Truth

Aristotle explains truth as ‘saying of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not’. Yet while this appears simple and clear, it leaves a number of issues unaddressed. Is truth relative or absolute, in other words can something be true relative to one standard and false relative to anther? Are there degrees of truth? What makes a true saying true? One answer is facts, but then what about negative truths such as ‘There is no Santa Claus’. Is this made true by a negative fact? Questions such as these have led philosophers to develop different theories of truth: principally, correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories, according to which some statement S is true if, respectively, a) it corresponds to the facts, or b) it coheres with other statements, or c) it warrants acting upon it.