On the Concept of ‘Internal’ Truth

Abstract

The paper shows that the concept of ‘internal’ truth has emerged as a reaction against the notion of truth as a reflection of reality, which has been demonstrated as invalid in modern scientific knowledge. The notion of ‘internal’ truth itself, however, despite all the popularity it has gained with the modern philosophy of science, can be proven to be inefficient for any real scientific cognition. Starting from it, it will be possible neither to solve the problem of plurality of ontologies, nor to give a valid foundation to the cumulative effect characteristic of scientific advance, nor offer a convincing reconstruction of many significant episodes in the history of science. In real science, one looks for truth not as a correspondence of knowledge to the object (the ontology of a theory), but rather to the thing as such. Moreover, even this interpretation of truth is insufficient for the purposes of modern science: today’s scientists put themselves a more ambitious task – not only to discover the structure of being, but to grasp its meaning, i.e., to understand, why its structure is such and no other.