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How does one define truth and how is it determined?

Hi jec41! Well, I'd define truth as the divine Logos, the Word of God. I think it's the foundation of the order of the universe, the source of all universal law. As to how it is "determined" -- I take this to mean how do humans recognize truth? -- Plato and Aristotle provide some possible answers.

For Plato, the Cosmos is one living being. Aristotle held that the Cosmos is "rational" through and through. Man is an "image" or eikon of the Cosmos; he is the microcosm, and so recapitulates all the various orders of the Cosmos in himself. If the Cosmos is "rational," then man, as its image, must be rational, too. And so man is naturally equipped to grasp the nature of the Cosmos. This is the setting, or context in which the quest for truth unfolds.

Man has two basic tools whereby to discover truth. One is perception, and the other apperception. Perception deals with sensory experience, and is directed "outward" from the human person. Apperception, or introspective self-consciousness, with noetic experience.

I came across a wonderful book recently, P. T. Raju’s Introduction to Comparative Philosophy. He expounds and cross-correlates the Western, Eastern, and Chinese cultural traditions, from antiquity to the present, conceding all the way that cultural traditions leave very long-lasting “footprints” on actual human experience. Raju writes:

If we take all the three traditions together, we find three standpoints in philosophy: the inward, the outward, and the middle. As I have said, man’s being has two dimensions or two directions, the inward and the outward.
Both the inward and the outward are the directions of man and point to something beyond him: the importance of this truth has not been properly recognized. On the whole, the outward limit is treated as objective and therefore as the objective basis for philosophical explanation, and the inward as merely subjective. This attitude results in materialistic philosophies.…
With respect to value, philosophies that start from the inward limit fare better. The Supreme Spirit is higher than mind, mind higher than life, and life higher than matter. The higher the reality, the higher is its value; and if the highest is the only reality as in Sankara, then it is the only value. Spiritual philosophies then can identify and equate reality and value; and this identity is the motif of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic traditions.
...spiritual philosophies maintain that the One — be it Sankara or Ousia — is beyond our powers of understanding. Yet, like a mischief-maker reason demands a rational derivation of the world from what is beyond reason.
Reason here is inconsistent with itself, in that, while accepting that the One is beyond reason, it asks for a rational derivation from the One.

Raju goes on to say that a rational explanation can be given in one of two ways: as a derivation of “the higher from the lower”; or as a derivation of “the lower from the higher.” In each case “the word evolution is often used.” Raju recognizes that

...evolution in the two directions will be intrinsically different. One is evolution of the higher from the lower, of the inward from the outward, of unity from the plurality; the other is the evolution of the lower from the higher, of the outward from the inward, of plurality from unity. The plurality is an emanation, creation, manifestation out of the fullness of the One; just as the unity is an emergence, an evolution, a product, or even a resultant of the plurality. In the histories of the traditions, [every] philosopher ... has accepted one [or other] of these views.
But just as the approach from the limit of outwardness fails to do justice to the conception that ultimate reality is also ultimate value, the approach from the limit of inwardness fails to explain the rationality of the descending orders of being. In the history of philosophy the latter tended to lean towards, and encourage, supernaturalism and even superstition. Indeed, the universe is mysterious. But it is a rational and natural, not a supernatural and superstitious, mystery….
So the world at every stage is a mystery. Yet it is a natural and rational mystery. Only we cannot abandon all attempts to understand it rationally because it is a mystery. It is as much a mystery that unity evolves out of plurality as that plurality evolves out of unity….
Matter answers the best to the principle of fixed order. Hence the contention of contemporary physicalism that we should rebuild our conception of the world in terms of physics. But the difficulty is that, unless we accept the higher realities beforehand, we cannot rebuild them simply with the help of the concepts of physics; much less can we rebuild them with the deeper inner experiences of man, which have an autonomy of their own. Yet, much of the rationality in the universe will be missed if we are content with the inward approach only. And the excesses of this approach are to be checked by the opposite approach and vice versa.…
Thus both the inward and the outward approaches can be made complementary to each other. The excesses and failures of each are checked and made up by the other.

In short, what we must have is a balance in consciousness of the external and the internal. They are, as Raju said, “complementary to each other.” For reality contains both the “thingly things” with which science is preoccupied, and the “nonthingly things” — values — with which science does not deal at all.

That's enuf for now, jec41. Must run along and take care of an errand. But I'll be back later.

Thank you so much for writing!