"What is truth?" — Pontius Pilate, John 18:38
Two thousand years later, philosophers still argue. Not just about the answer — but about what kind of question this even is. Five classic approaches — correspondence, coherence, pragmatism, deflationism, and Tarski's formal semantics — each illuminate part of the picture, but none captures the whole.
"Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet." — Jeremy Bentham
"We must not begin by talking of pure ideas — vagabond thoughts that tramp the public highways without any human habitation — but must begin with men and their conversation." — C. S. Peirce
Click any theory to unpack it
Pick a statement and see how each theory handles it
The bars show how well each theory's framework can handle this kind of claim — not whether the claim itself is true.
Correspondence is empty — the critics are right that it explains nothing we didn't already know. Coherence and pragmatism deliver valuable legacies: the holistic architecture of belief, the control of experience, the connection between truth and successful action. Deflationism — for which Blackburn has considerable sympathies — reveals that truth is transparent: adding "it is true that" to any claim adds nothing cognitive to the claim itself. And Tarski offers formal semantics, not a philosophy of truth.
Some, like Richard Rorty, concluded we should jettison the very notion of truth — it consorts with absolutes and certainties, not with polite and modest fallibilism. But deflationism shows this overcorrects: truth is too small a target to be worth attacking, and too useful a device to abandon.
The real insight is a reversal of priority. We might suppose that to understand legitimate enquiry we must first grasp what counts as fact — then certify methods by whether they reach those facts. But facts are tricky customers: try pinning down a moral fact, or an aesthetic one. So Blackburn, following Peirce and James, flips it: enquiry first, facts after. Look at actual practices of investigation — observation, experiment, criticism, conversation — and describe fact in terms of where those practices lead when conducted well.
There is a pleasing symmetry. Coherence gives us the input side: evidential basis, the friction and resistance of the world pressing against our beliefs. Pragmatism gives us the output side: consequences for action, success as a mark of being on the right track. Deflationism strips away the metaphysical mystique. What remains is the particular go of it (James, quoting Maxwell): real people settling real doubts, warping their web of belief as little as possible to accommodate what the world throws at them.
This doesn't make truth relative or optional. It makes it ours to work out — through careful, honest, fallible enquiry. A tentative judgement of truth is not a dogmatic assertion of certainty. We start where we are, deploy our inheritance of mental habits and experience, and deal with problems as they arise. We have nowhere else to stand.