When he was presented with the accused man Jesus of Nazareth, the governer Pontius Pilate asked a question laden with philosophical importance: “What is truth?” It’s a question that I think was adequately answered centuries earlier by Plato: “The essence of truth is to say of what is that it is, and to say of what is not that it is not.” In normal english, the essence of truth-telling is to tell it like it really is.
In this edition of the nuts and bolts ( a series in which I cover the fundamentals of philosophy and later, theology), I won’t be wading through theories of truth. What I am going to do, prompted by a recent conversation, is to discuss the distinction between two different kinds of truths: analytic and synthetic. It might sound a bit artificial at first to talk about distinguishing between different sorts of truth. Some statements are true, and some are not. Right? Bear with me.