Truth, Way, and Life: Pragmatic Reflections on the Concept of Truth

The present article opts for a pragmatic understanding of truth with a special focus on religion as a complex of belief and practice. Although the principle of accordance seems pertinent to the concept of truth, the argument is that there is no single definition of truth, which can account for the range of its actual use. The aim is to drive home this argument by showing how the concept of ‘truth’ is used in various ways and with different connotations, in religion, philosophy, and science. Although the article sides in overall terms with the pragmatic view of truth and language in William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, it also points to the necessity of taking a semantic level of propositional ‘truth’ into account in order to keep a relativizing notion of sheer fruitfulness at bay. In this respect, it is argued that one should distinguish between the way in which ‘truth’ is used, on the one hand, and the implicit beliefs that support such use, on the other. Among other things, the article traces an implicit understanding of truth as an ideal order of the world that pertains in different ways to a religious and a scientific view of reality. Referring to Foucault’s final studies, it is finally shown that the concept of truth in ancient philosophy was not used as an ontological predicate without also carrying the meaning of being realized as a way of life. In this respect Wittgenstein, James, and Foucault seem to converge in detecting a ‘practice of truth’.