In Defense of Nonpropositional Truth

ABSTRACT In contemporary philosophy, truth is often restricted to propositions or their bearers. Other uses of “true”—as in the case of “true friend”—are seen as philosophically insignificant. Arguments for this restriction are few and far between and require elaboration. By integrating contemporary and early modern views, we address this need by presenting two principal arguments for such restriction. The first argument concerns the primary and literal sense of “truth,” and the second focuses on epistemic usefulness. However, we show that both fail to motivate such a restriction. We argue that nonpropositional accounts of truth in the Tanakh and in Buddhism present unified senses of propositional and nonpropositional truth that resist the charge of epistemic uselessness and, as such, act as counterexamples to both arguments. Specifically, these non‐European accounts of truth show that one should not assume that propositional uses of “truth” are the only philosophically important uses.