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How Logical Fallacies Exploit Human Nature

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787).
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Plato believed that bad arguments had condemned his teacher to death, inspiring Aristotle’s search for the principles of sound reasoning.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

History is full of brilliant minds who believed false things and defended absurd ideas. Isaac Newton spent decades trying to create the philosopher’s stone. Thomas Edison championed radioactive products as remedies for various ailments. Steve Jobs skipped bathing in the conviction that his vegan diet could cleanse his body of mucus and toxins.

The problem is not that intelligent people cannot think. It is that they are human.

We all have hopes, fears, loyalties, ambitions, prejudices, and desires. We are naturally drawn to arguments that flatter our opinions, excuse our behaviour, or confirm our suspicions.

More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks began studying arguments that were unsound and yet persuasive, calling them fallacies. Learning to recognise them remains one of philosophy’s most practical lessons. But more interesting than what they are is how they work.

Why Bad Arguments Persuade Us

Most fallacies succeed not because they overwhelm our intelligence, but because they appeal to our human nature and frailties.

We are more receptive to arguments that confirm what we already believe than to those that ask us to change our minds. We welcome arguments that flatter our side, condemn our opponents, simplify a complicated world, or promise certainty where none exists. Reason is less often an impartial judge than a disingenuous lawyer, excelling at defending conclusions that we reached for wholly other reasons. And, sadly, the brighter the mind, the more elaborate—and persuasive—its rationalisations.

From Rhetoric to Logic

The study of fallacies emerged in ancient Greece as a branch of rhetoric, the art and science of persuasive speaking.

Following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE, Athens became a radically participatory democracy. Citizens served as jurors, debated laws, and competed for influence not with swords but with words.

Sophists such as Gorgias, Protagoras, and Hippias enriched themselves by teaching this new art of persuasion. Gorgias was not merely a teacher of rhetoric, but a performer, master of verbal display, and intellectual celebrity. According to tradition, when he appeared in the theatre at Athens, he would invite the audience: ‘Come, propose me a theme.’ He took pride in his ability to speak on any subject and defend even the most improbable of positions.

For Plato, this represented a profound problem. It had been by bad arguments that his teacher, Socrates, had been put to death. If persuasive speech could triumph over truth, what hope could there be for philosophy?

Plato’s pupil Aristotle sought to address these concerns by laying the foundations of logic. If rhetoric explains how people are persuaded, logic asks when they ought to be.

Formal and Informal Fallacies

Logic distinguishes two broad kinds of fallacy: formal and informal. A fallacy is a defect in an argument, whether accidental or deliberate.

Formal fallacies arise from the structure of an argument.

If I have the flu, then I have a fever.
I have a fever.
Therefore, I have the flu.

The conclusion, of course, does not follow, since I may have any number of other pyrogenic (fever-inducing) illnesses. This formal fallacy is known as affirming the consequent.

Far more common are informal fallacies, whose weakness lies not in their logical form but in their content. These are the fallacies that fill newspaper columns, political debates, boardrooms, dinner tables, and social media.

We Prefer People to Arguments

The easiest way to answer an argument is often not to answer it at all. Instead, attack the person making it.

This is the ad hominem fallacy. Closely related are the genetic fallacy, which judges an argument by its source, and the appeal to hypocrisy (tu quoque), which dismisses an argument because its author fails to live by it.

None addresses the argument itself. They succeed because judging people is easier than judging ideas.

A striking example of the genetic fallacy came during the 2016 Brexit referendum. On 3 June 2016, the then Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, declared: ‘The people in this country have had enough of experts…’

We Prefer Easy Victories

Some arguments are difficult to refute. It is then much easier to invent a weaker one.

A straw man caricatures an opponent’s position before knocking it down. Closely related is the red herring, which changes the subject altogether. Neither brings us closer to the truth, but both bring us closer to victory.

Some regard straw man as a form of red herring, since both serve to deflect. ‘Red herring’ takes its name from the custom of using stinky smoked herring to throw dogs off a trail. Think of it as a form of pre-Internet trolling.

For example:

—Critical appraisal of the new Bordeaux vintage would be more objective and meaningful if the wines could be tasted blind.

—Just Bordeaux?

We Prefer Agreement

Human beings are social animals. This makes us especially vulnerable to social arguments.

An appeal to popularity asks us to believe something because many other people believe it. An argument to moderationassures us that the middle position must be right. A false dilemma presents only two options when reality usually offers many more.

These fallacies appeal to our desire for belonging, certainty, and simplicity.

False dilemma is often a veiled attempt to force a Hobson’s choice of ‘take it or leave it’. For example, Theresa May insisted: ‘It’s my deal or no deal.’ At times, she expanded this into a false trilemma: ‘It’s my deal, no deal, or no Brexit at all.’

We Prefer Simple Stories

The human mind delights in finding patterns—so much so that it finds them where none exist.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (‘with this, therefore because of this’) mistakes correlation for causation. The gambler’s fallacy imagines that independent events, like a throw of dice, somehow remember what came before. Both satisfy our hunger for neat explanations in a messy world.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc is also known as the Chanticleer fallacy after the fictional rooster who believed that his crowing made the sun rise. I prefer to think of it as the scientist’s fallacy.

We Prefer Being Right

Perhaps the most bone-headed fallacy of all is begging the question. Instead of proving a conclusion, it quietly assumes it.

For example, the argument that opposes same-sex marriage on the grounds that marriage is the union between a man and a woman is no more substantial than ‘I’m right because I’m right.’

Circular arguments persuade because they begin where we already stand.

The Discipline of Thinking Clearly

This article may have seemed to be about reasoning. It has really been about self-deception.

Logical fallacies endure because they satisfy our desires more readily than they satisfy the demands of reason. We rarely believe bad arguments because we cannot think. More often, we believe them because they tell us what we wanted to hear.

Learning to recognise fallacies in others is useful. Learning to recognise them in ourselves is the beginning of self-knowledge.

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If you enjoyed this introduction to logical fallacies, you’ll find many more practical lessons on reasoning and rhetoric in How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

To explore the forces that so often lead us astray, see Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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Schopenhauer on the Benefits of Skipping School

Schopenhauer at the age of 14
Schopenhauer at the age of fourteen.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family then moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg. At nine years old, Arthur was sent to Le Havre in France to live with the family of his father’s business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age. The two years that Arthur spent in Le Havre were, he claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learnt to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean-Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

When Arthur was in his mid-teens, the principal of his private school, Dr Runge, who recognised his exceptional potential, attempted to persuade Heinrich Floris to redirect him onto an academic path. Arthur, too, exerted considerable pressure on his father. To settle the matter in his favour, the wily Heinrich Floris offered Arthur a Hobson’s choice between remaining in Hamburg to learn Latin and prepare for university, or accompany his parents on a luxurious two-year pleasure tour through Europe—on the condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Picking Up English

Thus, in 1803, Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Prussia. In England, he spent twelve weeks at Reverend Thomas Lancaster’s academy in Wimbledon, while his parents toured the North. Teachers thought of him as a ‘seething, belligerent pupil’. He developed a lifelong antipathy towards Anglicanism and later described the experience as a form of ‘incarceration’. But he became fluent in English, and, later, would write German in a more limpid English style.

Indeed, Schopenhauer is regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the German language. In On Language and Words, he would argue that language, though essential for human reasoning, shapes and limits our thoughts. It often serves as a substitute for true thinking and distances us from intuitive perception and action. However, learning another language can increase our range and flexibility of thought by obliging us to separate the concept from the word and to break down and reconstruct thoughts according to a different organisational scheme. This is all the more true of the classical languages (Latin and Greek), which call for a non-literal translation that forces a melting down and recasting of thought.

Three Hangings and a Penitentiary

Tourism in those days could take in the ugly as well as the beautiful. On June 8, 1803, Arthur witnessed three hangings from the window of a pub opposite Newgate prison in London. He noted in his travel diary that the men, right before the drop, took to praying: ‘One of them, who moved his hands up and down as he prayed, made the same movement a couple more times after he had fallen.’

On April 8, 1804, he visited the Bagne de Toulon, to be made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. ‘Can one think of a more terrible feeling than that of one of these unfortunates as he is chained to the bench in the dark galley and from which nothing but death can separate him?’

Later, he would compare the whole world to a penitentiary, and this period of his life to the Buddha’s awakening, when Prince Siddhartha (later, the Buddha) ventured out of the palace only to be confronted everywhere by the ‘Four Sights’ of age, sickness, death, and an ascetic monk.

Why Schopenhauer Warned Against Book Knowledge

There can be no doubt that Arthur gained a lot more from his travels than he would have done from sitting in a Hamburg classroom. Ironically, had his father never taken him out of school, he may never have become Schopenhauer. 

His worldliness, he would argue, gave him an advantage over ‘mere scholars’ or ‘book philosophers’, for true thought must be rooted in direct observation and firsthand experience of the world.

Reliance on books is like ‘thinking with somebody else’s head’ and produces only superficial knowledge, which, ‘like an artificial limb, false tooth, or waxen nose’, is not organically woven into our being. Children, he thought (like Jean-Jacques Rousseau), should not be exposed to ‘theories and doctrines’ until the age of sixteen.

In On Reading and Books, he wrote:

For the person who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them.

Can Reading Make You Stupid?

Schopenhauer cannot have believed that all reading makes us stupid, or he would not have written so many books. The problem is not reading as such, but what kind of reading, and when or in what order. The point, as he himself says, is to use books as rungs and climb beyond them, rather than gather a burden of rungs and carry them around like a donkey.

Much formal education consists in feeding us detached facts in the hope that some may stick and perhaps even inspire us to follow the subject. But true learning often proceeds in the opposite direction. We learn far more readily when we start from a place of meaning and emotion. Then, rather than being weighed down by the information, we thoroughly assimilate it, actively seeking out the answers to the further questions that it raises and moving, as it were, onto the next rung of the ladder.

Consider philosophy. Many people read Sartre at school or university. They hear that ‘existence precedes essence’, write an essay on existentialism, pass an examination, and then carry on living as if they were none the wiser. But pick up Sartre because you feel trapped and are questioning your life choices, and suddenly Existentialism Is a Humanism becomes electrifying. For Schopenhauer, Newgate and Toulon were not abstract answers to somebody else’s questions, but vivid experiences that set him—as the Four Sights did the Buddha—onto the path to enlightenment.

The problem, then, is not reading per se, but reading without intellectual appetite. When we are hungry for knowledge, we will make sure not to read the unedifying books that merely confirm or comfort us without being able to lift us onto the next rung of the ladder.

The best education makes us hungry before it feeds us, or trusts us to feed ourselves.

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Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.

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Ever Met a Clever Fool? Why Intelligence Alone Is Not Enough

Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Greater perspective is the beginning of wisdom.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Every time I utter the word ‘wisdom’, someone giggles or sneers. Wisdom, more so even than expertise, does not sit comfortably in an egalitarian, anti-elitist society. In an age dominated by materialism and consumerism, science and technology, and specialization and compartmentalization, it is too loose, too grand, and too mysterious a concept. With our heads in our smartphones and tablets, in our bills and bank statements, we simply do not have the time or mental space for it—or even the idea of it.

But things were not always thus.

The word wisdom features 222 times in the Old Testament, which includes all of seven so-called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.

Here is Ecclesiastes 7:12:

For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.

The word philosophy literally means ‘the love of wisdom’, and wisdom is the overarching aim of philosophy—or, at least, ancient philosophy.

In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates tells the young Lysis that, without wisdom, he will be of no worth to anyone:

And therefore, my boy, if you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor anyone else, will love you.

The patron goddess of Athens, the city in which the Lysis is set, is none other than Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprang out from the skull of Zeus. Her symbol, and the symbol of wisdom, is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.

Indeed, wisdom derives from the Proto-Indo-European root weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin gouged out one of his eyes and offered it to Mimir in exchange for a drink from the well of knowledge and wisdom, symbolically trading one mode of perception for another, higher one.

Is Wisdom the Same as Knowledge?

People often speak of ‘knowledge and wisdom’ as though they might be closely related or even the same thing. So one hypothesis is that wisdom is knowledge, or a great deal of knowledge. But if wisdom is knowledge, then it has to be a certain kind of knowledge, or else learning the telephone directory, or the names of all the rivers in the world, might count as wisdom.

Nor can it simply be scientific or technical knowledge, or else every contemporary person would be wiser than the wisest of ancient philosophers. Any twenty-first-century school-leaver would be wiser than a Seneca or Socrates.

Remember: the Delphic oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of all people not because he knew everything, or even very much, but because he knew the extent of what he did not know.

Still, there seems to be more to wisdom than mere ‘negative knowledge’, or else I could simply be super-sceptical about everything and count myself wise.

Or maybe wisdom consists in having high epistemic standards, that is, in having a high bar for believing something, and an even higher bar for calling that belief knowledge. But then we are back to a picture of wisdom as something like science…

So Is Wisdom Simply Correct Opinion?

In Plato’s Meno, Socrates notices that people of wisdom and virtue seem remarkably poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and throwing the javelin, yet no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, Pericles and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.

If wisdom cannot be taught, how, asks Meno, did good people come about? Socrates replies that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A person who has knowledge of the road to Larisa (a city-state in Thessaly) may make a good guide. But a person who has only correct opinion about the road, despite never having travelled it, might make an equally good guide.

Knowledge and correct opinion can therefore lead to the same destination.

Since wisdom cannot be taught, it cannot be knowledge; and if it cannot be knowledge, it can only be correct opinion—which explains why paragons of wisdom such as Themistocles, Lysimachus, and Pericles were unable to impart their wisdom even unto their own sons.

Wise people, says Socrates, are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are divinely inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.

Or Is Wisdom the Same as Understanding?

Aristotle gives us another clue in the Metaphysics, when he says that wisdom is the understanding of causes. None of the five senses are regarded as wisdom because, although they provide the most authoritative knowledge of sensible particulars, they are unable to discern the more distant causes of anything.

Similarly, we suppose artists to be wiser than artisans because artists know the ‘why’ or cause, and can therefore teach, whereas artisans do not, and cannot.

In other words, wisdom is the understanding of the right relations between things, which calls for more distant and elevated perspectives, and perhaps also the ability or willingness to shift between perspectives.

In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero cites as a paragon of wisdom the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who, upon being informed of the death of his son, simply said, “I knew that I begot a mortal.”

For Cicero, true sapience consists in preparing oneself for every eventuality, so as never to be taken—or overtaken—by surprise. And it is true that wisdom, the understanding of causes and connexions, has forever been associated with both insight and foresight.

What, Then, Is Wisdom?

Wisdom is not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.

When we take a few steps back, like when we stand under the shower or go on holiday, we begin to behold the bigger picture. In common parlance, ‘wisdom’ has two opposites: ‘foolishness’ and ‘folly’, which both derive from the Latin follis (‘bellows’, ‘bag’) and involve, respectively, lack and loss of perspective.

In cultivating a broader perspective, it helps, of course, to be knowledgeable, but it also helps to be intelligent, reflective, open-minded, and disinterested—which is why we often seek out and pay for independent advice.

Above all, it helps to be courageous, because the view from on high, though it can be exhilarating, and ultimately liberating, is at first terrifying—not least because it conflicts with so much that we have been taught or enculturated to think.

Courage, said Aristotle, is the first of the human qualities, because it is the one which underwrites all the others.

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If this article spoke to you, you might look into Hypersanity and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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The Socratic Method: Why Socrates Is Remembered for His Method, Not His Answers

Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.
Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Article substantially revised on 4 August 2026.

Socrates is often called ‘the father of philosophy’. Yet unlike Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, he left no books, no philosophical system, and scarcely any positive doctrines such as Plato’s Forms and Aristotle’s Four Causes. Instead, he is remembered above all for a method of thinking, questioning, and undermining.

This method, known as the Socratic method or method of elenchus, might seem disarmingly simple. Instead of asserting, contradicting, and correcting, Socrates asked apparently innocent questions. Instead of lecturing or teaching, he enquired. Instead of telling people what to think, he led them, rather like a modern therapist, to discover for themselves that they knew far less than they had imagined.

But how did Socrates arrive at this extraordinary way of testing, teaching, and philosophising? According to his student Plato, the answer lies in a remarkable visit to the Oracle of Delphi.

The Oracle of Delphi

The story goes that Socrates had a characterful friend called Chaerephon who went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. Astonishingly, the oracle replied that there was no one wiser, leaving Socrates, who knew only that he knew nothing, perplexed.

To discover the meaning of the oracle, Socrates questioned several supposedly wise people—first the politicians, then the poets, and then the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ Socrates was the wisest of all people not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew what he did not know.

From then on, Socrates dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’ As a result, he acquired a reputation for wisdom and a following among young men of the richer classes, who began to imitate him. But he also earnt the enmity of those whom he had exposed, and of those who stood beside them.

Plato paints the oracle story as the turning point in Socrates’ career. By validating his skeptical stance to the philosophers who came before, it gave him the confidence, and the impetus, to develop his own, distinct manner and method of doing philosophy.

But is the oracle story even true, or is it just another of Plato’s myths? The oracle story conveniently serves to frame Socrates, who had been put to death as a heretic and corrupter of youths, as having been on a noble, divinely inspired mission, attached by the gods to Athens as upon a great horse which ‘needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly’. In favour of the story being true is that it is also related by Xenophon, who knew Socrates well, although in his version the oracle replies that there is no one more just (rather than wiser) than Socrates.

The Socratic Method

Plato might also have intended the oracle story as a sort of origin myth for the Socratic method, or method of elenchus.

But although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. For instance, in Plato’s Parmenides, the much older Parmenides himself uses the method of elenchus on Socrates to undermine Plato’s Theory of the Forms. But it remains that while the sophists of his day tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance.

The method of elenchus, especially as employed by Socrates, consists in questioning one or more people about a certain concept such as justice or virtue with the aim of exposing a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly precise or refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding—and hence that we know far less than we thought we did.

People rarely change their minds because someone tells them otherwise. They are more likely to change their minds when they discover, for themselves, that their own beliefs are inconsistent.

With our initial dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgment, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we have not first become angry and resentful.

Socratic Irony

Strictly speaking, the Socratic method is broader than the method of elenchus. Elenchus is the process of questioning and refuting by which Socrates exposes contradictions in his interlocutors’ beliefs. But it is only one of several techniques that he employs. Others include Socratic irony, in which he feigns ignorance while quietly steering the conversation; the search for rigorous definitions, by which he moves from examples to essences; and the so-called maieutic (‘midwifery’) method. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates compares himself to a midwife, helping others to give birth not to children but to ideas of their own.

To have our understanding of a moral concept undermined is also to have our values undermined, and, with that, our sense of self. As I argue in The Problem with Critical Thinking, the greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance, but our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.

To manage their anger and anxieties, and to keep them talking, Socrates often flattered his interlocutors while himself playing the fool. In the Orator, Cicero esteems that, ‘for irony and dissimulation’, Socrates ‘far excelled all other men in the wit and genius which he displayed.’ Simon Blackburn in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Socratic irony with brio as ‘Socrates’ irritating tendency to praise his hearers while undermining them, or to disparage his own superior abilities while manifesting them.’

Here is an example of Socratic irony, combined with a little mock flirting, from Plato’s Meno, so pushed as to be almost parodic:

Had I the command of you as well as of myself, Meno, I would not have enquired whether virtue is given by instruction or not, until we had first ascertained what it is. But as you think only of controlling me who am your slave, and never of controlling yourself—such being your notion of freedom, I must yield to you, for you are irresistible.

The technique resembles that used by the TV character Lieutenant Columbo to trap villains. One of the few miscreants who can see through Columbo’s fumbling and forgetful façade is the husband-killer Leslie Williams:

LW: You know, Columbo, you’re almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it’s the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks.

Columbo: Me? Tricks?

LW: The humility, the seeming absent-mindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family: the wife, you know?

Columbo: Really?

LW: Yeah, Lieutenant Columbo, fumbling and stumbling along. But it’s always the jugular that he’s after.

The Socratic Method Today

Despite its pitfalls, and its potential for underhandedness, the Socratic method remains popular in education, especially at its acme, and has also been severally adapted for psychotherapy.

In the 1990s, during an institutional audit at the University of Oxford, a team of external assessors met the philosophers and asked about recent developments to their teaching methods. The question was met with a stunned silence, finally broken by Christopher Peacocke, the then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, who observed that Socrates had discovered the right way to teach philosophy more than two thousand years ago and that nobody since had been able to significantly improve upon it.

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To delve deeper into Socrates, see The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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Why Truth Matters More than Ever

Man walking out of Plato's cave into the sunlight
Post tenebras lux: After darkness, light.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Article substantially revised on 26 July 2026.

Veritas vos liberabit: The truth shall set you free. —John 8:32

Truth has always mattered. But never before have we had access to so much information—or misinformation. Our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood has become one of the defining challenges of modern life.

Truth tends to lead to successful action. In that much, truth has instrumental value. But truth also has intrinsic value. Given the choice between a life of limitless pleasure as a brain in a vat and a genuine human life, along with all its pain and suffering, most people opt for the latter.

In Plato’s Cratylus, on the philosophy of language, Socrates says that aletheia (Greek, ‘truth’) is a compression of the phrase ‘a wandering that is divine’. Since Plato, many thinkers have spoken of truth and God in the same breath, and truth has also been linked with concepts such as justice, power, and freedom. According to John the Apostle, Jesus said to the Jews: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.’

Fake News and Lies

Following his defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Mark Antony heard a rumour that Cleopatra had committed suicide and, in consequence, stabbed himself in the abdomen—only to discover that Cleopatra herself had been responsible for spreading the rumour. He later died in her arms. Fake news is nothing new, but in the internet age it spreads faster than ever, swinging elections, fomenting social unrest, undermining institutions, and diverting political capital away from health, education, and good government.

Those who are alarmed, or who despair, might take some comfort in the words of Søren Kierkegaard:

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion… while truth again reverts to a new minority.

One way to understand truth is to consider its opposites, namely, lies and bullsh*t. Lies differ from bullsh*t in that the liar must track the truth in order to conceal it, whereas the bullsh*tter has no regard or sensitivity for the truth or even for what their audience believes. 

In the words of Harry Frankfurt:

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullsh*tter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullsh*t is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. —On Bullshit

The Correspondence Theory of Truth

Let’s now turn to the three most influential positive theories of truth, starting with the correspondence theory. We shall then consider two important challenges to these traditional accounts.

For centuries, philosophers have agreed that thought or language is true if it corresponds to an independent reality. For Aristotle, ‘to say that what is is, and what is not is not, is true.’ For Avicenna, truth is ‘what corresponds in the mind to what is outside it.’ And for Aquinas, it is ‘the adequation of things and the intellect’ (adæquatio rei et intellectus).

Unfortunately for this so-called correspondence theory of truth, the mind does not perceive reality as it is, but only as it can, filtering, distorting, and interpreting it. In modern times, it has been argued that truth is constructed by social and cultural processes, to say nothing of individual desires and dispositions. Michel Foucault famously spoke, not of truth or truths, but of ‘regimes of truth.’ Categories and constructs concerning, for example, race, sexuality, and mental disorder may not reflect biological let alone metaphysical realities.

The Coherence Theory

Some philosophers have therefore argued that truth lies not in correspondence with an independent reality but in coherence within a system of beliefs.

On this view, a belief is true if it fits consistently with everything else we have good reason to believe. Truth, then, is less a matter of matching reality than of belonging to a coherent web of beliefs, each supporting and being supported by the others. Scientific theories, for example, are valued not only because they explain observations but because they integrate them into a coherent whole.

The coherence theory has particular appeal where direct verification is impossible. A new discovery is convincing not simply because it explains one fact, but because it fits with many others without creating contradictions.

But coherence alone cannot guarantee truth. A detective novel may be internally consistent while remaining entirely fictional. A system of beliefs can be perfectly coherent without corresponding to reality. Coherence is valuable, but coherence alone is not enough.

The Pragmatic Theory

Pragmatist philosophers such as William James proposed a different approach. Rather than asking whether a belief corresponds to reality or coheres with other beliefs, they asked whether it works.

A belief is true, they argued, insofar as it proves reliable in experience and enables us to navigate the world successfully. Scientific theories, for instance, are continually tested by their practical consequences. We could scarcely have sent astronauts to the Moon if our science had been wide off the mark. If something works, it may well be true; if it does not, it probably is not.

This emphasis on practical success reflects an important feature of truth. Our beliefs matter because they guide our actions. False beliefs eventually collide with reality.

Yet usefulness is not always the same as truth. What if something works for me but not for you? Is it then true for me but not for you? Some comforting illusions may help people cope with adversity without thereby becoming true. Conversely, some painful truths may offer no immediate practical benefit while remaining true nonetheless.

The Deflationary Theory

That a thing fits into a system, or leads to successful action, may suggest that it is true, but does not tell us much about what truth actually is, while the correspondence theory of truth is so thin as to be almost or entirely tautological. And perhaps for a reason. According to the deflationary or redundancy theory of truth, to say that ‘X is true’ is merely to say that X, and therefore that truth is an empty predicate. Truth is not a real property of things. Rather, it is a feature of language used to emphasize, agree, or hypothesize, or for stylistic purposes. For example, it can be used to explicate the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility: ‘Everything that the pope says is true.’ But this is merely shorthand for saying that if the Pope says A, then it is the case that A; and if he says B, then B.

The Verification Theory

For some thinkers, something can only be true or false if it is open to verification, at least in theory if not also in practice. According to the verification theory of truth, the truth of something lies at the end of our inquiry into that thing. Every observation, experiment, and argument brings us a little closer to the truth, even if we can never be certain that we have reached it.

But as our inquiry can have no end, the truth of something can never be more than our best opinion of that thing. If best opinion is all that we can have or hope for, then best opinion is as good as truth, and truth is a redundant concept.

But best opinion is only best because, at least on average, it is closest to the truth, which, as well as instrumental value, has deep intrinsic value.

The Real Barrier

The ancient Greeks pictured truth as something elusive. In the Odyssey, Menelaus seeks out the sea-god Proteus because only Proteus knows the fate of the Greek heroes. But before he will reveal the truth, Proteus repeatedly changes shape, becoming a lion, a serpent, a boar, even running water. Only when Menelaus refuses to let go does the sea-god resume his true shape and answer his questions. Truth, Homer suggests, does not simply present itself. It must be patiently pursued through appearances that are shifting, deceptive, and often frightening.

In any case, the greatest challenge to truth may not come from epistemology or metaphysics but from ourselves.

Human beings are not impartial observers. Our perceptions are shaped by expectations, emotions, loyalties, and unconscious motives. We readily notice evidence that confirms what we already believe while overlooking evidence that challenges it. We are often less interested in discovering the truth than in protecting our identities, reputations, and worldviews.

For this reason, the pursuit of truth requires intellectual virtues as much as intellectual abilities. Curiosity, humility, honesty, and the willingness to change one’s mind may matter at least as much as intelligence.

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