5 - Truth

Summary

More than most people, philosophers take truth very seriously, for they take as one of their primary tasks the investigation of the nature of truth. In many ways, this is a peculiar task: philosophers are not as interested in identifying true claims as they are in understanding what it means to say that a claim is true when it is true. Suppose we have some true statement. Here's one: “grass is green”. Philosophers want to know what unique properties that statement has that make it true. For instance, they will ask: if a statement is true, is it true for everyone? Is it always true? Can a true statement ever be false? If so, when? In virtue of what is the statement true? Philosophers are also interested in the so-called “truths of reason”, those logical, metaphysical and ethical statements that are routinely paraded about as absolutely true. Among these claims are: God exists; the world is/is not real; life is absurd; and happiness is the good. There are many others.

In this chapter, we investigate Nietzsche's criticisms of truth and his view of truth. We shall begin by canvassing Nietzsche's unwavering hostility to absolute truth. His criticisms of absolute truth range from semantic arguments about the function of the truth predicate in a language, through epistemological arguments that purport to show the impossibility of ever knowing that a statement is absolutely true, to practical arguments concerning the pernicious consequences of believing in absolute truths.