The metaphysics of truth

Some people find it very rude to hear somebody say that truth doesn’t exist. However, truth does not ‘exist’. Truth is not a being: speaking of truth is just one of many ways to add the predicate ‘true’ to a proposition.

Expressing truth

In ordinary language, the metaphysical status of ‘truth’ is very vague. Let us assume that John sees a brown table, and then says: “The table is brown”. A witness might then say: “John tells the truth”. Obviously, John’s words only refer to his present observation of a brown table. Better would have been for the witness to say that “John tells a truth”, or even better: “What John says, is true.” This affirmation of John’s observation refers to here and now only and not to something that exists independently of John himself.

In the expression, “What John says, is true.”, “What John says” is the sentence’s subject, “true” is its predicate.  However, “What John says” refers to something.

Now let us assume that John said: “The table is brown.”  If from this we distillate a non-John-dependent statement about reality, we might go for “It is true that the table is brown.” Obviously, in this sentence “it is true, that” adds nothing. If for the moment we overlook different shades of brown, the table is either brown or not-brown.

Truth as property and as particular existent

Properties are expressed by predicates that tell us something about a particular. In “The table is brown”, the table is a particular table, brown is one property of that table. On the classic notion, also known as Leibniz’ Law, an individual object has essential properties that make it differ from all other existing objects. No two brown tables are exactly the same, hence the term ‘particulars’,

Most philosophers believe that particulars can be known to exist because we have sensory impressions of them. These may be expressed by a series of predicates, such as brown, oval, large, in my room, etc. These predicates may be used in propositions, combined with the subject ‘table’: “The table is brown”, “The table is oval”, “The table is large”, etc. Following Bertrand Russell (1872 -1970), most philosophers say that a proposition is either true or false. True propositions may – under certain conditions of justification, see Knowledge and Truth – count as knowledge. False propositions are to be dismissed. Therefore, to each proposition, the qualification ‘It is true that’ adds nothing. “It is true that the table is brown”, “It is a fact that the table is brown”, or “Such is the case, that the table is brown” are only superfluous confirmations of “The table is brown”.

Our metaphysical starting point has to be that everything existing either is a particular that has properties or is itself a property. Then, we must decide if ‘truth’ is a unique particular: ‘truth’ as such, a set of particulars: ‘truths’ or a property: ‘true’. According to another, very classical division, truth might be either a particular (a spatiotemporally unique existent) or a universal (an existent possibly present at various places at the same time).

Truth as a particular individual

If truth is a spatiotemporally unique existent, to define truth would then mean to define its Leibnizian unique set of properties. This is not very promising since the only thinkable property of truth would be that truth is true; truth cannot be ‘red’, ‘odorless’ or ‘spongy’. We might say, however, that truth is ‘hard’, ‘surprising’ or ‘significant’. In the latter case, we are probably thinking of a particular truth in a particular case, saying a lot about a truth, but nothing about the character of truth as such.

People may attribute universal properties to truth, like “the truth is always hard”. Whatever ‘hard’ means – ‘hard to bear’, ‘inevitable’, … –, they use it as an essential property of the truth as individual existent. But obviously, the truth may also be nice, such as the fact that today is sunny. Apart from being ‘true’, ‘the truth’ has no essential properties at all.

Truth as a particular property

Quite some philosophers have said that not objects, but properties are the elementary entities of reality. A property like ‘brown’ means that there exist unique brownnesses, that somehow resemble each other. Brownness co-constitutes my table, together with lots of other properties like ‘of wood’, ‘oval’, ‘in my living room’ etc. etc. It makes no difference if these properties are existents in reality or only human perceptions, such as in the philosophy of George Berkeley (1685 – 1753). He teaches us that all particulars exist as bundles of properties. But if we apply this idea to truth, it would mean that all truths are individual existents, each with their own properties, or, simply put, that everything that is true has its own particular truth.

This brings on two problems. The first is that this kind of truth lacks a common denominator. If we try to define ‘truth’ as a class containing all individual truths, we should also be able to tell why a particular ‘truth’ classifies as a member of the class of all truths – or why not. The other problem is that the basic purpose of the ‘truth’-property is gone, which is to somehow distinguish between true and false. Aristotle taught us – with his law of the excluded middle – that truth just doesn’t come in degrees. Therefore, if seen as a particular property, truth is trivial. My table may be brown, oval, large, and true, but first, the latter cannot be directly perceived, second, it is dependent on human perception of the rest of my table’s properties. As particular property, truth is second-hand.

Truth as universal property

We might also start from truth as a universal, in which case ‘true’ might be a property of any existing particular, fact, or event, and simultaneously appear in different places. Note that universalism claims that universals are entities existing in reality. This so-called realistic universalism famously came in two classical types.

Plato thought that everything existing was the imperfect copy of perfect and universal Forms. Plato’s Forms were transcendent, existing in a reality outside the physical world. The perceivable world only imperfectly mirrored the Forms, all horses, for example, being only worse copies of the perfect form Horse, all brown horses also showing worse shades of the perfect form Brown. In this view, all truths are imperfect copies of the ideal Truth; examples of various truths are unfit to define Truth as Form since this would turn the metaphysical hierarchy upside down. Forms cannot be rationally defined, but only understood by means of noesis, intellectual understanding. The case of Truth is the same as that of comparable concepts like Justice, Beauty, Virtue, etc.

So, for astute philosophers, there is the possibility of ‘understanding’ these Forms. Later Platonists saw the Forms as expressions of ‘the One’. Early Christian philosophers integrated the One into Christianity, where it became the philosophical nature of God as the source of everything existing, of course including truth. When Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” – John 14:6 –, this was probably supposed to be read as Jesus offering a pathway to understand God. But once the Holy Trinity rose above discussion, the second part of the quotation lost its original meaning; the whole could just as well be simplified to Jesus, God, and truth being modes of one single superior being. This is the root of the belief of many that truth exists on its own account and that it can be ‘understood’ as opposed to rationally analyzed.

However, Plato’s student Aristotle held that universals were immanent in the perceivable world. Universal properties show themselves in individual existents. This enables truth to pop up in just about any object or concept, and in a way uncompromised by Plato’s imperfect mirroring. Sounds promising, if it weren’t for another of Aristotle’s findings, the law of the excluded middle, again. According to this law, statements about particular things, facts or events are either true or false, there is no middle way. As I wrote above, this makes ‘true’ a metaphysically trivial property for objects as well as for facts and occurrences.

Also read: The epistemology of truth

True as predicate

We have only two proper ways to think of truth. Either truth is equal to ‘being’, that is: the whole of reality itself, or truth is the expression of the predicate ‘true’. Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) writes that ‘truth’ is a mistranslation of the greek αληθεια,, (aletheia) which means ‘disclosure’, the getting to see of phenomena, the discovery that something exists. The other possibility is to use the ‘true’ predicate to state the existence of proof.  Such proof requires propositional connections between objects, facts, or occurrences, such as in “The table is brown” or “The table is in my living room”. So ‘true’ is not a predicate for a single something: it is a belief in the existence of a relation, expressed in a proposition.

The same goes for synonymic expressions like ‘is real’, ‘is the case’, ‘is absolutely certain’, and ‘is beyond the shadow of doubt’, all serving to express the certainty of facts relating and nothing more. Note that these predicates leave more than enough room for degrees of truth, ranging from ‘largely true’ or ‘probably true’ down to ‘almost certainly bullshit’.

After covering this metaphysical ground, we are ready to investigate truth as a relation between facts and the ability of humans to know them: The epistemology of truth. We shall see, however, that we left unanswered an important metaphysical question: whether relations between facts exist in reality or are constructs of the human mind.