Truth is correspondence to facts
This view is expressed by the correspondence theory of truth.
This view is expressed by the correspondence theory of truth.
One strong argument for the correspondence theory of truth is its obviousness. Descartes: "I have never had any doubts about truth, because it seems a notion so transcendentally clear that nobody can be ignorant of it...the word 'truth', in the strict sense, denotes the conformity of thought with its object". [1]
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved October 22, 2024. ↩︎
According to Bourget et al. (2014)[1], based on a survey conducted in 2009, when faculty members from 99 leading philosophy departments were asked, 'Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?', 50.8% answered correspondence, 24.8% deflationary, 6.9% epistemic, and 17.5% other. This indicates that the philosophical community leans towards the correspondence theory.
Bourget, D., & Chalmers, D. J. (2014). What do philosophers believe?. Philosophical studies, 170, 465-500. ↩︎
Regarding the "no access" argument which states that truth is inaccessible if one accepts the correspondence theory of truth. One has to bear in mind the distinction that exists between the theory of nature of truth and the criterion of determining what propositions are true. Correspondence theory might very well be a poor criterion for determining what is true.
The "no access" objection rests on the assumption:
(A) If truth = fact, then S knows that "P" is true only if S knows "P" corresponds to facts.
But this kind of principle of knowing something seems implausible. For example, today we know that water is identical to H2O (water = H2O). However, we wouldn’t say:
(A*) If water = H2O, then S knows that x is water only if S knows that x is H2O.
The "H2O" test is not necessary to know that something is water, even though water is H2O. Similarly, it is possible to know that proposition “P” is true without the "correspondence to a fact" test.
The Correspondence Theory of Truth. Retrieved October 22, 2024. ↩︎
Consider a counter argument to correspondence theory that there are moral "truths" like "slavery is wrong" that do not correspond to facts. If we look into the moral domain, we have views like non-cognitivism or error theory. In this case a correspondence theorist would grant that there are no facts to which moral claims could correspond and then she would conclude that there are no moral truths.
The Correspondence Theory of Truth. Retrieved October 22, 2024. ↩︎
The correspondence theory of truth is problematic because one cannot step outside their own mind and see the facts. One cannot take their beliefs on the one hand and facts on another and check if they correspond. Therefore, a worry exists that correspondence theory makes truth inaccessible to us.
The Coherence Theory of Truth. Retrieved October 22, 2024. ↩︎
It is true, we might say, that "slavery is wrong". Anybody who thinks that slavery is acceptable has made an error. However, what is the fact to which this proposition corresponds? Slavery does happen in the world, that is a fact, but what about "wrongness"?
The Correspondence Theory of Truth. Retrieved October 22, 2024. ↩︎
Propositions concerning possibility, necessity, contingency, and so on are problematic. For example, "I am currently wearing a white shirt, I could have worn a blue shirt". Depending on the situation, the previous statement could be true – you could have worn a blue shirt.
What would correspondence theorists say about the modal propositions? Are there facts in the actual world that make propositions like "... could have worn X" true? Or maybe these kind of propositions correspond to "merely possible" facts? But what would these merely possible facts be? [1]
The Correspondence Theory of Truth. Retrieved October 22, 2024. ↩︎
The world itself doesn’t seem to contain logical laws like modus ponens for example. However, it is widely accepted to be true.
The Correspondence Theory of Truth. Retrieved October 22, 2024. ↩︎