cartwright (1987) reminds us, it is useful to think of this argument in the context of Russell's slightly earlier views about propositions. As we see clearly in Russell (1903), for instance, he takes propositions to have constituents. But they are not mere collections of constituents, but a ‘unity’ which brings the constituents together. (We thus confront the ‘problem of the unity of the proposition’.) But what, we might ask, would be the ‘unity’ of a proposition that (Samuel) Ramey sings—with constituents Ramey and singing—except Ramey bearing the property of singing? If that is what the unity consists in, then we seem to have nothing other than the fact that Ramey sings. But then we could not have genuine false propositions without having false facts.

As Cartwright also reminds us, there is some reason to doubt the cogency of this sort of argument. But let us put the assessment of the arguments aside, and continue the story. From the rejection of propositions a correspondence theory emerges. The primary bearers of truth are no longer propositions, but beliefs themselves. In a slogan:

A belief is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact .

Views like this are held by Moore (1953) and Russell (1910b); Russell (1912). Of course, to understand such a theory, we need to understand the crucial relation of correspondence, as well as the notion of a fact to which a belief corresponds. We now turn to these questions. In doing so, we will leave the history, and present a somewhat more modern reconstruction of a correspondence theory.

The correspondence theory of truth is at its core an ontological thesis: a belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity—a fact—to which it corresponds. If there is no such entity, the belief is false.

Facts, for the neo-classical correspondence theory, are entities in their own right. Facts are generally taken to be composed of particulars and properties and relations or universals, at least. The neo-classical correspondence theory thus only makes sense within the setting of a metaphysics that includes such facts. Hence, it is no accident that as Moore and Russell turn away from the identity theory of truth, the metaphysics of facts takes on a much more significant role in their views. This perhaps becomes most vivid in the later Russell (1956, p. 182), where the existence of facts is the “first truism.” (The influence of Wittgenstein's ideas to appear in the Tractatus (1922) on Russell in this period was strong.)

Consider, for example, the belief that Ramey sings. Let us grant that this belief is true. In what does its truth consist, according to the correspondence theory? It consists in there being a fact in the world, built from the individual Ramey, and the property of singing. Let us denote this < Ramey , Singing >. This fact exists. In contrast, the world (we presume) contains no fact < Ramey , Dancing >. The belief that Ramey sings stands in the relation of correspondence to the fact < Ramey , Singing >, and so the belief is true.

What is the relation of correspondence? One of the standing objections to the classical correspondence theory is that a fully adequate explanation of correspondence proves elusive. But for a simple belief, like that Ramey sings, we can observe that the structure of the fact < Ramey , Singing > matches the subject-predicate form of the that -clause which reports the belief, and may well match the structure of the belief itself.

So far, we have very much the kind of view that Moore and Russell would have found congenial. But the modern form of the correspondence theory seeks to round out the explanation of correspondence by appeal to propositions . Indeed, it is common to base a correspondence theory of truth upon the notion of a structured proposition . Propositions are again cast at the contents of beliefs and assertions, and propositions have structure which at least roughly corresponds to the structure of sentences. At least, for simple beliefs like that Ramey sings, the proposition has the same subject predicate structure as the sentence. (Proponents of structured propositions, such as Kaplan (1989), often look to Russell (1903) for inspiration, and find unconvincing Russell's reasons for rejecting them.)

With facts and structured propositions in hand, an attempt may be made to explain the relation of correspondence. Correspondence holds between a proposition and a fact when the proposition and fact have the same structure, and the same constituents at each structural position. When they correspond, the proposition and fact thus mirror each-other. In our simple example, we might have:

proposition that Ramey sings ↓ ↓ fact < Ramey , Singing >

Propositions, though structured like facts, can be true or false. In a false case, like the proposition that Ramey dances, we would find no fact at the bottom of the corresponding diagram. Beliefs are true or false depending on whether the propositions which are believed are.

We have sketched this view for simple propositions like the proposition that Ramey sings. How to extend it to more complex cases, like general propositions or negative propositions, is an issue we will not delve into here. It requires deciding whether there are complex facts, such as general facts or negative facts, or whether there is a more complex relation of correspondence between complex propositions and simple facts. (The issue of whether there are such complex facts marks a break between Russell (1956) and Wittgenstein (1922) and the earlier views which Moore (1953) and Russell (1912) sketch.)

According to the correspondence theory as sketched here, what is key to truth is a relation between propositions and the world, which obtains when the world contains a fact that is structurally similar to the proposition. Though this is not the theory Moore and Russell held, it weaves together ideas of theirs with a more modern take on (structured) propositions. We will thus dub it the neo-classical correspondence theory. This theory offers us a paradigm example of a correspondence theory of truth.

The leading idea of the correspondence theory is familiar. It is a form of the older idea that true beliefs show the right kind of resemblance to what is believed. In contrast to earlier empiricist theories, the thesis is not that one's ideas per se resemble what they are about. Rather, the propositions which give the contents of one's true beliefs mirror reality, in virtue of entering into correspondence relations to the right pieces of it.

In this theory, it is the way the world provides us with appropriately structured entities that explains truth. Our metaphysics thus explains the nature of truth, by providing the entities needed to enter into correspondence relations.

For more on the correspondence theory, see the entry on the correspondance theory of truth .

Though initially the correspondence theory was seen by its developers as a competitor to the identity theory of truth, it was also understood as opposed to the coherence theory of truth.

We will be much briefer with the historical origins of the coherence theory than we were with the correspondence theory. Like the correspondence theory, versions of the coherence theory can be seen throughout the history of philosophy. (See, for instance, Walker (1989) for a discussion of its early modern lineage.) Like the correspondence theory, it was important in the early 20th century British origins of analytic philosophy. Particularly, the coherence theory of truth is associated with the British idealists to whom Moore and Russell were reacting.

Many idealists at that time did indeed hold coherence theories. Let us take as an example Joachim (1906). (This is the theory that Russell (1910a) attacks.) Joachim says that:

Truth in its essential nature is that systematic coherence which is the character of a significant whole (p. 76).

We will not attempt a full exposition of Joachim's view, which would take us well beyond the discussion of truth into the details of British idealism. But a few remarks about his theory will help to give substance to the quoted passage.

Perhaps most importantly, Joachim talks of ‘truth’ in the singular. This is not merely a turn of phrase, but a reflection of his monistic idealism. Joachim insists that what is true is the “whole complete truth” (p. 90). Individual judgments or beliefs are certainly not the whole complete truth. Such judgments are, according to Joachim, only true to a degree. One aspect of this doctrine is a kind of holism about content, which holds that any individual belief or judgment gets its content only in virtue of being part of a system of judgments. But even these systems are only true to a degree, measuring the extent to which they express the content of the single ‘whole complete truth’. Any real judgment we might make will only be partially true.

To flesh out Joachim's theory, we would have to explain what a significant whole is. We will not attempt that, as it leads us to some of the more formidable aspects of his view, e.g., that it is a “process of self-fulfillment” (p. 77). But it is clear that Joachim takes ‘systematic coherence’ to be stronger than consistency. In keeping with his holism about content, he rejects the idea that coherence is a relation between independently identified contents, and so finds it necessary to appeal to ‘significant wholes’.

As with the correspondence theory, it will be useful to recast the coherence theory in a more modern form, which will abstract away from some of the difficult features of British idealism. As with the correspondence theory, it can be put in a slogan:

A belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent system of beliefs.

To further the contrast with the neo-classical correspondence theory, we may add that a proposition is true if it is the content of a belief in the system, or entailed by a belief in the system. We may assume, with Joachim, that the condition of coherence will be stronger than consistency. With the idealists generally, we might suppose that features of the believing subject will come into play.

This theory is offered as an analysis of the nature of truth, and not simply a test or criterion for truth. Put as such, it is clearly not Joachim's theory (it lacks his monism, and he rejects propositions), but it is a standard take on coherence in the contemporary literature. (It is the way the coherence theory is given in Walker (1989), for instance.) Let us take this as our neo-classical version of the coherence theory. The contrast with the correspondence theory of truth is clear. Far from being a matter of whether the world provides a suitable object to mirror a proposition, truth is a matter of how beliefs are related to each-other.

The coherence theory of truth enjoys two sorts of motivations. One is primarily epistemological. Most coherence theorists also hold a coherence theory of knowledge; more specifically, a coherence theory of justification. According to this theory, to be justified is to be part of a coherent system of beliefs. An argument for this is often based on the claim that only another belief could stand in a justification relation to a belief, allowing nothing but properties of systems of belief, including coherence, to be conditions for justification. Combining this with the thesis that a fully justified belief is true forms an argument for the coherence theory of truth. (An argument along these lines is found in Blanshard (1939), who holds a form of the coherence theory closely related to Joachim's.)

The steps in this argument may be questioned by a number of contemporary epistemological views. But the coherence theory also goes hand-in-hand with its own metaphysics as well. The coherence theory is typically associated with idealism. As we have already discussed, forms of it were held by British idealists such as Joachim, and later by Blanshard (in America). An idealist should see the last step in the justification argument as quite natural. More generally, an idealist will see little (if any) room between a system of beliefs and the world it is about, leaving the coherence theory of truth as an extremely natural option.

It is possible to be an idealist without adopting a coherence theory. (For instance, many scholars read Bradley as holding a version of the identity theory of truth. See Baldwin (1991) for some discussion.) However, it is hard to see much of a way to hold the coherence theory of truth without maintaining some form of idealism. If there is nothing to truth beyond what is to be found in an appropriate system of beliefs, then it would seem one's beliefs constitute the world in a way that amounts to idealism. (Walker (1989) argues that every coherence theorist must be an idealist, but not vice-versa.)

The neo-classical correspondence theory seeks to capture the intuition that truth is a content-to-world relation. It captures this in the most straightforward way, by asking for an object in the world to pair up with a true proposition. The neo-classical coherence theory, in contrast, insists that truth is not a content-to-world relation at all; rather, it is a content-to-content, or belief-to-belief, relation. The coherence theory requires some metaphysics which can make the world somehow reflect this, and idealism appears to be it. (A distant descendant of the neo-classical coherence theory that does not require idealism will be discussed in section 6.5 below.)

For more on the coherence theory, see the entry on the coherence theory of truth .

A different perspective on truth was offered by the American pragmatists. As with the neo-classical correspondence and coherence theories, the pragmatist theories go with some typical slogans. For example, Peirce is usually understood as holding the view that:

Truth is the end of inquiry.

(See, for instance Hartshorne et al., 1931-58, §3.432.) Both Peirce and James are associated with the slogan that:

Truth is satisfactory to believe.

James (e.g., 1907) understands this principle as telling us what practical value truth has. True beliefs are guaranteed not to conflict with subsequent experience. Likewise, Peirce's slogan tells us that true beliefs will remain settled at the end of prolonged inquiry. Peirce's slogan is perhaps most typically associated with pragmatist views of truth, so we might take it to be our canonical neo-classical theory. However, the contemporary literature does not seem to have firmly settled upon a received ‘neo-classical’ pragmatist theory.

In her reconstruction (upon which we have relied heavily), Haack (1976) notes that the pragmatists' views on truth also make room for the idea that truth involves a kind of correspondence, insofar as the scientific method of inquiry is answerable to some independent world. Peirce, for instance, does not reject a correspondence theory outright; rather, he complains that it provides merely a ‘nominal’ or ‘transcendental’ definition of truth (e.g Hartshorne et al., 1931-58, §5.553, 5.572), which is cut off from practical matters of experience, belief, and doubt (§5.416). (See Misak (1991) for an extended discussion.)

This marks an important difference between the pragmatist theories and the coherence theory we just considered. Even so, pragmatist theories also have an affinity with coherence theories, insofar as we expect the end of inquiry to be a coherent system of beliefs. As Haack also notes, James maintains an important verificationist idea: truth is what is verifiable. We will see this idea re-appear in section 4.

James' views are discussed further in the entry on William James . Peirce's views are discussed further in the entry on Charles Sanders Peirce .

2. Tarski's theory of truth

Modern forms of the classical theories survive. Many of these modern theories, notably correspondence theories, draw on ideas developed by Tarski.

In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that his seminal work on truth (1935) is very much of a piece with other works in mathematical logic, such as his (1931), and as much as anything this work lays the ground-work for the modern subject of model theory—a branch of mathematical logic, not the metaphysics of truth. In this respect, Tarski's work provides a set of highly useful tools that may be employed in a wide range of philosophical projects.

Tarski's work has a number of components, which we will consider in turn.

In the classical debate on truth at the beginning of the 20th century we considered in section 1, the issue of truth-bearers was of great significance. For instance, Moore and Russell's turn to the correspondence theory was driven by their views on whether there are propositions to be the bearers of truth. Many theories we reviewed took beliefs to be the bearers of truth.

In contrast, Tarski and much of the subsequent work on truth takes sentences to be the primary bearers of truth. This is not an entirely novel development: Russell (1956) also takes truth to apply to sentence (which he calls ‘propositions’ in that text). But whereas much of the classical debate takes the issue of the primary bearers of truth to be a substantial and important metaphysical one, Tarski is quite casual about it. His primary reason for taking sentences as truth-bearers is convenience, and he explicitly distances himself from any commitment about the philosophically contentious issues surrounding other candidate truth-bearers (e.g., Tarski, 1944). (Russell (1956) makes a similar suggestion that sentences are the appropriate truth-bearers “for the purposes of logic” (p. 184), though he still takes the classical metaphysical issues to be important.)

We will return to the issue of the primary bearers of truth in section 6.1. For the moment, it will be useful to simply follow Tarski's lead. But it should be stressed that for this discussion, sentences are fully interpreted sentences, having meanings. We will also assume that the sentences in question do not change their content across occasions of use, i.e., that they display no context-dependence. We are taking sentences to be what Quine (1960) calls ‘eternal sentences’.

In some places (e.g., Tarski, 1944), Tarski refers to his view as the ‘semantic conception of truth’. It is not entirely clear just what Tarski had in mind by this, but it is clear enough that Tarski's theory defines truth for sentences in terms of concepts like reference and satisfaction, which are intimately related to the basic semantic functions of names and predicates (according to many approaches to semantics).

Let us suppose we have a fixed language L whose sentences are fully interpreted. The basic question Tarski poses is what an adequate theory of truth for L would be. Tarski's answer is embodied in what he calls Convention T :

An adequate theory of truth for L must imply, for each sentence φ of L

⌈ φ ⌉  is true if and only if φ .

(We have simplified Tarski's presentation somewhat.) This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. Given the assumption that L is fully interpreted, we may assume that each sentence φ in fact has a truth value. In light of this, Convention T guarantees that the truth predicate given by the theory will be extensionally correct , i.e., have as its extension all and only the true sentences of L .

Convention T draws our attention to the biconditionals of the form

⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ ,

which are usually called the Tarski biconditionals for a language L .

Tarski does not merely propose a condition of adequacy for theories of truth, he also shows how to meet it. One of his insights is that if the language L displays the right structure, then truth for L can be defined recursively. For instance, let us suppose that L is a simple formal language, containing two atomic sentences ‘snow is white’ and ‘grass is green’, and the sentential connectives ∨ and ¬.

In spite of its simplicity, L contains infinitely many distinct sentences. But truth can be defined for all of them by recursion.

• ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.
• ‘Grass is green’ is true if and only if grass is green.
• ⌈ φ ∨ ψ ⌉ is true if and only if ⌈ φ ⌉ is true or ⌈ ψ ⌉ is true.
• ⌈ ¬φ ⌉ is true if and only if it is not the case that ⌈ φ ⌉ is true.

This theory satisfies Convention T.

This may look trivial, but in defining an extensionally correct truth predicate for an infinite language with four clauses, we have made a modest application of a very powerful technique.

Tarski's techniques go further, however. They do not stop with atomic sentences. Tarski notes that truth for each atomic sentence can be defined in terms of two closely related notions: reference and satisfaction . Let us consider a language L ′ , just like L except that instead of simply having two atomic sentences, L ′ breaks atomic sentences into terms and predicates. L ′ contains terms ‘snow’ and ‘grass’ (let us engage in the idealization that these are simply singular terms), and predicates ‘is white’ and ‘is green’. So L ′ is like L , but also contains the sentences ‘Snow is green’ and ‘Grass is white’.)

We can define truth for atomic sentences of L ′ in the following way.

• ‘Snow’ refers to snow.
• ‘Grass’ refers to grass.
• a satisfies ‘is white’ if and only if a is white.
• a satisfies ‘is green’ if and only if a is green.
• For any atomic sentence ⌈ t is P ⌉ : ⌈ t is P ⌉ is true if and only if the referent of ⌈ t ⌉ satisfies ⌈ P ⌉ .

One of Tarski's key insights is that the apparatus of satisfaction allows for a recursive definition of truth for sentences with quantifiers , though we will not examine that here. We could repeat the recursion clauses for L to produce a full theory of truth for L ′.

Let us say that a Tarskian theory of truth is a recursive theory, built up in ways similar to the theory of truth for L ′. Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. A Tarskian theory of truth for a language L can be used to show that theories in L are consistent. This was especially important to Tarski, who was concerned the Liar paradox would make theories in languages containing a truth predicate inconsistent.

For more, see the entry on Tarski's truth definitions .

3. Correspondence revisited

The correspondence theory of truth expresses the very natural idea that truth is a content-to-world or word-to-world relation: what we say or think is true or false in virtue of the way the world turns out to be. We suggested that, against a background like the metaphysics of facts, it does so in a straightforward way. But the idea of correspondence is certainly not specific to this framework. Indeed, it is controversial whether a correspondence theory should rely on any particular metaphysics at all. The basic idea of correspondence, as Tarski (1944) and others have suggested, is captured in the slogan from Aristotle's Metaphysics Γ 7.27, “to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true” (Ross, 1928). ‘What is’, it is natural enough to say, is a fact, but this natural turn of phrase may well not require a full-blown metaphysics of facts.

Yet without the metaphysics of facts, the notion of correspondence as discussed in section 1.1 loses substance. This has led to two distinct strands in contemporary thinking about the correspondence theory. One strand seeks to recast the correspondence theory in a way that does not rely on any particular ontology. Another seeks to find an appropriate ontology for correspondence, either in terms of facts or other entities. We will consider each in turn.

Tarski himself sometimes suggested that his theory was a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Whether his own theory is a correspondence theory, and even whether it provides any substantial philosophical account of truth at all, is a matter of controversy. (One rather drastic negative assessment from Putnam (1985-86, p. 333) is that “As a philosophical account of truth, Tarski's theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.”) But a number of philosophers (e.g., Davidson, 1969; Field, 1972) have seen Tarski's theory as providing at least the core of a correspondence theory of truth which dispenses with the metaphysics of facts.

Tarski's theory shows how truth for a sentence is determined by certain properties of its constituents; in particular, by properties of reference and satisfaction (as well as by the logical constants). As it is normally understood, reference is the preeminent word-to-world relation. Satisfaction is naturally understood as a word-to-world relation as well, which relates a predicate to the things in the world that bear it. The Tarskian recursive definition shows how truth is determined by reference and satisfaction, and so is in effect determined by the things in the world we refer to and the properties they bear. This, one might propose, is all the correspondence we need. It is not correspondence of sentences or propositions to facts; rather, it is correspondence of our expressions to objects and the properties they bear, and then ways of working out the truth of claims in terms of this.

This is certainly not the neo-classical idea of correspondence. In not positing facts, it does not posit any single object to which a true proposition or sentence might correspond. Rather, it shows how truth might be worked out from basic word-to-world relations. However, a number of authors have noted that Tarski's theory cannot by itself provide us with such an account of truth. As we will discuss more fully in section 4.2, Tarski's apparatus is in fact compatible with theories of truth that are certainly not correspondence theories.

Field (1972), in an influential discussion and diagnosis of what is lacking in Tarski's account, in effect points out that whether we really have something worthy of the name ‘correspondence’ depends on our having notions of reference and satisfaction which genuinely establish word-to-world relations. (Field does not use the term ‘correspondence’, but does talk about e.g., the “connection between words and things” (p. 373).) By itself, Field notes, Tarski's theory does not offer an account of reference and satisfaction at all. Rather, it offers a number of disquotation clauses , such as:

These clauses have an air of triviality (though whether they are to be understood as trivial principles or statements of non-trivial semantic facts has been a matter of some debate). With Field, we might propose to supplement clauses like these with an account of reference and satisfaction. Such a theory should tell us what makes it the case that the word ‘snow’ refer to snow. (In 1972, Field was envisaging a physicalist account, along the lines of the causal theory of reference.) This should inter alia guarantee that truth is really determined by word-to-world relations, so in conjunction with the Tarskian recursive definition, it could provide a correspondence theory of truth.

Such a theory clearly does not rely on a metaphysics of facts. Indeed, it is in many ways metaphysically neutral, as it does not take a stand on the nature of particulars, or of the properties or universals that underwrite facts about satisfaction. However, it may not be entirely devoid of metaphysical implications, as we will discuss further in section 4.1.

There have been a number of correspondence theories that do make use of facts. Some are notably different from the neo-classical theory sketched in section 1.1. For instance, Austin (1950) proposes a view in which each statement (understood roughly as an utterance event) corresponds to both a fact or situation, and a type of situation. It is true if the former is of the latter type. This theory (which has been developed by situation theory (e.g., Barwise and Perry, 1986) rejects the idea that correspondence is a kind of mirroring between a fact and a proposition. Rather, correspondence relations to Austin are entirely conventional. As an ordinary language philosopher, Austin grounds his notion of fact more in linguistic usage than in an articulated metaphysics, but he defends his use of fact-talk in Austin (1961b).

In a somewhat more Tarskian spirit, formal theories of facts or states of affairs have also been developed. For instance, Taylor (1976) provides a recursive definition of a collection of ‘states of affairs’ for a given language. Taylor's states of affairs seem to reflect the notion of fact at work in the neo-classical theory, though as an exercise in logic, they are officially n -tuples of objects and intensions .

There are more metaphysically robust notions of fact in the current literature. For instance, Armstrong (1997) defends a metaphysics in which facts (under the name ‘states of affairs’) are metaphysically fundamental. The view has much in common with the neo-classical one. Like the neo-classical view, Armstrong endorses a version of the correspondence theory. States of affairs are truthmakers for propositions, though Armstrong argues that there may be many such truthmakers for a given proposition, and vice versa. (Armstrong also envisages a naturalistic account of propositions as classes of equivalent belief-tokens.)

Armstrong's primary argument is what he calls the ‘truthmaker argument’. It begins by advancing a truthmaker principle , which holds that for any given truth, there must be a truthmaker—a “something in the world which makes it the case, that serves as an ontological ground, for this truth” (p. 115). It is then argued that facts are the appropriate truthmakers.

In contrast to the approach to correspondence discussed in section 3.1, which offered correspondence with minimal ontological implications, this view returns to the ontological basis of correspondence that was characteristic of the neo-classical theory.

The truthmaker principle is often put as the schema:

If φ , then there is an x such that necessarily, if x exists, then φ .

(Fox (1987) proposed putting the principle this way, rather than explicitly in terms of truth.)

The truthmaker principle expresses the ontological aspect of the neo-classical correspondence theory. Not merely must truth obtain in virtue of word-to-world relations, but there must be a thing that makes each truth true.

The neo-classical correspondence theory, and Armstrong, cast facts as the appropriate truthmakers. However, it is a non-trivial step from the truthmaker principle to the existence of facts. There are a number of proposals in the literature for how other sorts of objects could be truthmakers; for instance, tropes (called ‘moments’, in Mulligan et al., 1984). Parsons (1999) argues that the truthmaker principle (presented in a somewhat different form) is compatible with there being only concrete particulars.

As we saw in discussing the neo-classical correspondence theory, truthmaker theories, and fact theories in particular, raise a number of issues. One which has been discussed at length, for instance, is whether there are negative facts . Negative facts would be the truthmakers for negated sentences. Russell (1956) notoriously expresses ambivalence about whether there are negative facts. Armstrong (1997) rejects them, while Beall (2000) defends them.

4. Realism and anti-realism

The neo-classical theories we surveyed in section 1 made the theory of truth an application of their background metaphysics (and in some cases epistemology). In section 2 and especially in section 3, we returned to the issue of what sorts of ontological commitments might go with the theory of truth. There we saw a range of options, from relatively ontologically non-committal theories, to theories requiring highly specific ontologies.

There is another way in which truth relates to metaphysics. Many ideas about realism and anti-realism are closely related to ideas about truth. Indeed, many approaches to questions about realism and anti-realism simply make them questions about truth.

In discussing the approach to correspondence of section 3.1, we noted that it has few ontological requirements. It relies on there being objects of reference, and something about the world which makes for determinate satisfaction relations; but beyond that, it is ontologically neutral. But as we mentioned there, this is not to say that it has no metaphysical implications. A correspondence theory of truth, of any kind, is often taken to embody a form of realism .

The key features of realism, as we will take it, are that:

• The world exists objectively, independently of the ways we think about it or describe it.
• Our thoughts and claims are about that world.

(Wright (1992) offers a nice statement of this way of thinking about realism.) These theses imply that our claims are objectively true or false, depending on how the world they are about is. The world that we represent in our thoughts or language is an objective world. (Realism may be restricted to some subject-matter, or range of discourse, but for simplicity, we will talk about only its global form.)

It is often argued that these theses require some form of the correspondence theory of truth. (Putnam (1978, p. 18) notes, “Whatever else realists say, they typically say that they believe in a ‘correspondence theory of truth’.”) At least, they are supported by the kind of correspondence theory without facts discussed in section 3.1, such as Field's proposal. Such a theory will provide an account of objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and show how these determine the truth or falsehood of what we say about the world. Field's own approach (1972) to this problem seeks a physicalist explanation of reference. But realism is a more general idea than physicalism. Any theory that provides objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and builds up a theory of truth from them, would give a form of realism. (Making the objectivity of reference the key to realism is characteristic of work of Putnam, e.g., 1978.)

Another important mark of realism expressed in terms of truth is the property of bivalence . As Dummett has stressed (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1983; 1991), a realist should see there being a fact of the matter one way or the other about whether any given claim is correct. Hence, one important mark of realism is that it goes together with the principle of bivalence : every truth-bearer (sentence or proposition) is true or false. In much of his work, Dummett has made this the characteristic mark of realism, and often identifies realism about some subject-matter with accepting bivalence for discourse about that subject-matter. At the very least, it captures a great deal of what is more loosely put in the statement of realism above.

Either the approach makes the theory of truth—or truth-and-reference—the primary vehicle for an account of realism. A theory of truth which substantiates bivalence, or a determinate reference relation, does most of the work of giving a realistic metaphysics. It might even simply be a realistic metaphysics.

We have thus turned on its head the relation of truth to metaphysics we saw in our discussion of the neo-classical correspondence theory in section 1.1. There, a correspondence theory of truth was built upon a substantial metaphysics. Here, we have seen how articulating a theory that captures the idea of correspondence can be crucial to providing a realist metaphysics. (For another perspective on realism and truth, see Alston (1996). Devitt (1984) offers an opposing view to the kind we have sketched here, which rejects any characterization of realism in terms of truth or other semantic concepts.)

In light of our discussion in section 1.1.1, we should pause to note that the connection between realism and the correspondence theory of truth is not absolute. When Moore and Russell held the identity theory of truth, they were most certainly realists. The right kind of metaphysics of propositions can support a realist view, as can a metaphysics of facts. The modern form of realism we have been discussing here seeks to avoid basing itself on such particular ontological commitments, and so prefers to rely on the kind of correspondence-without-facts approach discussed in section 3.1. This is not to say that realism will be devoid of ontological commitments, but the commitments will flow from whichever specific claims about some subject-matter are taken to be true.

For more on realism and truth, see the entry on realism .

It should come as no surprise that the relation between truth and metaphysics seen by modern realists can also be exploited by anti-realists. Many modern anti-realists see the theory of truth as the key to formulating and defending their views. With Dummett (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1991), we might expect the characteristic mark of anti-realism to be the rejection of bivalence.

Indeed, many contemporary forms of anti-realism may be formulated as theories of truth, and they do typically deny bivalence. Anti-realism comes in many forms, but let us take as an example a (somewhat crude) form of verificationism. Such a theory holds that a claim is correct just insofar as it is in principle verifiable , i.e., there is a verification procedure we could in principle carry out which would yield the answer that the claim in question was verified.

So understood, verificationism is a theory of truth. The claim is not that verification is the most important epistemic notion, but that truth just is verifiability. As with the kind of realism we considered in section 4.1, this view expresses its metaphysical commitments in its explanation of the nature of truth. Truth is not, to this view, a fully objective matter, independent of us or our thoughts. Instead, truth is constrained by our abilities to verify, and is thus constrained by our epistemic situation. Truth is to a significant degree an epistemic matter, which is typical of many anti-realist positions.

As Dummett says, the verificationist notion of truth does not appear to support bivalence. Any statement that reaches beyond what we can in principle verify or refute (verify its negation) will be a counter-example to bivalence. Take, for instance, the claim that there is some substance, say uranium, present in some region of the universe too distant to be inspected by us within the expected lifespan of the universe. Insofar as this really would be in principle unverifiable, we have no reason to maintain it is true or false according to the verificationist theory of truth.

Verificationism of this sort is one of a family of anti-realist views. Another example is the view that identifies truth with warranted assertibility. Assertibility, as well as verifiability, has been important in Dummett's work. (See also works of McDowell, e.g., 1976 and Wright, e.g., 1976; 1982; 1992.)

Anti-realism of the Dummettian sort is not a descendant of the coherence theory of truth per se . But in some ways, as Dummett himself has noted, it might be construed as a descendant—perhaps very distant—of idealism. If idealism is the most drastic form of rejection of the independence of mind and world, Dummettian anti-realism is a more modest form, which sees epistemology imprinted in the world, rather than the wholesale embedding of world into mind. At the same time, the idea of truth as warranted assertibility or verifiability reiterates a theme from the pragmatist views of truth we surveyed in section 1.3.

Anti-realist theories of truth, like the realist ones we discussed in section 4.1, can generally make use of the Tarskian apparatus. Convention T, in particular, does not discriminate between realist and anti-realist notions of truth. Likewise, the base clauses of a Tarskian recursive theory are given as disquotation principles, which are neutral between realist and anti-realist understandings of notions like reference. As we saw with the correspondence theory, giving a full account of the nature of truth will generally require more than the Tarskian apparatus itself. How an anti-realist is to explain the basic concepts that go into a Tarskian theory is a delicate matter. As Dummett and Wright have investigated in great detail, it appears that the background logic in which the theory is developed will have to be non-classical.

For more on anti-realism and truth, see the entry on realism .

Many commentators see a close connection between Dummett's anti-realism and the pragmatists' views of truth, in that both put great weight on ideas of verifiability or assertibility. Dummett himself stressed parallels between anti-realism and intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics.

Another view on truth which returns to pragmatist themes is the ‘internal realism’ of Putnam (1981). There Putnam glosses truth as what would be justified under ideal epistemic conditions. With the pragmatists, Putnam sees the ideal conditions as something which can be approximated, echoing the idea of truth as the end of inquiry.

Putnam is cautious about calling his view ant-realism, preferring the label ‘internal realism’. But he is clear that he sees his view as opposed to realism (‘metaphysical realism’, as he calls it).

5. Deflationism

We began in section 1 with the neo-classical theories, which explained the nature of truth within wider metaphysical systems. We then considered some alternatives in sections 2 and 3, some of which had more modest ontological implications. But we still saw in section 4 that substantial theories of truth tend to imply metaphysical theses, or even embody metaphysical positions.

One long-standing trend in the discussion of truth is to insist that truth really does not carry metaphysical significance at all. It does not, as it has no significance on its own. A number of different ideas have been advanced along these lines, under the general heading of deflationism .

Deflationist ideas appear quite early on, including a well-known argument against correspondence in Frege (1918-19). However, many deflationists take their cue from an idea of Ramsey (1927), often called the equivalence thesis :

⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true ⌉ has the same meaning as φ.

(Ramsey himself takes truth-bearers to be propositions rather than sentences. Glanzberg (2003b) questions whether Ramsey's account of propositions really makes him a deflationist.)

This can be taken as the core of a theory of truth, often called the redundancy theory . The redundancy theory holds that there is no property of truth at all, and appearances of the expression ‘true’ in our sentences are redundant, having no effect on what we express.

The equivalence thesis can also be understood in terms of speech acts rather than meaning:

To assert that ⌈ φ ⌉ is true is just to assert that φ.

This view was advanced by Strawson (1949); Strawson (1950), though Strawson also argues that there are other important aspects of speech acts involving ‘true’ beyond what is asserted. For instance, they may be acts of confirming or granting what someone else said. (Strawson would also object to my making sentences the bearers of truth.)

In either its speech act or meaning form, the redundancy theory argues there is no property of truth. It is commonly noted that the equivalence thesis itself is not enough to sustain the redundancy theory. It merely holds that when truth occurs in the outermost position in a sentence, and the full sentence to which truth is predicated is quoted, then truth is eliminable. What happens in other environments is left to be seen. Modern developments of the redundancy theory include Grover et al. (1975).

The equivalence principle looks familiar: it has something like the form of the Tarski biconditionals discussed in section 2.2. However, it is a stronger principle, which identifies the two sides of the biconditional—either their meanings or the speech acts performed with them. The Tarski biconditionals themselves are simply material biconditionals.

A number of deflationary theories look to the Tarski biconditionals rather than the full equivalence principle. Their key idea is that even if we do not insist on redundancy, we may still hold the following theses:

• For a given language L and every φ in L , the biconditionals ⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ hold by definition (or analytically, or trivially, or by stipulation …).
• This is all there is to say about the concept of truth.

We will refer to views which adopt these as minimalist . Officially, this is the name of the view of Horwich (1990), but we will apply it somewhat more widely. (Horwich's view differs in some specific respects from what is presented here, such as predicating truth of propositions, but we believe it is close enough to what is sketched here to justify the name.)

The second thesis, that the Tarski biconditionals are all there is to say about truth, captures something similar to the redundancy theory's view. It comes near to saying that truth is not a property at all; to the extent that truth is a property, there is no more to it than the disquotational pattern of the Tarski biconditionals. As Horwich puts it, there is no substantial underlying metaphysics to truth. And as Soames (1984) stresses, certainly nothing that could ground as far-reaching a view as realism or anti-realism.

If there is no property of truth, or no substantial property of truth, what role does our term ‘true’ play? Deflationists typically note that the truth predicate provides us with a convenient device of disquotation . Such a device allows us to make some useful claims which we could not formulate otherwise, such as the blind ascription ‘The next thing that Bill says will be true’. (For more on blind ascriptions and their relation to deflationism, see Azzouni, 2001.) A predicate obeying the Tarski biconditionals can also be used to express what would otherwise be (potentially) infinite conjunctions or disjunctions, such as the notorious statement of Papal infallibility put ‘Everything the Pope says is true’. (Suggestions like this are found in Leeds, 1978 and Quine, 1970.)

Recognizing these uses for a truth predicate, we might simply think of it as introduced into a language by stipulation . The Tarski biconditionals themselves might be stipulated, as the minimalists envisage. One could also construe the clauses of a recursive Tarskian theory as stipulated. (There are some significant logical differences between these two options. See Halbach (1999) and Ketland (1999) for discussion.) Other deflationists, such as Beall (forthcoming) or Field (1994), might prefer to focus here on rules of inference or rules of use, rather than the Tarski biconditionals themselves.

There are also important connections between deflationist ideas about truth and certain ideas about meaning. These are fundamental to the deflationism of Field (1986); Field (1994), which will be discussed in section 6.3. For an insightful critique of deflationism, see Gupta (1993).

For more on deflationism, see the entry on the deflationary theory of truth .

6. Truth and language

One of the important themes in the literature on truth is its connection to meaning, or more generally, to language. This has proved an important application of ideas about truth, and an important issue in the study of truth itself. This section will consider a number of issues relating truth and language.

There have been many debates in the literature over what the primary bearers of truth are. Candidates typically include beliefs, propositions, sentences, and utterances. We have already seen in section 1 that the classical debates on truth took this issue very seriously, and what sort of theory of truth was viable was often seen to depend on what the bearers of truth are.

In spite of the number of options under discussion, and the significance that has sometimes been placed on the choice, there is an important similarity between candidate truth-bearers. Consider the role of truth-bearers in the correspondence theory, for instance. We have seen versions of it which take beliefs, propositions, or interpreted sentences to be the primary bearers of truth. But all of them rely upon the idea that their truth-bearers represent the world. It is in virtue of representing the world that truth-bearers are able to enter into correspondence relations. Truth-bearers are things which represent, and are true or false depending on whether they correctly represent the facts in the world.

Exactly the same point can be made for the anti-realist theories of truth we saw in section 4.2, though with different accounts of how truth-bearers represent, and what the world contributes. Though it is somewhat more delicate, something similar can be said for coherence theories, which usually take beliefs, or whole systems of beliefs, as the primary truth-bearers. Though a coherence theory will hardly talk of beliefs representing the facts, it is crucial to the coherence theory that beliefs are contentful beliefs of agents, and that they can enter into coherence relations. Noting the complications in interpreting the genuine classical coherence theories, it appears fair to note that this requires truth-bearers to be representations, however the background metaphysics (presumably idealism) understands representation.

Though Tarski works with sentences, the same can be said of his theory. The sentences to which Tarski's theory applies are fully interpreted, and so also are representations. They characterize the world as being some way or another, and this in turn determines whether they are true or false. Indeed, Tarski needs there to be a fact of the matter about whether each sentence is true or false (abstracting away from context dependence), to ensure that the Tarski biconditionals do their job of fixing the extension of ‘is true’. (But note that just what this fact of the matter consists in is left open by the Tarskian apparatus.)

We thus find the usual candidate truth-bearers linked in a tight circle: interpreted sentences, the propositions they express, the belief speakers might hold towards them, and the acts of assertion they might perform with them are all connected by providing representations. This makes them reasonable bearers of truth. For this reason, it seems, contemporary debates on truth have been much less concerned with the issue of truth-bearers than were the classical ones. Some issues remain, of course. Different metaphysical assumptions may place primary weight on some particular node in the circle, and some metaphysical views still challenge the existence of some of the nodes. Perhaps more importantly, different views on the nature of representation itself might cast doubt on the coherence of some of the nodes. Notoriously for instance, Quineans (e.g., Quine, 1960) deny the existence of intensional entities, including propositions. Even so, it increasingly appears doubtful that attention to truth per se will bias us towards one particular primary bearer of truth.

There is a related, but somewhat different point, which is important to understanding the theories we have canvassed.

The neo-classical theories of truth start with truth-bearers which are already understood to be representational, and explain how they get their truth values. But along the way, they often do something more. Take the neo-classical correspondence theory, for instance. This theory, in effect, starts with a view of how propositions represent the world. They do so by having constituents in the world, which are brought together in the right way. There are many complications about the nature of representation, but at a minimum, this tells us what the truth conditions associated with a proposition are. The theory then explains how such truth conditions can lead to the truth value true , by the right fact existing .

Many theories of truth are like the neo-classical correspondence theory in being as much theories of how truth-bearers represent as of how their truth values are fixed. Again, abstracting from some complications about representation, this makes them theories both of truth conditions and truth values . The Tarskian theory of truth can be construed this way too. This can be seen both in the way the Tarski biconditionals are understood, and how a recursive theory of truth is understood. As we explained Convention T in section 2.2, the primary role of a Tarski biconditional of the form ⌈   ⌈ φ ⌉ is true if and only if φ ⌉ is to fix whether φ is in the extension of ‘is true’ or not. But it can also be seen as stating the truth conditions of φ. Both rely on the fact that the unquoted occurrence of φ is an occurrence of an interpreted sentence, which has a truth value, but also provides its truth conditions upon occasions of use.

Likewise, the base clauses of the recursive definition of truth, those for reference and satisfaction, are taken to state the relevant semantic properties of constituents of an interpreted sentence. In discussing Tarski's theory of truth in section 2, we focused on how these determine the truth value of a sentence. But they also show us the truth conditions of a sentence are determined by these semantic properties. For instance, for a simple sentence like ‘Snow is white’, the theory tells us that the sentence is true if the referent of ‘Snow’ satisfies ‘white’. This can be understood as telling us that the truth conditions of ‘Snow is white’ are those conditions in which the referent of ‘Snow’ satisfies the predicate ‘is white’.

As we saw in sections 3 and 4, the Tarskian apparatus is often seen as needing some kind of supplementation to provide a full theory of truth. A full theory of truth conditions will likewise rest on how the Tarskian apparatus is put to use. In particular, just what kinds of conditions those in which the referent of ‘snow’ satisfies the predicate ‘is white’ are will depend on whether we opt for realist or anti-realist theories. The realist option will simply look for the conditions under which the stuff snow bears the property of whiteness; the anti-realist option will look to the conditions under which it can be verified, or asserted with warrant, that snow is white.

There is a broad family of theories of truth which are theories of truth conditions as well as truth values. This family includes the correspondence theory in all its forms—classical and modern. Yet this family is much wider than the correspondence theory, and wider than realist theories of truth more generally. Indeed, virtually all the theories of truth that make contributions to the realism/anti-realism debate are theories of truth conditions. In a slogan, for many approaches to truth, a theory of truth is a theory of truth conditions.

Any theory that provides a substantial account of truth conditions can offer a simple account of truth values: a truth-bearer provides truth conditions, and it is true if and only if the actual way things are is among them. Because of this, any such theory will imply a strong, but very particular, biconditional, close in form to the Tarski biconditionals. It can be made most vivid if we think of propositions as sets of truth conditions. Let p be a proposition, i.e., a set of truth conditions, and let a be the ‘actual world’, the condition that actually obtains. Then we can almost trivially see:

p  is true if and only if  a ∈ p .

This is presumably necessary. But it is important to observe that it is in one respect crucially different from the genuine Tarski biconditionals. It makes no use of a non-quoted sentence, or in fact any sentence at all. It does not have the disquotational character of the Tarski biconditionals.

Though this may look like a principle that deflationists should applaud, it is not. Rather, it shows that deflationists cannot really hold a truth-conditional view of content at all. If they do, then they inter alia have a non-deflationary theory of truth, simply by linking truth value to truth conditions through the above biconditional. It is typical of thoroughgoing deflationist theories to present a non-truth-conditional theory of the contents of sentences: a non-truth-conditional account of what makes truth-bearers representational. We take it this is what is offered, for instance, by the use theory of propositions in Horwich (1990). It is certainly one of the leading ideas of Field (1986); Field (1994), which explore how a conceptual role account of content would ground a deflationist view of truth. Once one has a non-truth-conditional account of content, it is then possible to add a deflationist truth predicate, and use this to give purely deflationist statements of truth conditions. But the starting point must be a non-truth-conditional view of what makes truth-bearers representational.

Both deflationists and anti-realists start with something other than correspondence truth conditions. But whereas an anti-realist will propose a different theory of truth conditions, a deflationists will start with an account of content which is not a theory of truth conditions at all. The deflationist will then propose that the truth predicate, given by the Tarski biconditionals, is an additional device, not for understanding content, but for disquotation. It is a useful device, as we discussed in section 5.3, but it has nothing to do with content. To a deflationist, the representational properties of truth-bearers have nothing to do with truth.

It has been an influential idea, since the seminal work of Davidson (e.g., 1967), to see a Tarskian theory of truth as a theory of meaning. At least, as we have seen, a Tarskian theory can be seen as showing how the truth conditions of a sentence are determined by the semantic properties of its parts. More generally, as we see in much of the work of Davidson and of Dummett (e.g., 1959; 1976; 1983; 1991), giving a theory of truth conditions can be understood as a crucial part of giving a theory of meaning. Thus, any theory of truth that falls into the broad category of those which are theories of truth conditions can be seen as part of a theory of meaning.

A number of commentators on Tarski (e.g., Etchemendy, 1988; Soames, 1984) have observed that the Tarskian apparatus needs to be understood in a particular way to make it suitable for giving a theory of meaning. Tarski's work is often taken to show how to define a truth predicate. If it is so used, then whether or not a sentence is true becomes, in essence, a truth of mathematics. Presumably what truth conditions sentences of a natural language have is a contingent matter, so a truth predicate defined in this way cannot be used to give a theory of meaning for them. But the Tarskian apparatus need not be used just to explicitly define truth. The recursive characterization of truth can be used to state the semantic properties of sentences and their constituents, as a theory of meaning should. In such an application, truth is not taken to be explicitly defined, but rather the truth conditions of sentences are taken to be described. (See Heck, 1997 for more discussion.)

Inspired by Quine (e.g., 1960), Davidson himself is well known for taking a different approach to using a theory of truth as a theory of meaning than is implicit in Field (1972). Whereas a Field-inspired approach is based on a causal account of reference, Davidson (e.g., 1973) proposes a process of radical interpretation in which an interpreter builds a Tarskian theory to interpret a speaker as holding beliefs which are consistent, coherent, and largely true.

This led Davidson (1986) to argue that most of our beliefs are true—a conclusion that squares well with the coherence theory of truth. This is a weaker claim than the neo-classical coherence theory would make. It does not insist that all the members of any coherent set of beliefs are true, or that truth simply consists in being a member of such a coherent set. But all the same, the conclusion that most of our beliefs are true, because their contents are to be understood through a process of radical interpretation which will make them a coherent and rational system, has a clear affinity with the neo-classical coherence theory.

At the same time, Davidson insists that this observation is compatible with a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Indeed, insofar as the Tarskian theory of truth provides a correspondence theory, radical interpretation builds a correspondence theory of truth into its account of content. As we have seen, whether or not this really amounts to a correspondence theory is disputed. As we saw in section 3.1, the Tarskian theory by itself is weaker than the kind of theory proposed by Field (1972); as we saw in section 4.2, it is compatible with anti-realist views of truth. Nonetheless, the Tarskian clauses themselves state more of about the relation of word-to-world than the neo-classical coherence theory anticipated, which leads Davidson to the conclusion that coherence results in correspondence.

For more on Davidson, see the entry on Donald Davidson .

The relation between truth and meaning is not the only place where truth and language relate closely. Another is the idea, also much-stressed in the writings of Dummett (e.g., 1959), of the relation between truth and assertion. Again, it fits into a platitude:

Truth is the aim of assertion.

A person making an assertion, the platitude holds, aims to say something true.

It is easy to cast this platitude in a way that appears false. Surely, many speakers do not aim to say something true. Any speaker who lies does not. Any speaker whose aim is to flatter, or to deceive, aims at something other than truth.

The motivation for the truth-assertion platitude is rather different. It looks at assertion as a practice, in which certain rules are constitutive . As is often noted, the natural parallel here is with games, like chess or baseball, which are defined by certain rules. The platitude holds that it is constitutive of the practice of making assertions that assertions aim at truth. An assertion by its nature presents what it is saying as true, and any assertion which fails to be true is ipso facto liable to criticism, whether or not the person making the assertion themself wished to have said something true or to have lied.

Dummett's original discussion of this idea was partially a criticism of deflationism (in particular, of views of Strawson, 1950). The idea that we fully explain the concept of truth by way of the Tarski biconditionals is challenged by the claim that the truth-assertion platitude is fundamental to truth. As Dummett there put it, what is left out by the Tarski biconditionals, and captured by the truth-assertion platitude, is the point of the concept of truth, or what the concept is used for. (For further discussion, see Glanzberg, 2003a and Wright, 1992.)

Whether or not assertion has such constitutive rules is, of course, controversial. But among those who accept that it does, the place of truth in the constitutive rules is itself controversial. The leading alternative, defended by Williamson (1996), is that knowledge, not truth, is fundamental to the constitutive rules of assertion. Williamson defends an account of assertion based on the rule that one must assert only what one knows.

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• Ketland, Jeffrey, 1999, “Deflationism and Tarski's paradise”, Mind , 108: 69-94.
• Lackey, Douglas (ed.), 1973, Essays in Analysis , New York: George Braziller.
• Leeds, Stephen, 1978, “Theories of reference and truth”, Erkenntnis , 13: 111-129.
• McDowell, John, 1976, “Truth-conditions, bivalence, and verificationism”, in Truth and Meaning , G. Evans and J. McDowell, eds., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 42-66.
• Misak, Cheryl J., 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Moore, George Edward, 1899, “The nature of judgment”, Mind , 8: 176-193.
• Moore, George Edward, 1902, “Truth”, in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology , J. M. Baldwin, ed., London: Macmillan, vol. 2, 716-718.
• Moore, George Edward, 1953, Some Main Problems of Philosophy , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Mulligan, Kevin, Simons, Peter, and Smith, Barry, 1984, “Truth-makers”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 44: 287-321.
• Parsons, Josh, 1999, “There is no ‘truthmaker’ argument against nominalism”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 77: 325-334.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1978, Meaning and the Moral Sciences , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1981, Reason, Truth and History , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1985-86, “A comparison of something with something else”, New Literary History , 17: 61-79. Reprinted in Putnam (1994).
• Putnam, Hilary, 1994, Words and Life , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Quine, W. V. O., 1960, Word and Object , Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Quine, W. V. O., 1970, Philosophy of Logic , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Ramsey, Frank P., 1927, “Facts and propositions”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 7: 153-170. Reprinted in Ramsey (1931).
• Ramsey, Frank P., 1931, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Ross, W. D. (ed.), 1928, The Works of Aristotle Translated into English , Oxford: Clarendon Press, second ed.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1903, Principles of Mathematics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, first ed.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1904, “Meinong's theory of complexes and assumptions I, II, III”, Mind , 13: 204-219, 336-354, 509-524. Reprinted in Lackey (1973).
• Russell, Bertrand, 1910a, “The monistic theory of truth”, in Philosophical Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin, 131-146.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1910b, “On the nature of truth and falsehood”, in Philosophical Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin, 147-159.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1912, The Problems of Philosophy , London: Oxford University Press.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1956, “The philosophy of logical atomism”, in Logic and Knowledge , R. C. Marsh, ed., London: George Allen and Unwin, 177-281. Originally published in The Monist in 1918.
• Soames, Scott, 1984, “What is a theory of truth?”, Journal of Philosophy , 81: 411-429.
• Strawson, Peter F., 1949, “Truth”, Analysis , 9: 83-97.
• Strawson, Peter F., 1950, “Truth”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 24. Reprinted in Strawson (1971).
• Strawson, Peter F., 1971, Logico-Linguistic Papers , London: Methuen.
• Tarski, Alfred, 1931, “Sur les ensembles définissables de nombres réels. I.”, Fundamenta Mathematicae , 17: 210-239. References are to the translation by J. H. Woodger as “On Definable Sets of Real Numbers” in Tarski (1983).
• Tarski, Alfred, 1935, “Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalizierten Sprachen”, Studia Philosophica , 1: 261-405. References are to the translation by J. H. Woodger as “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages” in Tarski (1983).
• Tarski, Alfred, 1944, “The semantic conception of truth”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 4: 341-375.
• Tarski, Alfred, 1983, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics , Indianapolis: Hackett, second ed. Edited by J. Corcoran with translations by J. H. Woodger.
• Taylor, Barry, 1976, “States of affairs”, in Truth and Meaning , G. Evans and J. McDowell, eds., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 263-284.
• Walker, Ralph C. S., 1989, The Coherence Theory of Truth , London: Routledge.
• Williamson, Timothy, 1996, “Knowing and asserting”, Philosophical Review , 104: 489-523.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
• Wright, Crispin, 1976, “Truth-conditions and criteria”, Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. , 50: 217-245. Reprinted in Wright (1993).
• Wright, Crispin, 1982, “Anti-realist semantics: The role of criteria”, in Idealism: Past and Present , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 225-248. Reprinted in Wright (1993).
• Wright, Crispin, 1992, Truth and Objectivity , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Wright, Crispin, 1993, Realism, Meaning and Truth , Oxford: Blackwell, second ed.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Davidson, Donald | James, William | Peirce, Charles Sanders | realism | Tarski, Alfred: truth definitions | truth: axiomatic theories of | truth: coherence theory of | truth: correspondence theory of | truth: deflationary theory of | truth: identity theory of

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Josh Parsons for advice on metaphysics, and to JC Beall, Justin Khoo, Jason Stanley, and Paul Teller for very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

An opinion essay

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Information will soon be so easy to find on the internet that people will not need to remember anything. Do you agree?

Nowadays all the information we could ever need is available online and some people say that means the end of having to learn anything.

It is true that these days everything you want to know is a few clicks away as long as you have internet access. However, not everyone has working internet all the time, for example in certain buildings or remote locations, so we do need to be able to remember information. Moreover, it takes time to look up everything you need to know online, whereas remembering something is immediate. The human memory is a much more efficient system.

Another problem is the quality of the information online. How do we know if it is accurate or reliable? We need to think about other facts we know and remember how to compare information from different websites. Knowing (and remembering) how to find certain information will be more important than knowing the information itself.

Finally, the internet is a good tool but it is not a useful replacement for our brains. If we did not remember anything, we would all spend even more time on our phones and computers than we already do, which is not good for society.

In conclusion, the internet offers us many things but it is still important to use our knowledge and memories. We need our memories to function without the internet and we also need to know how to use the internet properly.

• Read the question carefully. Respond to all ideas in it or all parts of it.
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• Introduce your essay by restating the question in your own words.
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• Use linking words to connect your ideas.
• Draw your conclusion from the main ideas in your essay. Don't introduce new ideas at the end.

What do you think about the question? Would it be better or worse if we never learned anything and just used the internet instead?

Language level

It would be worse. If we only look for information on the internet, for everythingg and every time when we have a question about something we will become ''rusty robots''.

In other words, our minds, without exercising the creativity and memory of our brains, will be almost completly out of purpose. What's more, we will be lazy and with a slow capacity of thinking properly.

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It is evidently known that in recent days, the exchange of information is progressive over the network of various channels which we call it as Internet. Experts have made some definite predictions about the availability of data and information on the above mode of communication in near future. This particular development is totally agreeable. With respect to the technological advancements pertaining to the above, the human life shall be prepared to be compatible with the communication platforms on the network of servers. The key strengths will mainly focus on speed of communication, less errors and information accuracy. This aspect of technological development will eventually replace the traditional modes of information storage. This requires no effort in preservation of information on physical devices as all the core information will be stored in virtual servers. On the other hand, the above paradigm shift in terms of data centralization will certainly replace human brains. This attempt will not trigger any living beings to memorize information physically. It is quite obvious that our brains are limited and restricted with space constraints. Hence, this technology of information storage will drastically replace these drawbacks. Overall, this phenomenal trend of networking has provided a seamless mode of gathering, interpreting and storing information. At the same time, the consequences will be tremendous and noticeable as it will lead to an era where in people across the globe can surf and search their expected piece of data with-in no time. Practically, they don’t have to bother about any challenges related to failure of storage elements. Finally, this pattern of information storage is promisingly going to be accepted.

I think the use of the internet is not only in conflict with learning, but It has made the speed of learning faster and more comfortable.

On the one hand, With the advent of the internet and access to data whenever we want, we were able to free our minds from memorizing a lot of unnecessary data. It caused that instead of spending our time to remember the formulas and data, we use our time for a deeper understanding of the concepts. Concentration on understanding was a big step in order to make us more clear about how to apply scientific concepts practically, and It made the evolutionary process of turning scientific concepts into experimental tests go faster. Going through this evolutionary process quickly, in turn, caused, firstly, the faster growth of modern technologies and, secondly, the creation of many new data, concepts, and sciences. And now the data volume is so much that not only you can never remember or learn them, but you have to choose the best one that works for you. Somehow, the internet has changed how to learn. It has focused on analyzing the options and choosing the best one to learn Instead of memorizing a bunch of content.

On the other hand, Theoretically speaking, One of the laws In the world is that everything can be useful or harmful in turn. This law also applies to the internet. In fact, how to use the internet determines whether it is useful or harmful. Like many other tools that have been invented such as smartphones, smartwatches, electric cars, and so on we have spent time learning how to use them. In order to get the best out of the internet and don't waste our time, we must take the time to learn how to search. The searching skill is the most important one that helps us find better results.

In conclusion, Given the two analyzed reasons above, I agree with the idea that easy access to Information makes people get rid of memorizing lots of data. But this has nothing to do with the quality or quantity of learning.

I think it depends on the type of information. Some information are easier to remember, and hence it's more efficient to have them in memory instead of looking for them online. However, some complex information is offered online, and it will be impractical if we tried to remember it. Additionally, I believe that learning is not just about acquiring knowledge. It's about learning how to think with this knowledge available and solve problems efficiently. That's why the internet is considered a valuable tool to promote learning, not to replace it.

Nowadays we are witnesses how far technology has developed in a short time. A huge of information is backing up on internet and if you have access of surfing you can find any information that you are looking for. However, there are some relevant aspects that should be taking into account when we are talking about using always internet instead of learning. In this sense, the purpose of this essay will be to explain why it is not a good idea. Firstly, as you know, most of the information on internet is fake. For that reason, it is impossible the learning process can be replaced by internet use. If you are looking for reliable information you have to learn how it works. In other words you need of learning even if you want to use internet all the time because you have to discern what of all information is useful for you purpose. For example, if you are a student and want to write an essay about a specific topic you likely have to search for the best information if you want to get a job position or scholarship. Secondly, there is a high demand for professionals who have specific skills in the field that they are pretending to be involved. That’s why learning always is a must for satisfying the requirements of companies and institutions. For instance, in the education field, the main aim is the learning and knowledge which are essential on a daily life to be an expert in your field of action and these skills can’t be acquired through internet surfing. To sum up learning and knowledge are fundamentals in a current world that is demanding professionals highly qualified even in our daily live and the internet is far away of satisfying the required skills that you get every day through the practice, research and networking.

I think it become worse and dangerous for our society, we need to control it making rules. Without internet, many skills and knowledge could´nt be used.

I believe that, The internet become even more dangerous for young people who barely discovered the world around them, If they count on it for seeking information without parental supervision, it would be a disaster!

In nowadays,there are many ways to reach information.The Internet is just one of them but maybe most promising one.The Internet helps us to find information easily and efficently.

However there are some negative sides of Internet.For instance realibilty of information.There are no real control on Internet.I reckon there will not be soon.This reduces the trust in internet.This is why People will always need another source to be make sure and need to remember information.

It is also necesseray for objectivity. You can not just have one source and expect true and impartial information. It is against nature of science.This is not how science works.People must have and process the information.In this way we expand our knowledge.When we make brainstorm we always end up with another information. If we don’t have and process the information how Science works?

I suppose in the future People will never trust completely to Internet. They will always need another source and they will need to interrogate source of information.In conclusion Internet is by far most promising invention People have ever invented.However Internet is not beyond our brain and imagination.We will always need to posses and process the information.

It is about my hometown: My hometown is a beautiful, attractive and cool. N'beika is one of the most famous places in Mauritania where attractive views and economic capacities are in. It is located in Tagant which is in middle of the map. Therefore, It is one the biggest cities in the country. As there are interesting geographical features such as: high Mountains, nice valleys, light hills and wonderful pools. Historically, N'beika played an important role in culture, trade exchange and fighting colonialist. Also it has saved historical landmarks, for example: manuscripts, books and cities which the most important is Gasr Albarka. In the north, there have tourist views and in the East big mountains with lovely valleys like Matmata where there are some Alligators in and other attractive animals. As well as from the south and the west there are some fields, forests and farms. Moreover, people are interested in agriculture, trade, development and education. Furthermore, there are many schools and Mahidras and three colleges providing well-deserved education to students. What's more, mall shops is offering demands and created jobs for unemployment. There are different favourite for people , some of them are crazy about football as youth, and some people like doing agriculture and development. Moreover, there are entrepreneurs doing a small business like selling clothes, pitch, barbershop... etc. In conclusion, N'beika is a gift of Allah that has given to people to spend nice moments in order to feel happy and to invest for everything we want due to gain lots of money .

I believe it is amazing updated technology which has helped us a lot in our lives. In todays era everyone has access to internet over the globe. you can easily find all the information on internet that is required to you. Even though learn many new skills which aren't even taught you from the help of internet. it is good help for book writer like us where we can be part of book writing communities or book writing resources to enhance our skills and provides more guidance to others.

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Truth, Meaning and Realism: Essays in the Philosophy of Thought

A. C. Grayling, Truth, Meaning and Realism: Essays in the Philosophy of Thought , Continuum, 2007, 173pp., $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781847061546.

Reviewed by Alexander Miller, University of Birmingham

This volume is a collection of revised versions of ten essays apparently written in the 1980s or thereabouts, mainly as invited contributions to conferences. As Grayling admits in his preface, "All the papers are of their time". British philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s was dominated by an approach to the debate between realism and antirealism that was associated with Oxford and championed by Michael Dummett, and according to which the key issue was whether the theory of meaning should take as its central concept the notion of truth or the notion of assertibility , with realism favouring the former and antirealism favouring the latter. Much of the book concerns the realism debate conceived in these terms, and although there are also extended discussions of Putnam's twin-earth examples these are mainly in the context of an exchange with David Wiggins. Grayling's essays are thus also very much "of their place" (Oxford) as well as of their time (1980s).

Although in his early works Dummett had defended the idea that assertibility, and not truth, should be the central concept of the theory of meaning, in later work he -- and Crispin Wright -- suggested that antirealism could after all take the notion of truth to be the central notion of the theory of meaning so long as it was an epistemically constrained notion. Given this way of formulating antirealism there is no need to argue that the notion of assertion can be explained in terms that don't presuppose the notion of truth: even the antirealist can admit that it is a platitude that "to assert is to present as true".

In Essay 1, Grayling puts forward a view of assertion that contrasts with the approach of Wright and the later Dummett. Whereas the Wright-later Dummett view sees the aim of assertion as "the presentation of or laying claim to truth" (p.10), Grayling sees it as "the realisation of certain cognitive and practical goals" (ibid.).

Essay 2 proposes a recasting of the debate between realism and antirealism. Grayling suggests that (a) properly understood realism is not a metaphysical but an epistemological thesis: "that the domains or entities to which ontological commitment is made exist independently of knowledge of them" (p.26); and that (b) it is in fact a second-order debate about whether the realistic commitments of ordinary, first-order discourse are literally true or not, and as such has no implications for "logic, linguistic practice, or mundane metaphysics" (p.30). Grayling returns to these issues in Essays 8 and 9.

An alternative to deflationary and indefinabilist conceptions of truth is offered in Essay 3: "The predicate 'is true' is a lazy predicate. It holds a place for more precise predicates, denoting evaluatory properties appropriate to the discourse in which possession of those properties is valued" (p.32). On this view "there are, literally, different kinds of truth, individuated by subject-matter" (p.36). Grayling backs this up in Essay 4 (which, like Essay 3, is a reworked chapter from Grayling's An Introduction to Philosophical Logic , first published in 1982) with a critique of the indefinabilist position Davidson recommends in "The Folly of Trying to Define Truth". This essay also argues that Davidson's "The Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" fails to yield a satisfying account of objectivity: in particular "the principle of charity is questionable beyond its heuristic applications" (p.49).

Putnam's famous "twin-earth" argument appears to some to establish that it is essential to Jones's thinking the thought that someone is drinking water in the next room that there is (or has been) some H 2 0 in Jones's environment. In Essay 5 Grayling considers Wiggins's attempt to fuse this construal of Putnam's insight -- "the extension-involvingness of natural kind terms" (p.62) -- with a Fregean theory distinguishing between the sense and reference of such a term. For Wiggins,

Taking the sense of a name as its mode of presentation of an object means that we have two things … : an object that the name presents, and a way in which it is presented. This latter [is] the 'conception' of the object … 'a body of information' -- typically open-ended and imperfect, and hence rarely if ever condensable into a complete description of the object -- in which the object itself plays a role (p.62),

and something similar holds for natural kind terms: "the sense of a natural kind term is correlative to a recognitional conception that is unspecifiable except as the conception of things like this, that and the other specimens exemplifying the concept that this conception is a conception of" (p.65). Grayling suggests that instead of taking senses to be "correlative" to "conceptions" we should instead identify senses with conceptions: "a term's sense is: an open-ended extensible body of information, possession of which enables speakers to identify the term's reference" (p.69). However, this modified account has consequences for the notion of extension-involving sense:

on the minimum specification given for the grasp of the sense of a concept-word, any concept word which applies to nothing retains its sense because what is known by one who understands it is what would count as an exemplary instance of its application if ever one were offered. (p.74)

In consequence, Wiggins was wrong to take it "that the extension-involvingness constraint ensured the realism of the reality-involvingness he took this to entail" (p.75). Related matters are pursued in Essay 6. Grayling rejects Frege's "strong objectivism" about sense, and argues that since the publicity of sense "is essentially a matter of speakers' mutual constrainings of use", it is best construed in terms of "intersubjective agreement in use" (p.85). This has implications for the externalist arguments of Putnam and Burge. Although it is true that meanings are not in the head of any single speaker, "they are in our heads, collectively understood … meaning is the artefact of intersubjectively constituted conventions governing the use of sounds and marks to communicate, and therefore resides in the language itself" (p.89). This shows -- contra Putnam -- that "facts about the physical environment of language-use are not essential to meaning" (p.89). Grayling reaches this conclusion by reflecting on what he calls an "Explicit Speaker", an idealised speaker who knows everything contained in "some best and latest dictionary [which] pooled a community's knowledge of meanings" (p.87). It follows that

when he [an individual speaker with the linguistic community's best joint knowledge at his disposal] says 'water' he intends to refer to water, that is, H 2 0, or if he lives on twin-earth, then to water on twin-earth, that is, XYZ; and so in either case his grasp of the expression's meaning determines its extension, and the psychological state in which his grasp of the meaning consists is broad. But this is not because it is related, causally or in some other way, to water, but rather to theories of water, because he is speaking in conformity with the best dictionary, that is, with the fullest available knowledge of meaning, in accord with the best current theories held by the linguistic community. (p.88)

Grayling does not consider the obvious reply that a defender of Putnam might give: that a 10 th century English peasant's application of "water" to a sample of XYZ is incorrect, and clearly not because of anything to do with the best current theory held by his linguistic community. Moreover, it appears to beg the question against Putnam to assume that, in the late-20 th century scenario that Grayling is concerned with, facts about the physical environment are not essential to grasp the meanings of some of the expressions that appear in "the best current theories held by the linguistic community".

The "Explicit Speaker" reappears in Essay 7. As Grayling advertises in the preface, this chapter suggests that " point is the driving force in interpretation of implicatures by competent speakers of a natural language" (p.vi), and that "this simple insight reveals certain puzzles to be artefacts of inexplictness" (ibid.). According to Grayling:

An Explicit Speaker of his language is one who so uses it whenever he makes an assertion (and mutatis mutandis for other kinds of utterance) he: (1) expresses his intended meaning as fully as, if not more fully than, his audience needs in the circumstances; (2) expresses his intended meaning as exactly as, if not more exactly than, his audience, etc; and (3) is as epistemically cautious as the circumstances do or might require, if not more so, with respect to the claims made or presupposed by what he says. (p.93)

Grayling proposes to deploy this notion of an Explicit Speaker to shed light on the analogues in natural language of the logical constants, presupposition-failure in uses of the likes of "Jones omitted to turn out the light", the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions, and Putnam's use of twin-earth type examples. This chapter is difficult to follow. Although it is titled "Explicit Speaker Theory", and although the expression "Explicit Speaker Theory" is mentioned throughout, Grayling never gives a clear and explicit statement of what the theory actually is. The reader is left to work this out from inexplicit hints. We are told, for example, that according to Explicit Speaker Theory "the crux in meaning is the point, which is to be explained in terms of speakers' intentions to mean something on an occasion" (p.92), that "conventional meaning is to be characterised as the dry residue of speakers' meanings, agreed in the language community under constraints of publicity and stability" (ibid.), that "the meanings of expressions in a language are the agreed dry residue of speakers' meanings" (p.105), and that "what the Explicit Speaker does [when he says "the man whom I take to be drinking champagne is happy tonight"] is what all speakers are enthymematically doing anyway" (p.102). (Grayling does not attempt to explain what it is to do something enthymematically: again, the reader is left to work this out for himself.) In the light of this, readers with less sunny temperaments than the present reviewer are likely to be irritated by comments like "One should surely recognise all this as obvious" (p.100).

That Essay 8 is very much of its time and place is evident from its characterisation as "current orthodoxy" of the view that the realism/antirealism dispute is a debate about whether linguistic understanding is a matter of grasp of epistemically unconstrained truth-conditions or a matter of grasp of assertion conditions. For "current orthodoxy" read "orthodoxy in Oxford in the 1980s", and -- accordingly -- the essay is largely taken up with a discussion of Dummett's analysis of realism as the view that grasp of sentence-meaning is grasp of potentially evidence-transcendent truth-conditions. Grayling argues that rather than attempting in this way to bring all realist/antirealist controversies under one label, we should instead "recognise that they are controversies of different kinds" (p.126). This point is now well-taken -- and indeed defended -- even by philosophers out of the Dummettian stable (cf. Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Harvard University Press 1992)). However, in contrast to Wright, Grayling argues not that we can develop different realism-relevant considerations that can be brought to bear in different combinations as we move across different discourses, but rather that "we do well to restrict talk of realism to the case where controversy concerns unmetaphorical claims about the knowledge-independent existence of entities or realms of entities -- namely, the 'external world' case" (p.126).

Grayling's argument for this surprising claim is unconvincing. Dummett argues that realism is most fundamentally a semantic thesis, "a doctrine about the sort of thing that makes our statements true when they are true" (quoted by Grayling on p.120), since in some cases a straightforwardly ontological characterisation in terms of the existence of entities is not possible because there are no entities for the realist and antirealist to debate about (Dummett mentions realism about the future and realism about ethics as examples). Grayling argues against this that the semantic thesis is actually less fundamental than realism characterised in metaphysical and epistemological terms on the grounds that Dummett "goes on to unpack the expression 'sort of thing' in a way which shows that its being a semantic thesis comes courtesy of something else" (p.120). To display this Grayling quotes the following passage from Dummett:

the fundamental thesis of realism, so regarded, is that we really do succeed in referring to external objects, existing independently of our knowledge of them, and that the statements we make about them are rendered true or false by an objective reality the constitution of which is, again, independent of our knowledge. (Note that this is not, as Grayling refers to it, on p.55 of Dummett's 1982 "Realism" article, but actually on p.104.)

Grayling takes the reference to external objects in this latter characterisation to show that the semantic characterisation of realism presupposes the ontological characterisation rather than, as Dummett has it, vice versa. It then follows from this that "what we should say about those 'realisms' which are not readily classifiable in terms of entities is, simply, and on Dummett's own reasoning, that they are not realisms" (p.125), and it is this that leads in part to Grayling's restriction of talk of realism to the 'external world' case.

But this is an uncharitable interpretation of Dummett. I take it that what Dummett is saying in the passage quoted by Grayling is actually along the following lines: "the fundamental thesis of realism, so regarded, is that in cases where there is a relevant class of entities whose existence can be a matter of debate , the statements we make about them are rendered true or false by an objective reality the constitution of which is independent of our knowledge, so that in this sense we really do succeed in referring to external objects, existing independently of our knowledge of them; and that in cases where there is no relevant class of entities whose existence can be a matter of debate , the canonical statements of the discourse concerned are rendered true or false by an objective reality the constitution of which is independent of our knowledge". Read in this more charitable way it is clear that the class of entities mentioned is secondary to the mention of knowledge-independent truth, and so there is no implication that talk of realism should be restricted to the "external world" case, so that the way is left open for a Wright-style broadening of the realist/antirealist canvass.

Essay 9 is an extended discussion of McGinn, Nagel and McFetridge on the realism debate, while the final Essay 10 offers some brief reflections on evidence and judgement.

It is not straightforward to appraise this collection, as it is not clear what its target audience is. The various debates have moved on quite a way since Grayling's conference papers were written, and I can't help feeling that they should have been updated and submitted to the rigours of peer-review in the journals before being issued in a collection. To be fair to Grayling, though, he does attempt to pre-empt this kind of worry in his preface, where he points to the "exploratory character" of the essays and says that he "in no case take[s] them to be remotely near a final word on the debates they relate to" (p.v). But I'm not sure that this is enough to get Grayling off the hook. My main problem with the book is not that it is exploratory (there's nothing wrong with that), or that its approach is parochial and somewhat dated, but that the writing style displays some of the worst vices of philosophical writing a la 1980s Oxford, where writing clearly and succinctly appears to be regarded as a mark of superficiality, and where as you get nearer to the nub of an argument, the cruder the stylistic barbarities become. The following example -- of a single sentence! -- from Essay 5 is, unfortunately, not atypical:

Generalising from natural kind terms, we might wish to say that concept words which, in Frege's terminology, refer to empty concepts, can nevertheless be understood, because we can be (so to say) lexically exposed to -- it is more accurate to say: given an understanding of what it would be for something to fall into -- the extensions they would, in better or fuller worlds, have. (p.74)

I'm here reminded of Schopenhauer's comment that "when parentheses are inserted into sentences that have been broken up to accommodate them" the result is "unnecessary and wanton confusion" ( Essays and Aphorisms , trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin 1970), p.207). At any rate, the cause of serious philosophy is not furthered by the poor attempt at Henry James impersonation. Grayling writes:

Too many gifted colleagues publish too little for fear of having every nut and bolt tightened into place; those who venture ideas as if they were letters to friends, trying out a way of thinking about something, and knowing that they will learn from the mistakes they make, do more both for the conversation and themselves thereby. (p.v)

Far be it from me to dictate Grayling's epistolary habits, but if his style in this book is typical of the way he writes to his friends, I'll give his collected correspondence a miss.

Opinion Writing: a Guide to Writing a Successful Essay Easily

An opinion essay requires students to write their thoughts regarding a subject matter. Relevant examples and explanations back their point of view. Before starting an opinion paper, it is important to study the definition, topics, requirements, and structure. Referring to examples is also highly useful. Perhaps you need help with our admission essay writing service ? Take a look at this guide from our dissertation writing service to learn how to write an opinion essay like an expert.

What Is an Opinion Essay

A common question among students is: ‘What is an Opinion Essay?' It is an assignment that contains questions that allow students to share their point-of-view on a subject matter. Students should express their thoughts precisely while providing opinions on the issue related to the field within reasonable logic. Some opinion essays type require references to back the writer's claims.

Opinion writing involves using a student's personal point-of-view, which is segregated into a point. It is backed by examples and explanations. The paper addresses the audience directly by stating ‘Dear Readers' or the equivalent. The introduction involves a reference to a speech, book, or play. This is normally followed by a rhetorical question like ‘is the pope Catholic?' or something along those lines.

What Kind of Student Faces an Opinion Essay

Non-native English-speaking students enrolled in the International English Language Testing System by the British Council & Cambridge Assessment English are tasked with learning how to write the opinion essays. This can be high-school or college students. It is designed to enhance the level of English among students. It enables them to express their thoughts and opinions while writing good opinion essay in English.

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What Are the Requirements of an Opinion Essay?

Avoid Going Off-Topic: Always write an opinion essay within relevance to answer the assigned question. This is also known as ‘beating around the bush' and should not be included in any opinion paragraph as it may lower your grade.

Indent the First Paragraph: With most academic papers, opinion writing is not different. Therefore, it contains the rule of indenting the first line of the introduction.

A Well-Thought Thesis: The full thesis statement is a brief description of the opinion essay. It determines the rest of the paper. Include all the information that you wish to include in the body paragraphs

The Use of Formal Languages: Although it is okay to write informally, keep a wide range of professional and formal words. This includes: ‘Furthermore,' ‘As Stated By,' ‘However', & ‘Thus'.

Avoid Internet Slang: In the opinion paper, avoid writing using slang words. Don'tDon't include words like ‘LOL', ‘OMG', ‘LMAO', etc.

The Use of First Person Language (Optional): For the reason of providing personal thought, it is acceptable to write your personal opinion essay in the first person.

Avoid Informal Punctuation: Although the requirements allow custom essay for the first-person language, they do not permit informal punctuation. This includes dashes, exclamation marks, and emojis.

Avoid Including Contradictions: Always make sure all spelling and grammar is correct.

We also recommend reading about types of sentences with examples .

Opinion Essay Topics

Before learning about the structure, choosing from a wide range of opinion essay topics is important. Picking an essay theme is something that can be done very simply. Choosing an excellent opinion essay topic that you are interested in or have a passion for is advisable. Otherwise, you may find the writing process boring. This also ensures that your paper will be both effective and well-written.

• Do sports differ from ordinary board games?
• Is using animals in circus performances immoral?
• Why should we be honest with our peers?
• Should all humans be entitled to a 4-day workweek?
• Should all humans become vegetarians?
• Does a CEO earn too much?
• Should teens be barred from having sleepovers?
• Should everyone vote for their leader?
• The Pros & Cons of Day-Light Saving Hours.
• What are the most energy-efficient and safest cars of X year?

Opinion Essay Structure

When it comes to opinion paragraphs, students may struggle with the opinion essay format. The standard five-paragraph-essay structure usually works well for opinion essays. Figuring out what one is supposed to include in each section may be difficult for beginners. This is why following the opinion essay structure is something all beginners should do, for their own revision before writing the entire essay.

You might also be interested in getting more information about: 5 PARAGRAPH ESSAY

Opinion essay introduction

• Address the audience directly, and state the subject matter.
• Reference a speech, poem, book, or play.
• Include the author's name and date of publication in brackets.
• 1 or 2 sentences to make up a short description.
• 1 or 2 summarizing sentences of the entire paper.
• 1 sentence that links to the first body paragraph.

Body Paragraph 1

• Supporting arguments
• Explanation
• A linking sentence to the second body paragraph.

Body Paragraph 2

• Supporting argument
• A linking sentence to the third body paragraph.

Body Paragraph 3

• A linking sentence to the conclusion.

Conclusion paragraph

• Summary of the entire paper
• A conclusive sentence (the bigger picture in conclusion)

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Opinion Essay Examples

Do you need something for reference? Reading opinion essay examples can expand your knowledge of this style of writing, as you get to see exactly how this form of an essay is written. Take a look at our samples to get an insight into this form of academic writing.

Over the past, American popular culture has been strong in creating racial stereotypes. Images displayed through television, music, and the internet have an impact on how individuals behave and what individuals believe. People find their identities and belief systems from popular culture. Evidently, I believe that American pop culture has created racial stereotypes that predominantly affect other ethnic minorities. Analyzing the history of America reveals that African Americans have always had a problem defining themselves as Americans ever since the era of slavery. AfricanAmericans have always had a hard time being integrated into American culture. The result is that African Americans have been subjected to ridicule and shame. American pop culture has compounded the problem by enhancing the negative stereotypes ofAfrican American. In theatre, film, and music, African Americans have been associated with vices such as murder, theft, and violence.

The family systems theory has a significant revelation on family relations. I firmly agree that to understand a particular family or a member, they should be around other family members. The emotional connection among different family members may create functional or dysfunctional coexistence, which is not easy to identify when an individual is further from the other members. Taking an example of the extended family, the relationship between the mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law may be tense, but once they are outside the family, they can pretend to have a good relationship. Therefore, I agree with the theory that the existing emotional attachment and developed culture in the family is distinctively understood when the family is together.

Opinion writing is a form of academic paper that asks students to include their thoughts on a particular topic. This is then backed by a logical explanation and examples. Becoming more knowledgeable is a practical way to successfully learn how to write an opinion paper. Before writing anything, it is essential to refer to important information. That includes the definition, topics, opinion writing examples, and requirements. This is what turns amateur writers into master writers.

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What Is Truth? Essay Example

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The ideal of truth is relevant to the individual. Truth is based on a number of factors that are usually derived from absolute knowledge. However, when finding the relationship between knowledge and truth, one questions their own competence and confidence in establishing what is actually true. There are several debates among philosophers and research that try to derive the nature of truth. Defining the nature of truth is routed in technical analysis, a morass of arcane jargon, subtle distinctions from competing theories, and precise definition. Rene Desecrates famously wrote, “I am therefore I exist.” In stating this he holds that only truth that is certain is what the individuals own cognition of their existence. The principle question among the long time debate is to answer, what is truth? This questions have plagued the minds of philosophers since the time of Plato and Socrates. It has been a never ending debate trying to draw the relationship of knowledge, truth, and understanding what is relevant to their own assessment. From the readings of Martin Luther, Descartes, and others, this paper will explore the philosophical questions of knowledge and truth. Drawing on these reasons to come to a consensus on what can be the individual be assured of what they believe is the absolute truth, and what prevents individuals from the truth.

The notion of truth is developed through the ideas, belief, and opinion of what is and what is not. Truth is an object of relativism of an individual’s ideas, the agreement and disagreement of reality. In understanding truth, there are three principal interpretations that are used, truth as absolute, truth as relative, and truth as an unattainable reality. According to definition, absolute truth is, “is defined as inflexible reality: fixed, invariable, unalterable facts.” (All About Philosophy, n.d) Essentially it is a truth understood universally that cannot be altered. Plato was a staunch believer in this interpretation, as the truth found on earth was a shadow of the truth that existed within the universe. This is the hardest interpretation of truth because there can be no indefinite argument with those that try to negate the existence of absolute truth. In arguing against the interpretation, the arguer themselves tries to search for validation in their statement that absolute truth doesn’t exist. In a matter of contradiction in understanding what is truth is to establish that truth exists. In a better interpretation seeing the truth as relative is explaining that facts and realities vary dependent on their circumstances.

Relativism is in the matter of where no objectivity exists and is subjective which the validity of truth doesn’t exist. According to philosophy, “Relativism is not a single doctrine but a family of views whose common theme is that some central aspect of experience, thought, evaluation, or even reality is somehow relative to something else.” (Swoyer, 2014) The last interpretation of truth is that truth is an unattainable reality where no truth exists. Truth is a universal fact in which corresponds with evidence, reality, and experience. Since an individual’s reality and experience constantly change, it is impossible to reach an absolute truth. This interpretation is relative to one’s own knowledge because it is present in their person’s mind. Using this interpretation many philosophers have carved out several theories of truth.

The pragmatic approach to defining truth is by seeing that truth is the objects and ideas that the individual can validate, assimilate, verify, and corroborate. In understanding what is not true it is essentially what the individual cannot. In establishing the absolute truth, it is what happens and becomes true events that are verified through a process of verification.  In the view of this paper, is that truth is dependent on the individual’s fact and reality, as Aristotle stated, “to say of what is that is it not, or what is not that is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and what is not that it is not, is true.” As confusing as the statement may be to some, the concept of truth is based on a person’s confidence in their own reality as the basis of truth. Not only is the general consensus now, but in also philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas in the 9 th century in which, truth is the equation of things and intellect, more importantly the basis of truth as true is up to the individuals’ knowledge.

In Rene Descartes search for truth, he begins with the method of doubt. Written Descartes, Meditation , “I seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive, very clearly and distinctly is true.” (Descartes, 7.35) Descartes add to the questions of what is truth is by the confidence and certainty in knowing that what is true is from the natural experiences and own personal truths. The individuals’ definition of truth is what the person understands in life through logic and reason. The individual establishes their idea of reality from their senses, what they see, and true perceptions.  Descartes wrote in his, Letter to Mersenne , any doubts about truth is perpetuated by the notion that no one can be ignorant of truth because it symbolizes the conformity of thought with its object. (Smith, 2014) Drawing from Descartes works we will answer what prevents us from the truth.

In his Method of Doubt from his First Meditation , his purpose was to negate skepticism by doubting the truth of everything including what we know in our minds. The reasons in which people doubt their truth is based on people second guessing their own subsequent beliefs. People claim to know the truth beyond their own realms of justification. People senses and experiences that have been taught are largely provided from prejudices past down. (Descartes, 1639) People are disappointed that what they believe to be true is often not. Descartes stated, “Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.” (Descartes, 1639)  From these understandings people then began to doubt what they know to be true because they have reasonable doubt.

In order for a person to understand truth, they must first doubt all things around them in a hypothetical doubt, in order to provide a pretense of what we know is the truth and what we cannot know. By determining our own knowledge of what is true, such as the snow is white, because we know there is no other color in existence, we can have a foundation of unshakeable truths.  While the senses can sometimes present falsehood, it is subjective to suggest that all senses are wrong. In determining using one’s experience to determine truth, it is important to note that everyone’s experience is not the same. The way one person sees an event can be different from someone that sees the same event. Take for example the group of five blind men that felt the tusk of an elephant. One men said it was like a snake, while another suggested that was the neck of a giraffe. Who is to tell who is correct and not? From their own experiences, knowledge, and senses what they believe is to be true. By limiting knowledge on what we know is absolute certain is limiting one’s own perception of reality. This is how doubt is raised, and takes away from the confidence of the individuals’ own knowledge of the truth.

Martin Luther takes on the quest for truth through his thesis, which he wrote to the church. In his appendage for reformation of the Catholic Church, he questioned the authority of the Pope, and what their interpretation of the Bible. In his belief that the word of God is the truth, his stance is that followers of the religion must have faith. In believing what is true and what is not, Luther’s is bound by his idea of faith which correspond with God is the absolute truth.  His justification of God being true is based on the works of God, but more importantly the understanding of truth is by faith alone. His unshakeable foundation of what he believes to be true is routed in his on senses, ideas, and experiences derived from his faith.  Just like knowing what is true and not, Descartes share that while we cannot prove that God doesn’t exist, we can prove that he doesn’t exist. While we can see the things around us does exist, if that has indubitable truth in believing that something exists, it is impossible to prove it isn’t true.

From drawing on the works on how a person can assure that they know is true is using Descartes Method of Doubt to provide a foundation in which what we know is true, and what we know is not. Luther bases his justifications of truth on faith and knowledge, while drawing from logic and reasoning to know what is true. A person is able to draw from their own cognitive knowledge in determining what is true. While knowledge all things is limited, one cannot be limited to suggesting to know the truth of things beyond our resonance. Until proven otherwise, what we say is the truth and everything else is subjective. In the relationship between truth and knowledge, Plato and Charles Peirce had their own separate perceptions. Plato believed that truth is derived from a person’s knowledge, while Pierce believed absolute knowledge to determine absolute truth can never be obtained. Plato’s belief of knowledge and the truth is more correct in providing reasoning that knowledge is based on past experiences, where universal knowledge is a factor in determining truth.

The definition of truth and search for knowledge will continue to be an ongoing debate in which many great philosophers in past, present, and the future will offer philosophies to help guide the debate. While truth will continue to be a matter of one’s own perception, in order to assure that what people believe is the truth is to base their knowledge on their own perceptions.  Based what they know on their own absolute truth in their senses, knowledge, ideas, and beliefs that help form their own realities. Truth is relative to only that individual, as people will experience events differently from other individuals. Descartes said it best that what he knows to be true is based on his own existence. Since he knows that he exists, he knows that the reality around him exists, therefore, his own perception of what is true.

Absolute Truth. (n.d). All About Philosophy . Retrieved from http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/absolute-truth.htm

Bennett, Jonathan. (1990). Truth and Stability. Canadian Journal of Philosophy . Vo. 16. Pg. 75-108. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/jfb/trustab.pdf

Descartes, Rene. (1639). Meditations on First Philosophy . Marxists. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/descartes/1639/meditations.htm

James, William. (1909). The Meaning of Truth . Authorama. Retrieved from http://www.authorama.com/meaning-of-truth-1.html

Luther, Martin. (1520). The Freedom of a Christian . Lutheran Online. Retrieved from https://www.lutheransonline.com/lo/894/FSLO-1328308894-111894.pdf

Smith, Kurt. (2014). Descartes’ Life and Works.   The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/descartes-works

Swoyer, Chris. (2014). Relativism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/relativism

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Read our detailed notes on the Francis Bacon’s famous essay, “Of Truth”. Our notes cover Of Truth summary and analysis.

Of Truth by Francis Bacon Summary & Analysis

In this essay, Bacon has presented the objective truth in various manifestations.Similarly, Bacon shares with us the subjective truth, operative in social life. “OF TRUTH” is Bacon’s masterpiece that shows his keen observation of human beings with special regard to truth. In the beginning of the essay, Bacon rightly observes that generally people do not care for truth as Pilate, the governor of the Roman Empire, while conducting the trial of Jesus Christ, cares little for truth:

“What is truth? Said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.”

Advancing his essay, Bacon explores the reasons why the people do not like truth. First, truth is acquired through hard work and man is ever reluctant to work hard. Secondly, truth curtails man’s freedom. More than that the real reason of man’s disliking to truth is that man is attached to lies which Bacon says “a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.” Man loves falsehood because, Bacon says that truth is as if the bright light of the day and would show what men, in actual, are. They look attractive and colourful in the dim light of lies.He futher adds,

“A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.”

It is a fact that man prefers to cherish illusions, which make his life more interesting. With a profound observation of man’s psychology, Bacon states that if deprived of false pride and vanities, the human mind would contract like a deflated balloon and these human beings would become poor, sad and ill. However, poetic untruth is not gone unnoticed by Bacon’s piercing intellect. He says though poetic untruth is a wine of the Devil in priest’s eyes, yet it is not as harmful as the other lies are. Bacon being a literary artist illustrates this concept with an apt imagery that the poetic untruth is but the shadow of a lie. The enquiry of truth, knowledge of truth and belief of truth are compared with the enjoyment of love. Such a comparison lends the literary charm to this essay.Bacon further says in that the last act of creation was to create rational faculty, which helps in finding truth, is the finished product of God’s blessing as he says:

“… The last was the light of reason…is the illumination of his spirit.”

Bacon’s moral idealism is obvious when he advancing his argument in favour of truth asserts that the earth can be made paradise only with the help of truth. Man should ever stick to truth in every matter, do the act of charity and have faith in every matter, do the act of charity and have faith in God. Bacon’s strong belief in truth and Divinity is stated thus:

“Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in Providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.”

From the objective truth, Bacon passes judgment, to the subjective truth, which he calls “the truth of civil business”. It is the compelling quality of truth, Bacon observes, that the persons who do not practice truth, acknowledge it. Bacon’s idealistic moral attitude is obvious in these lines when he says: “….. that clear and round dealing is the honour of man’s nature; and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work better, but it embaseth it.”

Bacon further asserts that the liars are like a snake that goes basely upon the belly and not upon the feet. Imagery comprising comparison is apt and convincing. Moreover, Bacon refers to Montaigne who is of the view that “a lie faces God and shrinks from man”. Bacon adds that falsehood is the height of wickedness and as such will invite the Judgment of God upon all human beings on Doom’s day. Therefore, Bacon concludes his essay with didacticism with a tinge of Christian morality.

In the essay, “OF TRUTH”, there is no digression. All the arguments in the essay pertain to the single main idea, truth. Bacon’s wide learning is clearly observed when he refers to Pilate (history), Lucian (Greek literature), Creation, Montaigne (a French essayist). “OF TRUTH” is enriched with striking similes and analogies, such as he equates liars as a snake moving basely on its belly, mixture of falsehood is like an alloy of gold and silver.Similarly, truth is ‘open day light’ whereas lie is ‘candle light i.e fake dim light. Truth is ‘a pearl’ i.e worthy and precious whereas ,lie is ‘a diamond’ that reflects light illusions when placed in daylight.

The essay “OF TRUTH” is not ornamental as was the practice of the Elizabethan prose writers. Bacon is simple, natural and straightforward in his essay though Elizabethan colour is also found in “OF TRUTH” because there is a moderate use of Latinism in the essay. Economy of words is found in the essay not alone, but syntactic brevity is also obvious in this essay. We find conversational ease in this essay, which is the outstanding feature of Bacon’s style. There is a peculiar feature of Bacon i.e. aphorism. We find many short, crispy, memorable and witty sayings in this essay.

Therefore, Bacon’s essay “OF TRUTH” is rich in matter and manner. This is really a council ‘civil and moral’.

More From Francis Bacon

• Of Adversity
• Of Ambition
• Of Discourse
• Of Followers and Friends
• Of Friendship
• Of Great Place
• Of Marriage and Single Life
• Of Nobility
• Of Parents and Children
• Of Simulation and Dissimulation
• Of Superstition
• Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature

Essay on Truth

"A KNOWLEDGE OF TRUTH IS BEST FOR HUMAN WELFARE,

To Observe Enquire Read and Think in order to find Truth is the Highest Duty of Man."

It would appear to a careless observer, on glancing at the above text, that there is very little left to say upon the subject beyond what is there stated; but if we take a more minute notice of the ideas contained in it, we shall see that in such few words, thoughts lay hidden which would, if fully explained and commented on, fill volumes. We shall carefully proceed to analyse the motto—first of all asking ourselves the oft repeated question, "What is Truth?" Various have been the definitions given of its character, and many the thinkers who have striven to describe it. We do not intend to dictate to the reader of this essay what Truth actually is, for we consider that there is far more to be learnt before man can give an approximately correct definition of its real character in all its varied phases. Our intention is merely to show that if we want to find the truth of anything or everything, we must search it out for ourselves; not merely asking another what we wish to know and then resting satisfied with the answer but making ass of the information to test its real value, and discarding it if it does not harmonise with our reason after being carefully weighed in our minds without bias or headstrong aversion.

This great question has puzzled many a wise head, ​ and so varied and important are its bearings, that we hesitate not to say it will be food for philosophers of all time. It is a subject of such vast extent that what little progress we may make in its acquirement is scarcely noticeable, for it seems to keep continually beyond our grasp; and, in fact, so apparent was this to the ancient philosophers that many of them actually declared that it was not within man's power to find; that try hard as he may he never could obtain truth; and even allowing that he could do so, he would not then be certain that he had possession of it. This is going to extremes indeed, but we must remember that extreme views help to extend and develope human thought, and are equally as beneficial as the most impartial views to the proper understanding of truth. We hold the opinion that although man may not be capable of knowing all truth, still when he has the truth he is capable of appreciating its presence, or what would be the use of his senses? We know full well that nothing in nature is made without a purpose, and our perceptive faculties are no exception to this universal rule. For this reason it is man's duty to analyse carefully everything with which his ideas are brought in contact. This brings us to the first proposition of our text, "A knowledge of Truth is best for human welfare." It will be observed that the statement does not simply say that truth is best; but it goes on to say that a knowledge of truth is best. It is no use having a machine without knowing how to use it, nor an electric telegraph without knowing how to communicate through its agency—the knowledge of its method of working and general management, is what is required. And the same argument applies to truth. Truth is of little or no use to man unless he has a knowledge of its existence and the proper method of applying it. For instance, of what use would be the truths revealed to us by the telescope if we did not properly understand their significance, and the uses to which discoveries effected by their aid might be put for the benefit of humanity? We shall further illustrate our remarks by noting one or two of the benefits conferred on the race by the discoveries of Astronomy.

​ The science of astronomy has played an imporant part in the history of man's civilizatlon—both for good and evil—eventually for the former alone. In early times the study of astronomy was confined to a few, and not a remarkably sensible few either. It was then used (under the name of astrology) as a means of divining a person's future welfare—an extensive system of fortune telling. In this stage of its history it plunged man into a state of ignorance and superstition; the weakest of mankind were played upon by the more enlightened and avaricious, merely for the sake of pecuniary gain and generally as a system of earning a livelihood. Knowledge was hindered and superstition reigned. Men did not trouble about the affairs of life, beyond obtaining their daily bread, and asking their future lot of a set of men almost as ignorant and superstitious as themselves. We are told that in those times ignorance was almost universal, and that the little knowledge that existed was confined to a select few—a small portion of the aristocracy. Out of the ignorance which then existed many strange beliefs have sprung, some of which exist even to his day; for instance: in some foreign lands eclipses are viewed as an omen of evil. Amongst the Chinese an eclipse is a cause for great alarm, for they believe that the sun and moon are being devoured by dragons, and make all possible noise with drums, gongs, and brass kettles to frighten the monsters away. In many uncivilized lands similar views are held. But these beliefs, singular as they are, are not confined to the uncivilized alone; we find superstition rampant amongst ourselves. it is a common belief that the moon is the cause of lunacy; that scientific discoveries are often the work of the devil; and many more notions equally absurd. But, as we have before said, these beliefs chiefly exist amongst the ignorant, and astrology is almost a thing of the past. We have mentioned the state of society when ignorance reigned supreme. Let us now calmly watch Truth, which, like the rising sun, gently ascends from the horizon of superstition through which it has almost passed. Watching carefully, we note the gradual development of intellect in its attempts to unravel the mysteries of the stars. First a few shepherds mark the ​ relative positions of the stars on the soft sands. Presently, more interest appears to be taken in a study, so sublime; and men give more thought to it. Chaldean shepherds are superseded by the cultured. One after another discoveries are made, upsettlng false theories and giving correct and useful ones in their places. The Governments of Greece and Egypt give their aid to its development. Great men arise who attempt to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies upon the theory that the world is fixed in the centre of space, and that the stars are moving round it; but this theory, founded, as it is, on fiction, has to give way before the searching glance of a Coperuicus, who, in spite of the persecution and hatred with which he is received makes the bold assertion that the world is moving with the planets around the sun. People cannot believe it. They ask how it is, if the world is turning round, that they do not, fall off when it is turned upside down. Now, with a spirit almost unequalled, the brave Kepler comes to the front, and proves after years of toilsome and unceasing labour that the theory of Copernicus is correct. But all is not yet finished. It still waits to be accounted for how the earth manages to keep its inhabitants from falling to oblivion. Kepler, who applies a theory of attraction to certain phenomena of nature, leaves it to the master mind of Newton to apply this rule, without discrimination to every particle of matter in existence; and after mathematical demonstration of the correctness of his reasoning, proclaims it to the world. And thus truth rises. But, the reader may ask, "What good has all this done to man?" It has done this! It has taught him, in the first place, that a thing is not necessarily true because someone has said it is so. Further, that the truth cannot be arrived at without labour—that it is man's duty to try and find the truth; and when found, not to hoard it to himself as a miser does his gold, but to give it to the world for the benefit of humanity, so that his knowledge may be a foundation for other minds to build their knowledge upon. The force of our remarks are amply exemplified in the case of the question as to the fixity of the earth. What have been the consequences of these grand discoveries? ​ Why! the trading of priestcraft upon human credulity has been nipped in the bud and almost annihilated, not withstanding the vain efforts of the early Fathers, consequeutly giving man that liberty of thought which his nature so unsparingly demands.

Scientific discovery has also been greatly assisted by the disclosures of Geology. It is mainly by this science that most of the old legends connected with the history of this earth have been swept away. (In remarking upon these myths, or what we believe to be such, we know that we are treading upon dangerous ground; for many have their cherished fancies, and if anyone attempts to upset them, it wounds llke an arrow but we ask from such nothing more than an impartial and unprejudiced hearing, hoping for correction if we state anything wrongly, and the credit which we deserve if we speak the truth. Our intention is to state what we honestly believe to be the truth, and to show others the way to do the same, for

"The Truth is Truth, where'er 'tis found, On Christian or on heathen ground").

One of the old myths we shall more particularly notice, it being a common feature amongst the beliefs of various nations. We refer to the story of an unversal deluge. A short time back anyone attempting to deny the truth of this legend in a Christian community would have been stigmatised as a blasphemer and an opponent of the Word of God. This state of things is happily departing, and mankind are gradually discarding those old stories which cannot stand the test of reason—stories so ancient that they have no reliable records of who the real authors of them were, and which, by the searches made by modern theologists and scientists, are in many cases distinctly proved to be of different authorship than that ascribed to them. This legend of the universal deluge has a seat, as is now well known, amongst most of the nations of the world. We find it amongst the Chaldeans, the Jews, (the Christian and Mahometan stories being derived from the latter), and in America, and various parts of the world. Many works have been written upon the subject, both antagonistic and ​ defensive; amongst the former being the works of such eminent men as Lyell, Clodd, Bishop Colenso (of the Church of England), who, in spite of his being in such a high position, was, out of love for the truth, compelled to openly avow his total disbelief of these stories; and so ably has he defended his position that no one but the most prejudiced or ill-informed could possibly believe in the story after hearing the arguments that have been brought forward by himself and others to refute it.

Many other foolish beliefs have been uprooted by the revelations of Geology, amongst which are the ridiculous stories told in connection with the creation of the world, the origin of life upon its surface, the time which has elapsed since the creation, and the antiquity of man. In past times, when science was in its infancy, it was the common idea to believe that the world was created in a strange manner, only five or six thousand years ago, and that man suddenly appeared on its surface a few days later. The revelations of science, however, have taught man to be in this matter, as in everything else, cautious and enquiring, and have shown him conclusively that man has existed on this earth hundreds of thousands of years—the time of his first appearance being generally estimated at one million of years! It has shown, also, that the world could not have been created in one week, the time usually supposed to have elapsed, but that, like everything else in nature, its growth has been slow and orderly, and that it must have taken millions of years to perform its varied evolutions of matter. There are still many who doubt these statements; but one thing is certain—although they may be wrong in some minor points, they are built upon the strong foundations of truth; and though a few useless ornaments may crumble away, the edifice itself still remains ready to be re-adorned with facts more substantial and incontrovertible; and though men may close their ears to the voice of reason, they do themselves more harm than good, and stifle those glorious faculties for research with which nature has so plentifully endowed them.

"The proper study of mankind is man," is a ​ well-worn maxim, and one that, although quoted o'er and o'er, is always welcome to the ear. When man can properly appreciate the value of this study his progress will be far more rapid and beneficial. The more Physiology is understood the happier does man live. A great many valuable lessons can be learnt from it. He can learn how to save his fellow-creatures from agony, and often prevent a premature death; can discover the injurious effects of poisonous stimulants upon his constitution; can analyse every part of his body in order to have a better knowledge of its functions than he could by merely watching its effects; and, finally, can make laws—laws in accordance with nature's workings, which shall keep his health intact, and cause him to find that "life is real, life is earnest," and that it can only be properly enjoyed and appreciated by being assisted instead of being misunderstood. Medicine was tolerably well understood amongst the ancients, and they paid especial attention to the benefits to be derived from healthful exorcises. Later on, however, in the Middle Ages, people did not pay proper attention to their bodies; they were uncleanly and intemperate in their habits, and did not pay any attention to the ventilation of their houses, nor the sanitary conditions generally of the towns and villages in which they dwelt. And what was the result? They were visited on all sides by famine, disease, and fever; and in the fourteenth century were visited with the terrible Black Death, the horrors of which the pen of a Milton could not describe, nor the pencil of a Doré illustrate. But men are now living in an age of science and they have reason to be thankful for their good fortune. A man may now live in comparative happiness with very little chance of unknowingly infringing the laws of his nature; if he is sick, the means are in his reach to procure relief; if he suffers from fever, he knows that it is caused by bad drainage, or some other careless oversight—maybe insufficient ventilation and stifled atmosphere; if he be a drnnkard, the blame is upon himself, even thongh he be led into it by others, for he has perfect freedom of his will in such a case, and must be well aware from the experience gained by others, ​ that his sin will be visited on himself, This aptly illustrates the statement put forth in the conditions in reference to this essay, that it is man's duty to constantly exercise his intellectual faculties, and the consequent sin of not doing so can be seen accurately illustrated every day (we are sorry to say) in the streets of our city, by noticing the pernicious effects of so vile a practice on the poor inebriated fools who so frequently parade our streets in a sort of zigzag march, lowering themselves below the four-footed brutes, and making themselves despised by their fellow-creatures. If they studied the truths of Physiology and health, and spent their money on literature, or any other kind of useful knowledge, instead of buying the poisonous "nobbler," that their depraved tastes so eagerly long for, they might become model men and women and a benefit to mankind.

History, so called, gives an account of mankind in the collective sense; Biography gives an account of each man individually. Let us now turn our attention to the latter, and see what lessons of truth await us there, remembering that Biography requires the same careful study that History does. In all countries, and in all ages, we find lovers of mankind, eager to benefit their suffering brethren, and teaching such truths as their knowledge made them aware of. It is these that ​ we shall notice, for two reasons; firstly, they are more to the point for our subject; and secondly, the short space at our disposal prevents our noticing more. These saviours of mankind may be traced back to the remotest regions of antiquity. Going far before the time at which our own era begins, and, in fact, in almost prehistoric times, we take the reader back to about the year 628 B.C. This is the period generally assigned to the birth of Budda. We commence with him because he is the first, in chronological order, of the great moral leaders of mankind of whom we have any particular knowledge. Budda was born in India, of royal parents (so say the accounts). His mother died not long after his birth, and he took to spending his life in thoughtful reverie, his mind being chiefly occupied with thoughts upon life and death. Often would he stroll alone in the forests, thinking of the misery and wickedness of mankind, and wondering how he could help to better his fellow creatures. He went about preaching good morals, and spurring his hearers up to benevolent actions. He is said to have been very handsome, and of extensive wisdom; be this as it may, his teachings, written by his disciples (he never having written anything himself), show with what good thoughts he was inspired. We shall give a few examples of his utterances, though they must not be considered in any way complete; like every other good man he had his failings, but "taking him all in all" he was a worthy example for man to follow. He says, when asked by Alvaka (the devil), "of savoury things which is indeed the most savoury?" "Truth is indeed the most savoury of all savoury things." Again, he says, "Let the wise man guard his thoughts, they are difficult to perceive, very artful, and they rush wherever they list; thoughts well guarded bring happiness." "Let no man think lightly of evil." "Let us live happily then, not hating those that hate us .... free from greed among the greedy .... and though we call nothing our own." "Not to commit any sin; to do good, and to purify one's mind, that is the teaching of the Awakened" Budda lived to see his doctrines preached throughout India, and died in the eightieth year of his age. His ​ followers number at the present time upwards of four hundred million souls: a significant fact, showing how the truth can be spread by perseverance and devotion to its cause. Ascending the ladder of time we come next to Zoroaster. We cannot here say much of him. We shall merely remark that he was born about 513 years B.C., that he lived about 76 years, and that the docrines which he taught were widely spread throughout Persia. Very little is known of him, as his history (like that of Pythagoras) is so enveloped in fable and mystery. In his Zend-Avesa, or Bible, he says, Hear with your ears what is best, perceive with your mind what is pure, so that every man may choose his tenets." "Let us then be of those who further this world. . . ,. Oh! bliss. whose history is almost lost in fable, the next great thinker we come to is Confucius . He was born 550 years B.C. He is the leading light amongst the Chinese. He was very fond of learning, and showed great veneration to the aged; he also showed great respect for the laws of his country. "His life was given to teaching a few great truths, obedience to which would bring happiness to every man." Some of his sayings are very telling. "To see what is right, and not to do it, is the want of courage," and "Have no depraved thoughts," are two of his sayings. Pope says:—

"Superior and alone Confucius stood, Who taught that noble science—be good."

Socrates, born 469 B.C., was a great pioneer of truth. He taught that man should use his judgment in all things; and he was the first Greek philosopher on record who taught the value of scepticism. He talked with the youth of Greece upon all subjects, questioning them in a style not unlike the cross-questioning of the present day. "He talked with everyone, no matter how low in life they were nor how apparently ignorant; his theory being that every man knew something better than he did." He heretically taught that there was but one God, and that man was guided by an inward monitor (no doubt alluding to Conscience); but the people of ​ his day did not share that opinion, but said that he was possessed of a devil. He was therefore condemned to death, and drank the fatal cup of hemlock, the usual mode of death in those days. Thus through Ignorance of the Truth, and its offshoot, Bigotry, the world lost one of its greatest thinkers and philosophers. Plato, the disciple of Socrates, lived to preach his doctrines, and helped greatly to benefit his fellow creatures. We now come to one, of whom the reader of this essay has, no doubt, heard. We refer to Jesus Christ. This good man and true philanthropist (for a man he undoubtedly was, or his example would have been useless for man to try and imitate), whose history will be found in almost every Christian library, has done a great deal to alleviate the sufferings of mankind, and to teach them the doctrine of brotherly love; and, although respect for the truth prevents us from saying that we agree with many as to his Divine origin, we cannot but look upon him as one of those great and good minds, whose sympathies have ever been with their suffering fellow-creatures and who have always been averse to seeing the rich and powerful tramping down the weak. His teachings may be summed up in his two great moral precepts—"Do unto others as you would have that they should do unto you," and "Love one another." If men obey this there will be very little selfish feeling between them, and they will learn to respect the rights of others. In reference to our denying the Divinity of Jesus, we may mention that Buddists, Zoroastrians, Confucians, &c., might all put in a similar claim, and, of course, would do so, but we cannot grant it to them all, and if all but one be untrue, who is to say which is the true one? Coming to later times we meet with such men as Mahomet, King Alfred the Great, that earnest-hearted reformer, Martin Luther, who set the noble example of free thought to his followers—an example which few of them have imitated, and many other good souls; these we must, however pass over. In conclusion we must say, that it is by studying the lives of those that have lived before us, that man can best benefit himself and others; and that those whose names we have mentioned should all be classed in the same category, namely, saviours of mankind;— ​ when we speak of saviours, we mean those who have endeavoured to enlighten and benefit mankind. But whilst noticing their good qualities we must not overlook their faults, nor place blind faith in every story that human cunning, or human credulity, has affixed to their names.

Let Truth flash like the lightning, on, on, from shore to shore; Let all assist its progress, till time shall be no more.

We can scarcely mention a discovery of any importance whatever, that has not turned of advantage to man. Each new invention or discovery leads to another; the discoveries of electricity led to the electric telegraph; the electric telegraph led to the telephone, and evolved from this we have had the phonograph, microphone, and other great triumphs, the bare supposition of which, a few years back, would have been looked upon as the mental wanderings of a maniac, or at least, as "castles building in the air." Man has far more opportunities of aiding in the advancement of truth at the present time than he has ever had before. With the aid of the printing press and the newspapers, ideas can be exchanged between one party and another, and he who searches for the truth may find it by these means in many things; but as we have before remarked, he must not think himself infallible, but must use extreme care in drawing his conclusions; above all, he must avoid that great enemy to truth—Prejudice; let him overcome this, and he need not fear the results. Those modern outgrowths of civilization and experience, namely; Business, Commerce, Politics, and Law, are always capable of improvement and extension. We find them now, not applied to the advantages of one party and the disadvantages of another, to anything like the extent that they formerly were; for man is gradually, though surely, recognising the rights of others besides himself. And we hope, and believe, a time will come when prejudice shall be almost forgotten, and man's mind shall be free to wander through the broad paths of knowledge and enlightenment.

Reviewing what we have said, we note, that a correct knowledge of truth, as we have endeavoured to show, is absolutely necessary to man's welfare; we have shown the evil results of his not exercising his intellectual faculties, by reference to his state during the Middle Ages. We have shown that it is necessary he should observe, carefully taking note of the smallest particulars, enquiring far and wide amongst parties of every ​ opinion, either verbally, or by the use of books and papers; and that when he does get the information, he should carefully consider in his mind what value it has, and whether he cannot, if it be imperfect, supplant it by something better, or, at least, endeavour to improve it, that the truth may be more certain, and more reliable for future ages to build their knowledge upon.

If, as we believe, we have given a reasonably fair exposition of our text, our labours will not be in vain. We have honestly stated what we believe to be the truth, hoping earnestly that others may follow in our footsteps, finishing that which we may not have completed,and correcting any errors of our judgment by careful and impartal investigation, and thorough enquiry into the Truth.

E, Purton & CO., Printers, 106 Elizabeth-st., Melbourne

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.

The longest-living author of this work died in 1928, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 95 years or less . This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works .

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Truth and Politics

By Hannah Arendt

The New Yorker , February 25, 1967 P. 49

An essay on the antithesis of truth and politics. While probably no former time tolerated so many diverse opinions on religious and philosophical matters factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group's profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before... Even in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, it was more dangerous to talk about concentration and extermination camps, whose existence was no secret, than to hold and to utter "heretical" views on anti-Semitism, racism, and Communism. What seems even more distrubing is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously transformed into opinions -as through the fact of Germany's support of Hitler or of France's collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion.

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By Adam Gopnik

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

By James Carroll

By Andrew Marantz

Introduction

Background on the Course

CO300 as a University Core Course

Short Description of the Course

Course Objectives

General Overview

Alternative Approaches and Assignments

(Possible) Differences between COCC150 and CO300

What CO300 Students Are Like

And You Thought...

Beginning with Critical Reading

Opportunities for Innovation

Portfolio Grading as an Option

Teaching in the computer classroom

Finally. . .

Classroom materials

Audience awareness and rhetorical contexts

Critical thinking and reading

Focusing and narrowing topics

Mid-course, group, and supplemental evaluations

More detailed explanation of Rogerian argument and Toulmin analysis

Policy statements and syllabi

Portfolio explanations, checklists, and postscripts

Presenting evidence and organizing arguments/counter-arguments

Research and documentation

Writing assignment sheets

Assignments for portfolio 1

Assignments for portfolio 2

Assignments for portfolio 3

Workshopping and workshop sheets

On workshopping generally

Workshop sheets for portfolio 1

Workshop sheets for portfolio 2

Workshop sheets for portfolio 3

Workshop sheets for general purposes

Sample materials grouped by instructor

Distinguishing Fact, Opinion, Belief, and Prejudice

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Chapter 16: Distinguishing Between Facts and Opinions

What is the difference between fact and opinion.

Master readers must sort fact from opinion to properly understand and evaluate the information they are reading.

A fact is a specific detail that is true based on objective proof. A fact is discovered.

An opinion is an interpretation, value judgment, or belief that cannot be proved or disproved. An opinion is created. Objective proof can be physical evidence, an eyewitness account, or the result of an accepted scientific method. Most people’s points of view and beliefs are based on a blend of fact and opinion.

Separating fact from opinion requires you to think critically because opinion is often presented as fact. The following clues will help you separate fact from opinion.

Recognizing Fact and Opinion

Fact:  a specific detail that is true based on objective proof such as physical evidence, an eyewitness account, or the result of an accepted scientific method.   Example: Kanye West was born June 8, 1977 .

Opinion : an interpretation, value judgment, or belief that cannot be proved or disproved. Opinions often include biased words (beautiful, miserable, exciting, frightful).

Kanye West is superior to all other hip-hop artists.

To test whether a statement is a fact, ask these three questions: —Can the statement be proved or demonstrated to be true? —Can the statement be observed in practice or operation? —Can the statement by verified by witnesses, manuscripts, or documents?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, the statement is not a fact. Instead, it is an opinion. With that being said, many statements blend both fact and opinion.

Kanye West, the best hip-hop artist around, was born June 8, 1977.  

This statement has both a fact and opinion. If you don’t have both options as one answer choice on a test, then choose opinion.

There are various ‘levels’ of opinions:

An  informed opinion  is developed by gathering and analyzing evidence.

Example: a news reporter writing an editorial about a political candidate and why we should vote for him or her.

An  expert opinion  is developed through much training and extensive knowledge in a given field.

Example: a doctor giving a patient advice about diet and exercise

Beware! Expert and informed opinions may sound factual, but they still are OPINIONS!

Ask Questions to Identify Facts

To test whether  a statement is a fact, ask these three questions:

• Can the statement be proved or demonstrated to be true?
• Can the statement be observed in practice or operation?
• Can the statement by verified by witnesses, manuscripts, or documents?

If the answer to any of these questions is  no , the statement is  not  a fact. Instead, it is an opinion. With that being said, many statements blend both fact and opinion.

Note : Biased Words to Identify Opinions

Be aware of biased words, words that express opinions, value judgments, and interpretations. They are often loaded with emotion.

Biased words:

• unbelievable

Note Qualifiers to Identify Opinions

• Be on the lookout for words that qualify an idea.
• A qualifier may  express an absolute, unwavering opinion using words like always or never.
• It can also express an opinion in the form of a command as in must, or the desirability  of an action with a word like should.
• Qualifiers may indicate different degrees of doubt with words such as seems or might.

Words that Qualify Ideas

Think Carefully About Supposed “Facts”

Be aware of false facts, or statements presented as facts that are actually untrue. Sometimes authors mislead the reader with a false impression of the facts.  Ex: political and commercial advertisements. Sometimes an author deliberately presents false information.Be aware of opinions that sound like facts. Facts are specific details that can be researched and verified as true.  However, opinions may be introduced with phrases like in truth, the truth of the matter, or in fact.

Example:  In truth, reproductive cloning is expensive and highly inefficient.

Reading Critically: Evaluate Details as Fact or Opinion in Context

• Because the printed word seems to give authority to an idea, many of us accept what we read as fact. However, much of what is published is actually opinion.
• Master readers questions what they read.
• Reading critically is noting the use of fact and opinion in the context of a paragraph or passage, the author, and the type of source in which the passage is printed.

Evaluate the Context of the Author

Even though opinions can’t be proved true like facts can, many opinions are still sound and valuable.  To judge the accuracy of the opinion, you must consider the source; the author of the opinion.

• Authors offer two types of valid opinions: informed opinions and expert opinion.
• An author develops an informed opinion by gathering and analyzing evidence.
• An author develops an expert opinion though much training and extensive knowledge in a given field.

 Evaluate the Context of the Source

• Often people turn to factual sources to find the factual details needed to form informed opinions and expert opinions.
• A medical dictionary, an English handbook, and a world atlas are a few excellent examples of factual sources.

Reading a Textbook: The Use of Graphics, Fact, and Opinion in a Textbook

Most textbook authors are careful to present only ideas based on observation, research, and expert opinion. Textbook authors often use pictures, drawings, or graphics to make the relationship between the main idea and supporting details clear. Master readers must carefully analyze these graphics in order to discern facts from opinion as they are interpreted.

Watch this video to see more examples of facts and opinions:

CC Licensed Content, Shared Previously

Content adapted from  an open course from Broward, licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license .

Video Content

“ Distinguishing fact from opinion ” by Snap Language

Integrated Reading and Writing Level 1 Copyright © 2018 by pherringtonmoriarty and Judith Tomasson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Essay on How Will You Determine The Truth From An Opinion

Students are often asked to write an essay on How Will You Determine The Truth From An Opinion in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on How Will You Determine The Truth From An Opinion

Understanding truth and opinion.

Truth is what actually is or what has been proven. An opinion is what someone thinks or feels. To tell them apart, ask if something can be tested or proven. If it can, it’s likely a truth.

Checking Facts

To find the truth, look for evidence. This means checking if other trusted sources agree, and if there are facts to support the statement. If something is true, it doesn’t change, no matter who says it or how many times it’s said.

Listening to Experts

Experts spend years learning about a topic. If many experts agree on something after lots of study, it’s more likely to be true than just an opinion.

Being Open-Minded

Keep an open mind. Sometimes new information can change what we think is true. Always be ready to learn and update your understanding based on new evidence.

250 Words Essay on How Will You Determine The Truth From An Opinion

Truth is a fact that can be proved. Opinion is what someone believes or thinks. To tell them apart, you need to check the facts. If something is true, it does not change, no matter who says it or how they feel about it. An opinion can be different for each person.

Checking the Facts

To find out if something is true, look for evidence. Evidence is proof like studies, statistics, or historical records. For example, if you read that the Earth is round, you can find pictures from space as evidence. If someone says chocolate is the best ice cream flavor, that is an opinion because not everyone will agree.

Asking Experts

Sometimes it’s hard to know if something is true. Then, you might ask an expert. Experts have studied a lot about a certain topic. A doctor knows about health, and a scientist knows about the natural world. If you want to know if dinosaurs were real, you would ask a paleontologist because they study dinosaur bones.

It’s important to listen to different opinions and think about them. But remember, just because many people believe something, it doesn’t make it true. Each person has their own ideas and feelings, and that’s okay. But for something to be true, it has to be proven with facts that don’t change with different opinions.

In conclusion, to tell truth from opinion, look for facts and evidence, ask experts, and keep an open mind. Remember, truth is based on facts, while opinions are based on personal beliefs.

500 Words Essay on How Will You Determine The Truth From An Opinion

In our daily lives, we come across many statements. Some are facts, which are true and can be proven. Others are opinions, which are what someone thinks or feels about a topic. Knowing the difference is very important. A fact is like saying “The sky is blue,” which is true most days. An opinion is like saying “Chocolate is the best ice cream flavor,” which depends on what a person likes.

To figure out if something is true, you can check facts. For example, if someone tells you that the tallest mountain in the world is Mount Everest, you can look this up in a reliable book or website to confirm it’s true. Facts are supported by evidence. This means that there is real proof that something is true, like measurements, dates, or statistics.

Experts are people who know a lot about a particular subject. If you want to know if something is true, you can ask someone who is an expert in that area. For example, if you want to know about dinosaurs, you could ask a paleontologist because they study dinosaurs. It’s important to make sure the experts really know what they’re talking about and that they have studied or worked in that field for a long time.

Observing and Experimenting

Scientists find out what is true by observing the world and doing experiments. You can do this too. If you want to know if plants grow better with sunlight, you could try growing two plants, one in the sun and one in the dark, and see what happens. This is a simple experiment that shows you the truth with your own eyes.

Questioning and Thinking Critically

It’s good to ask questions about what you hear or read. Think about whether something makes sense. If someone says something that sounds unbelievable, like “Elephants can fly,” you should think about what you know about elephants and if it’s really possible. If it doesn’t make sense, it might not be true.

Opinions and Respect

When it comes to opinions, remember that everyone has different thoughts and feelings. It’s okay for someone to like something that you don’t. Opinions are not about being right or wrong; they’re about what people prefer or believe. It’s important to respect other people’s opinions, even if they are different from yours.

Telling the truth from an opinion can be tricky, but it’s easier when you check facts, listen to experts, observe and experiment, and think critically. Remember that while facts can be proven, opinions are personal and should be respected. By using these methods, you can become better at understanding the world around you and what is true.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on How Would A Grant Help Your Business
• Essay on Overcoming Academic Challenges
• Essay on Overcoming Adversity

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March 17, 2022

An opinion essay: Telling the truth (C1 CAE Writing)

An opinion essay: Telling the truth Many people believe that it is important to always tell the truth. In your opinion, is it ever acceptable to tell a lie? Explain your answer giving reasons and specific examples. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (Note: Is there any sentence that doesn’t sound natural?) (ESSAY ANSWER) According to so many people telling a lie is something morally wrong, in spite of being a common fact in our lives. Even scientists have proven the evolutionary need for lying for many species very close to us, such as, chimpanzees and orangutans. Obviously, everybody lies, but it doesn't suppose being a compulsive liar. To me, there are certain sorts of unregrettable lies. I mean, those in which lies behind a bad purpose. It is that goal what makes them unethical. An unfortunately typical case comes from politicians, when they take advantage of their positions for the sake of themselves, for example, taking up the public contract offer in favour of companies linked to their relatives. Although I do not have to go so further. In our daily lives, we tell lies in order to justify why we are getting late again at work, to avoid keeping in touch with someone we don't especially like,...There is an endless list of examples in this issue. On the other hand, there are situations where is acceptable, even ethic, to lie, if that means helping or avoiding other people be offended (frequently closest relatives, friends and a partner). Such is the case of having to say your cousin how beautiful is his drawing, though you can't understand what he wanted to draw. Or let us think about a friend who has give up looking for a job during an economic crisis, and you have to support him, even though you think he has not enough experience as to get a job actually. In summary, the best answer to the essay's questions is it depends on the case and how you behave, rather than the simply fact of lying.

Is there any sentence that doesn’t sound natural?

An opinion essay: Telling the truth

Many people believe that it is important to always tell the truth.

In your opinion, is it ever acceptable to tell a lie?

Explain your answer giving reasons and specific examples.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Note: Is there any sentence that doesn’t sound natural? )

(ESSAY ANSWER)

According to so many people , telling a lie is something morally wrong, in spite of being a common fact in part of our lives.

"so" feels a bit unnatural here. "According to many people" definitely still emphasises that this is a popular opinion :)

Even scientists have proven th e at there is an evolutionary need for lying for in many species very close ly related to us, such as , chimpanzees and orangutans.

Obviously, everybody lies, but i tha t doesn't suppos condon e being a compulsive liar.

To me, there are certain sorts of unregrettable lies lies which are inexcusable .

"unregrettable" means that someone has no remorse for what they have done, which doesn't quite fit here. "Inexcusable", "unpardonable", or "indefensible" are some options that could work well :)

I mean , those in lies which lies behind a are used for bad purpose s .

Rearranged the sentence for clarity and fluency :)

It is that goal w t hat makes them unethical.

An unfortunately typical case comes from politicians, when they take advantage of their positions for the sake of themselves, ir own benefit: for example, taking up the a public contract offer in favour of to support companies linked to their relatives.

Although I do not have to go so any further.

A more natural way to say this would be "There is no need to elaborate. The list goes on." :)

In our daily lives, we tell lies in order to justify why we are gett arriv ing late a gain a t work again , to avoid keeping in touch with someone we don't especially like , ... There is an endless list supply of examples in this issue.

"list" is fine as well, but I think "supply" sounds slightly better.

On the other hand, there are situations where is acceptable, even ethic al , to lie, if that means helping or avoiding offending other people be offended (frequently closest relatives, friends and a , or partner ). s) --

S s uch i a s the case of having to say tell your cousin how beautiful is his drawing , is, even though you can't understand what he wa nted s trying to draw.

Haha that's a great example :) I've joined it to the previous sentence because it doesn't stand as a sentence in its own right.

Or let us think about consider a friend who has give up looking for a job during an economic crisis, and you have to support encourage him, even though you think he has not doesn't have enough experience as to get a job actually .

Another great example

In summary, the best answer to the essay's question s is i t hat whether it is wrong to tell a lie depends on the case situation and how you behave , rather than the simply fact of lyi . It is simplistic to say that lying in itself is wro ng.

I've just expanded on this to better summarise your response :)

Great job! Interesting ideas and you linked the examples to your point very well :)

Replies ( 1 )

March 20, 2022

Thank you so much Caity for all your corrections and comments, it is very helpful.

According to so many people telling a lie is something morally wrong, in spite of it being a common fact in our lives.

"So" not needed, doesn't sound natural. Need subject for "being"

Even scientists have proven the evolutionary need for lying for many species very close to us, such as , chimpanzees and orangutans.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/such-as-comma/

Obviously, everybody lies, but i tha t doesn't suppose mean being a compulsive liar.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say; perhaps you want to use "mean" here rather than "suppose?"

To me, there are certain sorts of unregrettable lies.

"Unregrettable" is OK but uncommon. "Sorts" is also OK but a little awkward. Might say, "To me there are certain kinds of lies that one doesn't regret."

I To me an, those in which lies behind a bad purpose there are certain kinds of lies that one doesn't regret, for example those done for a bad reason .

"I mean" is more a conversational expression than a written one. "Lies behind" expresses a position in space rather than a kind of lie. "Purpose" is also fine but "reason" is more fluent.

It is th at eir goal wh at ich makes them unethical.

An unfortunately typical case comes from politicians, when they take advantage of their positions for the sake of themselves , ; for example, taking up the a public contract offer in favour of companies linked to their relatives.

Good use of comma with "for example." I'd use a semi-colon after "themselves" to make the sentence less of a "run on".

Although I do not have to go so further.

Two comments: 1) in terms of English usage, "although" is unnecessary and "so" shouldn't be part of the sentence; 2) in terms of the essay, you've only given one example of a lie done for a bad reason so including this sentence here is not logical.

In our daily lives, we tell lies in order to justify why we are getting late again at work, to avoid keeping in touch with someone we don't especially like, ... etc. There is an endless list of examples in for this issue.

"..." is not usually seen in formal writing. You don't usually see "getting" used with "late." Could also say "of this issue," but not "in this"

On the other hand, there are situations where it is acceptable, even ethic al , to lie, if that means helping others or avoiding other people be ing offended (frequently one's closest relatives, friends and a /or partner).

Such is the case of having to say to your cousin how beautiful is his drawing is , though you can't understand what he wanted to draw.

Or let us think about a friend who has give n up looking for a job during an economic crisis, and you have to support him, even though you think he has not enough experience as to to actually get a job actually .

In summary, the best answer to the essay's questions is that it depends on the case and how you behave, rather than the simpl y e fact of lying.

ARGH - prepositions and dependent clauses! You are improving, though. I think it'd be easier for you if your sentences were less complicated so you wouldn't have to make so many decisions about commas and whether or not your verb has a subject.

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Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts: Letter from the Editor

• Updated: Apr. 03, 2024, 11:22 a.m. |
• Published: Mar. 30, 2024, 8:16 a.m.

Some readers complain that we have different standards involving Donald Trump and Joe Biden. (AP Photo, File) AP

• Chris Quinn, Editor, cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer

A more-than-occasional arrival in the email these days is a question expressed two ways, one with dripping condescension and the other with courtesy:

Why don’t our opinion platforms treat Donald Trump and other politicians exactly the same way. Some phrase it differently, asking why we demean the former president’s supporters in describing his behavior as monstrous, insurrectionist and authoritarian.

I feel for those who write. They believe in Trump and want their local news source to recognize what they see in him.

The angry writers denounce me for ignoring what they call the Biden family crime syndicate and criminality far beyond that of Trump. They quote news sources of no credibility as proof the mainstream media ignores evidence that Biden, not Trump, is the criminal dictator.

The courteous writers don’t go down that road. They politely ask how we can discount the passions and beliefs of the many people who believe in Trump.

Chris Quinn's recent Letters from the Editor

• Let’s hang it up on polling. In election after election, they get it wrong: Letter from the Editor
• Most of us readily acknowledge when our slip is showing. Why can’t Ohio politicians? Letter from the Editor
• I made a presentation Wednesday while wearing two different shoes. Read on to see how common that is.

This is a tough column to write, because I don’t want to demean or insult those who write me in good faith. I’ve started it a half dozen times since November but turned to other topics each time because this needle is hard to thread. No matter how I present it, I’ll offend some thoughtful, decent people.

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.

As for those who equate Trump and Joe Biden, that’s false equivalency. Biden has done nothing remotely close to the egregious, anti-American acts of Trump. We can debate the success and mindset of our current president, as we have about most presidents in our lifetimes, but Biden was never a threat to our democracy. Trump is. He is unique among all American presidents for his efforts to keep power at any cost.

Personally, I find it hard to understand how Americans who take pride in our system of government support Trump. All those soldiers who died in World War II were fighting against the kind of regime Trump wants to create on our soil. How do they not see it?

The March 25 edition of the New Yorker magazine offers some insight. It includes a detailed review of a new book about Adolf Hitler, focused on the year 1932. It’s called “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” and is by historian Timothy W. Ryback. It explains how German leaders – including some in the media -- thought they could use Hitler as a means to get power for themselves and were willing to look past his obvious deficiencies to get where they wanted. In tolerating and using Hitler as a means to an end, they helped create the monstrous dictator responsible for millions of deaths.

How are those German leaders different from people in Congress saying the election was stolen or that Jan. 6 was not an insurrection aimed at destroying our government? They know the truth, but they deny it. They see Trump as a means to an end – power for themselves and their “team” – even if it means repeatedly telling lies.

Sadly, many believe the lies. They trust people in authority, without questioning the obvious discrepancies or relying on their own eyes. These are the people who take offense to the truths we tell about Trump. No one in our newsroom gets up in the morning wanting to make a segment of readers feel bad. No one seeks to demean anyone. We understand what a privilege it is to be welcomed into the lives of the millions of people who visit our platforms each month for news, sports and entertainment. But our duty is to the truth.

Our nation does seem to be slipping down the same slide that Germany did in the 1930s. Maybe the collapse of government in the hands of a madman is inevitable, given how the media landscape has been corrupted by partisans, as it was in 1930s Germany.

I hope not.

In our newsroom, we’ll do our part. Much as it offends some who read us, we will continue to tell the truth about Trump.

I’m at [email protected]

Thanks for reading.

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Opinion What we have learned about the Supreme Court’s right-wingers

Supreme Court observers frequently refer to its right-wing majority of six as a single bloc. However, differences among those six have become more apparent over time. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s and Clarence Thomas’s extreme judicial activism, partisan screeds and ethics controversies put them in a category unto themselves. Meanwhile, Justice Amy Coney Barrett has demonstrated surprising independence.

Watch Justice Barrett.

Not all Republican-appointed judges are the same. In Trump v. Anderson (concerning disqualification under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump), for example, Barrett, along with Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, criticized the maximalist majority opinion, which held that not only could state courts not determine disqualification but that Congress had to act before any candidate could be disqualified from federal office.

Like the so-called liberal justices, Barrett was disinclined to address “the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.” The court decided too much, she agreed. Her complaint with the so-called liberal justices was primarily tonal. (“This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency.”)

Likewise, in United States v. Texas (considering the stay on enforcement of Texas’s S.B. 4 immigration law ), Barrett, along with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, offered the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit an opening to take up the case promptly, which it did, rather than wade into a procedural fight over a stay in a case concerning Texas’s constitutionally suspect law.

As Supreme Court expert Steve Vladeck put it , “The Barrett/Kavanaugh concurrence went out of its way to nudge the Fifth Circuit — noting not only that the Fifth Circuit should be able to rule on the stay pending appeal ‘promptly,’ but that, ‘If a decision does not issue soon, the applicants may return to this Court.’” In essence, Barrett said the Supreme Court would not meddle in a circuit’s administrative business. But if the 5th Circuit actually allowed this constitutional monstrosity to proceed, she would have a different view.

And in Moore v. Harper (the independent state legislature doctrine), Barrett joined in the chief justice’s majority opinion, along with the three Democratic-appointed justices, to bat down the radical notion that state courts have no role in determining alleged violations of state election laws (provided they did “not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review”).

Beyond her opinions in high-profile cases, Barrett also sought to repair the court’s reputation damaged by right-wing partisanship. She has started appearing alongside Sotomayor publicly to insist that the court’s ideological combatants are more collegial than they might appear. Perhaps she is.

Barrett is no Sandra Day O’Connor (a true swing justice). Barrett was just as extreme on Roe v. Wade as the other right-wingers. Nevertheless, her efforts to carve an independent niche on the court should not be ignored.

On the other hand, there is no limit to what Justices Alito and Thomas will do.

In contrast to Barrett, no right-wing theory or activist invitation is too wacky for Alito and Thomas to entertain.

During oral argument on Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (considering the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone), Alito and Thomas took up the right-wing infatuation with the Comstock Act , passed in 1873. Alito, alone among the justices, seemed anxious to speed past the very real “standing” issue to ruminate about a means of banning abortion nationwide.

The Comstock law, which has not been enforced in about a century, bans sending “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion .” (Also, certainly unconstitutionally, it bans a large category of vaguely defined pornography.) Thomas and Alito seem ready and willing to deploy the law in a way it has never been applied: namely, to states where abortion is otherwise legal, thereby threatening the availability of medical abortions nationwide.

The Post reported , “Some experts and Biden officials fear Alito and Thomas are planning to write a separate opinion focused solely on the Comstock Act, arguing that the law remains viable and providing legal cover to a future administration that seeks to invoke it.” Even if Alito and Thomas do not carry the day, the Hill reported , “access to abortion pills could still very much be at risk if Alito and Thomas succeed in soliciting a Comstock-focused challenge in the future,” abortion rights defenders fear. A future Republican administration might well start trying to employ the law to throw abortion providers in jail.

Fishing for a hook to extrapolate the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling into a nationwide ban on medical abortions epitomizes these justices’ radical disregard for precedent and brazen judicial activism. Indeed, Alito and Thomas increasingly seem like stalking horses for the far-right agenda, be it on guns, abortion or voting.

The Supreme Court’s credibility

Numerous polls show the court’s approval has cratered , likely a function of its ethics scandals, partisan rhetoric and aggressive reversal of precedent. In other words, judicial imperialism and disdain for ethical rules that apply even to members of Congress are unpopular with voters.

Increasingly partisan Thomas and Alito no longer bother to conceal their contempt for ethical restrictions , congressional oversight or judicial temperament . They have repeatedly failed to disclose luxurious gifts (with no sign of remorse) and remain adamant that they will accept no outside oversight.

After a firestorm of protest over financial disclosure lapses, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. released ethical guidelines so weak that they lack an enforcement mechanism. Worse, the guidelines are so porous that they posed no barrier to Thomas sitting on cases involving attempts to overturn the 2020 election that his wife supported.

Unless the rest of the court decides to restrain Thomas and Alito, concerns about ethical lapses and misalignment with contemporary American values will deepen, heightening demands for congressional responses (e.g., mandatory ethics, term limits, court expansion). If that happens, Alito and Thomas will be largely responsible.

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Guest Essay

Earth to NASA: You Could Use Some Philosophers Up There

By Joseph O. Chapa

Dr. Chapa is a U.S. Air Force officer and the author of “Is Remote Warfare Moral?”

The window to apply to be a NASA astronaut — a window that opens only about every four years — closes this month, on April 16. Though I’ve submitted an application, I don’t expect to make the cut.

The educational requirements for the astronaut program are clear: Applicants must possess at least a master’s degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), a doctorate in medicine or a test pilot school graduate patch. Though I have a Ph.D., it’s in philosophy. (And though I’m an Air Force pilot, I’m not a test pilot.)

I hesitate to tell NASA its business. But I think its requirements are closing the astronaut program off from important insights from the humanities and social sciences.

Of course, the requirement for astronauts to have technical training makes some intuitive sense. NASA was founded in 1958 “to provide for research into problems of flight within and outside the earth’s atmosphere.” Who better to solve flight problems than scientists and engineers? What’s more, NASA’s space missions have long conducted science experiments to learn how plant and animal life behaves in the far-flung emptiness between us and the moon.

But the need for STEM in space might be waning — just as the need for humanities and the social sciences waxes. After all, the “problems of flight” that once tethered us to this planet have largely been solved, thanks in no small part to all those scientist and engineer astronauts who blazed the trail to space.

By contrast, the future of our relationship with the cosmos — a colony on the moon? Humans on Mars? Contact with intelligent alien life? — will require thoughtful inquiry from many disciplines. We will need sociologists and anthropologists to help us imagine new communities; theologians and linguists if we find we are not alone in the universe; political and legal theorists to sort out the governing principles of interstellar life.

Naturally, some scholars can study these topics while still earthbound. But so can many of today’s astronauts, who often end up working on projects unrelated to their academic training. The idea behind sending people with a wider array of academic disciplines into the cosmos is not just to give scholars a taste of outer space, but also to put them in fruitful conversation with one another.

My own discipline, philosophy, may be better suited for this kind of exploration than some might think. To be sure, much philosophy can be done from an armchair. Descartes arrived at his famous conclusion, “I think, therefore, I am,” while warming himself by the fire and, as he noted, “wearing a winter dressing gown.”

But some of the greatest philosophical breakthroughs occurred only because their authors had firsthand experience with extreme and uncomfortable conditions. We might not have the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus had he not faced the hardship of slavery in Nero’s court. We might not have Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan” (and his principle of the “consent of the governed,” so central to the American experiment), but for his flight from the English Civil War. And we might not have Hannah Arendt’s insights on the “banality of evil” had she not attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust.

Not all philosophers who want to learn what it means to be human in this vast and expanding universe need to experience living in space. But perhaps some of us should.

Throughout the history of Western philosophy, space has often served as stand-in for life’s deepest truths. Plato thought that the things of this world were mere images of true reality, and that true reality existed in the heavens beyond. What inspired admiration and awe in Immanuel Kant was not just the moral law within all of us but also the “starry heavens above.” The Platos and Kants of today are in a position to take a much closer look at those very heavens.

In general, the work of philosophy is to ask, “And suppose this proposition is right, what then?” When faced with a proposition — say, “The mind and body are separable,” or “One must always act to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number” — the philosopher takes another step and asks, “What are the implications of such a view?”

Though Earth has been our only home, it may not be our home forever. What are the implications of that proposition? What might that mean for our conception of nationhood? Of community? Of ourselves and our place in the world? This would be the work of space philosophers.

These days, unfortunately, the prestige of STEM continues to eclipse that of the social sciences and humanities. It seems unlikely that NASA will buck this trend.

That would be bad news for me, personally — but I think also for humanity at large. One day we may all echo Jodie Foster’s character in the sci-fi movie “Contact . ” When the mysteries of space-time were unfurled before her, all she could manage to say was, “They should have sent a poet.”

Joseph O. Chapa ( @JosephOChapa ) is a U.S. Air Force officer and the author of “Is Remote Warfare Moral?”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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No Labels officially drops out of the 2024 race. The truth is they were never in it.

No labels dropped plans thursday for a so-called unity ticket, which was expected to be a moderate republican running for president with an equally moderate democrat as vice president..

No Labels, with no candidate and no shot at winning the presidency, is no longer a player in that election this year.

That gust of wind you just felt? That's a huge sigh of relief from No Labels critics across the political spectrum who feared the third-party effort would inevitably pull votes from President Joe Biden, acting as a spoiler to help former President Donald Trump retake the White House.

No Labels dropped plans Thursday for a so-called unity ticket, which was expected to be a moderate Republican running for president with an equally moderate Democrat as vice president. That would have cut into the cross-party support Biden won in 2020, when Republicans and independents fed up with Trump backed the Democratic nominee.

"Americans remain more open to an independent presidential run, and hungrier for unifying national leadership than ever before," No Labels said in a statement . "But No Labels has always said we would only offer our ballot line to a ticket if we could identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House. No such candidate emerged, so the responsible course of action is for us to stand down."

That's a little off the mark. No Labels mostly pushed an in-it-to-win-it message. But the group's founder, Nancy Jacobson, was quoted in a January story in The Atlantic walking away from that message , saying the group only trying "to give people a choice."

It is true that no politician with established name recognition wanted a spot on the No Labels ticket. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who flamed out in the Republican presidential primaries in January before any votes were cast, last week took his name out of the running after he and his advisers considered it.

No Labels is out, but political spoilers still exist

Rahna Epting, executive director of the progressive group MoveOn, on Thursday responded to the news by proclaiming that " millions of Americans are relieved that No Labels finally decided to do the right thing to keep Donald Trump out of the White House."

She and other No Labels critics are also concerned about other potential spoilers, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running as an independent or Jill Stein running again on the Green Party ticket.

Epting called it time for Kennedy "to see the writing on the wall that no third-party has a path forward to winning the presidency. We must come together to defeat the biggest threat to our democracy and country: Donald Trump.”

Don't hold your breath on that one. Kennedy has what No Labels did not – name recognition inherited from an uncle who was president and a father who was assassinated while seeking that job. His campaign is built on an odd coalition of Camelot nostalgia and fearmongering about science.

Who is RFK Jr.'s running mate? RFK Jr.'s VP pick shows his presidential bid for what it is: A vanity project all about him

And while any candidate seeking the presidency brings an element of vanity to the effort, Kennedy's vainglory seems to be the most dominant factor in his quest, which clearly poses problems for Biden.

Just consider what Trump, the most obvious narcissist in the race, had to say about Kennedy last week.

"He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine," Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social. "I love that he is running!"

The No Labels secrecy hurt their stated mission

Matt Bennett, a spokesperson for Third Way,  a center-left think tank , on Thursday said his group had "waged a campaign to dissuade any serious candidate from joining" a No Labels ticket, which Third Way had predicted was "doomed, dangerous, and would divide the anti-Trump coalition."

Bennett said his group was "deeply relieved" that No Labels was out of the race but still concerned about "third-party spoilers."

The animosity for No Labels was often rooted in the group's secrecy, operating as a nonprofit with millions of dollars from donors it refused to identify.

We know, because Politico reported it last June , that one donor was Harlan Crow, a billionaire and Republican mega-donor known for footing the bill when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took private jets to lavish vacations.

Doesn't exactly give off centrist vibes, right?

Dropping out of this election is the latest No Labels failure

No Labels also took heat for making plans that would have provided a little transparency for the process and then just abandoning them. The group last year announced plans for an old-fashioned convention this month in Dallas, where we could watch the group nominate a ticket. That idea was killed in November .

Instead, No Labels convened a private virtual meeting last month for 800 "delegates" and then announced that they had voted to move forward with a unity ticket. Who were these delegates? How were they selected? No Labels refused to answer those pretty basic questions.

Is it a grift? Is No Labels an elaborate grift with no candidate? Their secrecy is telling.

No Labels then announced a 12-member "Country Over Party" committee to interview potential presidential candidates – again, all in secret – before finally pulling the plug Thursday.

With $21 million in the bank as of 2022, according to the The Daily Beast , and staffers making six-figure salaries while handing out lucrative consulting and polling contracts, some critics started to wonder if No Labels was a massive grift masquerading as a centrist political party.

Still, it was something worth trying in 2024

I think the group just lost its way after launching in 2010 with the laudable goal of getting Republicans and Democrats in Congress to talk to each other, to seek common ground, to actually legislate based on issues and policies rather than division and ideology.

It can be heady stuff, being the players in the game that so many are worrying about, an inside-the-Beltway bubble allure to being the hot topic. Maybe No Labels just finally saw the field from outside that bubble on Thursday.

The group's statement expressed concern that "the division and strife gripping the country will reach a critical point after this election, regardless of who wins" while vowing to keep its movement going.

Good luck with the reset. Be more transparent going forward. Get back to the focus on bipartisanship that motivated No Labels 14 years ago. Give critics reasons to reconsider your motives.

Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter:  @ByChrisBrennan