FREE ESSAY ON WHAT IS TRUTH?

WHAT IS TRUTH?

What is Truth? 
Truth exists and is an absolute. Contrary to the mush-minded meanderings of modern
educators, truth is not relative. If my truth differs from your truth that can only be
because either one or both of us is unaware of the truth and has called something true
which is not. Truth must have not the slightest touch of maybe to it. Maybe is dishonesty
to truth and if it touches truth, then truth becomes maybe. Truth is more and beyond that
which is true. Truth is a concept in philosophy that treats the meaning of true and the
criteria by which we judge the truth or falsity in written and spoken statements. For
thousands of years, Philosophers have attempted to answer the question "What is Truth?"
Truth is the quality of being true, and anything that is true is a truth, the concept of
truth is uncommonly complex and variable. Thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and opinions are said
to be true or false. An idea makes a truth claim and is true when the character of what
is thought about upholds its claim. Forms of words or statements are also said to be true
or false. This can be explained by saying a set of words is true when it expresses a true
thought. "Truth" should be replaced by the "facts", "reality" or the "way things are."
Truth is often imagined as consisting in a speaker's honesty with respect to what he
believes. Occasionally truth is rehashed, as in the doctrines of the German philosopher
Gottlob Frege. Mohandas Gandhi spoke of "The Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that
is God" and said, " I worship God as Truth only." Jesus said, " I am the Way, and the
Truth, and the Life." 
God is truth and the essence of it. All of his ways are truth and all truth stands or
falls as it is measured against Him. If we love truth and seek after it, we cannot help
but run into the outstretched arms of God. He wants us to know the truth, which is to
know him. 
God places the truth before us and gives us complete freedom to choose how to respond to
the truth. If we turn to God and ask him to instruct us in the truth and to lead us to
salvation, we will surely receive that which we ask because our prayer will be in line
with God's desire for us. The word truth is mentioned in the bible 235 times. 
Philosopher's proposed four main theories to answer the "What is Truth?" question. They
are correspondence, pragmatic, coherence, and deflationary theories of truth. Plato
developed the earliest version of the correspondence theory. He sought to understand the
meaning of knowledge and how it is acquired. Plato wanted to distinguish between true and
false belief. His theory was based on intuitive recognition that true statements
correspond to the facts, while false statements do not. A 20th-century British
philosopher Bertrand Russell and Plato recognized this theory unsatisfactory because it
did not allow false belief. Both Russell and Plato stated that if a belief were false
because there is no fact to prove it to be true, then it would be a belief about nothing,
or not even a belief at all. Each then thought that the grammar of a sentence could offer
a way around this problem. But how, they asked, are the parts of a sentence related to
reality? One suggestion is from the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He
stated that the parts of a sentence relate to the objects they describe much like the way
the parts of a picture relate to the objects pictured. But false sentences pose a
problem. If a false sentence pictures nothing, there can be no meaning in the sentence. 
The correspondence theory of truth is really no more than an expression of how the word
"truth" is defined. Some criticisms focus on an epistemological problem that is involved
in knowing whether or not a proposition does indeed agree with the facts. We clearly do
classify propositions as true or false in everyday life, but we cannot securely do so on
the basis of their correspondence to reality. 
Charles S. Peirce who was an American philosopher in the 19th, offered another answer to
the question. Pragmatists like Peirce say that the truth of our ideas must be tested
through practice. He said that it is something that experts will agree upon when their
investigations are final. He believed that our evolving species were a way to get evener
closer to the truth. Some pragmatists questioned the usefulness of the idea of truth,
stating that in evaluating our beliefs we should pay attention to the penalty that our
beliefs have. 
William James defined the pragmatist theory of truth, as "an idea is 'true' so long as to
believe it manifestly false. It is obvious to any person that a proposition is either
true or false separately of the utility of our belief in it. Pragmatist philosophers
twisted the meanings of words, so we have to make logical sense of pragmatism. William
James, qualified his attitude by saying that a proposition's being true consists in its
being useful in the widest possible sense. 
The coherence theory also concerns the meaning of knowledge. It states that a
proposition's truth consists in its fitting into a coherent system of propositions.
Beliefs cover everything and do not contradict each other. The coherence theory is
undoubtedly the better theory even here if only because there is an elegant economy in
having a single over-arching theory of truth that encompasses all situations.
True has been linked with the Good and the Beautiful as one of man's supreme values. The
pursuit of truth is indistinguishable in practice from the pursuit of knowledge, whether
about the environment, nature, ethnical duties and ideas, or the relation to the divine.

It has been doubted whether knowledge, or known truth, is humanly attainable. The truth
is often disagreeable, because it fails to support prejudice or myth. The pursuit of
truth tends to be suppressed as a dangerously revolutionary force. 
Some philosophers reject the question "What is truth?" with the observation that
attaching the claim "it is true that" to a sentence adds no meaning. The use of the word
true is essential when making a general claim about everything, nothing, or something, as
in the statement "most of what he says is true."
Truth is a very simple and handy concept. It is correspondence of a pictorial or symbolic
representation to the thing being represented. In the case of a symbolic representation,
the correspondence may be massively complicated, but it is nonetheless similar in kind to
a simple pictorial representation.
References
"Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 98" on disk. 1993-1997
"Encyclopedia Americana", 1986 by Grolier Incorporated
"Philosophy: History and Problems. Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Fifth Edition, New York:
McGraw-Hill Inc., 1994