TRUTH and FALSEHOOD. — As the Greek ἀληθής in the literal sense of the word means ‘what is not hidden’ or ‘he who conceals nothing,’ so the Latin *verus* denotes the genuine in contrast to what is deceptive imitation. Thus also the man who does not dissemble, the witness who does not deceive, is called *verus*. In every case, the notion of truth involves the idea of a conformity between what really is and its external manifestation or, respectively, the judgment of the knowing subject that follows from II. Unlike the concepts of being and reality, which indicate no relation of the entity, ‘truth’ asserts a relation between the real and the intellect or knowledge.
I. HISTORICAL OUTLINE
In Western philosophy, the conception of truth as conformity between thought and being undoubtedly predominates. In ancient philosophy, it can be said that only the Sophists and the Skeptics contradict this conception. According to Protagoras, in keeping 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 various appearances of a thing, which vary for each individual subject. This relativism is opposed by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; yet in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, truth is accentuated somewhat differently. For Plato, truth is primarily a quality of the object of knowledge: the clear, the distinct, the pure, the stable are the true; hence eternal Ideas are the true reality; the truth of objects determines the truth of knowledge. For Aristotle, however, ‘falsehood and truth are not in things... but in the mind’ (*Metaph.*, 6, 4). True, that is, is the thought that ‘says that what is, is, and that what is not, is not’; false, on the other hand, is the thought that ‘says that what is not, is, or that what is, is not’ (*ibid.*, 4, 7). This occurs, however, only in judgment, not in the ‘thought of indivisible quiddity’ or simple concept; thus Aristotle can even define judgment as thought ‘in which there is falsehood and truth’ (*De anima*, 3, 6). The Stoics and Epicurean thought also uphold the concept of truth as conformity between thought and being and seek a ‘criterion’ that guarantees truth thus understood. The Stoa finds this criterion in the *phantasia kataleptikē*, that is, an impression that brings the real object so ‘within reach’ that a denial would be absurd; for Epicurus, sensory perception is in itself the universal criterion of truth. According to Neoplatonism, on the other hand, the senses provide 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 rejecting, as the Neoplatonists do, the material element, the Christian Revelation of the New Testament, especially St. John, distinctly indicates the ‘true’ as the sphere of the ultramundane, the divine. Thus Christ is the ‘true light’ (Jn 1:9) or simply ‘the truth’ (*ibid.*, 14:6); the Holy Spirit is called ‘the Spirit of truth’ (*ibid.*, 14:17). But Christ’s revelatory word is also ‘the truth’; thus ‘the truth’ in St. John and St. Paul is simply synonymous with the Gospel, the fullness of Christian Revelation. ‘Truth’ in this sense does not mean merely, 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, teaching about God and His ways of salvation which the intellect is invited to accept in faith. Certainly it is not enough to recognize this truth intellectually; it must become truth of action and life: man must ‘do the truth’ (*ibid.*, 3:21).
The first speculative synthesis of the Christian doctrine of truth was accomplished by St. Augustine using the tools of Neoplatonic thought. In mathematics, metaphysics, and ethics, unchanging truths are perceived, which as such cannot derive from the sensory experience of ever-changing bodies. These cognitions must certainly come from God, who is truth itself and the light that enlightens every man. The Ideas in the divine intellect are the true prototypes, which the things of this world can imitate in perfection without ever attaining it; hence the truth of things, especially that of bodies, is always measured by illusion. Only the eternal divine Word, begotten from the Father’s knowledge, is the perfect image ‘in no way dissimilar’ to the Father; hence He is also 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 early centuries of Scholastic philosophy up to St. Bonaventure, the Augustinian conception dominates speculation on truth. Alongside it, the definition of truth by St. Anselm (*res tantum mente perceptibilis*) gained a certain importance; even St. Albert the Great in his *Summa Theologica* accepts this definition, which, calling truth ‘a thing perceptible only by the mind,’ intends to indicate that truth is conformity with a norm, with a duty. But in the synthesis of St. Thomas, the sober Aristotelian thought also comes to bear, without however abandoning the Platonic-Augustinian heritage. Truth is first found by 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’ (*adaequatio intellectus et rei*), attributed to Isaac Israeli (845–940), the Aristotelian paraphrase: ‘inasmuch as the intellect says of what is that it is’ (*Summa c. gent.*, I, 59). Human knowledge’s truth has no being outside the human thought and is therefore not eternal (*Sum. Theol.*, Iª, 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, for their part, are also ‘true’; this truth of being — later called ontological truth — means that reality is not a dark, ‘irrational’ force, but that, as the actuation of divine Ideas, it is formed by spirit and thus 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. Hence ‘every being 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 being is true,’ and conversely ‘every truth is being.’ Truth thus belongs, together with unity and goodness, to the transcendent properties of being, which belong to every entity.
In contrast to St. Albert and St. Thomas, Latin Averroism upholds the doctrine of Aristotle and his Arab commentators, which contradicts Christian faith. To avoid a clash with ecclesiastical authority, some sought to reconcile this contradiction with the doctrine of ‘double truth’: the truth of a philosophical doctrine does not exclude that the contrary may be true in a theological sense. Even in the 16th century, Pietro Pomponazzi (d. 1524) defended this conception. Against him, the Fifth Lateran Council defined: ‘Since one truth cannot contradict another, we declare entirely false any 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 the conformity between thought and being. However, the doctrine of the truth of being was increasingly stripped of its metaphysical content, so much 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 empty tautologies, while rationalism posited an intuition of “eternal truths,” independent of all experience and based on “innate ideas.”
The rationalistic separation of the knowledge of essences from reality, originally given only in experience, necessarily compromised the real value of a priori essential structures and thus the realistic concept of truth itself. Kant’s criticism in fact overturned the concept of truth, which had been dogmatically upheld in rationalism. For him, truth is no longer the conformity of thought with real being, but with the laws of reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 350); this is the concept of truth in 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. ed. H. Glockner, IX, Stuttgart 1927, p. 48). At the same time, Hegel states: “The true is the whole” (Phänomenologie, Vorrede, II, 24). This means: if partial truths are posited in isolation and absolutized, as if they were the whole, they become false; they are true only when they are elevated (aufgehoben) as “moments” within the whole designated by the idea. Although this conception is primarily grounded in Hegel’s dialectical idealism, it signals a real danger: namely, that by one-sidedly emphasizing partial truths, truth itself may be falsified. In our century, constructive idealism was renewed in a modified form by B. Croce and G. Gentile. According to Gentile, every reality is posited in the act of thought; it no longer depends on a being transcending thought but is the free creation of thought itself.
The gigantic attempt of idealism to derive all reality and truth from a single principle could not succeed. In four respects, idealistic systems amounted to unjustified simplifications of reality: the undeniable transcendence of truth is suppressed; the proper significance of matter is not recognized; alongside the necessary and universal orders of essence, the pure real, the concrete, the singular and variable of history escapes notice, despite efforts to attain a “concrete concept”; finally, idealism suffers from a certain intellectualism that seems to lack a sense for “life,” for the emotional dimension in man, and for his personal free decision. It is therefore not surprising that in the 19th and 20th centuries, currents opposed to idealism gained the upper hand, themselves exaggerating aspects of reality and truth neglected by idealism. Thus, logical transcendentalism, by admitting certain “truths in themselves,” will exaggerate the transcendence of truth and at the same time neglect its ontological value, conferring upon propositions—especially those of essential order—an “ideal in-itself” beyond not only knowledge but also real things. B. Bolzano speaks of “propositions in themselves”; E. Husserl, in Logische Untersuchungen (3rd ed., I, Halle 1922, p. 228), of “truths in themselves”; the neo-Kantian H. Rickert of the “transcendent sense,” which, as truth consisting in itself, is the proper object of knowledge. Such strange constructions arise because not only is the object of judgment posited, but at the same time its logical structure (subject-copula-predicate) is regarded as transcendent to thought.
A cruder reaction against idealism is found in materialism (v.). While idealism denied the subsistence of matter, reducing it to a content of spirit, materialism in turn denied the subsistence of spirit, reducing spiritual knowledge to a mere function of matter. It does, however, uphold a realistic conception of the truth of knowledge, at least with regard to knowledge of the material world; metaphysical, moral, juridical, and religious doctrines, however, have for dialectical materialism only the relative value of “ideologies,” which change according to the mode of production and the corresponding social order. This relativism, of course, is not extended to communism itself as a worldview and conception of life in the “classless society.” Materialism is unable to explain the possibility of logical truth, since it denies any ontological truth as the formation of reality through ideas. From this point of view, N. Hartmann’s doctrine of the “transintelligible,” beyond all “knowability” (Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 3rd ed., Berlin 1941, p. 232) and completely alien to spirit, has a patent affinity with materialism.
Materialism, despite its appeal to the sciences, violates concrete reality no less than idealism does. In its dogmatic realism, it unwittingly overleaps the problems posed by the progress of the sciences, especially psychology and historical sciences. Psychology makes clear that the knowledge of truth is conditioned by the psychic particularity of man, especially by the diversity of intellectual types; historical science directs 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 varies with the diversity of times, races, psychological types, etc. (“relative truth”). The same development was fostered by the excessive emphasis placed on the vital value of truth, provoked by aversion to an abstract science or a stifled speculation. Thus one arrives at pragmatism, for which truth is nothing other than the utility or “fruitfulness” of a belief. This conception was expressed most cynically by Fr. Nietzsche:
“Truth is that species of error without which a given species of living beings could not live” (Wille zur Macht, no. 493).
In modernism (v.), psychological, historicist, and pragmatic tendencies converged to explain the fact of religion and the evolution of dogmas. The truth of dogmas is nothing other than that of temporary and hence variable symbols of a reality that remains always unknowable. In this regard, Pius X condemned in the decree Lamentabili the proposition: “Truth is no more immutable than man, since it develops with him, in him, and through him” (Denz.-U., 2058). Similarly, the recent encyclical Humani generis affirmed that truth does not vary from day to day (no. 30). The same encyclical also sees in the existence of a threat to the absolute value of truth (no. 6), since it often binds truth so closely to the individual existing human being and his free decision that the objectivity of truth is endangered.
“Truth is subjectivity,” said S. Kierkegaard (Philosophische Bocken, in Werke, VI, Jena 1910, p. 265). With this daring word, he certainly did not intend to deny the objective value of truth; yet the personal appropriation of truth, 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 manifold ways of conceiving truth in modern philosophy, which have necessarily been outlined in a somewhat simplified manner, show what tasks are now entrusted to Christian philosophy regarding the problem of truth. The divergent conceptions of modern philosophers, which often contradict one another, cannot, without doubt, overturn the fundamental theses of perennial philosophy. They do, however, highlight problems that today require more careful examination than in the past. Starting from the unassailable fact that truth, as precisely reiterated by Aristotle and St. Thomas, is given only in our specifically human knowledge, the following questions arise: how can its ontological value be reconciled with the cognitive conditions within the subject itself, antecedent (a priori) to all experience—its universal value and absoluteness with the variable psychic particularity of the individual, its independence from time with human historicity, and, finally, its rigorous objectivity with its vitality, its individual importance, and its special appeal to each individual?J. Maréchal has endeavored, through his acute examination of Kant’s criticism and constructive idealism, to show that the a priori cognitive conditions of the human intellect do not falsify real being; rather, they are precisely adapted to constitute it as the object of our knowledge, such as it is in itself. This interpretation may not satisfy entirely, especially since it seems to emphasize too little the receptive moment of “seeing,” inherent in our knowledge, even intellectual, in favor of the moment of tendency and active “positing.” Nevertheless, Maréchal has shown that the a priori of the intellect must not necessarily be understood in an idealistic sense; rather, it is indispensable so that real being may encounter the intellect. As for the individual psychic particularity and the further concrete conditions of knowledge, which vary from one person to another, their strong influence on the actual thought of individuals is certainly undeniable. Not every truth is therefore equally accessible to everyone; indeed, under such influences, certain errors are more or less imminent for one person or another. This does not, however, imply that they should be designated as “relative truth” subordinate to the individual. For, despite the variable psychic influences of habits, feelings, tendencies, etc., the spirit remains free to follow its own law, namely, to focus on the evidence of reality and allow itself to be determined by II. This already follows from the mere fact that, in reflection, one can become aware of the various influences pressing upon oneself. Insofar as one can judge about influences inferior to one’s sphere, the spirit does not succumb to them but rises above them. Thus, speaking in somewhat bold terms, the very fact that a relativistic theory of knowledge could be conceived is already proof that it is false.
The same applies to the historical conditioning of the knowledge of truth. Logical truth has no being except in the act of knowing, and in human beings, this act is always conditioned by historical circumstances. In this sense, only in the Divine Spirit is there an “eternal truth,” and the notion of “truth in itself” must be rejected. This does not mean, however, that the value of truth is subject to historical change. Every genuine truth has universal value, for all peoples and all times, however variable its object may be. Whoever judges the same object, which at a given time has a certain quality, must affirm or deny the same, if they are not to judge falsely. In this sense, the value of truth transcends time. This holds all the more if the object of judgment is absolutely necessary and immutable; in this case, the proposition holds even without temporal qualification: two plus two does not equal four merely now, but simply equals four. From this it does not follow that this truth has an eternal being outside the Divine Spirit. Nor does it follow that every truth is equally accessible to people of every age. In this sense, one may rightly speak of a historicity of truth.
The historicity of truth emerges even more clearly when one considers that truth must not only be grasped in some way by thought but that, in accordance with its vital importance, the whole person must inwardly appropriate the necessity of responding to this question. This personal assent to truth is the justified concern of existential philosophy. It is not enough merely to transmit old truths in formulas; they must always be acquired anew. Thus, even if different people learn the same truth, it may be “embraced with varying breadth, depth, and vividness.” Even more varied, in terms of strength and impulse, richness and depth, is the response of feeling to the truth known. And it is precisely the voluntary surrender to truth and its realization in life that marks different degrees of intensity (Joh. B. Lotz). Yet, for subjective possession to be truly fruitful for the individual and for society, the object must constitute a genuine truth. There is therefore no real opposition between objective and subjective truth, provided both aspects are rightly understood.
FALSITY. — In common usage, the adjective "false" is often employed as a synonym for "lying," and thus "falsity" is understood as the opposite of sincerity or truthfulness; whereas the verb "falsare" (to falsify) is almost exclusively used in the sense of "falsificare" (to counterfeit), thereby giving rise to the juridical term "falso" (see *falso*).
Alongside these meanings, there is in common language a speculative sense of falsity more directly connected with philosophy, according to which, for example, one speaks of distinguishing genuine currency from counterfeit, or of ascertaining the truth or falsity of a statement or an entire theory. This manner of speaking is rooted in the common conviction that every judgment is either true or false, inasmuch as it either conforms to the object or diverges from II. In this sense, truth is generally understood as the conformity of thought to reality, and falsity as its opposite, namely, divergence.
In philosophical reflection as well, the theory of falsity develops in dependence upon the theory of truth, following both historically and speculatively the same vicissitudes. Historically, two opposing currents of thought can be distinguished: one leading to the common sense of truth and falsity systematically interpreted, the other traditionally evolving toward a quite different conception of truth and falsity. The first, objectivist conception, distinguishes the mode of knowing from what is known. With regard to the mode of knowing, the former depends on the conditions of the knower; but as regards what is known, the truth of the knower depends on reality: for it is not possible to speak of truth or falsity of a judgment except in relation to an objective term, posited as a point of comparison for evaluating the judgment and for distinguishing between two contradictory statements, the true from the false.
The second, subjectivist conception, making no distinction between the mode of knowing and what is actually known, and considering the object as a construction of the knowing subject itself, concludes instead that the truth or falsity of the judging act is determined by the knowing activity itself, which, therefore, is in the final analysis the true source and measure of the falsity and truth of its own act.
Whatever exact meaning is to be given to the saying of Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things, and that which appears to each person is" (Plato, *Theaetetus*, 152a, 162c), and whatever