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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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The correspondence theory of
truth assumes that the definition of truth is in the world. However, one can object that
everything is ultimately in the mind and therefore the definition of truth is
inside us. It is pointless to look for a definition in the world. Idealists (as
opposed to materialists) believe this. This leads to a different theory of
truth: truth can no longer be defined as the correspondence to the facts of the
worlds, but has to be defined as the correspondence with the facts of the mind.
The "coherence theory of truth" defines truth as coherence with the
system of beliefs in one's mind: the statement "Snow is white" is
true if the fact asserted by this statement this is coherent with all the other
facts that are believed to be true. Truth is defined by the set
of coherent statements that make up a whole system of beliefs. Any cosmological theory, for
example, is of this kind: the truth of a statement about black holes cannot be
verified (because we cannot travel into a black hole and not even get close to
one) and therefore it only depends on whether it is coherent with the other
"truths" of Physics. Idealists believe that this
is the only definition of truth that makes sense in general: we can never be
sure of the world, therefore we can only assess whether a statement is coherent
or not with our beliefs. The US philosopher Charles
Peircepioneered the
"pragmatist" approach to meaning that roughly says: the meaning of an
idea consists in its practical effects on our daily lives. If two ideas have
the same practical effects on us, they have the same meaning. He then defined
accordingly: truth is the effect it has on us, and that effect is
"consensus". Truth is not agreement with reality, it is agreement
among humans. That agreement is reached after a process of scientific
investigation. At the end of each such process, humans reach a consensus about
what is "true" (e.g., that the Earth is not the center of the
universe, that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, that Everest is the
highest mountain on Earth). Back to the beginning of the chapter "Meaning: Journey to the Center of the Mind" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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