---
title: Theories of Truth
section-id: epistemology
sort: 150
author: Prof. James Okafor
created: 2026-01-27 09:00
modified: 2026-03-05 10:30
language: en
description: Correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, and deflationary theories of truth.
---

# Theories of Truth

What is it for a statement to be true? This question might seem trivial—‘snow is white’ is true because snow is white, full stop. But this apparently trivial answer raises substantial questions. What is the relationship between a statement and the facts that make it true? Can we do without a metaphysical account of this relationship? These questions have divided philosophers into several camps.

## Correspondence Theory

The most intuitive theory holds that a statement is true if and only if it **corresponds** to reality. ‘Snow is white’ is true because there is a fact—the whiteness of snow—that the statement represents. Truth is a relationship between statements (or propositions, or beliefs) and mind-independent facts.

Correspondence theory captures the commonsense idea that truth is objective: whether a statement is true is determined by how things are, not by what anyone believes. It also captures the asymmetry: the statement is true because the snow is white, not the other way around.

The problems are well-known. What exactly are **facts**? If facts are just true propositions, the account is circular. If they are structured features of reality, we need an account of their nature and of what makes a statement correspond to a particular fact rather than to none or to a different one. Negative facts (‘there is no elephant in the room’), disjunctive facts, and moral facts pose particular difficulties.

## Coherence Theory

The coherence theory holds that truth consists in coherence with a system of beliefs. A belief is true if it coheres—fits together consistently and systematically—with the rest of one’s belief system.

Coherence theory appeals to idealists and those who are sceptical about mind-independent reality. If we cannot step outside our own beliefs to compare them with facts, perhaps truth just is what hangs together within a maximal coherent system.

The main objection is that coherence seems insufficient: a completely consistent body of fiction coheres perfectly but is not thereby true. Two incompatible belief systems might each cohere internally; both cannot be true. Coherence seems at most a sign of truth, not what truth consists in.

## Pragmatist Theory

William James and Charles Sanders Peirce developed pragmatist accounts of truth. For James, a belief is true if it ‘works,’ if acting on it proves satisfying or leads to success. For Peirce, truth is what inquiry would converge on in the long run under ideal conditions.

Pragmatism connects truth to human practice and dissolves the metaphysical question. But critics argue it conflates truth with utility or justification. A useful belief might be false; a belief that inquiry converges on might just be the belief that survives rather than the belief that is true.

## Deflationary Theories

Deflationists argue that ‘is true’ adds nothing to a statement. To say ‘“Snow is white” is true’ is simply to say that snow is white. The truth predicate is a device for generalising (‘everything the witness said is true’) or for expressing agreement, not for describing a substantial property that statements have.

**Disquotationalism** (Quine) and **minimalism** (Paul Horwich) are varieties of deflationism. Both hold that the truth predicate is exhausted by its instances: the schema ‘“P” is true if and only if P’ tells us everything about truth there is to know.

Critics argue that deflationism cannot explain why truth is a goal of inquiry. If truth is merely a grammatical convenience, why should we care about it? Deflationists respond that the norms of inquiry—accuracy, coherence, evidence—can be explained without positing a substantial property of truth.

## Pluralism

Alastair Wright and Crispin Wright have argued that there is no single property that truth consists in across all domains. Truth in mathematics might work differently from truth in ethics or truth in empirical science. Each domain has its own truth norm.

Pluralism accommodates the intuitions behind several of the theories above without committing to any one account across the board. Whether it succeeds depends on whether the plurality of truth norms can be unified by anything more than the shared label.

## Summary

- Correspondence theory: truth is correspondence with mind-independent facts; faces problems with the nature of facts
- Coherence theory: truth is coherence within a belief system; faces the problem of isolated coherent fictions
- Pragmatist theories: truth is what works or what inquiry converges on; conflates truth with utility or consensus
- Deflationary theories: the truth predicate adds nothing; faces difficulty explaining why truth matters
- Pluralism: different domains have different truth norms
