It is quite often said that Pontius Pilate, the man who asked: "what is truth", never stayed for an answer. This is from the mere reason that if he would have stayed he would have been waiting until this very day. The truth is constructed of many parts of our existence including language, conscience, knowledge and belief and a complete answer for his question would be far too complicated. In today's society most of these factors are often ignored and the definitions of truth and belief are taken far too simply than they really are. James Williams, who along with Charles Pierce developed pragmatism, claimed "Belief is what we accept as truth". Though I agree with this statement I feel that it is incomplete and too extreme. The acceptance of truth does not necessarily mean without justification.
             In order to understand what the "acceptance of truth" means we first must look at the definition of truth. Today truth is mostly regarded to as a statement which accurately tells a state of affairs. A state of affairs is what we accept or define as fact. The Microsoft Bookshelf definition is "Consistent with fact or reality; not false or erroneous." When we take a closer look at the word 'consistent' we find that things are not necessarily true or false though. It is referring to how close the statement is to the fact. Then we must consider how close the language, state of mind, is to the universal fact, state of affairs. For example the statement "snow is white" will most likely be accepted as the truth. But judging by this definition the statement is only as true as the word 'snow' describes the natural phenomena snow, and the word 'white' describes the actual color white. We notice that language creates a marginal error. A different view is then provided by the pragmatism theories which claim that the truth is a claim providing with a solution to a prob...