We use the word constantly: That’s not true. Is that true? Tell me the truth. But if someone asked you, “What do you actually mean by that word?”…could you answer?
I don’t think most people can and neither could most philosophers, at least not without a fight.
The word “true” comes from Old English trēowe, meaning faithful, trustworthy, steady.1 It’s the same root that gives us “trust,” “troth,” and the German treu (loyal). When we call someone a “true friend,” as example, we’re using the word in its original sense. Not “a friend who corresponds to the objective definition of friendship,” but a friend who holds, shows up, you can lean on.
Truth, in its oldest meaning, was about relationships, not propositions.
And this matters more than it might seem.
At some point sround the scientific revolution, “true” narrowed. And it became almost exclusively about whether statements correspond to our external reality. Whether propositions match facts.
This is useful, science needs a version of truth that could be tested, measured, falsified, made legible. You need to know whether your bridge design matches the actual properties of steel before you build it.
And even here, the correspondence is more complicated than it might appear . Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman has argued that evolution doesn’t optimize for truth, it optimizes for fitness. His research suggests that organisms who grasp reality accurately, were outcompeted by organisms perceiving reality usefully. Natural selection, he writes, “does not favor veridical perceptions, it routinely drives them to extinction.”2
Even our most “objective” interpretation, the ones we use to build bridges, are fitness tuned interfaces, not mirrors of reality. We see what we need to survive and reproduce, not what’s actually there.
This doesn’t mean bridges don’t work but it does mean correspondence to reality was never as accurately interpreted as we thought.
But we let this version of truth swallow all the others.
Nietzsche saw this clearly. In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, he asked the question directly:
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.”
Harsh…But is he wrong?
We forget that all our categories, “cause,” “effect,” “substance,” “self”, these are human inventions that proved useful. We reified them. Now we treat them as discoveries rather than constructions.
William James took a different approach. Pragmatism rather than cynicism.
In Pragmatism, he reframes the question entirely:
“Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”
Truth isn’t separate from usefulness. Truth is a kind of usefulness. The kind that applies to ideas.
James again:
“Truth in our ideas means their power to work.”
And:
“Ideas become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.”
I don’t take this as relativism, because ideas still have to work. Ideas face resistance from reality. A false belief about gravity can very well kill you regardless of your preferences.
But the test isn’t “does this idea perfectly copy some mind independent fact?” The test is more “does this idea lead somewhere worth going?”
“[Pragmatism’s] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted.”
This is where the correspondence theory falters. It omits too much, it can handle “the boiling point of water is 212°F at sea level.” But cannot handle “loyalty matters,” or “life has meaning,” or “you should keep your promises.”
Are those statements true? By correspondence theory standards, the question barely make any sense. But by the older standard, the trēowe standard, we can ask: are they faithful? Do they hold? Can you build a life on them?
James was direct about the conclusion that could be drawn:
“If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much.”
This will scandalize some people. Truth shouldn’t be useful, it should be true.
But what does that objection even mean if w strip away the circular definition. What is the “truth” you’re defending? A correspondence to what and accessed how?
The demand for pure correspondence, untouched for human purposes, may itself be pretty incoherent. We never really step outside our own heads to check our ideas against raw, uninterpreted reality. We check ideas against other ideas, against experiences, against consequences. There’s no view from nowhere.
And this is not suggesting we abandon accuracy. Bridges still need to stand and medicine still needs to work. The correspondence version of truth applies powerfully to the domains it was built for.
But I am suggesting we recover the older meaning, to sit alongside correspondence.
Some things are true because they match facts.
Some things are true because they hold.
Because they’re faithful. Because they’ve proven steady. Because generations have leaned on them and they don’t bend.
The word is big enough for both.
James closes his lecture on truth with this:
“The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”
Proves itself.
Not “feels good.” Not “I want it to be so.” Proves itself, over time, under pressure, across circumstances. Truth earns the name through performance.
1 See “true” at Etymonline. The sense of “consistent with fact” doesn’t appear until c. 1200—about two centuries after the “faithful, trustworthy” meaning was established.
2 Donald Hoffman’s “Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem” demonstrates this mathematically. See Prakash, C., et al., “Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception,” Acta Biotheoretica 68 (2020): 319-341. As Hoffman summarizes: “natural selection does not favor veridical perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction.” For an accessible introduction, see his Quanta Magazine interview, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality” (April 21, 2016).
m-chael 