¹ It seems obvious that truth is descriptive, that it is giving just the facts about the world. (Without a definition of ‘descriptive property’, however, there may be some doubt.) And if truth is descriptive and the descriptive/evaluative dichotomy is mutually exclusive, truth cannot be evaluative. But there is no reason to think that the dichotomy is mutually exclusive, and hence it may be that truth is both. There seem to be other such properties. When we call an action ‘just’, for example, we are describing it as well as evaluating it. Truth may be the same way. For the descriptive/evaluative distinctinon, see Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. For the possibility that truth is both, see Kovach, Adam, ‘Truth as a Value Concept’, In Circularity, Definition and Truth, edited by Chapuis, A. and Gupta, A. (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2000)Google Scholar, and Lynch, Michael, True to Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

² Much recent work address this question, rather than the question I ask in this paper, see, for example, Coates, Allen, ‘Explaining the Value of Truth’, American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2009), 105–115Google Scholar, and Piller, Christian, ‘Desiring the Truth and Nothing but the Truth’, Noûs 43 (2009) 193–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Chisholm, Roderick, Brentano and Intrinsic Value (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 3Google Scholar).

⁴ The primary reason to doubt that it is truth that is important is the phone book objection: If it is their truth that confers value upon truths, I might as well start memorizing the phone book, for it is a treasure-trove of truths. And yet that would not be a worthy pursuit; hence, it is not truth alone that makes a proposition valuable. See, for example, Sosa, Ernest, ‘For the Love of Truth?’ Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, ed. Fairweather, A. & Zagzebski, L. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 49–62)Google Scholar. I think this objection shows only that not all truths are equally valuable: see section 3 below.

⁵ In arguing against Plato's Form of the Good, Aristotle says (translating loosely), ‘Honor is good and wisdom is good and pleasure is good, but they are good for very different reasons and in very different ways. There can be no single Form that accounts for them all’ (1096b23–25). See Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986Google Scholar, 295, but the whole book can be seen as a hymn to the incommensurability of values). For discussion and references on the intransitivity of the ‘better than’ relation, see Rachels, Stuart, ‘Counterexamples to the Transitivity of Better Than’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (1998) 71–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ James, William, ‘The Will to Believe’ (reprinted in Writings 1878–1899, edited by Myers, Gerald E., New York: The Library of America, 445–704)Google Scholar. This is often expressed that one should believe p if and only if p is true. But the word ‘pursue’ seems to ask us to seek truth, rather than merely believe what is true. Hence a lot of the work on the topic misses the mark.

Piller (op. cit. note 2) has recently argued against the latter half of the norm that if I desire (if p then q), and p is the case, then I should rationally desire q, or at least that I have a reason to. This is clearly false in cases in which q has an influence on p. Let's say you and I are deciding which movie to watch. I don't want to see Casablanca, but I do want to please you. I desire that we watch Casablanca only if you want to watch it. I notice that we are watching Casablanca. Thus I have reason to want you to want to watch it. This case seems odd because your choice is instrumental in its being the case that we're watching the movie.

⁷ James says: ‘Yet since almost any object may some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious’. William James, Pragmatism (reprinted in Writings 1902–1910, edited by Kuklick, Bruce, New York: The Library of America, 479–624, 575)Google Scholar. This may be taken to imply that every truth is equally valuable over long enough periods of time. Now, while it is true that not every proposition that is valuable at some time is valuable right now to me, this doesn't imply that all truths are valuable. There will never be a situation in which it is valuable to know how many gnats were swirling about my head last summer. Hence the hedges in James' remark.

⁸ Rosen, Gideon, ‘Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction’, in Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology, edited by Hale, Bob and Hoffmann, Aviv (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. I use Rosen because his notion of ground holds between true propositions. Other philosophers have other theories of grounding as holding between other kinds of entities.

⁹ There is a small problem with transitivity. The grounding relation is transitive; if a grounds b and b grounds c, then a grounds c. But this allows us only two levels, those propositions that are grounded and those that are not, and hence fundamentality is a binary property. But, since grounding is asymmetric, the facts can be ordered into discrete levels. If a grounds b and there is no fact c such that a grounds c and c grounds b, then b is one level above a. In general, if a fact is grounded in a set of facts, that fact is one level less fundamental than the least fundamental fact in the set.

¹⁰ Op. cit. note 8, 111.

¹¹ Kripke, Saul, ‘Outline of a Theory of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975) 690–716CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² In the Analogy of the Sun, Plato says that the Good is beyond truth, but in the Analogy of the Divided Line and the Allegory of the Cave, he identifies the Good with truth.

¹³ A key part of Plato's theory of truth is his theory of the Good (or Beautiful or True). This Form is an exception to No Upper Bound. If there is a truth that implies all truths, its value would be at least as great as the sum of the values of all other truths. But a truth that implies all truths would be logically equivalent to an infinite conjunction of all truths, which can be shown not to exist by a diagonal argument. It is not clear whether Plato accepts Density, the thesis that for any two true propositions, there is a proposition more true than one and less true than the other. Diotima's discussion in the Symposium indicates that Plato held such a view, but the Divided Line apparently holds that there are discrete levels of truth.

¹⁴ I mean ‘corresponds’ here in a metaphysically unloaded way: if p is the proposition that dogs bark and a is the fact that dogs bark, then p corresponds to a. One might explain this relation with some metaphysical theory, or one might explain it syntactically (e.g., the sentence embedded in the canonical name of the proposition – ‘dogs bark’ – is the same sentence embedded in the canonical name of the fact).