Truth, Goodness & Beauty

Truth

In order to count as true, a proposition has at least three conditions to fulfil.

Firstly, a proposition must be consistent with our beliefs about how the world fits together as a single whole of working parts which can be made subject to a reasoned harmony, that is a coherent and consistent set of such beliefs.

This is what we must bring to truth: we must believe something to be true for it to be able to apply for the status of truth.

This set of beliefs can be made objective, or as I prefer to say it, they can be properly objectified, so that, secondly, anything we say, can, on demand, be demonstrated to be consistent with our beliefs, which in turn must be able to form a coherent whole with which every part is consistent.

This condition demands that we use the word true for any proposition that is consistent with our model of the world.

To take a silly example. If I were to believe that the world was created by a spaghetti monster, I would use the word ‘true’ to qualify the proposition that the world was made by a spaghetti monster.

But just in case you think I believe such a thing, there is a third condition that a proposition must fulfil in order to count as true. And this third condition is that a proposition models what it attempts to model accurately. I.e. that our conceptually constructed model is an accurate model of what it tries to model.

At this stage I cannot discount the existence of a spaghetti monster, but I can at least bracket the need for such a concept and pursue science on the basis of things I can say with greater confidence.

The conceptual model must correspond to the observed behaviour of the world at a scale deemed appropriate for the conversation. In other words, truth must be believed to be true, be demonstrated to be true inferentially and shown to be true empirically in order to count as true.

Goodness

Similarly, in order to count as good a proposition has two conditions to fulfil.

Firstly, such a proposition must be consistent with our beliefs regarding the proper use of a thing with reference to the purpose we give it or use we make of it.

And secondly this given purpose or use must be consistent with ideas about our relation to the world in terms of use and purpose.

A fully coherent and properly objectified view of goodness is more difficult to achieve than a fully objectified view of the truth of things as the relationships the idea of the good governs in judgment are organized perspectivally, that is from a specific viewpoint.

A view of the good is necessarily subjective but can achieve a collective sense of value through intersubjective discourse.

All talk of goodness is best left subjective or intersubjective as all attempts to objectify goodness beyond that run amok.

Beauty

is the requirement of a proposition to be seen as consistent and coherent with any more or less coherent set of ideas so that we can speak of ‘wholes’ with working ‘parts’ that ‘fit together’ to form what we might call a reasoned harmony in which beauty truth and goodness all give their best performance, thus bringing joy if it works, and sadness if it does not.

As such beauty governs all our judgments including those concerning truth and goodness from the point of view of coherence and consistency.

Truth and goodness form subsets of the beautiful, the one objectifiable, the other subjectifiable.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. 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.