being flat. We would probably agree to change our idea of truth to the judgments of experts. This example we may have once believed to be the absolute truth, may be proven wrong at any time, and what we really know, may not be the truth after all. The word truth is mentioned in the bible 235 times. Plato developed an early version of the correspondence theory. He sought to understand the meaning of knowledge and how it is acquired. Plato wanted to distinguish between true and false belief. His theory was based on intuitive recognition that true statements correspond to the facts, while false statements do not. Plato recognized this theory as unsatisfactory because it did not allow false belief. Plato stated that if a belief was false because no fact proved it to be true, then it would be a belief about nothing, or not even a belief at all. He then thought that the grammar of a sentence could offer a way around this problem. But how, he asked, are the parts of a sentence related to reality? One suggestion is from the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He stated that the parts of a sentence relate to the objects they describe much like the way the parts of a picture relate to the objects pictured. But false sentences pose a problem. If a false sentence pictures nothing, there can be no meaning in the sentence. The correspondence theory of truth is really no more than an expression of how the word "truth" is defined. Some criticisms focus on the limits of a problem that is involved in knowing whether or not a proposition does indeed agree with the facts. We clearly do classify propositions as true or false in everyday life, but we cannot securely do so on the basis of their conformity to reality. William James defined the pragmatist theory of truth, as "an idea is ‘‘true' so long as to believe it manifestly false." It is obvious to any person that a proposition is either true or false separately of the utility of ...
