What Is Truth?

From correspondence to Christ

Two questions are routinely mistaken for one.

The first is philosophical: What is truth?
The second is moral: What happens when truth demands something from us?

The first asks whether our claims correspond to reality. The second asks whether we are willing to let reality govern our conduct. Most quarrels about truth are actually quarrels about the second question, dressed up as disagreements about the first.

This essay begins with the first question, within a broadly secular philosophical frame. It will move through language, perception, science, and the limits of human knowledge — and at each stage it will try to push its own claims as far as they will honestly go, rather than stopping wherever they first feel comfortable. Only later, at the point where secular method runs out of resources of its own, will it turn — deliberately, and by name — to a Christian account of what truth is, why it is knowable, why we resist it, and what it might mean not merely to know truth but to live in it.

I. The claim and the world

The simplest useful definition of truth remains this:

A claim is true when reality is as the claim says it is.