Abstract
By correspondence truth, I mean a conception of truth which takes ‘true’ to be (a) a genuine predicate, which (b) denotes a property which a truth bearer possesses (c) in virtue of its relation (correspondence) to what it is about, (d) independently of our knowledge of what it is about. Truth is a property but it is so constituted by a relation as to be itself a kind of relation. It is like being a father, which is a property constituted by a man’s fatherhood relation to others.
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Notes
Assert’, not ‘say’: to say ‘It is true that Harry is in bed’ is not necessarily to assert ‘Harry is in bed’.
The equivalence thesis does not entail that sentences must have a truth value. ‘Is Harry in bed?’ has no truth value, unless it is being used to make an assertion. ‘Harry is in bed’ has a truth value, unless it is being used to give a command (for instance). Declarative sentences are presumed to have truth value because they are presumed to be assertible; if that presumption is mistaken for some reason in some context, then the sentence lacks a truth value in that context. This presumption must be taken for granted in using the equivalence thesis; the thesis does not apply to sentences which do not meet it.
Developed by Dorothy Grover and first published in the classic paper she wrote with Belnap and Camp in Philosophical Studies for February, 1975. For more discussion see Grover’s A Prosentential Theory of Truth,Princeton University Press, 1992.
Note that ‘What John said is true’ is a pro-sentence which contains a pro-noun (’what’); as a pro-sentence, it is the whole sentence which is connected anaphorically with an antecedent sentence, not the pronoun in it. The analysis is not that ‘what John said’ anaphorically refers to John’s earlier utterance and says of it that it is true; that would be to take the anaphoric expression as a pro-noun. Rather ‘What John said is true’ is what anaphorically refers to his earlier utterance; the anaphoric expression is the whole pro-sentence. Note too that it is not the presence of ‘is true’ which makes the utterance assertive; ‘What John said was silly’ is also assertive. ‘Is true’ does in this context endorse what John said, but it does not do that in many other contexts, for example, ‘If what John said is true, then he is in trouble’.
Generalizations of this kind are of particular interest to philosophers, which is one reason why they tend, rightly, to resist claims that ‘true’ is eliminable or redundant. The burden of this paper, however, is that it is a mistake to think that a notion so indispensable to philosophical reflection must carry a substantive content.
True to the Facts’ in Journal of Philosophy,1969.
Quine explains this point very elegantly in his From Stimulus to Science,Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 65ff. My claim that Tarski does not treat satisfaction — or truth — as a relation with a nature which constitutes its instances is a useful way of saying that he does not treat ‘true’ as designating a property. It undermines the objection that ‘true’ must designate a property since every set of objects determines a property, and so the set of true sentences must determine a truth property. That objection can be granted (assuming it is not paradoxical to speak of the set of true sentences) since properties in that sense come free, and any set of sentences will have an infinite number. In the sense of property in which having been uttered in Helsinki in December or containing the letter ‘n’ are properties of sets of sentences, a deflationist conception can grant that truth is a property. But that is not relevant to what a deflationist conception denies (and what a correspondence theory affirms), namely, that truth is a property constituted by the correspondence relation and which constitutes as true any sentence which is true.
Tarski’s Theory of Truth’ in The Journal of Philosophy,1972.
There are, that is, no semantical terms in the list following the ‘if and only if’ which is the definition of ‘satisfies’ — e.g., ‘name’ is not in the definition (only the names of predicates and objects).
The View From Nowhere,Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 69.
As is claimed by ‘eliminativists’ in the philosophy of mind.
Problems of Philosophy,Oxford University Press, 1912, p. 123. He is criticizing a view Moore once held.
‘Truth’ in G. Pitcher, ed. Truth,Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964, p. 106. (Dummett’s emphasis.)
This point might be put by saying ‘true’ is ambiguous in that it expresses one concept in a context where it is contrasted with falsity and another in a context where it is contrasted with error I argue below that these two concepts are necessarily connected.
For an assertion to be correct, more is required than that what is uttered be true, for even madmen may utter what is true without having made a correct assertion if their madness prevents their utterance from being an assertion at all. An analogous point can be made about beliefs: a madman may say he believes such and such a true claim but it does not follow that he has a correct belief: he would not have a correct belief if his madness has undermined his capacity for having genuine beliefs.
The points quoted above from Russell and Dummett, while they do not apply to the true-false distinction, do apply to the truth-error distinction.
Or at least not true (if the sentence is not assertible in the context).
The arguments clearly needed here are left out for lack of space. There is surely no direct connection between these factors and correspondence truth; the connection would require extensive epistemological and metaphysical commitments, all of which I regard as dubious.
Epistemic conceptions of truth illustrate both alternatives. Peirce defined correct belief without any reference to truth, as what the community of inquirers would settle on in the long run (which he then used to define truth). Many relativists simply do away with correctness in favor of justification, arguing that since justification is relative, so is truth.
For discussions of this point (and much else related to this paper), see Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit,Harvard University Press, 1994, esp. Chapter 5.
Much more so than when they are characterized in terms of correspondence truth: believing p is accepting p as true; asserting p is uttering it so as to show one intends it to be taken as true. Since correspondence truth may not be construed as normative at all (as it is not by physicalists like Field), the characterization may leave the correct-incorrect distinction without its normative character.
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Stoutland, F. (1999). Do We Need Correspondence Truth?. In: Peregrin, J. (eds) Truth and Its Nature (if Any). Synthese Library, vol 284. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9233-8_6
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