ABSTRACT
Defining ‘truth’ is not an easy task. However, normal speakers use ‘truth’ and understand it in certain contexts where it seems to make perfect sense. Consider, for example, the website caption: “Scholars for 9/11 Truth Exposing Falsehoods and Revealing Truth”,1 which contrasts ‘truth’ with the abstract concept of ‘falsehood’. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the English word ‘triewþa’ and ‘trewthe’ to 893AD. Truth appears in the context of sentiments such as love and mercy in Chaucer (1390): “On hir, which hath on me no mercy ne no rewthe that love hir best, but sleeth me for my trewthe”. The OED specifies several definitions in several contexts:
The character of being, or disposition to be, true to a person, principle, cause, etc.; faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, constancy, steadfast allegiance; Belief; a formula of belief, a creed; one’s faith or loyalty as pledged in a promise or agreement; a solemn engagement or promise, a covenant; Faith, trust, confidence; belief; a formula of belief, a creed; disposition to speak or act truly or without deceit; truthfulness, veracity, sincerity; formerly sometimes in wider sense: honesty, uprightness, righteousness,
also emerged in twentieth century philosophy to deal with the difference between the formal logic of truth and truth-conditional semantics, where truth conditions relate to the proposition expressed by the sentence rather than the sentence itself. The Correspondence Theory of Truth (Russell 1910; Wittgenstein 1922) is based on the idea that true sentences (propositions) are bearers of truth values since they reflect the state of affairs in the real world. Ramsey (1931) developed the notion of ‘redundancy’ and argued that if a sentence is true, stating that ‘it is true’ is redundant; hence, ‘truth’ is a redundant addition to true sentences.
