Teach students how to think, not what to think.

Let's start somewhere simple. Think of a claim you'd consider obviously true. Something like "the sun rose this morning." What makes that true?

So truth is about matching reality. The claim lines up with what's actually the case. That's a pretty old idea, actually. But let me push on it. What about the claim "7 is a prime number"? Is that true because it matches something in reality? Where is the reality you'd be matching it to?

Interesting. So you're already drawing a line between two kinds of truth, one that depends on observation and one that seems to come from proof or logic. Here's a harder one: "Torturing innocent people for fun is wrong." True or false?

You're in good company not knowing how to explain it. Philosophers have been stuck on that exact tension for centuries. But notice what you just did. You said it "feels" more certain. Is certainty the same thing as truth? If you're absolutely convinced of something, does that make it true?

That's one real option. Some philosophers take exactly that position. But before you commit to it, consider what you're giving up. If truth means something different in math versus ethics versus science, what holds those things together? Is "true" even the same word anymore, or just a label we paste onto things we feel confident about?

That might be the most philosophically honest thing you've said. There's a position that takes that seriously, that what we call "truth" is always filtered through our concepts, our language, our access to evidence, and that claiming a view from nowhere is itself a kind of illusion. But that raises a question worth sitting with: if truth is always filtered like that, does that mean there's no difference between a claim that's true and one that's merely believed? Or is there still something that distinction is tracking, even if we can't perfectly define it?