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88-432: A fact is a true datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance. Standard reference works are often used to check facts . Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by experiments or other means. For example, "This sentence contains words." accurately describes a linguistic fact, and "The sun is a star" accurately describes an astronomical fact. Further, " Abraham Lincoln

176-414: A Boolean algebra , in intuitionistic logic , and more generally, constructive mathematics , the truth values form a Heyting algebra . Such truth values may express various aspects of validity, including locality, temporality, or computational content. For example, one may use the open sets of a topological space as intuitionistic truth values, in which case the truth value of a formula expresses where

264-461: A Proto-Germanic *trewwj- "having good faith ", perhaps ultimately from PIE *dru- "tree", on the notion of "steadfast as an oak" (e.g., Sanskrit [[[:wikt:दारु#Sanskrit|dā́ru]]] Error: {{Lang}}: Non-latn text/Latn script subtag mismatch ( help ) "(piece of) wood"). Old Norse trú , "faith, word of honour; religious faith, belief" (archaic English troth "loyalty, honesty , good faith", compare Ásatrú ). Thus, "truth" involves both

352-557: A continuous range, typically between 0 and 1, as with fuzzy logic and other forms of infinite-valued logic . In general, the concept of representing truth using more than two values is known as many-valued logic . There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are the model theory of truth and the proof theory of truth . Historically, with the nineteenth century development of Boolean algebra , mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity"

440-659: A fact-finding commission"). Facts may be checked by reason, experiment, personal experience, or may be argued from authority. Roger Bacon wrote "If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics." In philosophy , the concept fact is considered in the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, called epistemology and ontology , which studies concepts such as existence , being , becoming , and reality . Questions of objectivity and truth are closely associated with questions of fact. A fact can be defined as something that

528-443: A matter under discussion deemed to be true or correct, such as to emphasize a point or prove a disputed issue; (e.g., "... the fact of the matter is ..."). Alternatively, fact may also indicate an allegation or stipulation of something that may or may not be a true fact , (e.g., "the author's facts are not trustworthy"). This alternate usage, although contested by some, has a long history in standard English according to

616-550: A modified form of the logician Alfred Tarski 's schema : proponents observe that to say that "'P' is true" is to assert "P". A version of this theory was defended by C. J. F. Williams (in his book What is Truth? ). Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims. They argue that utterances such as "that's true", when said in response to (e.g.) "it's raining", are " prosentences "—expressions that merely repeat

704-404: A real property of sentences or propositions. This thesis is in part a response to the common use of truth predicates (e.g., that some particular thing "...   is true") which was particularly prevalent in philosophical discourse on truth in the first half of the 20th century. From this point of view, to assert that "'2 + 2 = 4' is true" is logically equivalent to asserting that "2 + 2 = 4", and

792-429: A resurgence also among several proponents of logical positivism , notably Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel . The three most influential forms of the pragmatic theory of truth were introduced around the turn of the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce , William James , and John Dewey . Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other proponents of pragmatic theory, they hold in common that truth

880-504: A safeguard against contingencies such as res judicata that would otherwise preclude presenting a claim or defense that depends on a particular interpretation of the underlying facts and ruling of the court. Truth Truth or verity is the property of being in accord with fact or reality . In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs , propositions , and declarative sentences . Truth

968-423: A similar analysis is applicable to all speech acts, not just illocutionary ones: "To say a statement is true is not to make a statement about a statement, but rather to perform the act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement. When one says 'It's true that it's raining,' one asserts no more than 'It's raining.' The function of [the statement] 'It's true that   ...' is to agree with, accept, or endorse

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1056-525: A survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views which was carried out in November 2009 (taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students) 45% of respondents accept or lean toward correspondence theories, 21% accept or lean toward deflationary theories and 14% epistemic theories . Correspondence theories emphasize that true beliefs and true statements correspond to

1144-399: A useful accounting of the concept of "truth" is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas . Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation . Among the current strong critics of consensus theory is the philosopher Nicholas Rescher . Modern developments in the field of philosophy have resulted in the rise of a new thesis: that the term truth does not denote

1232-430: A whole system. Very often, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system. A pervasive tenet of coherence theories

1320-418: A word that actually equates to anything in reality. This theory is commonly attributed to Frank P. Ramsey , who held that the use of words like fact and truth was nothing but a roundabout way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic muddle". A variant of redundancy theory is the "disquotational" theory, which uses

1408-410: Is (in fact) the case if its antecedent is (in fact) true—for example, "If you drink this, it will make you well." Such sentences are important to modal logic , especially since the development of possible world semantics. In mathematics, a fact is a statement (called a theorem ) that can be proven by logical argument from certain axioms and definitions . The definition of a scientific fact

1496-429: Is Alfred Tarski , whose semantic theory is summarized further on. Proponents of several of the theories below have gone further to assert that there are yet other issues necessary to the analysis, such as interpersonal power struggles, community interactions, personal biases, and other factors involved in deciding what is seen as truth. For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within

1584-501: Is about the fact that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Pascal Engel's version of the correspondence theory of truth explains that what makes a sentence true is that it corresponds to a fact. This theory presupposes the existence of an objective world. The Slingshot argument claims to show that all true statements stand for the same thing, the truth value true . If this argument holds, and facts are taken to be what true statements stand for, then one arrives at

1672-400: Is "an epiphenomenal expression of the relation of material forces in a given economic arrangement". Consensus theory holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might come to be agreed upon, by some specified group. Such a group might include all human beings, or a subset thereof consisting of more than one person. Among the current advocates of consensus theory as

1760-518: Is History? argues that the inherent biases from the gathering of facts makes the objective truth of any historical perspective idealistic and impossible. Facts are, "like fish in the Ocean", of which we may only happen to catch a few, only an indication of what is below the surface. Even a dragnet cannot tell us for certain what it would be like to live below the Ocean's surface. Even if we do not discard any facts (or fish) presented, we will always miss

1848-409: 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 most prevalent substantive theories of truth listed below. Each presents perspectives that are widely shared by published scholars. Theories other than the most prevalent substantive theories are also discussed. According to

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1936-400: Is also an arbitrary constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". In propositional logic , these symbols can be manipulated according to a set of axioms and rules of inference , often given in the form of truth tables . In addition, from at least the time of Hilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century to the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the development of

2024-613: Is always absolute or if it can be relative to one's perspective. The English word truth is derived from Old English tríewþ, tréowþ, trýwþ , Middle English trewþe , cognate to Old High German triuwida , Old Norse tryggð . Like troth , it is a -th nominalisation of the adjective true (Old English tréowe ). The English word true is from Old English ( West Saxon ) (ge)tríewe, tréowe , cognate to Old Saxon (gi)trûui , Old High German (ga)triuwu ( Modern German treu "faithful"), Old Norse tryggr , Gothic triggws , all from

2112-420: Is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race , sexuality , and gender , are socially constructed. Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made. Vico's epistemological orientation unfolds in one axiom: verum ipsum factum —"truth itself is constructed". Hegel and Marx were among the other early proponents of

2200-448: Is considered to be a logical truth because of the meaning of the symbols and words in it and not because of any fact of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue. Degrees of truth in logic may be represented using two or more discrete values, as with bivalent logic (or binary logic ), three-valued logic , and other forms of finite-valued logic . Truth in logic can be represented using numbers comprising

2288-438: Is different from the definition of fact, as it implies knowledge . A scientific fact is the result of a repeatable careful observation or measurement by experimentation or other means, also called empirical evidence . These are central to building scientific theories . Various forms of observation and measurement lead to fundamental questions about the scientific method , and the scope and validity of scientific reasoning . In

2376-482: Is not as odd as it may seem. For example, when a wedding couple says "I do" at the appropriate time in a wedding, they are performing the act of taking the other to be their lawful wedded spouse. They are not describing themselves as taking the other, but actually doing so (perhaps the most thorough analysis of such "illocutionary acts" is J. L. Austin , most notably in How to Do Things With Words ). Strawson holds that

2464-731: Is not the case that p {\displaystyle p} is neither true nor false"). In intuitionistic type theory , the Curry-Howard correspondence exhibits an equivalence of propositions and types, according to which validity is equivalent to inhabitation of a type. For other notions of intuitionistic truth values, see the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation and Intuitionistic logic § Semantics . Multi-valued logics (such as fuzzy logic and relevance logic ) allow for more than two truth values, possibly containing some internal structure. For example, on

2552-481: Is often summarized by his statement that "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving." By this, James meant that truth is a quality , the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to practice (thus, "pragmatic"). Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held that inquiry , whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical, or cultural,

2640-431: Is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may "know" what it means, but any translation of the word apparently fails to accurately capture its full meaning (this is a problem with many abstract words, especially those derived in agglutinative languages ). Thus, some words add an additional parameter to the construction of an accurate truth predicate . Among the philosophers who grappled with this problem

2728-579: Is possible and urge us to suspend judgment regarding ascription of truth on many or all controversial matters. More moderate forms of skepticism claim only that nothing can be known with certainty, or that we can know little or nothing about the "big questions" in life, such as whether God exists or whether there is an afterlife. Religious skepticism is "doubt concerning basic religious principles (such as immortality, providence, and revelation)". Scientific skepticism concerns testing beliefs for reliability, by subjecting them to systematic investigation using

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2816-478: Is self-corrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine, and/or refute proposed truths. Though not widely known, a new variation of the pragmatic theory was defined and wielded successfully from the 20th century forward. Defined and named by William Ernest Hocking , this variation is known as "negative pragmatism". Essentially, what works may or may not be true, but what fails cannot be true because

2904-498: Is such a place as Paris, there is such a place as France, there are such things as capital cities, as well as that France has a government, that the government of France has the power to define its capital city, and that the French government has chosen Paris to be the capital, that there is such a thing as a place or a government , and so on. The verifiable accuracy of all of these assertions, if facts themselves, may coincide to create

2992-504: Is the case" dates from the mid-16th century. Barbara J. Shapiro wrote in her book A Culture of Fact how the concept of a fact evolved, starting within the English legal tradition of the 16th century. In 1870, Charles Sanders Peirce described in his book "The Fixation of Belief" four methods which people use to decide what they should believe: tenacity, method of authority, a priori and scientific method. The term fact also indicates

3080-409: Is the case, in other words, a state of affairs . Facts may be understood as information , which makes a true sentence true: "A fact is, traditionally, the worldly correlate of a true proposition, a state of affairs whose obtaining makes that proposition true." Facts may also be understood as those things to which a true sentence refers. The statement "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system"

3168-447: Is the idea that truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence with the whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single absolute system. Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to describe

3256-430: Is the statement by the thirteenth century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas : " Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus " ("Truth is the adequation of things and intellect "), which Aquinas attributed to the ninth century Neoplatonist Isaac Israeli . Aquinas also restated the theory as: "A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality". Correspondence theory centres heavily around

3344-533: Is used in both senses in the philosophy of science. Scholars and clinical researchers in both the social and natural sciences have written about numerous questions and theories that arise in the attempt to clarify the fundamental nature of scientific fact. Pertinent issues raised by this inquiry include: Consistent with the idea of confirmation holism , some scholars assert "fact" to be necessarily "theory-laden" to some degree. Thomas Kuhn points out that knowing what facts to measure, and how to measure them, requires

3432-430: Is used, deflationary theories can be said to hold in common that "the predicate 'true' is an expressive convenience, not the name of a property requiring deep analysis." Once we have identified the truth predicate's formal features and utility, deflationists argue, we have said all there is to be said about truth. Among the theoretical concerns of these views is to explain away those special cases where it does appear that

3520-494: Is usually held to be the opposite of false statement . The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy , art , theology , law , and science . Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion, including journalism and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than

3608-592: Is verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice. Peirce defines it: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth." This statement stresses Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as fallibilism and "reference to

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3696-495: Is wrong." Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community. Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed," because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold). Rather, perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It

3784-551: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The Oxford English Dictionary dates this use to 1729. Fact may also indicate findings derived through a process of evaluation , including review of testimony, direct observation, or otherwise; as distinguishable from matters of inference or speculation. This use is reflected in the terms "fact-find" and "fact-finder" (e.g., "set up

3872-571: The Church–Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics were generally assumed to be those statements that are provable in a formal axiomatic system. The works of Kurt Gödel , Alan Turing , and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system. Two examples of the latter can be found in Hilbert's problems . Work on Hilbert's 10th problem led in

3960-456: The equality binary relation, and negation becomes a bijection which permutes true and false. Conjunction and disjunction are dual with respect to negation, which is expressed by De Morgan's laws : Propositional variables become variables in the Boolean domain. Assigning values for propositional variables is referred to as valuation . Whereas in classical logic truth values form

4048-489: The natural world , empirical data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and society, especially when used without support from the other major theories of truth. Coherence theories distinguish the thought of rationalist philosophers, particularly of Baruch Spinoza , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , along with the British philosopher F. H. Bradley . They have found

4136-478: The naturalistic fallacy . Factuality —what has occurred—can also be contrasted with counterfactuality: what might have occurred, but did not. A counterfactual conditional or subjunctive conditional is a conditional (or "if–then") statement indicating what would be the case if events had been other than they were. For example, "If Alexander had lived, his empire would have been greater than Rome." This contrasts with an indicative conditional, which indicates what

4224-442: The scientific method , to discover empirical evidence for them. Several of the major theories of truth hold that there is a particular property the having of which makes a belief or proposition true. Pluralist theories of truth assert that there may be more than one property that makes propositions true: ethical propositions might be true by virtue of coherence. Propositions about the physical world might be true by corresponding to

4312-412: The unit interval [0,1] such structure is a total order ; this may be expressed as the existence of various degrees of truth . Not all logical systems are truth-valuational in the sense that logical connectives may be interpreted as truth functions. For example, intuitionistic logic lacks a complete set of truth values because its semantics, the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation ,

4400-557: The Latin veritas , while the Greek aletheia , Russian pravda , South Slavic istina and Sanskrit sat (related to English sooth and North Germanic sanna ) have separate etymological origins. In some modern contexts, the word "truth" is used to refer to fidelity to an original or standard. It can also be used in the context of being "true to oneself" in the sense of acting with authenticity . The question of what

4488-527: The actual state of affairs. This type of theory stresses a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a traditional model tracing its origins to ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle . This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined in principle entirely by how it relates to "things" according to whether it accurately describes those "things". A classic example of correspondence theory

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4576-523: The assertion "P" may well involve a substantial truth—it is only the redundancy involved in statements such as "that's true" (i.e., a prosentence) which is to be minimized. Attributed to philosopher P. F. Strawson is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "'Snow is white' is true" is to perform the speech act of signaling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are more actions than communicative statements

4664-441: The assumption that truth is a matter of accurately copying what is known as " objective reality " and then representing it in thoughts, words, and other symbols. Many modern theorists have stated that this ideal cannot be achieved without analysing additional factors. For example, language plays a role in that all languages have words to represent concepts that are virtually undefined in other languages. The German word Zeitgeist

4752-403: The case to be derived from a series of statements of what is the case. This is called the is–ought distinction . Those who insist there is a logical gulf between facts and values , such that it is fallacious to attempt to derive values (e.g., "it is good to give food to hungry people") from facts (e.g., "people will die if they can't eat"), include G. E. Moore , who called attempting to do so

4840-637: The concept of truth has peculiar and interesting properties. (See, e.g., Semantic paradoxes , and below.) The scope of deflationary principles is generally limited to representations that resemble sentences. They do not encompass a broader range of entities that are typically considered true or otherwise. In addition, some deflationists point out that the concept employed in "...   is true" formulations does enable us to express things that might otherwise require infinitely long sentences; for example, one cannot express confidence in Michael's accuracy by asserting

4928-429: The concept of truth itself. Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth . Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. There are many different questions about the nature of truth which are still the subject of contemporary debates. These include

5016-427: The content of other expressions. In the same way that it means the same as my dog in the statement "my dog was hungry, so I fed it", that's true is supposed to mean the same as it's raining when the former is said in reply to the latter. As noted above, proponents of these ideas do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is not a property; rather, they can be understood to say that, for instance,

5104-424: The counter-intuitive conclusion that there is only one fact: the truth . Any non-trivial true statement about reality is necessarily an abstraction composed of a complex of objects and properties or relations . Facts "possess internal structure, being complexes of objects and properties or relations". For example, the fact described by the true statement "Paris is the capital city of France" implies that there

5192-529: The elements of the subobject classifier . In particular, in a topos every formula of higher-order logic may be assigned a truth value in the subobject classifier. Even though a Heyting algebra may have many elements, this should not be understood as there being truth values that are neither true nor false, because intuitionistic logic proves ¬ ( p ≠ ⊤ ∧ p ≠ ⊥ ) {\displaystyle \neg (p\neq \top \land p\neq \bot )} ("it

5280-638: The empty list, is treated as false, and all other values are treated as true. In C , the number 0 or 0.0 is false, and all other values are treated as true. In JavaScript , the empty string ( "" ), null , undefined , NaN , +0, −0 and false are sometimes called falsy (of which the complement is truthy ) to distinguish between strictly type-checked and coerced Booleans (see also: JavaScript syntax#Type conversion ). As opposed to Python, empty containers (Arrays, Maps, Sets) are considered truthy. Languages such as PHP also use this approach. In classical logic , with its intended semantics,

5368-461: The endless sentence: This assertion can instead be succinctly expressed by saying: What Michael says is true . An early variety of deflationary theory is the redundancy theory of truth , so-called because—in examples like those above, e.g. "snow is white [is true]"—the concept of "truth" is redundant and need not have been articulated; that is, it is merely a word that is traditionally used in conversation or writing, generally for emphasis, but not

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5456-435: The essential and intrinsic properties of formal systems in logic and mathematics. Formal reasoners are content to contemplate axiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side, for example, the various alternative geometries . On the whole, coherence theories have been rejected for lacking justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially with respect to assertions about

5544-404: The fact, that Paris is the capital of France. Difficulties arise, however, in attempting to identify the constituent parts of negative, modal, disjunctive, or moral facts. Moral philosophers since David Hume have debated whether values are objective, and thus factual. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume pointed out there is no obvious way for a series of statements about what ought to be

5632-496: The formula holds, not whether it holds. In realizability truth values are sets of programs, which can be understood as computational evidence of validity of a formula. For example, the truth value of the statement "for every number there is a prime larger than it" is the set of all programs that take as input a number n {\displaystyle n} , and output a prime larger than n {\displaystyle n} . In category theory , truth values appear as

5720-424: The future", are essential to a proper conception of truth. Although Peirce uses words like concordance and correspondence to describe one aspect of the pragmatic sign relation , he is also quite explicit in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence are no more than nominal definitions, which he accords a lower status than real definitions. James' version of pragmatic theory, while complex,

5808-480: The general concept and analysis of fact reflects fundamental principles of jurisprudence , and is supported by several well-established standards. Matters of fact have various formal definitions under common law jurisdictions. These include: A party (e.g., plaintiff ) to a civil suit generally must clearly state the relevant allegations of fact that form the basis of a claim . The requisite level of precision and particularity of these allegations varies, depending on

5896-433: The late twentieth century to the construction of specific Diophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution, or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions. More fundamentally, Hilbert's first problem was on the continuum hypothesis . Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standard axioms of set theory . In

5984-416: The majority; the site of our fishing, the methods undertaken, the weather and even luck play a vital role in what we will catch. Additionally, the composition of history is inevitably made up by the compilation of many different biases of fact finding – all compounded over time. He concludes that for a historian to attempt a more objective method, one must accept that history can only aspire to a conversation of

6072-430: The means and assumptions used to measure them. Apart from the fundamental inquiry into the nature of scientific fact, there remain the practical and social considerations of how fact is investigated, established, and substantiated through the proper application of the scientific method. Scientific facts are generally believed independent of the observer: no matter who performs a scientific experiment, all observers agree on

6160-680: The more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all". The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language: Truth value In some programming languages, any expression can be evaluated in a context that expects a Boolean data type . Typically (though this varies by programming language) expressions like the number zero , the empty string , empty lists, and null are treated as false, and strings with content (like "abc"), other numbers, and objects evaluate to true. Sometimes these classes of expressions are called falsy and truthy . For example, in Lisp , nil ,

6248-470: The most basic sense, a scientific fact is an objective and verifiable observation, in contrast with a hypothesis or theory , which is intended to explain or interpret facts. Various scholars have offered significant refinements to this basic formulation. Philosophers and scientists are careful to distinguish between: 1) states of affairs in the external world and 2) assertions of fact that may be considered relevant in scientific analysis. The term

6336-459: The objects and properties they are about. Some of the pragmatic theories, such as those by Charles Peirce and William James , included aspects of correspondence, coherence and constructivist theories. Crispin Wright argued in his 1992 book Truth and Objectivity that any predicate which satisfied certain platitudes about truth qualified as a truth predicate. In some discourses, Wright argued,

6424-431: The outcome. In addition to these considerations, there are the social and institutional measures, such as peer review and accreditation, that are intended to promote factual accuracy among other interests in scientific study. A common rhetorical cliché states, " History is written by the winners ". This phrase suggests but does not examine the use of facts in the writing of history. E. H. Carr in his 1961 volume What

6512-549: The phrase "is true" is—philosophically, if not practically (see: "Michael" example, below)—completely dispensable in this and every other context. In common parlance, truth predicates are not commonly heard, and it would be interpreted as an unusual occurrence were someone to utilize a truth predicate in an everyday conversation when asserting that something is true. Newer perspectives that take this discrepancy into account, and work with sentence structures as actually employed in common discourse, can be broadly described: Whichever term

6600-401: The premise that truth is, or can be, socially constructed. Marx, like many critical theorists who followed, did not reject the existence of objective truth, but rather distinguished between true knowledge and knowledge that has been distorted through power or ideology. For Marx, scientific and true knowledge is "in accordance with the dialectical understanding of history" and ideological knowledge

6688-589: The present with the past – and that one's methods of fact gathering should be openly examined. The set of highlighted historical facts, and their interpretations, therefore changes over time, and reflect present consensuses. This section of the article emphasizes common law jurisprudence as primarily represented in Anglo-American–based legal tradition. Nevertheless, the principles described herein have analogous treatment in other legal systems such as civil law systems as well. In most common law jurisdictions,

6776-720: The quality of "faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity", and that of "agreement with fact or reality ", in Anglo-Saxon expressed by sōþ (Modern English sooth ). All Germanic languages besides English have introduced a terminological distinction between truth "fidelity" and truth "factuality". To express "factuality", North Germanic opted for nouns derived from sanna "to assert, affirm", while continental West Germanic (German and Dutch) opted for continuations of wâra "faith, trust, pact" (cognate to Slavic věra "(religious) faith", but influenced by Latin verus ). Romance languages use terms following

6864-420: The question of defining truth; whether it is even possible to give an informative definition of truth; identifying things as truth-bearers capable of being true or false; if truth and falsehood are bivalent , or if there are other truth values; identifying the criteria of truth that allow us to identify it and to distinguish it from falsehood; the role that truth plays in constituting knowledge ; and, if truth

6952-445: The role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of superassertibility. Michael Lynch , in a 2009 book Truth as One and Many , argued that we should see truth as a functional property capable of being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or coherence. Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell if a proposition is true or not. Logicians use formal languages to express

7040-405: The rules of civil procedure and jurisdiction. Parties who face uncertainties regarding facts and circumstances attendant to their side in a dispute may sometimes invoke alternative pleading. In this situation, a party may plead separate sets of facts that when considered together may be contradictory or mutually exclusive. This seemingly logically-inconsistent presentation of facts may be necessary as

7128-540: The statement that 'it's raining. ' " Philosophical skepticism is generally any doubt of one or more items of knowledge or belief which ascribe truth to their assertions and propositions. The primary target of philosophical skepticism is epistemology , but it can be applied to any domain, such as the supernatural , morality ( moral skepticism ), and religion (skepticism about the existence of God). Philosophical skepticism comes in various forms. Radical forms of skepticism deny that knowledge or rational belief

7216-549: The truth always works. Philosopher of science Richard Feynman also subscribed to it: "We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong." This approach incorporates many of the ideas from Peirce, James, and Dewey. For Peirce, the idea of "endless investigation would tend to bring about scientific belief" fits negative pragmatism in that a negative pragmatist would never stop testing. As Feynman noted, an idea or theory "could never be proved right, because tomorrow's experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought

7304-454: The truth values are true (denoted by 1 or the verum ⊤), and untrue or false (denoted by 0 or the falsum ⊥); that is, classical logic is a two-valued logic . This set of two values is also called the Boolean domain . Corresponding semantics of logical connectives are truth functions , whose values are expressed in the form of truth tables . Logical biconditional becomes

7392-493: The truths they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under some interpretation or truth within some logical system . A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement that is true in all possible worlds or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to a fact (also called a synthetic claim or a contingency ), which is only true in this world as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as "If p and q, then p"

7480-410: The use of other theories. For example, the age of fossils is based on radiometric dating , which is justified by reasoning that radioactive decay follows a Poisson process rather than a Bernoulli process . Similarly, Percy Williams Bridgman is credited with the methodological position known as operationalism , which asserts that all observations are not only influenced, but necessarily defined, by

7568-486: The view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom. Gödel thought that the ability to perceive the truth of a mathematical or logical proposition is a matter of intuition , an ability he admitted could be ultimately beyond the scope of a formal theory of logic or mathematics and perhaps best considered in the realm of human comprehension and communication. But he commented, "The more I think about language,

7656-514: Was right." Similarly, James and Dewey's ideas also ascribe truth to repeated testing which is "self-corrective" over time. Pragmatism and negative pragmatism are also closely aligned with the coherence theory of truth in that any testing should not be isolated but rather incorporate knowledge from all human endeavors and experience. The universe is a whole and integrated system, and testing should acknowledge and account for its diversity. As Feynman said, "...   if it disagrees with experiment, it

7744-588: Was the 16th President of the United States" and "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated" both accurately describe historical facts. Generally speaking, facts are independent of belief and of knowledge and opinion . Facts are different from inferences , theories , values , and objects . The word fact derives from the Latin factum . It was first used in English with the same meaning: "a thing done or performed" – a meaning now obsolete. The common usage of "something that has really occurred or

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