The Nature of Truth

Abstract

What is truth? What character is it that we can ascribe to an opinion or a statement when we call it true? This is the first question we have to ask, and before trying to answer it, it may be as well to reflect for a moment on what it means. Above all we must distinguish clearly our question, what is truth, from the quite different question, what is true? If we asked what was true, the sort of answer we should hope for would either be as complete an enumeration as possible of all true opinions [the truth about everything], i.e., an encyclopaedia, or else a test or criterion of truth, a method by which we could know a truth from a falsehood. But what we are asking for is neither of these things, but something much more modest; we do not hope to learn an infallible means of telling true statements from false ones, but simply to know what it is that this word “true” means. It is a word which we all understand, but if we try to explain it, we can easily get involved, as the history of philosophy shows, in a maze of confusion.