Thinkers across many traditions within philosophy have sought to identify the nature of truth. This isn't surprising, as a moment's reflection will reveal that one of our most basic projects as thinkers is to separate true claims, hypotheses, and theories from false ones. To do this, it would seem that we must first understand what it is for a claim, hypothesis, or theory to be true or false. That is, it would seem that to responsibly and effectively think about the world that we inhabit, we must understand the nature of truth.

The theories of truth that philosophers have defended over the years are multifarious, and this paper offers an overview of the major classic and contemporary theories. We will begin with the classic trifecta: correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories. We'll then move on to influential, if less popular, alternatives to these: primitivist and identity theories.

In the second half of the paper, we'll begin by covering Alfred Tarski's landmark semantic conception of truth, which among other things, served to safeguard the notion of truth during the anti-metaphysical campaigns of the logical positivists. We'll then move to what is now the dominant approach to truth, which was inspired by Tarski's work, as well as that of Frank Ramsey and Gottlob Frege: deflationism. We'll consider two deflationary theories, known as disquotationalism and minimalism. We'll also take up one of the main challenges to deflationism: that deflationists cannot account for the value of truth. Next, we'll look at two approaches that have been highly impactful in recent years: pluralism and relativism about truth. To close our discussion, we'll consider a pair of cutting-edge approaches that promise to transform the ways in which we study the nature of truth (and happen to have been respectively defended by the convenors): experimental and cross-linguistic truth theory.