Truth

Truth is the recognition of reality — the identification of a fact by a consciousness. Objectivism holds a version of the correspondence theory, with the qualification that truth is a property of a mind's judgments rather than of the facts themselves, since facts simply are what they are and neither correspond nor fail to correspond to anything.

“Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.”
   ~ Ayn Rand, "Galt's Speech", For The New Intellectual

What bears the property

Truth attaches to propositions, and therefore to the concepts they are made of and the mind that holds them. It does not attach to reality. A rock is not true; it is. The statement that the rock is granite is true or false, and it is one or the other because of the rock.

Two conditions must hold for a proposition to be true, and most disputes about truth turn on the second being forgotten:

1. The concepts must be validly formed. A proposition assembled from terms that have no route back to observed existents cannot be true, because it does not say anything determinate about anything. See Concept formation and Floating Abstraction.
2. What the proposition asserts must be the case. Given valid concepts, truth is a matter of whether the relationship asserted holds among the referents.

This is why a string of characters produced at random that happens to read as a factual sentence is not true. There is no identification going on — no consciousness has related anything to anything. Correspondence, on the Objectivist account, is a relation between a mind's identification and the facts, not a relation between marks and the world.

Truth and identity

The base of the whole treatment is the axiom of identity. A thing is what it is, so of any determinate question there is a fact of the matter, and a judgment about it is either right or wrong. There is no third option and no partial exemption.

This is the ground on which Objectivism rejects the various positions that make truth relative — to a culture, a paradigm, a language, or the interests of a group. All of them require that the same thing be so and not so depending on who is asking, which is what the axiom denies. See Axioms and Subjectivism.

It is also the ground on which Objectivism rejects the analytic-synthetic dichotomy: the doctrine that some truths follow from meanings alone and others report facts, with no overlap. If a concept subsumes all the characteristics of its referents rather than only those named in its definition, the division has nothing to stand on.

Contextual, not relative

Every truth is reached and held within a context — the sum of the knowledge conditioning it. Recognising this is not a concession to relativism but the opposite: it is what lets a conclusion be true and complete without being omniscient.

Newtonian mechanics is the standard case. Within the range of evidence available in the seventeenth century it was not an approximation of something else; it was a correct identification of how bodies behave under the conditions then observable, and it remains correct within those conditions. What later evidence added was scope, not a correction of the original judgment inside its own range. See Certainty and Induction.

The alternative view — that a proposition is true only if it could never be qualified by anything anyone might later learn — makes truth unavailable to any finite mind, which is exactly the conclusion the skeptic wants.

Common misunderstandings

• That "truth is contextual" means it is relative. Context is the body of evidence a judgment is made within, and it is a fact about the situation, not a preference of the judge. Two people in the same context who reach opposite conclusions are not both right.
• That the mind's role in truth makes truth subjective. It takes a consciousness to identify anything, and what is identified is not up to it. Denying the first half gives intrinsicism; denying the second gives subjectivism. See Objectivity.
• That an unfalsifiable claim is at least a candidate for truth. A claim advanced with no evidence is not false but arbitrary — outside the true-false classification entirely, since nothing has been offered to evaluate. Objectivism treats such claims as to be dismissed rather than refuted.
• That coherence is enough. A set of propositions can be internally consistent and have nothing to do with anything. Consistency is necessary and not sufficient; the concepts still have to refer. See Rationalism.
• That truth requires certainty about everything connected to it. It requires proof within the available context, which is a finite requirement rather than an infinite one.

See also

• Fact · Identity · Existence · Objectivity
• Knowledge · Proof · Certainty · Context · Arbitrary
• Reason · Logic · Induction · Concept formation
• Analytic-synthetic dichotomy · Skepticism · Subjectivism · Intrinsicism

Discussion

• "The only thing I know is that I don't know anything"
• How does Objectivism disprove skepticism?
• Is direct realism tenable?

References

• Rand, Ayn. "Definitions", Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. The Objectivist, 1967.
• Rand, Ayn. "Galt's Speech", For The New Intellectual. Random House, 1961.
• Peikoff, Leonard. "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy", appendix to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
• Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 5.

External links

• Truth at the Ayn Rand Lexicon