A Brief History of Truth
Thoughts from some eminent Western thinkers
“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; and therefore also he who says that a thing is or is not will say either what is true or what is false.”
— Aristotle, Metaphysics (~335 BC) 4.1011b
“A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality.”
— Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate (1259), q1, “Truth”
“The world is all that is the case.”
— Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), §1
“All epistemology begins in fear.”
— Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (2007)
“Although the Logos is shared, most men live as though their thinking were a private possession.”
— Heraclitus (~500 BC), fragment 3
“We still do not know where the desire for truth originates; for until now we have heard only of the obligation which society, in order to exist, imposes: to be truthful, i.e., to use the customary metaphors, or in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to an established convention, to lie collectively in a style that is mandatory for everyone.”
— Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873)
“Grant an idea or belief to be true, […] what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? What experiences may be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? How will the truth be realized?”
— William James, The Meaning of Truth (1909)
“All truths are paradoxes. The direct deductions of reason are fallible; the absurd conclusions of experience are infallible.”
— Tolstoy, Diaries, 24 August 1854
“Consequently, immediate evidence is everywhere far preferable to demonstrated truth, and the latter is to be accepted only when the former is too remote, and not when it is just as near as, or even nearer than, the latter.”
— Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol 1 (1818), §14
“The singular family resemblance between all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is easy enough to explain. Where there exists a language affinity it is quite impossible, thanks to the common philosophy of grammar — I mean thanks to unconscious domination and directing by similar grammatical functions — to avoid everything being prepared in advance for a similar evolution and succession of philosophical systems: just as the road seems to be barred to certain other possibilities of world interpretation.”
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), part 1, §20
“In China, truth and falsity in the Greek sense have rarely been important considerations in a philosopher’s acceptance of a given belief or proposition; these are Western concerns.”
— Donald Munro, The Concept of Man in Early Chinese Thought (1969)
“Munro’s assessment is correct and Graham’s can be freed from the single character limitation and generalized to pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophy. Chinese philosophy has no concept of truth.”
— Chad Hansen, “Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, and ‘Truth’” (1985)
“It is now time to notice that until the last very few pages the term ‘truth’ had entered this essay only in a quotation from Francis Bacon. […] The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything. Inevitably that lacuna will have disturbed many readers. We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance.
But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science’s existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community’s state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?”
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), chapter XIII, “Progress Through Revolutions”
As always I’d love to hear from you.
Bryan