Truth is a commodity and can have a variety of meanings, from the state of being the case, being in accord with a particular fact or reality, being in accord with the body of real things, events, actuality, or fidelity to an original or to a standard. In archaic usage it could be fidelity, constancy or sincerity in action, character, and utterance. The term has no single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories and views of truth continue to be debated. There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth; what things are truthbearers capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that revealed and acquired knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective, relative, objective, or absolute. This article introduces the various perspectives and claims, both today and throughout history.

The major theories of truth

The question of what is a proper basis for deciding how words, symbols, ideas and beliefs may properly be considered true, whether by a single person or an entire society, is dealt with by the five major substantive theories introduced below. Each theory presents perspectives that are widely shared by published scholars. There also have more recently arisen "deflationary" or "minimalist" theories of truth based on the idea that the application of a term like true to a statement does not assert anything significant about it, for instance, anything about its nature, but that the label truth is a tool of discourse used to express agreement, to emphasize claims, or to form certain types of generalizations.

Quotations about truth.

Contents

• 1 Sourced
  • 1.1 Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 External links

Sourced

Arranged alphabetically by author

• The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
  • Douglas Adams in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul; spoken by the character Dirk Gently

• The national argument right now is, one, who's got the truth and, two, who's got the facts… Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we're not going to make much progress.
  • Michael Adams, lexicology professor at North Carolina State University, discussing the neologism "truthiness", defined as "the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts" in "Linguists Vote 'Truthiness' Word of 2005", AP via Yahoo! News, (6 January 2006)]

• To say of what is, that it is, or of what is not, that it is not, is true.
  • Aristotle in Metaphysics (Book 4)

• Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true.
  • Richard Bach, in There's No Such Place As Far Away (1978)

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Sun Dec 6 10:49:03 2009