On Truth...

By: Maria Odete Madeira

(Worked from Heidegger’s thinking)

If the discourse speaks the truth, which as a word («truth») that it is, it states, about the discourse, that it is true, because it speaks the truth. Truth?

What is, thus, understood by «truth»? This word «truth», elevated (?) and spent and worn out, that designates that which makes true something that is true, but what is «the true»?

It is said of something, that it is true if that something has an effective (actual) reality, thus, it could be said of the things that are true, that they are effective (in act), which leads one to state that the contrary of the true, that is, the false would be a non effective (in act) reality, however, it is the case that the things that are false, are also effective (actual), as realities of which it is said that are not true. Being effective (actual), therefore, characterizes both the true and the false (Plato, Parricide).

But if both (true and false) are effective, what can distinguish the true from the false? The character of authenticity? The true will be the authentic and the false the inauthentic. This authentic resends towards something anticipated and constantly considered as authentic of a reality and that is in conformity with that same reality.

Thus, of a statement, it is said to be true when that which it states is in conformity with the thing that is stated in it, and about which the statement itself is. What is in conformity is what agrees, then, being true and truth mean (in the statement) the agreement of something with what was previously thought about it and the conformity of the thing with that which is intended in the statement.

There is, thus, a double character in the concordance such that the truth is the resembling of the thing to the knowledge (veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus) and, also, such that the truth is the resembling of the knowledge to the thing (veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem). The truth, thus conceived, presupposes the truth of the thing in the statement and always means a “to conform to”…, concordance, compatibilized order, synchronized order… relations, proportions… systems…