When semantic, systemic, logical, or empirical truths come into conflict, theorists urge us to believe that truth as such has no cognitive value—that we literally should not care whether our beliefs are true or false, but only whether they enable us to achieve more substantive goals such as happiness and well-being. However, Sophists were urging much the same in the time of Plato, and—fortunately!—it seems unlikely that philosophers will ever entirely give up asking “What is truth?” and assuming that the answer is something of importance. Quite apart from anything else, giving up the question of truth would deprive them of the endless enjoyment to be derived from attempting to solve the various paradoxes, such as the liar paradox, which the notion of truth throws up.
For example, human beings have supported, at different times and places, various customs, moral codes, legal orders, political systems, and religious doctrines. Such diversity and variation is a basic fact about human culture and social life. In particular, it was the fact of the relativity of morality. What can be allowable in one culture is prohibited in another. So the truth that beef is delicious for Americans can be offensive to some Hindu people who regard cows as sacred animals. Americans cannot insist on their truths upon Indians because it is what their religion tells them – eating beef is sacrilegious.
In recent years, according to Lowe (2005) metaphysicians have been emphasizing again the connection between realism and truth that seems to have inspired many advocates of the correspondence theory. This attitude often finds expression in some version of the so-called truth-maker principle—the principle that every truth (or, at least, every contingent truth) must be made true by the existence of something in reality. Some advocates of the principle, such as David Armstrong, maintain that truth-makers are states of affairs, others that they are particularized properties, or tropes. So, for example, on the former view, it is Mars’s being red that makes true the proposition that Mars is red, while on the latter it is Mars’s redness that makes this true. Both approaches contend that the world contains a multiplicity of truth-makers, but neither insists, as some versions of the correspondence theory do, that there is a one-to-one correlation between truths and truth-makers. Indeed, truth-maker realism is not committed to the claim that truth consists in, or is definable in terms of, any independently specifiable relation between truth-bearers and other entities of any specific kind. For this reason, it is not vulnerable to many of the objections traditionally raised against the correspondence theory of truth, while at the same time inheriting the attractive realist and anti- relativist implications of that view.