What does truth mean?

What does truth mean? Truth can mean many different things, to different people. I believe, that truth is what people accept as being correct when it can not be proven factually. "It is a relationship that holds that holds between a proposition and the corresponding fact"(Truth[Inernet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]). "According to, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, truth is conformity to knowledge, fact, actuality, or logic." There are three major competing theories of truth. The three theories are pragmatic, correspondence, and coherence. The remainder of this paper will discuss all three of these theories, plus which theory seems to be the most defensible to me, and why.

The first theory of truth is the pragmatic theory. The pragmatic theory is a statement that is true if it allows you to interact effectively and efficiently, or in other words and works. The least that a belief is true, the less it uses such interaction. If the pragmatic theory holds the belief, it will lead to good consequences. An example of someone who is a pragmatist would be William James. "An example of a pragmatic theory situation would be , when you do a math problem that is supposed to be done a certain way, but do it in different way and end up getting the exact same answer

anyways"(Drifty's Rants-Truth). This is possibly the easiest theory of truth, because it basically means, if it's true, it "works"! Truth is made by human adjustment. An example of an argument of the pragmatic theory, would be that not all beliefs and ideas that are useful in solving practical problems turn out to be true. Therefore, truth cannot be explained in terms of the usefulness of beliefs and ideas in solving practical problems, which means that the pragmatic theory of truth could be incorrect.

The second theory of truth is the correspondence theory. The correspondence is the truth of falsehood of a belief the depends on its relationship to something that lies outside of the belief.