Truth and Status Rerum

Abstract

I. Throughout most of the The Correspondence Theory of Truth, Dan O’Connor is offering a critique of the theory referred to in the book’s title.¹ Neither the ‘classical’ Russellian version, nor those of Tarski and Austin, succeeds in ‘making a clear and consistent philosophical theory out of a commonsense conviction — that true beliefs and statements correspond to facts’.² The central criticism, at least of the ‘classical’ version, emerges from the discussion of the items in the world to which truths might correspond. O’Connor agrees with Strawson that facts will not do since, being merely ‘what statements (when true) state’, they are ‘on the linguistic side of the semantic divide’ between language and world.³ More ‘worldly-sounding’ items, such as states of affairs, fare no better:

We may not simply re-title facts as ‘states of affairs’, ‘situations’ or some equally objective-sounding equivalent. For what we count as objects, properties, situations, relations and so on are equally features of the world as seen in our conceptual mirror. Once we have accepted the enormous advantages of language, we are incapable of seeing the world untainted by the very concepts which enable us to order and understand it.⁴