The experience of the agreement between the meaning and what is itself present, meant, between the actual sense of an assertion and the self-given state of affairs, is inward evidence; the Idea of this agreement is truth, whose ideality is also its objectivity.

This is an experiment of acting as if you were dead. […] But what does it mean to be dead, when you are not totally dead? It means that you look at things the way they are as such, you look at the object as such. To perceive the object as such implies that you perceive the object as it is or as it is supposed to be when you are not there. To see the bottle as such means to see the bottle as it would be without me. If I were dead the bottle would remain the same as it is, the colour, the same consistency, and so on. So, to relate to an object as such means to relate to it as if you were dead. That’s the condition of truth, the condition of perception, the condition of objectivity, at least in their most conventional sense.

If there is irresolvable disagreement about the possibility of justifying truth claims, about standards of argumentation or evidential support, for example, between members of different linguistic, scientific or cultural communities, may I still supppose that there are – somewhere – the correct standards, the right criteria, in short that there is an objective truth of the matter? Or should I rather think that truth is ‘relative’ to cultures, languages, communities or even persons? While relativism (the second alternative) appears to be inconsistent, absolutism (the first alternative) seems to imply metaphysical assumptions. I would call this the antinomy of truth. Much important philosophical work has been done in recent decades to resolve this antinomy of truth; either by trying to show that absolutism need not be metaphysical or by trying to show that the critique of absolutism need not lead to relativism.

It is commonly supposed that the truth of a proposition consists in some relation which it bears to reality; and falsehood in the absence of this relation. The relation in question is generally called a “correspondence” or “agreement”; and it seems to be generally conceived as one of partial similarity to something else, and hence it is essential to the theory that a truth should differ in some specific way from the reality, in relation to which its truth is to consist. […] It is the impossibility of finding any such difference between a truth and the reality to which it is supposed to correspond which refutes the theory.

The notion that truths external to the human mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions.

The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.

Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.

All languages offer the possibility of distinguishing between what is true and what we hold to be true. The supposition of a common objective world is built into the pragmatics of every single linguistic usage. And the dialogue roles of every speech situation enforce a symmetry in participant perspectives.

We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither a visible target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a value, so the ‘pursuit of truth’ is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations. From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our beliefs are true, pragmatists conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most successful beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. […] But here we have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can’t consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think that they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a goal.

The mind is adequate to its objects insofar as the expectations which it frames on the basis of these activities are not liable to disappointment and the remembering which it engages in enables it to return to and recover what it had encountered previously, whether the objects themselves are still present or not (…) One of the great originating insights of tradition-constituted inquiries is that false beliefs and false judgments represent a failure of the mind, not of its objects. It is the mind which stands in need of correction. So the most primitive conception of truth is of the manifestness of the objects which present themselves to mind; and it is when mind fails to re-present that manifestness that falsity, the inadequacy of mind to its objects, appears.