First published in 1975, The Correspondence Theory of Truth examines the simplest statements of empirical fact and establishes what we can mean when we say that such statements are true. In particular, the author has considered whether any or all of beliefs, sentences, statements, or propositions are properly said to be true or false. He proceeds to examine what we mean by the term 'fact' and what possible relation between facts and beliefs (or their linguistic embodiments) could be meant by the term 'correspondence'. The second part of the book is a critical survey of important contemporary accounts of truth. The author examines Tarski's semantic theory to see if it offers a satisfactory reconstruction of the essence of the traditional notion of correspondence, then J.L. Austin's recent and famous version of the correspondence theory and some criticisms of it by Professor P. E. Strawson. A final chapter summarizes the viable content of the correspondence theory and suggests what problems about truth still remain for discussion if the theory is accepted. This book will be an essential read for students and scholars of Philosophy.
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The problems of philosophy arise from many sources—from scientific theories, from religious speculations and doctrines, from legal and political notions and also from concepts which are familiar to us all in everyday life. In particular, the problems of the theory of knowledge, though they are sharpened by the discoveries of physics, physiology and psychology, arise in the first place from perfectly familiar notions. We talk of seeing, hearing, remembering, believing and knowing, of truth and falsity and so on without any awkwardness or puzzlement. To say that I am now seeing trees and grass, that I am now remembering walking on an Irish beach a month ago, that I believe that the steady state theory of the universe is false are all fairly trivial and uninteresting statements, useful only as illustrating the point that I want now to make. That point is that these everyday concepts of seeing, memory, truth and belief are quite transparent and unproblematic when used in these ordinary contexts. But once we try to focus our attention on them and ask ourselves what exactly we mean by the words ‘seeing’, ‘remembering’, ‘believe’, ‘true’ and the like we meet quite unexpected difficulties. It is surprising and even paradoxical to find that concepts and their counterparts in language that we can handle effortlessly in ordinary discourse are not only very difficult to elucidate but are apt to lead us into a maze of inter-connected problems when we try to get our ideas clear about them.
The work of the philosopher is in some respects like that of the scientist. Each uses rational methods in dealing with his problems, each looks beneath surface appearance to explain the workings of what he is studying and each tries to link up his different areas of investigation into a consistent overall picture. It is true that the philosopher does not use the observational and experimental approach to the world which is the mark of natural science. His field of enquiry is conceptual rather than material. But his aim of a synoptic explanatory map of our conceptual world is very like what the scientist is looking for in his investigations into the workings of the physical world. In some ways, indeed, the natural scientist has the advantage in that the bits and pieces of the scientific jigsaw can be searched for one by one provided only that, when discovered, they fit together to make a comprehensible picture. An understanding of the nature of light, for example, was arrived at independently of an understanding of the nature of electricity before the genius of Maxwell brought the two fields of enquiry together into one theory. It is not so easy in philosophy to use the scientist’s policy of ‘divide and rule’. One problem leads very quickly to another so that if I ask, for example, exactly what I mean by saying that I believe a certain proposition p, I find very quickly that I have to ask the same question about the meanings of ‘know’, ‘true’, ‘false’ and many other words. All such concepts are linked together in a complex and widely ramifying network so that the satisfactory analysis of each seems to presuppose, quite impossibly, the analysis of all. In this unsatisfactory situation we have to compromise in the interest of arriving at some provisional solutions. These, we may hope, will offer a basis, however imperfect and insecure, for further more solidly based solutions to our problems.
These remarks are made by way of a preliminary warning about the limitations of this book. The topic that I shall be discussing is a particular theory about truth—the so-called correspondence theory. A ‘theory’ about truth is an attempt to give satisfactory answers to questions such as the following: what are the marks that distinguish a true statement from a false one? How can we establish that a particular statement is true or false? What is an acceptable definition of the word ‘true’? Or, more simply, what is truth? Such questions do not look on the surface very difficult. But the attempt to answer them leads us very quickly into deep philosophical issues which have not so far met with any solutions that have been generally accepted.
Part of the difficulty with such questions is that they are very general. We can see at once the difference between asking:
(A) How can we establish that a particular statement is true or false?
and
(B) How can we establish that the statement ‘There are orchids in Kew Gardens’ is true or false?
We would all feel much happier about tackling (B) than (A) because it raises a particular concrete issue which our everyday experience has equipped us to deal with. Faced with question (A), the prudent answer seems to be: ‘What particular statement or what kind of statement are you talking about?’ There is an indefinitely large number of possible questions and a large number of different types of question about which the issue of truth or falsity can be raised. Consider (B) in the general form (B′): How can we establish that the statement S is true or false? where S can be any one of the following statements:
There is at least one lion in the London Zoo
There are snakes in Ireland
Cigarette smoking causes lung cancer
The atomic weight of copper is 63·54
1913 is a prime number
There is an infinite number of prime numbers
Abortion is wrong
God created the world
Every even number is the sum of two primes
This list could be made much longer but the examples given are sufficient to illustrate the point that the answer that we give to questions of the form (B′) must depend on the nature of the statement occurring in the question. The methods by which we determine the truth value* of 1 are easy to state. We find out if there is at least one lion in the Zoo by going to look. More elaborate methods are needed to establish the truth values of 2, 3 and 4, though they are all similar to 1 and to each other in requiring sensory observation of some kind as a basis. 5 and 6 call for different methods; but the methods themselves, those of mathematics, are not in doubt. 7 and 8 are controversial in that there is no agreement about the ways in which statements of these two types can be confirmed or refuted or even, indeed, if they are genuine statements possessing truth values. 9 is an example of a mathematical statement whose truth or falsity has never been decided although mathematicians have worked on it for over 200 years.
Instances of this kind make it clear that we cannot profitably start upon the investigation of the nature of truth and its associated problems without first specifying what type of statement we are proposing to consider. Let us then agree to confine our attention to empirical statements. These are statements whose truth values can be determined, if they can be determined at all, by the evidence of the senses together with inferences made from such sensory evidence. Statements 1 to 4 above are instances of empirical statements. It should be emphasized, however, that it is very difficult to define the term ‘empirical statements’ exactly enough to know whether any given statement is empirical or not. It is a class which includes many different types. But the rather vague characterization given above will at least exclude from our field of interest statements of the types 5 to 9 above, together with many others. We need not concern ourselves with statements in mathematics, logic, moral philosophy, theology, aesthetics, politics and so on except in so far as they can plausibly be construed as empirical. (Contrast, for example, two statements which may arise in a political context: ‘Democracy is the most stable form of government’, ‘Democracy is the best form of government’. The first is an empirical statement supported, in so far as it can be supported, by historical evidence. The second is not.)
This somewhat crude and naive distinction will enable us to select for investigation a more manageable field of enquiry than would be the case if we were prepared to envisage a theory of truth which would claim to account for all ascriptions of truth values to statements. The difficulties even of this restricted field are, as we shall see, quite formidable enough.
* The term ‘truth value’ is a convenient accepted shorthand for the phrase ‘truth or falsity’.
2
Preconditions for a theory of truth
In a famous version of the correspondence theory of truth,1 published over sixty years ago, Bertrand Russell laid down three conditions which must be satisfied by any attempt to answer the question: what do we mean by truth and falsehood? (1) The account that we give of truth must allow for the possibility of falsehood and error. The only reason for stating this seemingly obvious condition is that philosophers have offered accounts of truth in the past which did not fulfil this condition. (2) Truth and falsity must be properties of beliefs and statements. A world without consciousness and so without symbols in which to register and convey the contents of consciousness would have no place for truth. (3) Lastly, though truth and falsehood are notions attributable only to beliefs and statements, they are not attributable in virtue of any intrinsic property of the belief itself—its clarity, for example, or the certainty with which it is held. A belief must be true in virtue of something external to the belief itself but to which the belief is in some way related. We usually say that beliefs are true or false because of their relation to facts. We shall be asking later exactly what this means; but for the present we need only note it as a prerequisite of the enquiry. These conditions conform fairly well to our rather vague intuitive notions of truth and falsity. And we should perhaps add a fourth condition: (4) truth and falsity are properties that belong once and for all to belief, statement or whatever else we may agree to select as our truth-bearers. It is difficult to put any sense on the supposition that a statement or belief once true or false could afterwards change its truth values. (This is not to say, of course, that we cannot change our cognitive attitudes to a given statement so that it is accepted as true at one time and not at another.)
It might indeed be asked whether we are not improperly limiting the field of our enquiry by stating preconditions for the answer in this way. Are we not perhaps begging the question that we are considering by setting limits in advance to the answers that we shall find acceptable? This is a difficulty with which any philosophical enquiry is faced, and, to some extent, any scientific enquiry as well. All questions, however they are posed, must set the framework for their answers. This is so whether the question is of the Yes/No type or of what the linguists call the Wh-type which calls for an answer in terms of a description. In the case of Yes/No questions, the issue is clear. If I phone the station to ask, ‘Is the 10.30 from London on time?’ the form of my question allows only two acceptable answers (provided, of course, that my informant does not reply with ‘Don’t know’ which is not an answer to the question). Questions of the Wh-type specify implicitly a wider range of possible answers. But that there is such an implicitly assumed range is clear from the fact that we reject some answers as absurd or irrelevant. (For example, ‘Where is the dog?’ may plausibly be answered with ‘In the garden’ or ‘On the sofa’ but not with ‘On the dome of St Paul’s’ or ‘At the court of Queen Anne’.)
In general, we can say that it is the mark of a precisely phrased question that it has a clear range of acceptable answers. Most ordinary everyday questions are of this convenient type. But some scientific questions and most of those that arise in philosophy are not. Some of the peculiar puzzlement that such questions generate arises from the fact that it is difficult to say what kind of an answer we expect. Part of the remedy for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is to take care to make the question we are asking as precise as possible. That is to say, we have to make clear to ourselves, at least, what kind of an answer we would find acceptable. And we have to do this in the knowledge that it is a dangerous procedure. It is dangerous because by delimiting the range of possible answers to our question to accommodate our ignorance or our prejudice we may thereby exclude the right answer. Errors of this kind are familiar in the history of science.
It is considerations of this sort that are the main justification for the constraints that we have already placed on the answers to our question: what is truth? For example, we first limited the range of the question to empirical statements and then further specified that any acceptable answer to the question must conform to four conditions. We do have, however, some further justification for restricting the range of the enquiry in this way.
Our justification is that, as we noted earlier, ‘true’ and ‘truth’ are ordinary English words whose meanings are familiar. They are vague words in that their exact range of application is indeterminate. But their central core of meaning is well enough understood to justify us in anticipating the general outlines of the answers that we are looking for. When we read in the Oxford English Dictionary that an important meaning of ‘truth’ is ‘conformity with fact; agreement with reality’, we recognize in this accepted social usage a very rough blue-print for our investigation. The so-called correspondence theory of truth is simply an attempt to spell out in consistent detail the implications of the accepted dictionary definition.
It must be conceded, however, that the use of the word ‘theory’ in the phrase ‘correspondence theory of truth’ is misleading. The standard uses of the term ‘theory’ occur in the context of the natural sciences where the term means roughly ‘a logically connected set of hypotheses’. But we must have an idea of what we mean by ‘true’ and ‘false’ before we can even begin to formulate a hypothesis. For a hypothesis is something to be tested and confirmed or falsified. And we would not know what it meant to confirm or falsify a hypothesis if we did not already have some notion of what we meant by ‘true’ and ‘false’. However, it is an important function of a theory to be a vehicle of explanation. And it is certainly an essential task of a philosophical account of truth to explain the concept adequately, to remove as far as is possible the penumbra of vagueness that surrounds its everyday occurrences, to elucidate its detail and to trace its linkages with related concepts. In so far as the correspondence theory (or any other theory) of truth attempts to do this, it may, by a loose analogy, be called a theory.
The correspondence theory of truth may be regarded as a systematic development of the commonsense account of truth embodied in such dictionary definitions for ‘truth’ as ‘conformity with fact’ and the like. Taken at their face value, such definitions seem to be straightforward and uncontroversial. If, however, it is found that they cannot be developed systematically without disclosing inconsistencies and contradictions, this will be evidence that our commonsense ideas on the subject of truth and its allied notions, for all their surface acceptability, are covertly incoherent and need reformulation in the interests of intellectual hygiene.
1 Superior figures refer to Notes and references, pp. 137–9.
3
Truth and verification
Most philosophical accounts of truth start with a warning against confusing two different but closely allied questions: (a) What is truth? (b) How do we find out what beliefs are true? (a) is a question about the nature of truth; (b) is a question about the nature of verification. The first is a theoretical question; the second is more practical. Most people can go through their lives without raising the philosophical issues of (a); but the demands of everyday living require that we all have some answer, however imperfect, to (b). Bertrand Russell claimed, indeed, that the question of verification which he put in the form ‘How are we to know, in a given case, that our belief is not erroneous?’ is ‘a question of the very greatest difficulty, to which no completely satisfactory answer is possible’. And he added that the question: what do we mean by truth and falsehood? was less difficult. It is worthwhile to get clear at the st...
