§ 13 The value of truth and beauty

What sets truth and beauty apart is that things judged true and things judged beautiful thereby acquire a special use value.¹

Truths have reliability as their use-value.

A truth must at least be consistent with our conceptual model of the world we think about. At this stage, what we count as knowledge aligns with beliefs and can be acted on according to the confidence we hold in those beliefs.

But to be reliable as information, that is, as information that can be acted upon with full confidence, that truth also needs to be an accurate reflection of the actual working and behaviour of the world we think about. We test this empirically.

That is a further requirement: an accurate truth is not only consistent with one’s beliefs but also provides an accurate reflection of reality. Only then can it be used reliably in our interactions with our environment. With the word accuracy, then, we mean a high degree of reliable predictive power.

Something beautiful necessarily exhibits some form of unity and coherence. Beauty begins as a satisfaction in some fit and ends as an ecstatic joy when things fit particularly well into a coherent whole and unified experience.

Beauty has fittingness as its use value. Things that fit together well promise structural adequacy, usefulness, sense, coherence, and consistency. If two pieces of wood forming a joint fit well, or if two stones fit together well, they promise structural reliability. That is satisfying, and even joyful, especially when the stakes are high. Something that fits inferentially with some conceptual constellation, satisfies, and may even give joy.

A beautiful thing must fit to make a unified whole, or fit into a greater whole to count as beautiful.

And as our experience of the world is wholly conceptual, to count as beautiful, a thing, which is an idea we have, must fit harmoniously with some other idea or ideas we have, of which we might well not be consciously aware.

Beauty is a fitting of conceptions with beliefs, theories, ideas as well as our taste, always, and in whatever way possible, making a coherent and consistent whole.

Looking upriver, things that fit have passed the first hurdle on the way to becoming truths and goods. After all, both a truth and a good must fit with our conception of things, or fit with an explanation that is compelling enough to make us adapt our belief structure and frame of reference.

Looking downriver, when truths and goods start fitting together, they give joy and satisfaction as in this way they begin to form further coherent and consistent wholes.

Truths fit with the facts as understood within a particular conceptual model and, as such, quickly qualify as beautiful or ugly.

That is why truths and virtues often have such enormous aesthetic appeal, either along the dimension of beauty, such as a mathematical formula, or indeed along the dimension of ugliness, such as a horrid truth about someone’s past.

To understand this, it is well to remind ourselves that ugliness is a special case of beauty. It is useful as the negation of the beautiful, in which case they are mutually exclusive: that which is beautiful is, in such cases, not ugly, and that which is ugly is not beautiful.

In this way, we tidy up our own tastes as a set of personal convictions and positions regarding any subject, and concomitantly, adapt our frame of reference.

The oppositional nature of the ugly and the beautiful works well for the purposes of keeping one’s own taste tidy, but it can also take on more complex forms.

Both are judgments with regard to fitting. The beautiful is judged to fit well; the ugly to fit badly.

Something that does not fit well may fit well with the idea of not fitting well.

In this way, an instance of inappropriateness, for example, can be considered to fit beautifully with the set of things that fit badly. The beautiful can thus be considered ugly and the ugly beautiful, especially by those who delight in provocation of some sort.

The good, like any truth, is quick to become aesthetically appealing, whilst the bad is set up to be unappealing. A good fits a plan or an action with a use or a purpose. Wisdom is a beautiful thing because it manages to fit good means to good ends.

Mere cleverness, by those who admire wisdom, is considered bad because it matches merely effective means to any desired purpose, allowing people to do things for the wrong reasons and to do wrong for unworthy reasons. Those who admire wisdom are wary of mere cleverness, even though it is sometimes hard not to admire a cleverly thought-through robbery and even find that beautifully done.

A person might find something beautiful if it fits with their ideas about what is admirable, and thus be judged thoroughly worrying and anxious-making by another person.

So far, the vagaries of beauty, truth, and goodness. and the way they relate to each other through use value.

The question we should be starting to address now is how use is expressed and communicated. How do I recognise a truth, a goodness or a beauty? For this to happen, I must make them into objects that I can exchange with others on the basis of a mutual understanding of their worth.

All three are objectifiable when their assertion in the form of a judgment, such as “This is beautiful“ or “This is true”, is presumed stable within a particular frame of reference.

A truth held as a truth by one person may be objectified if, and only if, it is consistent with the frame of reference held by that person.

Unfortunately, that means very little. It means only that if I believe in the spaghetti monster, propositions about the spaghetti monster consistent with my beliefs and legitimate with regard to my frame of reference may be held up as truths to me and yet be completely nonsensical to another.

Just to remind ourselves, a person’s frame of reference is the set of concepts a person has access to while thinking or expressing thoughts. It is not just the number of concepts a person has access to, but the richness of those concepts in terms of the properties they are dressed with and their consequent structuring into a space of implications. The frame of reference shapes a person’s belief structure and taste.

That truth may be shared with others as a truth insofar as my frame of reference and consequent belief structure and taste align with theirs.

So, whilst everything may fit beautifully, nonsense remains possible, even when a fact is objectified and given as a truth.

A beauty found in some event, construction, or situation, may similarly be assumed to be findable by all and can thus be objectified.

A beauty is determined by a person’s taste and the finding of a fit within the conditions imposed by that taste. A taste, again at the risk of becoming tiresome, I hold to be the set of critical positions a person holds relative to any subject based on their beliefs, which is shaped by a person’s frame of reference.

A frame of reference is unique to each subject and communicable only to the extent that we can try to express our thoughts accurately with regard to our own frame of reference.

Those hearing our thoughts expressed and deliberating them naturally process them according to the dictates of their own frame of reference.

This is where misunderstanding and interpretation occur.

Lossless communication can only occur insofar as the two frames of reference overlap accurately, that is, fit together perfectly.

This is a very rare pleasure. But headway can be made in conversation where meanings are often negotiated through learning. We learn to deal with each other’s vocabularies.

But that does not yet get us all the way to a useful position. To assert that something is true and that something is good or beautiful prepares something for use as the something so judged thereby acquires reliability, worthiness and admirability.

At the same time, to say that something is true, good or that something is beautiful merely delivers the judgment; it does not yet describe and explain that judgment against criteria made explicit to measure and place the judgment, nor does it follow through any inferential implications. As such, the use value of the mere judgment is limited. It says merely. Things judged such and so have been given a label of approval.

To make the underpinning of an ethical, alethic (a judgment as to whether something is true or not) or aesthetic judgement (a judgment as to whether something fits or not) explicit allows the conceptual properties involved in the inferential exercise to be explored and take up a privileged place within the space of implications.

Making things explicit allows two frames of reference to find each other’s particularities through conversational negotiation.

What makes truths and beauties attractive is (and please excuse the ugly word) their objectifyability as this makes it possible for subjectivity to convince on the basis of recognisability.

For me to convince you, without recourse to fallacy, not only that this or that is beautiful, but also why, I have to explain the fit I admire to you. For this, we need to negotiate the landscape of our respective frames of reference and taste.

That is what I would like to concentrate on for a bit.

© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

1. A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, Tu/e (2024)  ↩︎