Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Truth-Apt Act

5 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Wahrheitsfähiger Akt

A truth-apt act is a propositional act of claiming or judging with a truth-claim from a first-person perspective. Whoever acts in a truth-apt manner does not merely claim that something is the case — he assumes the claim as his own and stands for it.

This determination is the central distinction for personalist ontology: it distinguishes the human from the animal, from the machine, and from the swarm — not by behavioural performance, but by the constitution of the bearer.

Three Structural Moments

Pieper (Truth of All Things) and Spaemann (Persons 1996) emphasize three structural moments of a truth-apt act:

  1. Propositional content — the act has an expressible claim as its object (“p is the case”).
  2. Reference to truth — the act raises the claim of correspondence with the state of affairs; it can be true or false.
  3. First-person assumption — the act is performed by the bearer as his own; he bears the responsibility for his claiming.

All three moments must be jointly fulfilled. If one is missing, no truth-apt act is present.

Animals

Animals have representations of the environment — they can recognize danger, identify prey, distinguish companions. But they do not have claims with propositional structure and truth-claim in the strict sense.

This is not a question of complexity but of ontological constitution: an animal cannot stand for a thesis, because it does not assume what it represents from a first-person perspective.

Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models produce texts that look syntactically and semantically like truth-apt claims. The system writes: “The truth is that …” — and does not mean it.

The decisive difference: the model simulates the act of claiming without assuming it as its own. There is no bearer who advocates for the thesis, who stands for it, who revises it when reasons appear.

This difference is also a performative finding: whoever claims that the LLM claims, claims what he denies — he performs the truth-apt act that he ascribes to the machine. Cf. the performative contradiction.

Human Being

The human is the being that is truth-apt — not because he constantly acts in a truth-apt manner (he errs, he lies, he sleeps), but because he has the faculty for it. This is the substance-ontological sense of the determination: capacity for truth belongs to the essence-form of the person.

For this reason the personalist ontology has the axiom:

Truth-apt acts have personal bearers.

Wherever a truth-apt act is performed, a person is the bearer. This is not an empirical, but an ontological implication.

Methodological Pointe

The distinction truth-apt vs. non-truth-apt is the sharpest available dividing line between person and non-person:

  • It excludes animals and machines categorically from personhood without taking behavioural performance as standard.
  • It does not exclude the sleeper, the severely demented person, or the embryo, because in these cases the faculty remains present even if its actualization is currently absent.
  • It keeps the openness of status visible for ontologically uncertain bearers, because there the question does this entity bear the faculty? is not answered.

Application

In the planned research studies the distinction is applied to four concrete cases — autonomous agents with apparent self-reference, brain organoids, synthetic embryo models, human-machine hybrids via BCI. Sustainable application studies follow from 2027.

Ontological Classification

Sources (recension date 25 April 2026).

Further sources:

  • Pieper, Josef (1947 / 2011): Truth of All Things. An Inquiry into the Anthropology of the High Middle Ages. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press (orig. Wahrheit der Dinge, München: Kösel).
  • Spaemann, Robert (2006): Persons. The Difference between “Someone” and “Something”. Translated by Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Spaemann, Robert (2000): Happiness and Benevolence. Translated by Jeremiah Alberg. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.
  • Apel, Karl-Otto (1980): Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (orig. Transformation der Philosophie, Bd. II, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1973).
  • Habermas, Jürgen (2003): Truth and Justification. Translated by Barbara Fultner. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (orig. Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, Suhrkamp 1999).
  • Reinach, Adolf (1983): The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law. Translated by John F. Crosby. Aletheia 3: 1 – 142 (orig. 1913).
  • Husserl, Edmund (2001): Logical Investigations, vol. I: Prolegomena to Pure Logic. Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge (orig. 1900).
  • Searle, John R. (1969): Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Brandom, Robert (1994): Making It Explicit. Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957 / 2000): Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; reprint Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • McDowell, John (1994): Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Williams, Bernard (2002): Truth and Truthfulness. An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Krüger, Gerhard (1958): Grundfragen der Philosophie. Geschichte — Wahrheit — Wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
  • Tugendhat, Ernst (1976): Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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