Pilate sayeth unto him, `What is truth?' -- John 18:38

We attribute to truth a superhuman objectivity...though we cannot say what it means. -- A. Einstein

§1.0. Introduction

Philosophy begins in wonder, and we hope it ends in truth. This is not the only aim of philosophy, and not always the most urgent, but surely one of the things the lover of wisdom pursues is truth. And yet what is it we pursue, when we pursue truth? Without some clear idea it could be a chimera, though not necessarily -- prey vaguely glimpsed through the forest still is prey. But the more we know about the creature -- its size, habits and tracks -- the better we can tell how to capture it, and the better we can tell when we have captured that kind rather than what biologists call its mimic. We need to know something about what we are looking for, when we are looking for the truth about something.

Unfortunately `truth' has many senses. Sometimes it names meditative awareness of an alleged "beyond that is within." Sometimes it names a less quiet state of inwardness or subjectivity. Or it may denote what mystics claim to see, perhaps a universal oneness, ecstatic and ineffable, in which subject and object completely fuse: "Those who know don't say, and those who say don't know," in the Taoist epigram. Sometimes `truth' is supposed to name an equally unutterable union with God. Or it may be used to name various modes of secular insight and understanding held to be incompletely expressible.

More often, truth is attributed to particular beliefs. So far from being ineffable, such truth is spoken, routinely, whenever we utter a sentence that expresses some particular true belief. It is this, the truth of beliefs, that we consider here. Later we see how the realist account sketched in §1.1 is compatible after all with notions of truth as disclosure, with the occasional priority of such truth and of understanding and metaphor, and with the irreducibility of perspectival matters such as what it is like to be the subject (§§5.3, 5.4, 7.1). We also see how religious and mystical vision might conceivably be construed on occasion as invaluable and correct, even within the frame of an astringent physicalism (§8.2). So let us suppress the urge to stereotype the present account as just another victim of discursive, analytical, rational, western modes of thought, oblivious to opposite insights. Truth can be discursive -- the truth of beliefs -- while heightened states of insight and being are not. To call the former true is not to belittle the latter. They are neither true nor untrue, but authentic or not, according to standards appropriate perhaps to them alone.

Is there a concept of truth that applies to beliefs regardless of their subject matter? Indeed there is. The concept applies whether the discourse is from science, religion or the marketplace. The concept is neutral in a further sense. It does not imply that one of the domains -- physics, say -- is unconditionally more fundamental than the others. Nor does its use beg any question in favor of physicalism or other "scientific philosophies." Their opponents can and often do use the same concept to good effect (Bishop Berkeley, for example, as we see in §1.5(iv)). Indeed the concept is neutral with respect to most philosophies. The only exceptions are those few that reject any such notion of truth, though with what merit we shall soon see.

Of course truth is not the only virtue of beliefs. On occasion we want them to be and do much more, or even much instead. Sometimes we want a belief to be comforting, and rightly. Often we want it to be inspiring, to move us to action, or to tears, and rightly. Some beliefs govern our relations with each other. Others are treasured for their simplicity and comprehensiveness. Still others are valued as generally reliable guides to practical action. These virtues of beliefs, plus many others, do not require the beliefs to be true in the strict sense. It is only when we want our beliefs to be strictly true as well that we are bound by the prerequisites spelled out in §1.5. The pursuit of truth enjoys no unconditional priority over the pursuit of other virtues of beliefs, but once we claim truth for a belief we subject ourselves to relentless imperatives.