Oh, that's a lot of
handwashing answers !
Main thing is, truth has consequences, so I'll settle for Pierce's
pragmatic version (not James, and not Dewey).
http://atheism.about.com/od/philosophyepistemology/a/Pragmatic.htmTruth is ....... well ,,,,,,,,,
what's true. Yeah! A nice way to confuse people is, give them Tarski's definition.
"The definition of True should be ‘formally correct’. This means that it should be a sentence of the form
For all x, True(x) if and only if φ(x),
where True never occurs in φ; or failing this, that the definition should be provably equivalent to a sentence of this form. The equivalence must be provable using axioms of the metalanguage that don't contain True. Definitions of the kind displayed above are usually called explicit, though Tarski in 1933 called them normal".
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tarski-truth/
