Truth and Falsehood

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD. - Just as the Greek ἀληθής in the literal sense of the word means the "unhidden" or "he who conceals nothing," so the Latin verus indicates the genuine as opposed to what is a deceptive imitation. Thus too the man who does not feign, the witness who does not deceive, is called verus. In every case there enters into truth the thought of a conformity between what really is and its manifestation externally or, respectively, the judgment of the knowing subject that follows from it. Unlike the concepts of being and of reality, which indicate no relation of the entity, "truth" affirms a relation between the real and the intellect or knowledge.

I. HISTORICAL SURVEY

In Western philosophy the conception of truth as conformity between thought and being undoubtedly predominates. In ancient philosophy it may be said that only the Sophists and the Sceptics contradict this conception. According to Protagoras, in accordance with his principle that "man (the individual) is the measure of all things," truth differs according to the diversity of knowing subjects; "true" is the judgment that corresponds to the different appearances of a thing, which differ for each individual subject. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle opposed this relativism; but in Platonic and in Aristotelian philosophy truth was emphasized somewhat differently. For Plato truth is pre-eminently a quality of the object of knowledge: the clear, the distinct, the pure, the stable are the true; therefore the eternal ideas are the true reality; on the truth of objects depends the truth of knowledge. For Aristotle, on the other hand, "the false and the true are not found in things... but in the mind" (Metaph., 6, 4). True, that is, is that thought which "says that what is, is, and that what is not, is not"; false, on the other hand, is the thought which "says that what is not, is, or that what is, is not" (ibid., 4, 7). This, however, occurs only in judgment, not in the "thought of the indivisible quiddity" or simple concept; thus Aristotle can even define judgment as thought "in which there is falsity and truth" (De anima, 3, 6). The Stoics too, and even Epicurus, uphold the concept of truth as conformity between thought and being and devote themselves to the search for a "criterion" that guarantees truth thus understood. The Stoa finds this criterion in the "catalectic representation," that is, in a representation that brings the real object so "within reach" that a denial would be absurd; for Epicurus sensory apprehension is without further ado the universal criterion of truth. According to Neoplatonism, on the other hand, the senses give only indistinct traces of truth. The only true reality is the supersensible, transcendent world, to which one ascends only through thought and intellectual intuition.

Without banishing, as the Neoplatonists did, the material element, the Christian Revelation of the New Testament, especially St. John, indicates specifically as "true" the sphere of the otherworldly, the divine. Thus Christ is the "true light" (Io., 1, 9) or simply "the truth" (ibid., 14, 6); the Holy Spirit is called the "Spirit of truth" (ibid., 14, 17). But Christ's revealing word too is "the truth"; thus "the truth" in St. John and St. Paul is simply synonymous with the Gospel, with the fullness of Christian Revelation. "Truth" in this sense does not mean only, as certain Protestant theologians are inclined to believe under the influence of existentialist philosophy, a personal encounter between God and man, in which God presents himself to man demanding obedience, but also truth of knowledge, that is, a teaching about God and his ways of salvation that the intellect is invited to accept with faith. Certainly it is not enough to recognize this truth intellectually; it must become truth of action and of life: man must "do the truth" (ibid., 3, 21).

The first speculative synthesis of Christian doctrine on truth was accomplished by St. Augustine with the instruments of Neoplatonic thought. In mathematics, metaphysics and ethics one perceives invariable truths, which as such cannot derive from the sensory experience of bodies that are always variable. These cognitions are certainly due to God, who is "truth" itself and the light that enlightens every man. The ideas in the divine intellect are the true prototypes, whose perfection the things of this world can imitate without ever attaining it; therefore the truth of things, especially that of bodies, is always mingled with illusion. Only the eternal divine Word, generated from the knowledge of the Father, is the perfect image, "in nothing unlike," of the Father; therefore it too is called, as a distinct divine person, in a particular way "the truth" (De vera relig., ch. 55, n. 113; De trin., XV, ch. 14).

In the first centuries of scholastic philosophy down to St. Bonaventure the Augustinian conception dominates speculation on truth. Alongside it, St. Anselm's definition of truth ("rectitudo sola mente perceptibile") acquired a certain importance; even Albert the Great in his Summa Theologica accepts this definition which, by calling truth "rectitudo," means to indicate that truth is conformity with a norm, with a duty. But in the synthesis of St. Thomas the sober Aristotelian thought also makes itself felt, without however abandoning the Platonic-Augustinian heritage. Truth is found first of all for us as truth of knowledge — later called logical truth — in the judgment of the intellect. St. Thomas defines it by adding to the definition "conformity of thought and being" (adäquatio intellectus et rei), attributed to Isaac Israeli (845-940), the Aristotelian paraphrase: "insofar as the intellect says of what really is that it is" (Summa c. gent., 1, 59). The truth of human knowledge has no being except in human thought and is therefore not eternal (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 16 a. 7); its object is not an "eternal truth," but the being of things (ibid., q. 16 a. 1 ad 3). Certainly things too, for their part, are "true"; this truth of being — later called ontological truth — means that reality is not a dark, "irrational" force, but that it is, as the actualization of the divine ideas, formed by spirit and therefore also intelligible to spiritual knowledge. In God, finally, who is truth itself, the truth of knowledge and that of being interpenetrate, since in him being and intellectual knowledge are identified. Therefore "every entity is true," although the truth of each thing is according to the degree of the fullness of its being; this is expressed in the proposition "ens et verum convertuntur," that is, "every entity is true," and conversely "every true is an entity." Truth therefore belongs, together with unity and goodness, to the transcendental properties of being, that is, those that belong to every entity.

Contrary to Albert the Great and St. Thomas, Latin Averroism also upholds doctrines of Aristotle and his Arab commentators that contradict the Christian faith. To avoid a clash with ecclesiastical authority some sought to contest this contradiction with the doctrine of the "double truth": the philosophical truth of a doctrine does not exclude that the contrary is true in a theological sense. Still in the 16th century Pietro Pomponazzi (d. 1524) defended this conception. Against him the Fifth Lateran Council defined: "Since one truth cannot contradict another, it declares fully false every assertion that contradicts the truth of the enlightened faith" (Denz-U, n. 738).

Modern philosophers, from Descartes to Wolff, generally adhered to the conception of truth as conformity between thought and being. The doctrine of the truth of being was nevertheless increasingly emptied of its metaphysical content, so that Kant could regard the proposition "quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum" as a mere tautology, preserved only honoris causa (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 113). The truth of knowledge in English empiricism was increasingly restricted to propositions of experience and to mere tautologies, while rationalism held to an intuition of "eternal truths," independent of all experience and based on "innate ideas."

The rationalistic separation of the knowledge of essences from reality, which is originally given only in experience, was consequently bound to compromise the real value of a priori essential structures and therefore the realistic concept of truth itself. Kant's criticism in fact overturns the concept of truth, upheld in a purely dogmatic manner in rationalism. For it, truth is no longer conformity of thought with real being, but with the laws of reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 350); such, then, is the concept of truth of critical idealism.

If in absolute idealism thought and being, and also the laws of thought and the laws of being, are identified, then necessarily the concept of truth must also change. For Hegel truth means that the object is congruent with the concept from which it proceeds (cf. Naturphilosophie, Einleitung A; Jubil.-Ausg. edited by H. Glockner, IX, Stuttgart 1927, p. 48). At the same time Hegel affirms: "The true is the whole" (Phänomenologie, Vorrede, II, 24). This means: if partial truths are posited in isolation and as absolute, as if they were the whole, they become false; they are true only when they are elevated (aufgehoben) as "moments" into the totality designated by the idea. If this conception is founded primarily on Hegel's dialectical idealism, it nevertheless points to a real danger, namely that, by emphasizing in a one-sided manner partial truths, one falsifies truth itself. In our century constructive idealism was renewed in modified form by B. Croce and G. Gentile. Since, according to Gentile, every reality is posited in the act of thought, it no longer depends on a being transcendent to thought, but is a free creation of thought itself.

The gigantic attempt of idealism to derive every reality and truth from a single principle could not succeed. In four respects the idealistic systems had to prove to be unjustified simplifications of reality: the undeniable transcendence of truth is suppressed; the proper significance of matter is not recognized; in the face of the necessary and universal orders of essence, the purely real, the concrete, the singular and variable element of history suffers, despite the concern for a "concrete concept"; finally idealism betrays a certain intellectualism, which seems to lack a sense for "life," for the emotional side in man and for his personal free decision. There is therefore no cause for wonder if in the 19th and 20th centuries currents opposed to idealism managed to gain the upper hand, in their turn exaggerating those aspects of reality and of truth that idealism had neglected. Thus logical transcendentalism, by admitting certain "truths in themselves," exaggerates the transcendence of truth and at the same time neglects its ontological value, conferring on propositions, especially those of the essential order, an "ideal in-itself" outside not only of knowledge but also of real things. Thus B. Bolzano speaks of "propositions in themselves"; E. Husserl, in the Logische Untersuchungen (3rd ed., I, Halle 1924, p. 228), of "truths in themselves"; the neo-Kantian H. Rickert of the "transcendent sense," which, as truth subsisting in itself, is the proper object of knowledge. These strange constructions are arrived at because not only the object of judgment is posited, but at the same time also its logical structure (subject-copula-predicate) as transcendent with respect to thought.

More crude is the reaction of materialism (v.) against idealism. While idealism denied the subsistence of matter, reducing it to a content of spirit, materialism in its turn denies the subsistence of spirit, reducing spiritual knowledge to a simple function of matter. For the rest it upholds the realistic conception of the truth of knowledge, at least as regards knowledge of the material world; metaphysical, moral, juridical and religious doctrines have instead, according to dialectical materialism, only the relative value of "ideologies," which change according to the mode of production and the respective social order; this relativism, it is well understood, was not extended to communism itself, as a conception of the world and of life in the "classless society." Materialism is not able to explain the possibility of logical truth, because it denies every ontological truth, as the formation of reality by means of ideas. From this point of view N. Hartmann's doctrine of the "transintelligible," beyond every "knowability" (Grundzüge einer Metaph. der Erkenntnis, 3rd ed., Berlin 1941, p. 232) and completely extraneous to spirit, has a manifest affinity with materialism.

Materialism does violence, despite its appeal to the sciences, to concrete reality no less than idealism. In its dogmatic realism it unwittingly goes beyond the problems posed by the progress of the sciences, especially of psychology and of the historical sciences. Psychology observes that the knowledge of truth is conditioned by the psychic particularity of man, especially by the diversity of intellectual types; historical science turns its attention to its historical limitation. The one-sided consideration of the concrete conditions of knowledge led to a widely diffused relativism, according to which truth is different according to the diversity of times, races, psychological types, etc. ("relative truth"). The same development was favored by the excessive emphasis (given to the vital value of truth) provoked by the aversion to life of an abstract science or of a misguided speculation. Thus one arrived at pragmatism, for which truth is nothing other than the utility or "fruitfulness" of a persuasion. This conception was uttered in the most cynical manner by Fr. Nietzsche: of truth (no. 6), since it often binds truth so closely to the individual existing man and to his free decision that the objectivity of truth is endangered by it.

"Truth is subjectivity," said S. Kierkegaard already (Philosophische Brocken, in Werke, VI, Jena 1910, p. 605). With this daring word he certainly did not intend to deny the objective value of truth; but the personal appropriation of truth, the interiority and passion in grasping it, are sometimes so exaggerated by existentialism that by comparison objective and universal truth seems outright falsehood.

II. NOTES ON SOME SYSTEMATIC PROBLEMS

The many ways of conceiving "truth" in modern philosophy, which have necessarily been indicated in a somewhat simplified manner, show what tasks are today entrusted to Christian philosophy regarding the problem of truth. The divergent conceptions of modern philosophers, which often contradict one another, certainly do not succeed in overturning the fundamental theses of perennial philosophy. They do, however, accentuate problems that today require a more careful examination than in the past. Starting from the irremovable fact that truth, as Aristotle and St. Thomas precisely repeat, is given only in our specifically human knowledge, one asks: how can its ontological value be reconciled with the cognitive conditions in the subject itself, antecedent (a priori) to all experience; its universal value and its absoluteness with the variable psychic particularity of the individual; its independence from time with the historicity of man; and finally, its rigorous objectivity with its liveliness and its individual importance and with its special spur for each individual?

J. Maréchal endeavored, with his acute examination of Kant's criticism and of constructive idealism, to show that the a priori cognitive conditions of the human intellect need not at all falsify real being, that on the contrary they are not properly adapted to constitute it as the object of our knowledge, such as it is in itself. This interpretation will perhaps not satisfy in every respect; it will be objected especially that it has placed too little emphasis on the receptive moment of "seeing," proper to our knowledge, even intellectual knowledge, in order to favor the moment of tendency and of active "positing"; nevertheless he has shown that the a-priori of the intellect must not necessarily be understood in an idealistic sense, but that on the contrary it is indispensable in order that real being may encounter the intellect. As regards then the individual psychic particularity and the further concrete conditions of knowledge, variable from one man to another, their strong influence on the real thought of individual persons is certainly incontestable. Not every truth is therefore equally accessible to each person; indeed, certain errors, under such influences, are for this or that person more or less imminent. From this it does not follow, however, that they must be designated as "relative truth" subordinate to the individual. In the face of the variable psychic influences of habits, feelings, tendencies, etc., the spirit indeed remains free to follow its law, that is, to concentrate on the evidence of reality and let itself be determined by it. This follows already from the mere fact that in reflection it can give an account of the various influences that press upon it. Insofar as it can judge concerning influences inferior to its sphere, the spirit does not succumb to them, but rises above them. Thus, to speak in somewhat bold terms, the mere fact that a relativistic theory of knowledge has been able to be conceived is already a proof that it is false.

The same holds also for the historical conditionedness of the knowledge of truth. Logical truth has no being except in the exercise of knowledge, and this in men is always also conditioned by the historical situation. In this sense only in the Divine Spirit is there an "eternal truth," and the fiction of "truth in itself" must be rejected. This does not mean that the value of truth is also subject to historical change. Every genuine truth has universal value, for all peoples and all times, however variable its object may be. Whoever at any time judges of the same object, having at a given time a given quality, must also affirm or respectively deny the same, if he does not wish to judge falsely. In this sense the value of truth is beyond time. This holds all the more if the object of the judgment is absolutely necessary and immutable; in this case the proposition holds even without fixing a time: two times two does not make four only now, but simply makes four. From this it does not follow that this truth has an eternal being, outside the Divine Spirit. And it does not follow either that every truth is equally accessible to men of every time. In this sense one may rightly speak of a historicity of truth.

The historicity of truth emerges even more if one considers that truth must not only be grasped in some way by thought, but that, in correspondence with its vital importance, the whole man must inwardly appropriate it to himself. This personal appropriation of truth is the justified concern of existentialist philosophy. It is not enough to hand down old truths in formulas; they must always be acquired on one's own account. If therefore different men learn the same truth, this can indeed be "embraced in different breadth, depth and liveliness. Even more varied according to force and impetus, richness and depth, is the response of feeling to the known truth. And it is precisely the volitional abandonment to truth, and its realization in life, that marks different degrees of intensity" (Joh. B. Lotz). However, in order that the subjective possession may be truly fruitful for the individual and for society, the object must constitute a genuine truth. Between "objective" and "subjective" truth there is therefore no real opposition, provided both aspects are rightly understood.

Giuseppe de Vries

FALSEHOOD

In common usage, the adjective false is often used as a synonym for lying, and therefore by falsity is meant the opposite of sincerity or truthfulness; the verb to falsify, on the other hand, is used almost exclusively in the sense of to counterfeit, thus giving rise to the legal term "false" (v.). Alongside these acceptations there is in common language a speculative sense of falsity more directly connected with philosophy, whereby, for example, one speaks of wanting to distinguish true coin from false, and of wanting to give an account of the truth or falsity of an assertion or of an entire theory. This manner of speaking is founded on the common persuasion that every judgment is either true or false, insofar as it either conforms to its object or is at variance with it. In this sense, by truth one usually means the conformity of thought with reality, and by falsity its contrary opposite, that is, the lack of conformity.

Even in philosophical reflection the theory of falsity unfolds in dependence on the theory of truth, following the same vicissitudes both historically and speculatively. Historically, two opposing currents of thought can be distinguished: one that issues in the common sense of truth and falsity systematically interpreted, the other that gradually evolves toward a quite different conception of truth and falsity. The first conception, objectivistic, distinguishes the mode of knowing from what is known. As regards the mode of knowing, truth depends on the conditions of the knower; as regards the object, on the other hand, the truth of the knower depends on reality: insofar as it is not possible to speak of the truth or falsity of a judgment except in relation to an objective term, presupposed as the point of comparison for evaluating the judgment and for distinguishing, between two contradictory assertions, the true one from the false.

The second conception, subjectivistic, making no distinction between the mode of knowing and what is actually known, and considering the object as a construction of the object itself, concludes instead that the truth or falsity of the judging act is determined by the knowing activity itself, which, therefore, is in the last instance the true source and measure of the falsity and truth of its own act.

Whatever the exact sense to be given to Protagoras's saying that "man is the measure of all things" insofar as "for each person, what appears to him, this is" (Plato, Theaetetus, VIII, 152a, XVI 162c), and whatever the meaning today historically determinable of Gorgias's antiletic thesis that "the entity does not exist; and even if it existed we could not know it; and even if we knew it we could not make it known to others," the fact remains that in antiquity, just as on the name of Protagoras there polarized the subjectivist-relativistic theory of truth — that in the flux of our cognitions there is no distinction between true and false because everything is true — so on the name of Gorgias there polarized the relativistic denial of the opposition between true and false because everything is false (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, VII, 65). Academics and skeptics made this conception their own, denied the contrary opposition between truth and falsity, and concluded that it is not possible for man to determine the true or the false between two contradictory assertions. Thus for antiquity and the Middle Ages (Commentaries on Aristotle) the subjectivist-empirical conception of truth and falsity became a synonym for skepticism and the denial of the possibility of philosophizing.

In modern philosophy, Kant, in opposition to the "most wretched skepticism" of Hume, introduced the a priori forms of the transcendental I, thinking in this way to save the stability of science from the contingent mutability of experience; but by thus denying the metaphysics of being and opening the possibility of only a metaphysics of knowing, he also effected the passage from the traditional objective conception of truth (adaequatio intellectus et rei) to the transcendental subjectivistic conception, according to which the subject is the measure of the object, and therefore truth is the coherence of knowing with itself (adaequatio intellectus et intellectus) just as falsity is incoherence (difformitas intellectus et intellectus). Post-Kantian idealism, and in particular Hegelianism, devoted themselves to the systematization of this conception. In the development of reason, essentially triadic, every positivity contains intrinsically within its own negation the principle of the movement that leads it to surpass itself and to preserve itself as a higher determination. In this sense truth and falsity are dialecticized, and their contrariety is resolved into relation. Hence the recent idealistic theories of error, according to which a falsity is always intrinsic in every truth, as the negative element of the becoming of spirit. Croce, considering the definition of error as "lack of conformity of thought with its object" still too realistic, admits a certain positivity of error, then seeking to reduce it to a mere practical fact, indeed an economic one. Gentile, on the other hand, insists on the dialectical negativity of error: "error is what can no longer be thought, after having been thought." Thus idealistic coherence remains intact, but the logical conclusion of actual idealism is that "what we think, in the act in which we think it, is always true," but true with a truth in part false, and therefore always further dialecticizable.

This extreme conclusion, however, also manifests the impossibility of a subjective conception of truth and falsity. In fact, Kant, by distinguishing the immutability of the transcendental from the contingency of the empirical, could say that he had saved the common stability of science, but he had to profess agnosticism with regard to reality. Idealism, in order to make Kant coherent with himself, conceived the empirical as the very realization of the transcendental. But in this way it transported the contingency of the empirical into the bosom of the transcendental itself, and so relativism became essential to the dialectic of philosophical knowledge. For if not everything is dialecticizable, idealism empties its own claim and places itself on a realistic footing; if everything is dialecticizable, then even the actual idealistic truth must be recognized as dialecticizable, that is, capable of being falsified through its further negation in a historicism without term and without end.

Contemporary reactions to the subjective conception of reality and of truth also represent a return to the human and traditional conception of objective truth. Little intellectualistic in existentialism, more intellectualistic in spiritualism. But it is clear from what has been hinted that the objective conception of truth and falsity is bound to the same demand and possibility of philosophizing. If it were not possible to distinguish between truth and falsity in two contradictory assertions, if therefore truth and falsity were not two incompatible contraries in the same act of judgment, philosophical inquiry would cease to have meaning and no profession would remain to the philosopher other than that of a fundamental relativism. Christian philosophy has given of objective truth and falsity a theory that is by now classical, which is summarized here in the terms and motifs that concern the human intellect. Sensible reality grounds the objectivity of sensations, sensations ground the objectivity of concepts, and the objectivity of concepts grounds the subsequent certain and evident judgment: which, being a conscious synthesis of two objective concepts, knows at the same time the reality of the object and the correspondence of its own act with that same object. Truth, therefore, properly speaking, is a perfection of judgment (v. logica); but by analogy and subordination the name of truth is customarily extended also to concepts, to sensations and to things. Things are true (v. ontologica) insofar as they correspond to the true judgment that originates from them; sensations are true insofar as they are objective and the foundation of concepts; these in turn are true insofar as they are objective of the things sensed and the proximate foundation of judgment. Not all judgments, however, are true and evident, since obscure and false judgments also occur. Correspondingly, therefore, it must be said that falsity is in fact proper to judgment (logical falsity) and that, by analogy and subordination to the false judgment, the name of falsity can be extended to the concept, to the sensation and to things. Things are called false (ontological falsity) insofar as they do not correspond to the judgment occasioned by them in whatever way; sensations are false when, not being objective, they become the occasion of false conceptions; concepts are false when they are derived and inadequate elaborations that can give rise to a false judgment. In this sense, it must be concluded, the theory of falsity completes the theory of error (v.) and the theory of the possibility of error completes the theory of the possibility of falsity in the different orders of knowledge.

Francesco Morandini