AIM Framework glossary
Truth
Canonical definition
Truth is correspondence between a Hypothesis or Belief and the state of affairs in physical reality it concerns, which is the Belief's Referent. Truth is a property of the relation between a representation and physical reality, not a property of whether the representation is stored (Knowledge) or of the confidence with which it is held (Belief): a Belief's truth-value is orthogonal to its credence (Truth-Value Orthogonality), so certainty is no evidence of Truth (Certainty-Truth Independence), and a proposition's mere presence in the Memory Store is no guarantee of its Truth. A Belief has a truth-value only where a Referent exists. A Belief about the form of a work, and an evaluation with no Referent, have none and sit in the aesthetic regime; a prediction has one that is pending until its domain decoheres. That a result follows from stated premises is settled by proof, a check constitutive of holding the Belief that lies outside the Certification Bound, and such a Belief has no truth-value: it is valid or invalid relative to its premises. Whether the premises describe physical reality is a separate Belief, which has a Referent like any other and carries the truth-value. The AIM Framework takes correspondence as given and does not derive it. What the AIM Framework derives is what the architecture cannot do with Truth: carry a variable for Truth in updating, be moved toward Truth by certainty, or certify that Truth has been reached. Truth is what a Truth-Tracked Regime converges toward. In the domain of motivational source, the correspondence that would make a self-attribution true is precisely what Source Opacity renders introspectively inaccessible, which is why Truth about one's own motives is reached, if at all, from behavioural Evidence rather than from introspection.
Explanation
Truth is simply the match between what a thought says and how things actually are. It is not the same as being sure of something (you can be certain and wrong), and it is not the same as having something stored, or even widely believed (a whole culture can hold a falsehood). Some thoughts are not about how things are at all, such as whether a melody is lovely or a cause noble, and those are neither true nor false. A proof settles whether something follows from its starting points; whether the starting points describe the world is a further question, settled the ordinary way. The framework leans on these separations throughout: much of what feels obviously true about our own motives is confident confabulation, so getting to the Truth means going around the feeling of certainty rather than trusting it, and checking against what people actually do.
Epistemic status
Inherited (correspondence primitive) with Framework-Specific Disambiguation.
Derivation
Chapter 14, Section 14.4.13; Chapter 14, Section 14.8.1; Appendix D, Section D.2.