A true account

Abstract

A central professional accounting value is expressed in the imperative to give true accounts. This paper explores some philosophical background to the concept of truth, and develops a novel approach to accounting truth that sheds some light on how true accounts can be given in a wide range of discursive environments. This approach depends upon the observation that true statements must not only be coherent with each other, but must also be coherent with the possibility of the discourse within which they occur. A demonstration that an accounting report was true would comprise an appropriately conditionalised demonstration that its falsehood was incoherent with the possibility of giving any account at all. This is a much less restrictive requirement than would be implied by a representational account of truth, or by a theory of accounting fundamentals which depended on a sensory/empiricist epistemology. It does, however, allow for a kind of theoretical progress that both these approaches have failed to demonstrate. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.