For Hegel Truth is an Ontological Concept
Truth for Hegel – and a whole tradition after him – is not a semantic notion. Truth is not a property of well-formed sentences or propositions; it is a much richer metaphysical concept. ‘The true’ or ‘truth’ in their fully developed form are reached only at the pinnacle of Hegel’s system – the Idea. The idea is of course the single principle of all reality.
‘The Idea is what is true in and for itself, the absolute unity of Concept and objectivity.’’ (Enc §213, Werke 8, 367)
In Hegel’s emphatic conception the idea and truth are ontological categories, and the absolute unity ‘of the Concept and objectivity’ of which he speaks, is different from the contingent correspondence of concept and object, word and thing. Hegel allows that in common parlance truth can mean ‘mere correctness’ Encyclopedia Logic §213 Z or “ the correspondence of external things with my ideas of them” (§213, 8, 368) but this is a derivative of the emphatic conception. For Hegel, then, something is true to the extent that it is an adequate instantiation of its concept.
“It is this deeper sense of truth that is at issue when we speak for example, of a ‘true’ state, or a ‘true’ work of art. These objects are ‘true’ when they are what they ought to be, i.e., when their reality corresponds to their concept.” (§213 Z, 8, 268)
It follows from this is that all finite things are qua finite false, and that the one true reality is the idea.
“The individual being is only one side or other of the idea: that is why other actualities are needed for it – actualities which likewise appear to exist distinctly and on their own account. The idea is realised only in their being altogether and in their relation. The individual entity by itself does not correspond to its concept. This restrictedness of its mode of being constitutes its finitude and its fall.” (§213 Z, 8, 268)
So Hegel allows that one can have a true (correct) opinion or representation about an untrue (because finite) thing.
What goes for Hegel’s conception of truth goes also for his notion of a substantial universal.
‘The universal in the sense of the universality of reason, is also universal in the sense…that it presents itself for consciousness in the mode of thinghood and sensuous being, without thereby losing its nature and having regressed into lazy being or indifferent succession. What is universally valid is also universally effective: what ought to be is, and what only ought to be without actually being has no truth.’ PhS Miller, p. 192 Observing Reason.