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AS Philosophy question: "Assess the concept of truth"

Hi, I am doing AS philosophy at the moment and have asked to do the essay question titled, "Assess the concept of truth". It is worth 24 marks and is going to be marked using the AS level marking scheme.
I am a bit stuck on the question, but this is what I have written so far:

I am going to assess the concept of truth by firstly finding out what concept and truth are and what they mean.
A concept is a more modern term for the word "idea", which is when people have a belief about a meaning after they have thought carefully about it.
Truth is more difficult to find the meaning of, therefore, we have to look at the different concepts people have had about truth and see if they reach a similar conclusion.
Many philosopher's use truth when debating subjects such as belief, certiancy and knowledge. Belief does have some importance in truth, as you have to believe something is true or else there wouldn't be any truth in the matter.
There are many different theories of truth. The most attractive is the Correspondance Theory. This theory suggests that proposistions are true if and only they correspond with fact. However, don't facts have to contain truths as well? If so, then that would meen that truths have to correspond with truths which would cancel each other out.

That is all I have done so far, I was then going to go on to talk about the Coherance theory and other theories to do with truth and conclude with what they all meen.

Is this ok?

Reply 1

Zarathustra

What do you mean when you say

This theory suggests that proposistions are true if and only they correspond with fact. However, don't facts have to contain truths as well? If so, then that would meen that truths have to correspond with truths which would cancel each other out.

?
I'm not 100% sure on this, but i always interpreted correspondence theory as requiring simply that a 'true' statement depict accurately the state of affairs to which it refers (ie. the statement 'the cat is on the mat' is true iff the cat is in fact on the mat). It is difficult to see how there could be any inherent truth in the state of affairs, or the 'fact', as a cat is either on a mat or it isn't, and the concept of truth only seems to become relevant when you attempt to formulate propositions about the cat, as there is then the possibility of falsity (ie. misrepresenting or lying about the actions or whereabouts of the cat - I am beginning to wish i'd chosen a different example now!).
However, your point does raise an interesting issue about the concept of truth - perhaps once you have discussed truth as a relation between statements and the world (correspondence) or as a relation between all accepted statements (coherence), you could flag up the alternative of truth being an innate (possibly the wrong word) or inherent property of certain things, and not a 'relation' at all.

Other than that your plan sounds good - maybe bring into the end the 'redundancy' theory of truth as a way of 'assessing' the concept (perhaps it's simply a meaningless concept, rather than a relation or basic property of things...). Also, postmodernism (if well used) is always good for assessing absolutist concepts such as truth :biggrin:

AS Philosophy question: "Assess the concept of truth"

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