`  :I find Arc de Ciel's comments on truth quite unconvincing, for example: Predictive statements coming out true or false are evidence for or against the hypothesis, not evidence for truth or falsity as you suggest. Are you sure that you mean that? If evidence for or against a hypothesis is not evidence for or against the hypothesis's truth, then what other property or relation of the hypothesis is the evidence for or against? What is this non-truth favorability that a hypothesis has in light of evidence? Is it power, wealth, glamour, status? Is it beauty? But a beautiful or architecturally wonderful theory is still rejected if found false. You accept the idea of reality but not the idea of truth. Yet truth and reality are paired; hypotheses, theories, predictions, declarative statements, etc., aim to be true about the real. The idea of truth is not an unnecessary ``second step,`` it's something that various things have in common and clarifies their kinship, so we use it to speak plainly to the general reader rather than engaging in bureaucratic euphemism and elision. One abstracts a common idea of what predictions, hypotheses, theories aim to be: and that is the idea of truth, not some other, or more general kind, of favorability or merit minimalistically alluded to by use of a fleeting preposition like ``for`` as in ``evidence for``; nor should the forest which is truth be lost sight of amid the trees that are species of truth, even such key ones as predictive power; in a way truth is predictive power about potential investigatory results; a true statement truly predicts a common element of further truths that one will find, for example about the past, if one investigates far enough; and the meaning of each of those further truths is in its imaginable practical implications; yet truth is also correspondence; if you compare an accurate map to the mapped territory, you can see how the map and the territory have the same implications, lead to the same predictions; and one explains an account's or explanation's leading only to successful predictions as evidencing the account's or explanation's correspondence to that portion of the real which is its subject matter, for example the past. We need a forest word and that word is ``truth``. The idea that some religions might object to use of the word ``truth`` in regard to science goes, mutatis mutandis, for ``reality``, ``certainty``, and an awful lot else here; it's a red herring. It's also remarkable to say that ``certainty`` is a weaker word than ``truth``; to assert that p is certain is stronger than to assert that p is true; it implies a stronger commitment by the speaker; it evokes the idea of doubts that have been overcome, or a probability that has been shown to be 100%.   .`