See also: the Truth

The truth (of Latin veritas) is a term of Philosophie which expresses quality of what is true. It is the conformity of the idea with its object; of what one says with what is or what one really thinks.

The diversity of interpretations of the word constituted in the past and until now, many controversies. And the reflections of thinkers and philosophers during the centuries constitute as many different schools.

The glance of the thinkers: historic insight

Aristote

The respective directions of the Greek words άληθής , alithis, be " truth (E) " and Άλήθεια , Alithia, " Vérité" are remained constant during all the traditional time and are associated with the field of logic, the geometry and deductive sciences in general; as well Plato resorts to these matters like educational tools to illustrate his theory of the supposed Ideas to contain any understandable truth. Aristote, on a very different register, also develops logic like means of investigation of the speech, useful in the investigation of reality in what it makes it possible to organize knowledge.

These concepts of " vrai" and of " vérité" were also associated, side of the school of Millet and later of Aristote still, with the observational sciences - more exactly - because in this context there is no really scientific method such as we conceive it since Galileo - with the first attempts at study of the natural phenomena - the " météores" - and of the living beings; Aristote never lost an occasion to go to observe fish of the lagoon of Pyrrha in the island of Lesbos.

In both cases, the binary and normative character of these concepts does not make mystery. In its Metaphysical , written Aristote: " to say that what is not, or that what is not, is false; and to say that what is, is, and that what is not not, is vrai".”. Similar statements are found in Plato, for example the Cratyle .

In Of Interpretation , Aristote analyzes the formation of the logical proposals, i.e. the parts of speech likely to be true or false. This truth is also called the truth correspondence . This type of truth relates to the scientific research. This design is strongly realistic, because we say for example that the statement " the cat is on the tapis" is true because the cat is indeed on the carpet , and not the reverse.

The school of Mégare

The stoical ones methodically analyzed the logic of connections of the language running such as " et" , " ou" , and negation of the statements. Philon de Mégare extends the range of conditional what makes it possible to validate proposals apparently as ridiculous as " if Greenland is out of candy sugar, then Charlemagne is the great writer of the Middle Ages " ; the two parts of conditional are materially false, and yet the sentence has a direction, and is even true. This kind of consideration has obviously its importance for the use of the logical connectors in any general information, including when one does not know if the terms of conditional are true.

Thomas d' Aquin

For Aquinaste, veritas is adæquatio intellectus and rei : the truth is the adequacy of intellect to the things, on this point thus its thought marries that of Aristote perfectly. Thomas had at the same time a realistic design of the gasoline of the things.

Baruch Spinoza

In the text according to drawn from the Pensées metaphysics one finds well at Spinoza the concept of truth like adequacy of the idea with the object:

“the first significance of Truth and Forgery seems to have its origin in the accounts; and truth an account was told, when the told fact had really arrived; forgery, when the told fact had not arrived nowhere. Later, the philosophers employed the word to indicate the agreement of an idea with its object; thus, one calls idea true that which shows a thing as it is in itself; distort, that which shows a thing differently than it is not actually. The ideas are not other thing indeed only accounts or stories of nature in the spirit. And from there one came from there to indicate in the same way, by metaphor, of the inert things; thus, when we say true gold or false gold, as if the gold which is presented to us told something on itself, which is or is not in him.”

Emmanuel Kant

Kant attached the question of the truth less with what exists apart from the experiment that with the human order. Science amounted building an order of the phenomena universal, valid for all the human intelligences. It could not enable us to see the Être with-through hole in the curtain of appearances. It is included/understood whereas for Kant the question of the truth and that of sincerity are inseparable. In a case as in the other, it is the communicability which it is a question of preserving.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel examines the paradoxical nature of the human conscience, which would like a truth whole and supplements when the majority of the individuals cannot generally go well far without dissension. But this antagonism is the engine of an evolution: the spirit of the universe grows towards moreover high degrees of awakening and conscience. This process is dialectical: one passes from a stage to another by exceeding contradictions within the framework of a time historical, productive, where once subsumed antagonism leads to the synthesis from where a new truth emerges.

It should nevertheless be noted that in the theory of Hegel there is in fact an intermediate synthesis within l'" antithèse" , between " opposition externe" and " division intern"

Hegel had also been interested in the reports/ratios of the truth and justice. Justice is said by judges purely human, rational, representing the City. They can at least oppose the law and the definitions of the right to the intentions considered as good by the actors, with their bad faith, the subjective significance which for them their actions had.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

For Wittgenstein, the proposals are well an image of the facts, but one can only show this identity of structure, and not describe it.

Jürgen Habermas

In its work, the German philosopher Habermas watch which the communication is inseparable from an ethics: each one admits that its assertions are opened with the rational refutation, but less does not aspire to the truth its own statements, or to the accuracy of the actions suggested, and finally subjects of them to a requirement sincerity. The person who lies, dissimulates or handles breaks by là-même the communication.

Formal theories: the truth in deductive sciences

The role of a proposal is to express an opinion; it contains words which return to concepts, it has an internal structure, but at the same time it forms a whole: as soon as it expresses the opinion it unifies it, in the sense that it calls on behalf of the receiver an option which takes the form of an acceptance or a refusal.

Treatment of the functions of truth: history

Analysis of the proposals

Semantics and syntax

The truth in philosophy of sciences

Historical truth

“the truth in history, which one will agree easily that it raises of the Utopia” (Maurice Sartre)

The research of historical truth poses various relative questions with the historical Méthodologie:

* on the research and the criticism of materials:

* taken into interdisciplinary account (extent of the field of investigation),

* research of materials and sources,

* critical of materials and sources (reliability, put in correspondence),

* method of interpretation of these materials for the writing of the History.

The Historien Marc Bloch had a design of the Histoire which, according to Gerard Noiriel, rested on two central ideas:

* the constant refusal to confuse the trade of Historian and that of " prosecutor " ,

* l'" professional ethic " , which leads it to stress that the Historien owes " to return accounts " with its readers.

Always according to Gerard Noiriel, Marc Bloch provided two large lines of thinking:

* the correspondence enters the Réalité and its Représentation;

* the judgment " human " : how to include/understand men having lived in a remote past, starting from the only inert traces that they left us of their passage over the ground? This idea takes again the concerns of Humboldt.

It should be stressed that Marc Bloch rejected the Positivisme methodical school (Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos). It was a precursor, by diversifying the sources Historien, extending it to the made economic, and being interested in other materials that only the written Document S: the Archeology, the Art, the Numismatic . Marc Bloch was at the origin of the school of Annals.

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