Absolute or Relative Truth?

Abstract

Up to now, Frege’s argumentation has turned out to be (internally) consistent; but is it still relevant today at all? Since Frege’s objections to the correspondence theory originally have their place in the confrontation of I-truth and S-truth, we might think them to be no longer relevant. Scientific truth is now uncontroversially identified with S-truth; I-truth does not appear to play any part at all. This raises the possibility that Frege’s objections to truth-as-correspondence are fatally infected by the obsolescence of the dispute within which they are originally framed — the dispute that, in fact, motivates them. If that is so, then eliciting the true nature of those objections by attending to their contexts secures Frege against the charge of obvious falsehood at the cost of consigning him to archaism — a questionable trade-off and, in any case, hardly a stirring defense!