Knowledge claims are true

One way in which beliefs are contrasted with knowledge, is to suggest that knowledge is
known to be ‘true’, that is to say that knowledge claims capture some fact about reality or the
way the world actually is. What makes something ‘true’ and how this is established,
however, are highly contentious and generally depend on the way that some community of
knowers or an AOK has decided the criteria for what ‘truth’ amounts to.
Calling a claim a ‘belief’, or saying ‘I believe that ...’ means something like, ‘I think it’s true
and I might have some reasons for thinking this is true, but I’m not sure or certain’, or it
might mean ‘I am absolutely certain this is true, but don’t have a method by which I can
make you as certain as I am’ (see Chapter 1 for a more in-depth discussion of the concept of
certainty).

Correspondence theory
In some cases, a claim can be said to be true if it
corresponds
with facts about the world. So were I to claim that the
statement ‘Mitochondria provide cells with the energy
needed to function is true’, what I mean is that there really
are mitochondria in cells and they really do provide the
energy needed to function. There is a fact about
mitochondria and cells and my claim captures and describes
that fact, and this is what it means for that claim to be true.
The claims you find in biology, chemistry, physics or other
sciences generally follow this sort of understanding of truth.
An important part of this is that it doesn’t matter what I think
about the world, or what I think about the claim, some claims are just true or false depending
on how the world actually is. People who claim that ‘the Earth is flat’, for instance, are
simply mistaken, because there is a fact about the world’s shape, regardless of what they
think about it. The actual shape of the Earth simply does not correspond with the claim ‘the
Earth is flat’.

Coherence theory
Some of the other claims in Set 3 above are less clearly associated with a fact in the world.
These claims cannot really correspond to the world in the same way as the others, as it
is not entirely clear what in the world they’d apply to. The trigonometry identity or the claim
about hobbits’ feet don’t obviously correspond to the actual world, but we’d still want to say
that they are true and that we know them.
Another way to think about truth is to say that
some claim is ‘true’ when it is coherent with all
the other true claims in a system. When
investigating whether hobbits have hairy feet,
we might see what else is true in the world of
Middle Earth. We would find that, indeed,
‘Hobbits are little human-like creatures with
oddly hairy feet’ and that this fact is consistent
with other truths in that world. So the claim that
‘hobbits have hairy feet’ is true. Were I also to
say that ‘Gandalf is the name of the King of the
Elves’, this claim contradicts all that we know
about Middle Earth, so we’d say that this claim is false, even though there is no fact in this
world which would ever show it to be true or false (unless you consider the book The Lord of
the Rings as the object which shows it to be false).
Mathematics is generally accepted to be true in this sense; it’s hard to see just what is being
described by mathematical equations. We don’t bump up against numbers and sine and
cosine in the world, but we know that certain mathematical truths are still available. What
makes the quadratic formula equivalent to quadratic equations isn’t some fact about the world
around us, but rather facts about the system of mathematics
Some claims seem to occupy a middle ground. Measuring the supply and demand of goods
and relating them to price, for instance, isn’t as straight forward as getting out a microscope
and tape measure. ‘Supply’ and ‘demand’ are concepts that relate to general behaviours of
groups of people. Although we might measure and tally particular instances of people
wanting to buy particular items, this isn’t quite the same as measuring the ‘demand’ in the
market for that good. These concepts, while they build on individual instances of real-world
actions, are also truths about concepts which exist as ideas, not objects.

Sourced from:
TOK Hodder Education