The naked figure of Truth is held aloft by her father, Time, who with his scythe subdues Falsehood, in her fine apparel and dissembling mask, while the baleful figure of Discord and Envy recedes, protesting. The subject may have held a personal significance for the artist; the day after he completed it he committed suicide. Yet, as the collector Caylus recalled: ‘there is no sense of his alienation of spirit in the work, it is even one of his most beautiful cabinet pictures’.
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.[1] In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences.
Truth is usually held to be the opposite of falsity. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, and science. Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself.[2] Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth.
Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. There are many different questions about the nature of truth which are still the subject of contemporary debates, such as: How do we define truth? Is it even possible to give an informative definition of truth? What things are truthbearers and are therefore capable of being true or false? Are truth and falsity bivalent, or are there other truth values? What are the criteria of truth that allow us to identify it and to distinguish it from falsity? What role does truth play in constituting knowledge? And is truth absolute, or is it merely relative to one's perspective?
