Truth. In the history of philosophy, the concept of truth has been and has remained difficult and controversial. In antiquity philosophers for the most part assumed that there is an objective truth which it is their business as philosophers to find. The Sophists, notably Protagoras, questioned this assumption, proposing that, in one way or another, truth is relative, i.e., what is true for X may not be true for Y: a Laplander might find a Frenchman dark-skinned while an Ethiopian might find him fairskinned. Two basic theories of truth are (1) the correspondence theory and (2) the coherence theory. According to the former, that which corresponds to reality is true; according to the latter, that which coheres within a system of ideas. Other theories include the pragmatic: the true is that which "works." The meaning of truth is best perceived in examining what appears to be false. Both Plato and Aristotle, each in his own way, uphold a correspondence theory of truth. The notion of a "double truth" (e.g., that what is true in religion may be false in science and what is true in science may be false in religion) was much discussed in the Middle Ages, both in Christian and in Islamic philosophy. Thomas Aquinas and others insisted that truth must be one, so that there cannot be any such difference that is fundamental.

Leibniz made an important distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact. This became the basis for the now generally accepted distinction between the analytical and the synthetic. That there are two right angles in every triangle is an analytical truth, i.e., it follows from a mathematical system; it does not tell us anything that is not already in some sense known; i.e., it exhibits a property of all triangles and that there could not be a triangle that lacks this property any more than there could be a triangle that is not a three sided figure. The case of synthetic propositions is radically different. There is no necessity about the statement that John's house is white; it might be yellow or pink; indeed it might have been yellow last week and now pink. The truth or falsity relates to empirical fact not to a system of thought. This distinction has been expressed in various ways, e.g., Hume distinguished between "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact." More recent philosophers have continued to discuss subtleties in the problem of the nature and meaning of truth, but the correspondence-coherence distinction, in one form or another, retains basic importance.

Geddes MacGregor, Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy, New York: Paragon House, 1989

truth : (nt.) sacca; taccha; tatha || he took it for truth: so taṃ saccan ti gaṇhi.

A.P. Buddhadatta Mahathera, Concise Pali-English and English-Pali Dictionary [available as digital version from Metta Net, Sri Lanka]

bden

[translation-san] satya

[translation-san] tattva

[translation-eng] {Hopkins} truth; true

Jeffrey Hopkins' Tibetan-Sanskrit-English Dictionary

bden pa

[translation-san] {MV,MSA} satya

[translation-eng] {Hopkins} truth; reality [i.e., what exists the way it appears]

[division-bod] dbye ba 1 kun rdzob bden pa/ 2 don dam bden pa/

[division-eng] Divisions: (1) conventional truth; (2) ultimate truth

Jeffrey Hopkins' Tibetan-Sanskrit-English Dictionary