Truth, truths, "truth," and "truths" in the law.

AuthorHaack, Susan
PositionPanel I: Law & Truth: Pre-Modernism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism - Federalist Society 2002 Symposium on Law and Truth

The best way to get a clear view of questions about truth--in the law or anywhere else--is to start, not with debates over "modernism" versus "post-modernism," and the whole dubious history of ideas they presuppose, but with a few simple distinctions.

Truth is the property of being true, what it is to be true. Of the umpteen competing philosophical theories of truth, the most plausible are, in intent or in effect, generalizations of the Aristotelian Insight that "to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true." (1) These theories explain truth without reference to what you or I or anyone believes, without reference to culture, paradigm, or perspective. Some of them, the various versions of the correspondence theory, turn the emphatic adverb for which we reach when we say that p is true just in case actually, really, in fact, p, into serious metaphysics, construing truth as a relation, structural or conventional, of propositions or statements to facts or reality. (2) Others, such as Tarski's semantic theory, (3) Ramsey's "redundancy" theory, (4) and the contemporary deflationist, minimalist, disquotationalist, and prosententialist theories that are their descendants, (5) don't require such an elaborate ontological apparatus.

Truths are the many and various propositions, beliefs, etc., which are true, including: particular empirical claims, scientific theories, historical propositions, mathematical theorems, logical principles, textual interpretations, statements about what a person believes or wants or intends, about social roles and rules, etc. To say that a claim is true is not to say that anyone, or everyone, believes it, but that things are as it says. However, some claims are such that the relevant things--a person's beliefs or intentions, a legal or grammatical rule--depend, in one way or another, on us; and some are such that it makes sense to ascribe a truth-value only relative to this or that community or social practice. Moreover, not every sentence, not even every declarative sentence, manages to express something true or false; some, for instance, are too indeterminate in meaning to have a truth-value.

The effect of scare quotes is to turn an expression meaning "X" into an expression meaning "so-called 'X'." So scare-quotes "troth," as distinct from truth, is what is taken to be truth; and scare-quotes "truths," as distinct from truths, are claims, propositions, or beliefs, which are taken to be truths--many of which are not really troths at all. We humans, after all, are thoroughly fallible creatures. Even with the best will in the world, finding out the truth...

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