I’ve long been adrift as far as when to capitalize characters. Of course I’ve capitalized the first character in a sentence, that rule seems universal in “proper” written english (you see a lot of exception in informal settings like the internet, but I don’t take those exceptions to be diagreement, so much as typically lazy/sloppy/fast writing appropriate to e.g. Youtube comments). And of course I capitalize letters in titles, though there the convention is less universal: Sometimes the first letter of every word is capitalized, sometimes all initials except those of prepositions (e.g. Treatise on Whatever). Other time it is so-called “sentence case”, i.e. first letter capitalized and the rest lower case. I’ve also frequently seen all-caps, but I take that as a sort of cop out, and an alternative to bolding in publications where bolding seems too pedestrian (I read a lot of law journals, but most academic publication seems to avoid bold).
But here I’d like to talk about a different situation where capitalizing comes up: the distinction between e.g. big-T Truth and little-t truth. I think the conventions as they apply to this situation are more significant for two reasons: 1 is that, as in the example of Truth/truth, the difference is often intended to change the meaning of the word. Where failure to capitalize the first letter of a sentence is almost always inadvertent or unconscious, changing from Truth to truth is usually intended to talk about a different kind or order of truth.
But in the context of other conventions about capitalization, the usual intent is exactly backwards. Presumably the convention draws from that used in discussing ‘God’, a specific deity, usually the one followed by the speaker, as opposed to 'god, a type of very powerful being. As the gods of yore coalesced into the God of the monotheistic religions, the word god became the name of the one god, God. That makes sense following the general convention of capitalizing the first letter of a name: ‘God’ is her name, and ‘god’ is her kind.
But the name version of Truth is exactly backwards following that same convention. Big-T Truth is used to mean the realest truth, but that truth would be the ordinary noun truth. To name a thing Truth is to divorce it from what is true: the truth is true, but the Truth need not be. When Truth is named, it becomes a special word that is part of a specialized vocabulary. It is a term of art.
And that fits convention everywhere else. Capitalizing Truth is often intended to indicate a certain reverence, but in doing so it’s defining the referent away from what is intended, namely the thing called out by the plain, ordinary truth.
)