  Diego A.  Odchimar,  III ABSTRACT:  Discourse on truth dominates the traditional philosophical theorizing in the fields of Metaphysics,  Epistemology,  Language,
 Logic,  Ethics and Science.  Traditional theories of truth have never really worked out a convincing repudiation of the general skepticism that none of our beliefs are objectively justified as any more likely true than its negation.  Rather than formulate theories of truth to assuage this alarming intellectual worry,  postmodern philosophers have abandoned the discourse.  For the purposes of this essay,
 I shall argue that truth is merely a convenient fiction and that rationality does not presuppose the idea of truth.  KEY WORDS:  truth,  dualism,  appearance,  reality,
 knowledge,  object,  subject,  skepticism,  relativism,  rationalism,
 empiricism,  pragmatism,  postmodernism,  Plato,  Kant,  Frege,
 Austin,  Wittgenstein,  Nietzsche,  Pierce,  James,  Kuhn,
 Foucault,  Feyerabend,  Putnam,  Rorty WE ARE SITUATED in the world.  We look at the world from where we stand.  One implication of this is that the world appears to us differently.
 We have different pictures of the world.  A second implication is that anyone’ s opinion about the world is as good as anyone else’ s.  Another implication is that the only criterion for what is a fact,  and what it is rational to accept,
 is whether or not it is coherent to a belief system,  or system of values.  A being with no values would have no facts either.  Hilary Putnam,  author of Reason,  Truth and History,
 argues that ‘ every fact is value loaded and every one of our values loads some fact.  Every decision that a picture of the world is true,  that an idea is rationally acceptable,  reveals our total system of value commitments. 1 There are no objective values.
 Even science is not value- neutral.  METAPHYSICS The common sense idea of truth is correspondence to physical reality.  A belief is true if it is a statement that mirrors,  or copies,  the features of the world.
 In other words,  a statement is true if it accurately reflects objective reality.  This is the correspondence theory of truth.  J. L.  Austin explains that a statement,
 by definition,  is a truth claim.  By definition,  statements are made with declarative sentences.  Not all sentences express a statement.  Only a declarative sentence is a statement because it makes a claim about the world that is either true or false.
 Take,  for example,  the declarative sentence ‘ The cat is on the mat.  This statement describes a particular state of affairs,  namely,
 that situation in which a cat is on the mat.  Austin argues that this declarative sentence is true,  if and only if,  I use this declarative sentence to make the statement that a cat is on the mat. 2 Traditionally,  the correspondence theory has been described as the claim that truth involves a correspondence relation between truth claims (
statements)  and physical reality.  A true statement corresponds or agrees with the facts.  Truth is a relational property.  Thus,  in these terms,
 a ‘ fact’  is just another name for ‘ true sentence.  The Logical Positivist school of philosophy endorses the correspondence theory of truth.  Logical Positivists disparage most abstract entities (
e. g.  ‘ just’  and ‘ good’
 as useless postulations because they cannot be defined in terms of correspondence to facts.  But this theory of truth is problematic because our conception of the world is necessarily incomplete.  Thomas Nagel,  author of The View from Nowhere,  argues that “ the world is not dependent on our view of it,
 or any other view. 3 EPISTEMOLOGY Traditionally,  knowledge is a true,  justified belief.  As it were,  correspondence theory of truth is a realist theory because it holds that among the conditions individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the truth of a belief is a condition to the effect that a certain state of affairs must obtain.
 For a realist theory,  the object of a belief in question must be mind- independent.  A fact must not be a thought or a mental entity.  For example,  a belief that snow is white is true only if snow is white in the extra-
mental world.  But not all truth claims are about facts.  Not all statements are declarative sentences about the physical world.  Often,  we make statements like ‘ Abortion is immoral’
 or ‘ Angelica is beautiful.  Ordinarily,  we appraise the truth of these statements relative to some scale or conceptual paradigm.  When we say “ Abortion is immoral,
 we are saying that abortion is immoral because it fits the essential characteristic of what is repugnant and objectionable.  Likewise,  ‘ Angelica is beautiful’  is true because it fits the profile of archetypal beauty.  Thus,
 correspondence theory of truth,  a realist theory,  fails to justify everyday descriptive beliefs,  in particular,  evaluative statements about mental entities.  On a realist theory of truth,
 none of our moral beliefs and aesthetic preferences would be justified as any more likely to be true than their denials.  Non- realist theories of truth,  like the pragmatic criterion of truth,  justify the truth of beliefs by appealing to meaning.  For them,
 truth is not a matter of fact.  Charles Sanders Pierce,  consistent with the phenomenology of Kant,  argues that truth is not something “ overwhelmingly forced upon the mind in experience as an effect of an independent reality. 4 Real objects are determined by the mind.
 Reality is whatever is said to exist or to be the case in the statements to which everyone ( with sufficient relevant experiences)  would agree.  LANGUAGE The dictionary definition of a true belief or statement is one that “ agrees with reality.  William James,
 author of The Meaning of Truth,  a pragmatist,  insists that this phrase is doubly ambiguous,  it does not tell us what sort of relation could constitute agreement in this context,  and it does not tell us what is meant by ‘ reality.
5 To understand a sentence is to know which circumstances would make it true.  In pragmatic sense,  it means that ideas become true just in so far as they help us into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.  Any statement,  which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars is true instrumentally. 6 Thus,
 James’  famous answer to the question regarding the ways with which to know whether or not a truth claim ( statement)  agrees with physical reality:  “ By proving useful to those who believe it.
7 Ludwig Wittgenstein,  author of Philosophical Investigations,  argues that any judgment,  even of sense impression,  has to go beyond what is ‘ given’
 to be a judgment at all.  There are implicit norms to which we appeal in ordinary judgments.  Wittgenstein calls these implicit norms,  or conventions,  as rules of language games we play.  What is true and what is rational is what is warranted by the institutionalized epistemological justifications (
forms of life)  of statements. 8 For example,  the statement ‘ Love means not forcing anything on a beloved,  not even love’
 is true,  if and only if,  a particular language game uses the word ‘ love’  to mean that way.  Wittgenstein insists that in order for us to have a concept at all,
 we need ‘ agreement in our judgments.  LOGIC Truth is preserved in valid reasoning.  The laws of logical inference preserve truth.  As Gottlob Frege said,  “
logic is the science of truth. 9 Donald Davidson believes that the requirement for a sentence to be true is its truth condition. 10 The truth value of a statement consists not only in its correspondence to reality ( Snow is white’  is true,  if and only if,
 snow is white)  but whether or not they follow the laws of logic ( e. g.  law of non- contradiction,
 law of identity,  law of excluded middle)  This is the classical Aristotelian conception of truth.  We could perhaps express this conception by means of a familiar formula:  “ To say of what is that it is not,
 or of what is not that it is,  is false,  while to say of what is that it is,  or of what is not that it is not is true. 11 Consequently,  logicians dismiss evaluative statements,
 like expressions of moral beliefs,  aesthetic preferences,  and those that purport to assert truths,  as merely expressions of feelings because the only intellectually respectable concepts can be defined ultimately and entirely in terms of the concepts of logic,  mathematics,  and physical science.
 At issue are paradoxical statements.  In particular,  the Buddhist maxim “ In every truth,  the opposite is equally true” 12 appears mistaken because it seems to contradict its own assertion.
 Of course,  I personally believe that this is a meaningful statement.  Obviously,  laws of logic are formal and empty that they fail to accommodate the fact of the basic heterogeneity of human beings and the different situations they occupy in the world.  ETHICS Hilary Putnam argues that ethics does not conflict with physics,  as the term ‘
unscientific’  suggests.  It is simply that ‘ just’  and ‘ good’
 and ‘ sense of justice’  are concepts in a discourse which are not reducible to physical discourse.  It does not necessarily follow that because ethics is about value judgments,  not matters of fact,  that it is not rational or intellectually respectable.
 Putnam insists that a statement of fact is actually a value statement.  Truth itself is defined by our criteria of rational acceptability. 13 Contrary to traditional belief,  it is not truth that confers rational acceptability on statements of facts.  Rather,  it is our criteria of rational acceptability that confers truth on our statements of value.
 Thus,  I argue that it does not really matter whether or not evaluative assertions,  like expressions of our moral beliefs and aesthetic preferences,  are true.  What really matters is whether or not such statements are rationally acceptable.  Morally right action is a rationally acceptable action.
 The problem is not that we do not have a way to verify that evaluative statements agree with physical reality.  The problem is whether or not we have a plausible criterion of finding out what is rationally acceptable.  This is a philosophical problem.  Immanuel Kant was well aware of this problem.  In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,  Kant proposed that what is rationally acceptable is to treat every human being qua a human being.
 That is,  man,  should be treated as a person,  not a thing.  Every human being including oneself,  in every case,
 should be free to set and end for himself because,  by nature,  as the origin of the will,  he has the capacity to set and end for himself. 14 SCIENCE Truth is the aim of science.  Of course,
 scientific truth is correspondence to physical reality.  Obviously,  this obsession to mirror,  or copy,  the features of the world is heavily influenced by the Platonic dualisms ( appearance-
reality,  matter- mind,  etc.  that dominate the history of Western philosophy.  Richard Rorty,
 in Philosophy and Social Hope,  argues that the vocabulary,  which centers upon these Platonic dualisms,  has become an obstacle to our social hopes.  Rorty suggests that science should be a quest for more means towards greater human happiness rather than a hopeless pursuit of the ‘ truth.
15 Thomas Kuhn,  author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,  argues that science is arbitrary and value- laden. 16 Prejudice aside,  science is actually an ethical and political position that is of equal value with other cherished cultural values like the belief in the existence of a personal God,
 or the belief in the Divine Right of Kings.  What was previously thought of to be objective has turned out to be subjective paradigm.  While James asserts that true and rational beliefs tend to facilitate the achievement of practical goals,  Paul Feyerabend,  author of Against Method,  and Michel Foucault,
 author of The Archeology of Knowledge,  argue that there is something political in our present institutionalized criteria of truth and rationality.  They link it with capitalism,  exploitation,  and even sexual repression.  Feyerabend,
 like Foucault,  stressed the manner in which different cultures and historic epochs produce different paradigms of rationality.  As Kuhn puts it,  different paradigms inhabit different worlds.  This is the thesis of incommensurability which helped dismantle the traditional hierarchy of disciplines that dates back to Plato’ s image of the divided line.
 CONCLUSION Truth is a convenient fiction traditionally employed to arbitrarily legitimize and artificially confer a privileged position to some epistemico- ontological hierarchy.  By rejecting the metaphysical correspondence theory of truth,  rational acceptability could be rephrased as “ mutual respect of the freedom of every human being to frame,  revise and pursue one’
s own conception of the good.  Thus,  the only irrationality is when a person is forced to live a life that he does not value.  Any conception of the world must include some acknowledgement of its own incompleteness.  A view that what exists must be identified with what is thinkable by us sense is an attempt to cut the universe down to size.  The truth about the universe is something which we cannot describe or know fully because it lies beyond the reach of language,
 proof,  evidence,  or empirical understanding.  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT In writing this essay,  I benefited from the intellectual discussions I had with my students at the College of Saint Benilde,  De La Salle University,
 Taft,  Manila.  I am indebted to them.  NOTES 1 Hilary Putnam,  Reason,  Truth and History (
Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,  1981)  Chapter 6.  We have different conceptions of truth as we have different conceptions of rationality.  2 J.
 L.  Austin,  “ Truth,  Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,  supp.
 Vol.  24:  111- 128.  All page references to the reprint in Austin 1970,  117-
133.  3 Thomas Nagel,  The View from Nowhere ( New York:  Oxford University Press,  1986)
 p.  109.  4 Charles Sanders Pierce,  Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce ( 1931- 1950)
 vols.  1- 8,  ed.  By Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss ( vols.
 1- 6)  and A.  W.  Burks ( vols.
 7- 8)  ( Cambridge:  Harvard University Press)  5 William James,
 The Meaning of Truth ( Cambridge:  Harvard University Press)  1909.  See also Richard Kirkham,  Theories of Truth;
 A Critical Introduction ( Cambridge,  Massachusetts:  The MIT Press,  2001)  Chapter 3:
 Nonrealist theories.  6 Ibid.  p.  34.  7 William James,  Pragmatism (
Cambridge:  Harvard University Press,  1907)  p.  51.  8 Ludwig Wittgenstein,
 Philosophical Investigations,  trans.  G. E. M.  Anscombe (
Oxford:  Blackwell,  1953)  9 Gottlob Frege,  “ On Function and Concept,
 Translations from Philosophical Writings of Frege,  ed.  And trans.  M.  Black and P.  Geach (
Oxford:  Blackwell,  1960)  10 Donald Davidson,  “ Truth and Meaning,
 Synthese,  1967.  Volume 17,  pp.  304- 23.
 11 Aristotle,  Metaphysics.  In other words,  A is A,  A cannot be not A at the same time.  Contradictory statements are false.
 12 Hermann Hesse,  Siddhartha,  p.  143.  13 Hilary Putnam,  Reason,
 Truth and History ( Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,  1981)  Chapter 6:  Fact and Value.
 14 Immanuel Kant,  Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,  ( 1785)  trans.  by Lewis White Beck (
New York:  The Bobbs- Merrill Company,  Inc.  1959)  p.
 36.  15 Richard Rorty,  Philosophy and Social Hope ( London:  Penguin Books,  1999)
 Chapter 2:  Hope in Place of Knowledge:  A Version of Pragmatism.  16 Thomas Kuhn,  The Structures of Scientific Revolutions ( Chicago:
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