This sounds more like a rails question for Gertrude Stein, to be honest.
There is no :there there.
:true and :false have no special meaning in Ruby. They are symbols. If you are using them interchangeably with true and false, you're only creating bugs.
Really, symbols are useful wherever you might be using a string over and over again as a token to represent some state or other. They are more efficient than strings in this context.
google 'ruby symbols versus strings' and you'll get some good results.
MIke.
