Abstract
This entry surveys five influential medieval theories of truth, paying particular attention to the bearers of truth within each theory as well as to their emphasis, whether metaphysical or semantic. (1) Anselm’s notion of truth is characterized by the concept of rectitude: something is true if it is/does what it ought to be/do, that is, if it conforms to God’s design for it (2) Abelard’s theory of truth revolves around the notion of the dicta of propositions, i.e., what is said by propositions. Dicta are the actual truth-bearers for Abelard. (3) Thomas Aquinas defends an approach to truth based on the notion of adequation of intellect and object. The fit can occur in both directions: an object can conform to the concept of it in its creator’s intellect, and a concept can conform to the object insofar as it represents it accurately in the knower’s intellect. (4) Theories of truth based on the concept of supposition provide recursive definitions of the truth of propositions based on the supposition of their terms, and reject any metaphysical import concerning the notion of truth. (5) Theories of truth emerging from fourteenth century treatises on insolubilia start out with a fundamentally Aristotelian definition of a true proposition as a proposition signifying as things are, which is then modified so as to introduce quantification over the signification of a proposition.
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Novaes, C.D. (2020). Truth, Theories of. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1665-7_505
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