What Does 'True' Do for Us?

In this fifth lecture of the series, Amie L. Thomasson turns her attention to truth, a concept at the heart of both philosophy and public life. She argues that traditional attempts to define truth through correspondence to facts create more problems than they solve. Instead, she proposes a reverse engineering approach: examining what the word "true" and the noun "truth" actually do in our language and reasoning. Thomasson traces how basic practices of accepting and rejecting claims, saying "yeah" or "nah," give rise to more sophisticated truth talk. She explores truth as a device of generalization, a norm governing assertion, and a tool that puts friction into inquiry by forcing us to resolve disagreements. Drawing on pragmatist insights, she shows how different discourses operate with different standards of evaluation, without sliding into relativism. Understanding truth in this way, she argues, helps us really understand why truth matters.