CONCEPT
Truth and Truthfulness
Williams's 2002 distinction between truth (a property of statements) and truthfulness (the character virtues of accuracy and sincerity) — and the argument that the AI moment produces more truth and makes truthfulness harder, a paradox no technology can resolve.
Williams's last major work distinguished two things modern discourse routinely conflates. Truth is a property of statements: a statement is true if it corresponds to the way things are. Truthfulness is a property of persons: a person is truthful if she possesses the dispositions of accuracy (care about getting things right, willingness to check beliefs against evidence, readiness to correct errors) and sincerity (commitment to say what she actually believes). A person can be truthful and still say false things, because accuracy does not guarantee correctness. A person can say true things without being truthful, because the truth may be accidental. Large language models exemplify the latter condition: systems that produce often-true outputs without possessing the dispositions that constitute truthful character. The AI moment produces more truth and makes truthfulness harder — a paradox resolvable only through cultivation of human dispositions the technology cannot replicate and actively erodes.
