ABSTRACT
A rational person wants to sort out truths from falsehoods and to believe only the truths. Theorists of truth divide into two camps: those who think truth is a theoretically interesting and explanatory property and those who deny this. Correspondence, coherence and anti-realist theories of truth all hold that there is a nature to truth, discoverable by a priori reflection: correspondence to the facts, coherence with other beliefs and knowability respectively. 'Correspondence' has traditionally been understood to require a structural similarity between some privileged subset of basic or elementary truths and appropriate worldly entities. Complex propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions just if the truth-value of a complex proposition is fixed entirely by the truth-values of its contained elementary propositions. Correspondence theorists tend to be realists: they think of facts as mind-independent entities. The coherence theory of truth has traditionally been associated with idealism.
