Truly Understanding Truth

�The grass is green,’ �there is a staple holding the pages of this essay together,’ �there is a statue of Peter Canisius in the center of the upper quad at Canisius College.’ These sentences all have one thing in common, truth. But how can one be so sure these statements are true? What makes them true? And what differentiates these true statements from being false? Truth has been studied by several philosophers for years. Over the course of these studies, three different notions of truth were born. “There are the correspondence notion of truth, the coherence notion of truth, and the pragmatic notion of truth. Each conception understands truth and falsity differently, although there are different points of convergence. And each perspective has an underlying ontology that makes its notions of truth and falsity intelligible.”

The correspondence notion of truth is the most common and easily understood notion. Under this theory, sentences are considered to be dependant of the events and occurrences in the external world. For example, the sentence �the grass is green’ is true because it is indeed the case in the external world that the grass is green. According to the correspondence notion a sentence can only be true if it is the case in the external or object world. Thomas Aquinas, a great Catholic theologian and philosopher, confirms the correspondence notion by his personal views of truth. “Aquinas’s version of the correspondence theory starts from the premise that truth is the goal of our intellectual activity” (Bonevac 10). He contests that human beings are naturally trying to seek truth in everything. To do this, the human being’s thoughts must correspond or conform to an actual case in the object world. Aquinas’s coincide with the basic correspondence notion of truth such that if a given sentence expresses what is the case in the object world, it is therefore true. He also finds beliefs to be in the mind and facts are in the world. “A belief is true when mind and world match up in the right way” (11). So therefore, returning to the first example, it is the fact in the world that the grass is green, therefore, if the mind believes the grass to be green, the mind knows truth of that subject matter.

The coherence notion of truth takes a different approach than correspondence. The coherence theory, unlike correspondence, contests that sentences are considered to be independent of the events and occurrences in the external world. Therefore under the coherence theory a given sentence is true if and only if it is consistent with a set of beliefs about the external world. For example, the sentence �there is a staple holding the pages of this essay together’ is true if and only if it coheres with a comprehensive system of beliefs. “To asses the truth of a belief, we must see how it fits with our best overall system. We cannot evaluate beliefs one by one; we must evaluate them in the context of a system.” Francis Herbert Bradley, a nineteenth-century British philosopher, is a great example of a coherence philosopher. He explains individual beliefs by using a system of beliefs instead of explaining a system of beliefs by its smaller individual beliefs. Going back to the example, we can