Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy.
It is also one of the largest. topics of
discussion for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in
philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or
implying theses about truth.
It would be impossible to survey all there is to
say about truth in any coherent way. Instead, this essay will concentrate on
the main themes in the study of truth in the contemporary philosophical
literature. It will attempt to survey the key problems and theories of current interest
and show how they relate to one-another. Several other entries investigate many
of these topics in greater depth. Generally, discussion of the principal
arguments is left to them. The goal of this essay is only to provide an
overview of the current Theories. Many of the papers mentioned in this essay
can be found in the anthologies edited by Blackburn and Simmons (1999), Lynch
(2001b), and Lynch et al. (2021). There are several book-length surveys of the
topics discussed here, including Beall & Middleton 2024, Blackburn 2018,
Burgess & Burgess 2011, Kirkham 1992, and Künne 2003. Also, several of the
topics discussed here, and many further ones, are surveyed at more length in
papers in Glanzberg 2018.
The problem of truth is in a way easy to define if
the truth refers to any objective truth, because it can be observed and
described by our natural senses, but this simple statement makes a great deal
of controversy, when it makes a definition of anything subject when there is a
metaphysical problem of truth at all, where we have the question of what kind
of theory might address it, are we able to use some or all the traditional
theories of truth. We will now investigate a number of distinct ways of
answering these questions.