Sparksam's Blog

What Is Truth and What Defines the Truth?

Samuel Klutse · · 11 min read
Updated
truth philosophy series

The Ground Beneath My Feet

A pile of newspapers stacked on top of each other Photo by Utsav Srestha on Unsplash

We are in March 2026, and the world, as some people, if not most of the world, would describe it, is on fire. There is mayhem in so many places than one cannot keep track of. Ukraine-Russia is in the 4th year, the Middle East is locked in cycles of violence. Across Africa, we have Sudan, the Eastern Congo, and the Sahel, which conflicts rage but have far less international attention that I think they deserve, but I digress.

Left and Right, we are hit with headlines that flatly contrast with each other on the same events, and sometimes the bias is clearly visible and sometimes is more subtle.

At some point, I had to ask myself a few questions:

  • What is the truth?
  • What makes me think something is true?
  • How can I ascertain that something is true?

As the old saying goes, the more you look, the less you see”. These questions made me realize that the implications of truth reach into everything. Let’s think about it for a second.

  • In Religion, we have billions of people that belong to faiths that claim the hold of absolute truth, yet the claims contradict one another. They cannot all be right. Right?
  • Talking about Science, very educated people knew the Earth was the center of the universe until Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler proved it was not. This proves that even scientific “truth” is provisional; the best answer we have until a better one arrives.
  • Politics, I hate talking about this one. Thankfully we can all agree that the same facts can be waved around to serve different agendas.
  • Let’s think about Technology, AI can generate a photograph of an event that never took place, a speech never given, and it looks and sounds entirely convincing.

Those are just small examples that, when we stack them up, the ground beneath our feet does not feel as solid as we thought. What is true? And what is not?

These are not new questions. For millenia, thinkers have asked them. I tried to find what the philosophers, the logicians, and the skeptics had to say about: What truth is.

The Dictionary Definition

The natural first stop is the dictionary. Merriam-Webster defines truth as “the body of real things, events, and facts” (actuality) or, more concisely, “the property of being in accord with fact or reality.” There it is. Clean, and simply put, truth is what matches reality.

It is a very satisfying definition, one on which our civilization is built, and subconsciously, that’s how we see the truth. Courts for example, will ask witnesses to tell?? “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. The truth here feels like a solid, stable object, that one can see if you put it on a table. Something that could be inspected.

There are cracks to it. If the truth is a “conformity with fact”, then who determines the facts? What do we count as reality and who says what reality is? For example, two people can look at the same event and walk away with opposing accounts, both strongly believing what actually happened. Who is then in accord with fact?

The dictionary defines truth with an assumption that facts and reality are not up for debate. But in reality, the world we live in says otherwise. At least, we have a starting point, but not an answer. Let’s find something sturdier. Let’s go further back to the people that made the truth their life’s work.

The Philosophers

A marble bust of a man with curly hair Photo by Felipe Pérez Lamana on Unsplash

If truth were easy, I think the greatest minds in history would have answered this question and case closed. But instead, we are left with a trail of brilliant, incomplete answers, where each one illuminates a different face of the problem while leaving others in shadow. Let’s check four of them.

Plato: Truth as Perfect Form

Plato believed that truth exists independently of us. It is perfect, unchanging, and eternal. In The Republic (Book VII), he described our everyday experience as shadows flickering on a cave wall (The Allegory of the Cave). The real objects casting those shadows, what he called the “Forms”, exist in a higher realm that most people never access. A chair you sit in, for example, is just a rough copy of the perfect Form of “chair.” Justice as we practice it in a courtroom is a pale imitation of the Form of Justice itself. Truth, for Plato, is not something we construct. It is something that we discover, if we are disciplined enough to turn away from the shadows and look toward the light.

This is a breathtaking vision. We commonly say, not knowing the truth is being kept the dark, but here is the problem. If truth lives in a realm only the enlightened few can reach, then who decides who qualifies as enlightened? In practice, this becomes a power game. The philosopher-king who claims to see the Forms gets to dictate reality to everyone else. Plato’s truth is absolute, but access to it is suspiciously exclusive.

Descartes: Truth Through Radical Doubt

René Descartes took a totally different path. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he came in hot and decided to doubt everything. Totally everything! His senses, the external world, even mathematics, just to see if anything survived. After doubting it all, he was left with the act of doubting itself. If he was doubting, that means he was thinking. And if he was thinking, then he existed. Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am.”) I imagine the Ah Ah moment he must have had. From that single robust point, he decided to rebuild all of human knowledge on a foundation of certainty.

This method is very very powerful, I have to acknowledge. But, as robust as doubt is, exiting doubt is not an easy task. From “I exist”, to prove the “external world”, Descartes had to make a belief-based argument on the existence of God, which his entire reconstruction was based on. In a nutshell, he started by trying to move beyond faith and assumption and ended up just doing that.

Nietzsche: Truth as a Human Invention

Friedrich Nietzsche turned the table over entirely. In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he argued that truth is not discovered or deduced; it is invented. He said, “There are no facts, only interpretations,”. According to Nietzsche, What we call truth are just metaphors that have been used so long we have forgotten they are metaphors. In his view, truth is shaped by power, perspective, and the will of whoever gets to define the terms.

Although I do think his position is thrilling, I also find it deeply unsettling. Hear me out! If nothing is objectively true, then what he claimed is not objectively true either. His relativism, just contradicts itself, but it is very obvious when we look around us that truth is wielded as a tool of power, and very often, dominant narratives crush inconvenient facts. There is probably an overstatement in what Nietzsche said, but it cannot be dismissed as it is a hard warning.

William James: Truth as What Works

William James, approached the impasse with a practical move. In Pragmatism (1907), he proposed that truth is not about matching some hidden reality or surviving philosophical doubt, it is about results. Simply put, an idea is true if it works. If it helps you navigate the world, if it produces useful and reliable outcomes. Truth is not a static property; it is something that happens to an idea when that idea proves its worth in practice.

That would make sense, right? let me ask this. Works for who? and under what conditions? A lie can be very useful. (Lies got me out of few situations myself 😄). On a serious note, propaganda works, at least for a while, at least for the people that create it. If truth is whatever produces results, then we have no principled way to distinguish what is genuinely true from a very convenient fiction. We could say, James gives us a working definition, but it is dangerously flexible.

Here we are with four thinkers, four frameworks, and none of them holds up without a crack running through it.

  • Plato’s truth is inaccessible.
  • Descartes’ truth rests on faith.
  • Nietzsche’s truth undermines itself.
  • James’s truth can justify almost anything.

Each one of them gives us something valuable, just like a piece of the puzzle, but none of them gives us a solid ground to stand on.

The question remains, what is the ground beneath our feet? what is truth? What defines the truth?

What I’m left with

Silhouette of a person looking out through a window at the sea Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

So here I am, back from this little philosophical deep dive, and let’s be honnest: I do not have an answer 😅. For the least, I looked.

I am still in quest of how to assess and discern what is true from what is not. Plato was right that some truths feel bigger than our individual perspectives. Descartes was right that rigorously doubting is one of the sharpest tools we have. Nietzsche was right that power shapes what gets to be called truth. James was right that ideas earn their value in practice. But there is not a unified framework I could use in the morning to sort the news headlines cleanly into true and false.

The wars are still going. The contradictory coverage is still flowing. If anything, the philosophy made it worse, because now I cannot even pretend there is a simple standard I am failing to apply. The standard itself is the problem.

I do think that sitting with a discomfort of not knowning the truth might be the most honest thing I can do. Not picking a team. Not adopting one philosopher’s lens and pretending it covers everything. The discomfort of not having a clean answer is not a failure of thinking. It might be what real thinking actually feels like.

What I keep coming back to is the act of questioning itself, not as a performance, but as a discipline. The refusal to accept any single source, any single framework, any single voice as the final word. That refusal does not give me certainty. It does not make me right. But it keeps me from being easy to fool, including by myself.

In a world saturated with confident claims and algorithmically curated realities, that might be the closest thing to intellectual honesty I can manage.

I did not mean for this to be this long. It’s the longest I have written, but to conclude, I am not done with this question. Not even close. But I wanted to start here, with the admission that I do not know, and that I am choosing to keep looking anyway.

What Comes Next

Two dirt paths diverging in a green forest Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

You know what? Maybe the scope was too broad to have an answer to that question. In some future posts, probably; God willing; I want to explore some questions from different angles. Angles where truth gets made, broken, and fought over every day:

  • Religion – billions of people live by truths accepted on faith, not evidence (The belief system). What makes a belief true to the believer, and does it matter whether anyone else agrees?
  • Science – physics, mathematics, and the hard sciences give us truths that are supposedly provable. But are they absolute, or just the best answers we have until better ones arrive?
  • AI & Technology – Now we have systems that generate “truth” without understanding a word of it. What happens when the source of information has no concept of honesty? (👀 AI, I see you!)
  • Media – This is an entire industry built on deciding what is true on our behalf, and packaging it for us to consume before we can even if possible examine it ourselves.
  • Politics – Hmmmm. Here, truth stops being a question and becomes a tool of power, bent and sharpened to serve whoever holds it.

These are angles that we could explore in other articles. Before I leave, let me leave you with this. I promise, it is not a clifhanger.

If you cannot fully trust the philosophers, the institutions, the algorithms, or even your own experience to deliver the truth reliably, how do you do it? How do you find the truth? What is true?

Till the next one, Stay safe and stay blessed!

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