Everyone knows that a belief is true if it corresponds with the facts. This is the first theory of truth, and it has only two problems: what to make of correspondence, and what to make of facts. Facts, said the twentieth century logician Willard Van Orman Quine, are fictions: sentence-sized objects invented for the sake of correspondence. Facts are not simply given, independent, partners of true beliefs. To form a belief is just to claim to find a fact. It may or may not be a fact that Elizabeth I remained a virgin; to find out requires inquiry, and inquiry is just a matter of settling what to believe about this pressing issue. 

Inquiry is a matter of warping our beliefs as little as possible in order to accommodate new experience. But in order to exert a pressure, experience needs to be interpreted and conceptualised, or in other words, to have a voice, indicating what to believe. So once it includes the results of inquiry, there is no escape from our overall system of belief. So says the second theory: the coherence theory of truth. It suggests a picture in which we are cut off from the world, imprisoned in a gossamer web of our own construction. Yet many fine philosophers have ended up here, and it gives us the second of our theories. 

 It doesn’t require much to recoil from the picture this offers, and one direction is to emphasise the relation between truth and success in practice. Truth works. Falsehood does not, and surely this is why we care so much about truth. Or think that we do, for unfortunately the equation is only rough. Across large swathes of life self-deception and fantasy, half-truths and outright lies, seem to work quite well. Some people in politics seem to get by with almost nothing else. So this third theory, the so-called pragmatic theory of truth, needs a more careful formulation, and nobody has quite managed to give one. If it is part of our cherished national myth that Elizabeth I remained a virgin, what is the advantage of inquiring any too carefully into whether it was true? It won’t bake more bread or breed more offspring, so in a Darwinian world it is somewhat puzzling that some people do care whether it was true. Nietzsche worried that they had just made an unnecessary cross to bear. 

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"The cure is for people to respect inquiry above assertion"

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