Sign in. Not registered? Sign up. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Find in Worldcat. Go to page:. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. But the coherence theory also goes hand-in-hand with its own metaphysics as well. The coherence theory is typically associated with idealism. As we have already discussed, forms of it were held by British idealists such as Joachim, and later by Blanshard in America.
An idealist should see the last step in the justification argument as quite natural. More generally, an idealist will see little if any room between a system of beliefs and the world it is about, leaving the coherence theory of truth as an extremely natural option. It is possible to be an idealist without adopting a coherence theory. For instance, many scholars read Bradley as holding a version of the identity theory of truth.
See Baldwin for some discussion. However, it is hard to see much of a way to hold the coherence theory of truth without maintaining some form of idealism. Walker argues that every coherence theorist must be an idealist, but not vice-versa.
The neo-classical correspondence theory seeks to capture the intuition that truth is a content-to-world relation. It captures this in the most straightforward way, by asking for an object in the world to pair up with a true proposition.
The neo-classical coherence theory, in contrast, insists that truth is not a content-to-world relation at all; rather, it is a content-to-content, or belief-to-belief, relation. The coherence theory requires some metaphysics which can make the world somehow reflect this, and idealism appears to be it. A distant descendant of the neo-classical coherence theory that does not require idealism will be discussed in section 6.
For more on the coherence theory, see Walker and the entry on the coherence theory of truth. A different perspective on truth was offered by the American pragmatists. As with the neo-classical correspondence and coherence theories, the pragmatist theories go with some typical slogans. For example, Peirce is usually understood as holding the view that:.
See, for instance Hartshorne et al. Both Peirce and James are associated with the slogan that:. James e. True beliefs are guaranteed not to conflict with subsequent experience. See Misak for an extended discussion.
This marks an important difference between the pragmatist theories and the coherence theory we just considered. Even so, pragmatist theories also have an affinity with coherence theories, insofar as we expect the end of inquiry to be a coherent system of beliefs. As Haack also notes, James maintains an important verificationist idea: truth is what is verifiable. We will see this idea re-appear in section 4. For more on pragmatist theories of truth, see Misak Modern forms of the classical theories survive.
Many of these modern theories, notably correspondence theories, draw on ideas developed by Tarski. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that his seminal work on truth is very much of a piece with other works in mathematical logic, such as his , and as much as anything this work lays the ground-work for the modern subject of model theory — a branch of mathematical logic, not the metaphysics of truth.
In the classical debate on truth at the beginning of the 20th century we considered in section 1, the issue of truth-bearers was of great significance. Many theories we reviewed took beliefs to be the bearers of truth. In contrast, Tarski and much of the subsequent work on truth takes sentences to be the primary bearers of truth.
But whereas much of the classical debate takes the issue of the primary bearers of truth to be a substantial and important metaphysical one, Tarski is quite casual about it. His primary reason for taking sentences as truth-bearers is convenience, and he explicitly distances himself from any commitment about the philosophically contentious issues surrounding other candidate truth-bearers e.
We will return to the issue of the primary bearers of truth in section 6. But it should be stressed that for this discussion, sentences are fully interpreted sentences, having meanings. We will also assume that the sentences in question do not change their content across occasions of use, i. In some places e.
This is an adequacy condition for theories, not a theory itself. In light of this, Convention T guarantees that the truth predicate given by the theory will be extensionally correct , i. Tarski does not merely propose a condition of adequacy for theories of truth, he also shows how to meet it.
But truth can be defined for all of them by recursion. This may look trivial, but in defining an extensionally correct truth predicate for an infinite language with four clauses, we have made a modest application of a very powerful technique. They do not stop with atomic sentences. Tarski notes that truth for each atomic sentence can be defined in terms of two closely related notions: reference and satisfaction.
Tarski goes on to demonstrate some key applications of such a theory of truth. This was especially important to Tarski, who was concerned the Liar paradox would make theories in languages containing a truth predicate inconsistent. The correspondence theory of truth expresses the very natural idea that truth is a content-to-world or word-to-world relation: what we say or think is true or false in virtue of the way the world turns out to be.
We suggested that, against a background like the metaphysics of facts, it does so in a straightforward way. But the idea of correspondence is certainly not specific to this framework.
Indeed, it is controversial whether a correspondence theory should rely on any particular metaphysics at all. Yet without the metaphysics of facts, the notion of correspondence as discussed in section 1. This has led to two distinct strands in contemporary thinking about the correspondence theory. One strand seeks to recast the correspondence theory in a way that does not rely on any particular ontology. Another seeks to find an appropriate ontology for correspondence, either in terms of facts or other entities.
We will consider each in turn. Tarski himself sometimes suggested that his theory was a kind of correspondence theory of truth. Whether his own theory is a correspondence theory, and even whether it provides any substantial philosophical account of truth at all, is a matter of controversy.
One rather drastic negative assessment from Putnam —86, p. As it is normally understood, reference is the preeminent word-to-world relation. Satisfaction is naturally understood as a word-to-world relation as well, which relates a predicate to the things in the world that bear it. The Tarskian recursive definition shows how truth is determined by reference and satisfaction, and so is in effect determined by the things in the world we refer to and the properties they bear.
This, one might propose, is all the correspondence we need. It is not correspondence of sentences or propositions to facts; rather, it is correspondence of our expressions to objects and the properties they bear, and then ways of working out the truth of claims in terms of this. This is certainly not the neo-classical idea of correspondence. In not positing facts, it does not posit any single object to which a true proposition or sentence might correspond.
Rather, it shows how truth might be worked out from basic word-to-world relations. As we will discuss more fully in section 4. Rather, it offers a number of disquotation clauses , such as:. These clauses have an air of triviality though whether they are to be understood as trivial principles or statements of non-trivial semantic facts has been a matter of some debate. With Field, we might propose to supplement clauses like these with an account of reference and satisfaction.
In , Field was envisaging a physicalist account, along the lines of the causal theory of reference. This should inter alia guarantee that truth is really determined by word-to-world relations, so in conjunction with the Tarskian recursive definition, it could provide a correspondence theory of truth.
Such a theory clearly does not rely on a metaphysics of facts. Indeed, it is in many ways metaphysically neutral, as it does not take a stand on the nature of particulars, or of the properties or universals that underwrite facts about satisfaction. However, it may not be entirely devoid of metaphysical implications, as we will discuss further in section 4. Much of the subsequent discussion of Field-style approaches to correspondence has focused on the role of representation in these views.
These are instances of representation relations. According to representational views, meaningful items, like perhaps thoughts or sentences or their constituents, have their contents in virtue of standing in the right relation to the things they represent.
The project of developing a naturalist account of the representation relation has been an important one in the philosophy of mind and language. See the entry on mental representation. But, it has implications for the theory of truth. Representational views of content lead naturally to correspondence theories of truth.
To make this vivid, suppose you hold that sentences or beliefs stand in a representation relation to some objects. It is natural to suppose that for true beliefs or sentences, those objects would be facts. We then have a correspondence theory, with the correspondence relation explicated as a representation relation: a truth bearer is true if it represents a fact. As we have discussed, many contemporary views reject facts, but one can hold a representational view of content without them.
The relations of reference and satisfaction are representation relations, and truth for sentences is determined compositionally in terms of those representation relations, and the nature of the objects they represent. If we have such relations, we have the building blocks for a correspondence theory without facts. Field anticipated a naturalist reduction of the representation via a causal theory, but any view that accepts representation relations for truth bearers or their constituents can provide a similar theory of truth.
See Jackson and Lynch for further discussion. Representational views of content provide a natural way to approach the correspondence theory of truth, and likewise, anti-representational views provide a natural way to avoid the correspondence theory of truth. This is most clear in the work of Davidson, as we will discuss more in section 6.
There have been a number of correspondence theories that do make use of facts. Some are notably different from the neo-classical theory sketched in section 1. For instance, Austin proposes a view in which each statement understood roughly as an utterance event corresponds to both a fact or situation, and a type of situation.
It is true if the former is of the latter type. This theory, which has been developed by situation theory e. Rather, correspondence relations to Austin are entirely conventional. See Vision for an extended defense of an Austinian correspondence theory.
As an ordinary language philosopher, Austin grounds his notion of fact more in linguistic usage than in an articulated metaphysics, but he defends his use of fact-talk in Austin b. In a somewhat more Tarskian spirit, formal theories of facts or states of affairs have also been developed. There are more metaphysically robust notions of fact in the current literature. The view has much in common with the neo-classical one. Like the neo-classical view, Armstrong endorses a version of the correspondence theory.
States of affairs are truthmakers for propositions, though Armstrong argues that there may be many such truthmakers for a given proposition, and vice versa. Armstrong also envisages a naturalistic account of propositions as classes of equivalent belief-tokens. It is then argued that facts are the appropriate truthmakers. In contrast to the approach to correspondence discussed in section 3.
The truthmaker principle expresses the ontological aspect of the neo-classical correspondence theory. Not merely must truth obtain in virtue of word-to-world relations, but there must be a thing that makes each truth true. For one view on this, see Merricks The neo-classical correspondence theory, and Armstrong, cast facts as the appropriate truthmakers. However, it is a non-trivial step from the truthmaker principle to the existence of facts.
Parsons argues that the truthmaker principle presented in a somewhat different form is compatible with there being only concrete particulars. As we saw in discussing the neo-classical correspondence theory, truthmaker theories, and fact theories in particular, raise a number of issues.
One which has been discussed at length, for instance, is whether there are negative facts. Negative facts would be the truthmakers for negated sentences. Russell notoriously expresses ambivalence about whether there are negative facts. Armstrong rejects them, while Beall defends them. For more discussion of truthmakers, see Cameron and the papers in Beebee and Dodd The neo-classical theories we surveyed in section 1 made the theory of truth an application of their background metaphysics and in some cases epistemology.
In section 2 and especially in section 3, we returned to the issue of what sorts of ontological commitments might go with the theory of truth. There we saw a range of options, from relatively ontologically non-committal theories, to theories requiring highly specific ontologies.
There is another way in which truth relates to metaphysics. Many ideas about realism and anti-realism are closely related to ideas about truth. Indeed, many approaches to questions about realism and anti-realism simply make them questions about truth. In discussing the approach to correspondence of section 3. It relies on there being objects of reference, and something about the world which makes for determinate satisfaction relations; but beyond that, it is ontologically neutral.
But as we mentioned there, this is not to say that it has no metaphysical implications. A correspondence theory of truth, of any kind, is often taken to embody a form of realism. Wright offers a nice statement of this way of thinking about realism. These theses imply that our claims are objectively true or false, depending on how the world they are about is. The world that we represent in our thoughts or language is an objective world. Realism may be restricted to some subject-matter, or range of discourse, but for simplicity, we will talk about only its global form.
It is often argued that these theses require some form of the correspondence theory of truth. Putnam , p. Such a theory will provide an account of objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and show how these determine the truth or falsehood of what we say about the world. But realism is a more general idea than physicalism. Any theory that provides objective relations of reference and satisfaction, and builds up a theory of truth from them, would give a form of realism.
Making the objectivity of reference the key to realism is characteristic of work of Putnam, e. Another important mark of realism expressed in terms of truth is the property of bivalence.
As Dummett has stressed e. Hence, one important mark of realism is that it goes together with the principle of bivalence : every truth-bearer sentence or proposition is true or false. In much of his work, Dummett has made this the characteristic mark of realism, and often identifies realism about some subject-matter with accepting bivalence for discourse about that subject-matter.
At the very least, it captures a great deal of what is more loosely put in the statement of realism above. Both the approaches to realism, through reference and through bivalence, make truth the primary vehicle for an account of realism. A theory of truth which substantiates bivalence, or builds truth from a determinate reference relation, does most of the work of giving a realistic metaphysics.
It might even simply be a realistic metaphysics. Significant progress was made in the early twentieth century on the problem of axiomatizing arithmetic and other areas of mathematics. In the s, David Hilbert hoped to represent the sentences of arithmetic very precisely in a formal language, then to generate all and only the theorems of arithmetic from uncontroversial axioms, and thereby to show that all true propositions of arithmetic can in principle be proved as theorems.
This would put the concept of truth in arithmetic on a very solid basis. Thus the concept of truth transcends the concept of proof in classical formal languages.
This is a remarkable, precise insight into the nature of truth. A very great many linguistic devices count as definitions. These devices include providing a synonym, offering examples, pointing at objects that satisfy the term being defined, using the term in sentences, contrasting it with opposites, and contrasting it with terms with which it is often confused. For further reading, see Definitions, Dictionaries, and Meanings.
However, modern theories about definition have not been especially recognized, let alone adopted, outside of certain academic and specialist circles. Many persons persist with the earlier, naive, view that the role of a definition is only to offer a synonym for the term to be defined. The definition would allow for a line of reasoning that produced the Liar Paradox recall above and thus would lead us into self contradiction. That result shows that we do not have a coherent concept of truth for a language within that language.
Some of our beliefs about truth, and about related concepts that are used in the argument to the contradiction, must be rejected, even though they might seem to be intuitively acceptable. There is no reason to believe that paradox is to be avoided by rejecting formal languages in favor of natural languages. The Liar Paradox first appeared in natural languages.
That is, they try to remove vagueness and be precise about the ramifications of their solutions, usually by showing how they work in a formal language that has the essential features of our natural language. The principal solutions agree that — to resolve a paradox — we must go back and systematically reform or clarify some of our original beliefs.
However, to be acceptable, the solution must be presented systematically and be backed up by an argument about the general character of our language. In short, there must be both systematic evasion and systematic explanation. The later Wittgenstein did not agree. He rejected the systematic approach and elevated the need to preserve ordinary language, and our intuitions about it, over the need to create a coherent and consistent semantical theory. Except in special cases, most scientific researchers would agree that their results are only approximately true.
Similarly, scientific theories are designed to fit the world. Scientists should not aim to create true theories; they should aim to construct theories whose models are representations of the world. Bradley Dowden Email: dowden csus. Norman Swartz Email: swartz sfu. Truth Philosophers are interested in a constellation of issues involving the concept of truth. Whichever theory of truth is advanced to settle the principal issue, there are a number of additional issues to be addressed: Can claims about the future be true now?
Can there be some algorithm for finding truth — some recipe or procedure for deciding, for any claim in the system of, say, arithmetic, whether the claim is true? To what extent do theories of truth avoid paradox? Is the goal of scientific research to achieve truth? Can a Theory of Truth Avoid Paradox? References and Further Reading 1. What Sorts of Things are True or False? There are many candidates for the sorts of things that can bear truth-values: statements sentence-tokens sentence-types propositions theories facts assertions utterances beliefs opinions doctrines etc.
Ontological Issues What sorts of things are these candidates? These three English sentence-tokens are all of the same sentence-type: Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun. Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun.
Might sentence- tokens be the bearers of truth-values? Constraints on Truth and Falsehood There are two commonly accepted constraints on truth and falsehood: Every proposition is true or false. Which Sentences Express Propositions? Problem Cases But do all declarative sentences express propositions? Predictions of future events What about declarative sentences that refer to events in the future?
So, the CEO should be awakened. In other words, for any proposition p, p is true if and only if p corresponds to a fact. For example all of the following propositions are contingent : Snow is white. Snow is purple. Canada belongs to the U. It is false that Canada belongs to the U. Even under those conditions, the truth-values of the following noncontingent propositions will remain unchanged: Truths Falsehoods Snow is white or it is false that snow is white.
Snow is white and it is false that snow is white. All squares are rectangles. Not all squares are rectangles. To see how one can argue that the Semantic Theory of Truth can be used to explicate the truth of noncontingent propositions, consider the following series of propositions, the first four of which are contingent, the fifth of which is noncontingent: There are fewer than seven bumblebees or more than ten. There are fewer than eight bumblebees or more than ten.
There are fewer than nine bumblebees or more than ten. There are fewer than ten bumblebees or more than ten. There are fewer than eleven bumblebees or more than ten. Coherence Theories The Correspondence Theory and the Semantic Theory account for the truth of a proposition as arising out of a relationship between that proposition and features or events in the world.
This locale is not the habitat of elephants. There is neither a zoo nor a circus anywhere nearby. Severely intoxicated persons have been known to experience hallucinations. Postmodernism: The Most Recent Coherence Theory In recent years, one particular Coherence Theory has attracted a lot of attention and some considerable heat and fury. Pragmatic Theories A Pragmatic Theory of Truth holds roughly that a proposition is true if it is useful to believe.
Deflationary Theories What all the theories of truth discussed so far have in common is the assumption that a proposition is true just in case the proposition has some property or other — correspondence with the facts, satisfaction, coherence, utility, etc.
Performative Theory The Performative Theory is a deflationary theory that is not a redundancy theory. Related Issues a. Davidson, Donald. Horwich, Paul. Truth , Basil Blackwell Ltd. Mates, Benson. McGee, Vann. Kirkham, Richard. Kripke, Saul. Quine, W. Ramsey, F. Russell, B. Strawson, P. Tarski, Alfred. Author Information Bradley Dowden Email: dowden csus. An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers. The proposition expressed by S-in- L is true, if and only if p.
Correct morality never changes as it has its source in the unchanging God. Even within the field of world religions there is no consensus on this question.
In the ancient Hindu texts, the rig Vedas, we find a mediated position which declares the truth is singular but there are many different paths. This position can be seen in the famous Hindu parable of the blind men and the elephant. Five blind men are brought into a room with an elephant and asked to describe the object there. One holds the trunk, another the leg, another the ear, and the descriptions of the object differ, dependent of course on the limited perspective of the individual.
Richard Rorty - Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity In this text Rorty puts forth that neither side in this debate can even communicate with each other because each is operating from within a perspective in which the other sides argument is nonsensical- a perspectival or moderated relativism is hence at work in his very suggestion. Plato - Thaeatetus Early in the dialogue Socrates argues against Protagoras' famous 'man is the measure' relativistic theory.
Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion An interesting argument from a philosopher of science against relativism of the kind Thomas Kuhn puts forth. Dawkins suggests that relativism weakens the ability of science to pursue the fundamental truths of reality.
II's argument for the reliance of all truth on the absolute will of God. Search Query Show Search.
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