Understanding Truth: Adequacy, Realism, and Consistency

Truth and Adequacy

It is based on the correspondence between thought and reality, that is, between thought and deed. It rests on three basic principles: there is an objective reality external to thought, the truth is the concordance between thought and reality, and rational knowledge is the mental representation of reality, facts, and processes.

Truth is the conformity or fitness between thought and reality. Therefore, if we have trials (the truth is given in trials) in which the predicate affirms or denies something of the subject, if the affirmation or the negation matches facts, it is true, and if not, it is false.

Application of Truth as Adequacy: Realism and its Classes

Realism is the theory that supports the ontological distinction between the cognizing subject (who knows) and the object known.

Naive Realism

Knowledge corresponds to sensible things perceived by direct contact with them, that is, as they are shown determined by the senses and thresholds. It argues that color is not a representative property of the perceiving subject, but a quality of the perceived object. There is much objectivity as species.

Absolute Realism

It corresponds with philosophical knowledge. It claims that human reason can know the essence of things, and therefore knowledge can reach absolute and immutable truths. Also called dogmatic realism or dogmatism.

Critical Realism

It corresponds to scientific knowledge. It argues that the true objective of scientific knowledge is an ideal toward which we walk to modify hypotheses (conjectures or assumptions based on observation), laws (confirmed hypotheses), and theories (systematic articulation of laws explaining a particular field of the empirical world), and sometimes replace them with more credible ones. Since we cannot consider all the consequences of a theory, we can never be absolutely certain of its truth. What we can observe is that knowledge plays with more success every time the characteristics and modes of action of nature.

Truth as Consistency

This truth does not reside in trial but in reasoning. This interpretation of truth takes place primarily in the field of formal sciences (those whose contents are not facts or processes of reality but empty forms or mental models of content). Adequacy is not conceived as thinking and outside reality, but as no contradiction in judgments or statements of an argument. In this way, truth is the absence of contradictory statements with themselves and with the system they belong to. If A = A, then A = ¬ B is false, but A = B is false.