Property of Truth

The property of truth is a possible property of a statement that hinges on a given concept of truth.

Even the simplest of statements such as 2 + 2 = 4 still require some definition around what these signs mean and what laws govern the notion that these two numbers as parameters to this operation equal this result. It may seem trivial -- and it may be in a given context that's already past such elementary matters --, but truth is not an inherent property.

The exercise of defining truth and the methods to discern it is central to the formation of a paradigm.

For example, take the statement:

The axis of the Earth is tilted 23.439281 degrees

Here, we have several narrowly-defined ways to evaluate truth as a property, such as the source of the measurement, the fittingness of the measuring unit, the rate of change over time. Because these are all coherent within the paradigm of astronomical science, the truthness of the statemnet as a property can be debated more rigorously. However, this still shows that such a property is relative to the paradigm that defines it conceptually.

There is no concrete truth to be observed as a counterpart to the concept of truth in the same way as there is a Baobab to observe as a counterpart to the concept of a tree. At the same time, there are numerous statements someone can make that can trivially be proven false without requiring a whole concept of truth to argue against them.

We can observe that a number of liquids boil at 100 degrees Celsius and call that an observation of truth, but this observation only yields truths about the liquids. Truth itself as a concrete entity would remain impossible to discern. What it does yield is a particular method of obtaining truthful observations.