less, thanks to the influence of modern philosophy, that ideal continues to have a strong impact on the question of the essence of truth.
Thus, among the various meanings of the word truth, the real priority goes to the sense of truth that is oriented to propositional statements. In order to first get some (in fact, very extrinsic) clarity on this ambiguous word “truth,” let me mention some of its meanings by simply listing them at this point without going into the relevant explanations of what they mean.
In the first place, truth is understood to be a feature of statements about things. Truth is thus a property of propositions, by virtue of which they express something just as it is.
Secondly, however, truth is understood not simply as a property of propositions and statements. We also call the statement itself a truth, as when we say: “‘Two plus two equals four’ is a truth,” or “There are many truths” (i.e., many [true] propositions and statements), or when we speak of eternal and temporal truths or of absolute and relative truths. In all these cases, truth is not just a property of propositions but is the propositions themselves.
Thirdly, truth means the same as knowledge of a truth, as when we say, “So-in-so cannot bear the truth.” That means that so-in-so resists knowledge of the truth, hides from it.
Fourthly, we also use the word truth to mean an aggregate of true propositions about a state of affairs. When we say, “We want to learn the truth about this or that event,” this refers to the collection of possible statements that must be made if we are to have access to the event just the way it happened, and, if we may say so, just the way it is. [10]
Fifthly, truth also has the sense of “the true,” where “the true” means the real, just as it is. When we speak of “true gold,” we mean real, genuine gold. The same goes for speaking of the “true God.” In these cases, our statements are not focused on the mere things we are speaking about, so that the statement would be true by simply expressing how things are out there. It’s quite the reverse. In these cases a thing is properly called “true” only when it is in such a way as to correspond to its “idea.” When something is what it should be according to the idea of that thing, only then can we say, for example, it is “true gold” and not “sham gold,” mere fool’s gold.
Pulling these different senses of truth together, we see a formal structure that recurs in all of them. In the first four cases, the statement is true when it speaks of the thing just as the thing is. But in the fifth case—“true” in the sense of “real”—it is the reverse. The thing is true when it is just as it is according to its idea, the essence of the thing as apprehended by reason (νοῦς or even λόγoς). In this latter case, genuine gold is what corresponds to the idea of gold. In both cases, however, truth has the formal structure of just-as or as-so.