TOK Reflections on Truth

A short essay I did last year regarding the various theories of truth:
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“Truth”, defined in a layman fashion, is the conforming of a proposition to reality, and is the most straightforward definition of this term. As we are taught in the module on truth, truth can be divided into three theories, each defining truth in slightly more detail. The first one, the correspondence theory of truth, is the agreement of our thoughts with reality, or in essence, the layman definition outlined above. However, it does have its flaws, the most apparent being the fact that if we are comparing a proposition to the reality of it in this world, do we not already possess an incorruptible example of the truth itself?
To address this issue, the coherence theory of truth was proposed, where “truth” is, in essence, defined as the agreement of a belief with a body of knowledge we possess. In this respect, if everyone agrees with a certain truth, it becomes fact to them, since there is a general consensus. However, this begs the question of whether, even though the large majority of people living on Earth agreed on a certain proposition to be true, there is any guarantee that this was truly truth.
Thus sprang the last theory of truth to address the problems the above theories of truth faced: the pragmatic theory of truth, where a proposition is “true” if it is useful and aids in the interests of the person concerned, while a proposition is declared false if it has utterly no utility towards a person’s personal interests. In this respect, the pragmatic theory of truth is personal to each and every one of us; if we were to adopt a code of living by the pragmatic theory of truth, each and every one of us would possess different truths evident in our lives, which would challenge the concept of truth.
Personally, of these three theories of truth, I believe that the correspondence theory of truth holds the most water, due to several experiences denying the latter two theories of truth to be accurate as far as I am concerned, as well as beliefs which justify my faith in the correspondence theory of truth. Firstly, to prove that the coherence theory of truth does not always bring the truth, we need only look at the renaissance era, where people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. This being common belief, it was held as FACT all the way until Galileo’s proofs were re-examined and showed that the general consensus of the time then, that the sun revolved around the Earth, was wrong. On a personal level, I have also experienced the coherence theory of truth going awry where truth is concerned. For example, when I was in primary school, when I was staring into a mirror, one of my classmates commented that one “should never look into a mirror when it is dark”, or else, he believed the spirit would depart from the body, leaving a lifeless husk. When he had said this, a complete stranger whom neither of us, knew who was standing nearby, turned to me, and affirmed the truth in that statement. From then on, I had been avoiding looking at mirrors in dark places on the basis that the statement was true, and until recently, have realized that there is no basis for such a phenomena to exist. As a result, the coherence theory does not always cohere to what can be proven truth beyond all measure, and therefore, the coherence theory of truth has little utility for me because to me.
I also disagree in the pragmatic theory of truth because “truth” here is relative and personal to each and every one of us. As a result, the “truth” expressed in such situations might not be true, simply because it is based on question’s level of utility in your life, and might produce absurd situations. For example, to a colour blind person, a banana being yellow is false because it does not help him in any way at all- all colours look the same to him. Therefore, using the coherence theory of truth, we are able to establish that our proposition of a banana being yellow is false, which does not cohere with sense perception and what we already know. Thus, in this respect, the pragmatic theory of truth is also unreliable.
On the other hand, I agree with the correspondence theory of truth because I believe that in addition to truths by sense perception, like the statement: “it is raining” (which can be true or false), there are also absolute, eternal truths, which are undoubtedly correct and impossible to prove otherwise. An example of this is the statement “two plus two equals to four”, where it was always equal four no matter what. Therefore, I believe that the correspondence theory of truth is the most accurate because when defining a truth, we are able to draw from a pool of “eternal truths”, which form the core base of truths, to which we are able to fairly compare. Moreover, a proposition cohering with an eternal truth remains a truth nonetheless, and not a proposition we are unable to verify the fidelity of.
The correspondence theory of truth, therefore, is in my opinion, the most accurate way to derive truth.