Truth and correspondence

The title is a reference to the correspondence theory of truth. This is not a post about letter writing.

When asked what they mean by “true” people often mention the correspondence theory. However, I find the common descriptions of the correspondence theory to be unsatisfactory. So this post will be an attempt to make sense of the idea of correspondence.

The correspondence theory is sometime said to say that a sentence is true if it corresponds to the facts. I always saw this as puzzling, because to me the term “fact” was just another name for a true statement. Described that way, the correspondence theory of truth seemed to just say that true statements are true and false statements are false. Of course, I did not disagree with that, except that it did not say anything at all.

It is sometimes suggested that facts are metaphysical things, and that correspondence to facts means correspondence to these metaphysical entities. I have trouble trying to understand what a metaphysical fact might be. Several hundred years ago, it would have been taken to be a metaphysical fact that the earth is fixed and the sun goes around the earth. Today, we instead say that the earth goes around the the sun.

Another way of presenting it, that I sometime see, is to say that a sentence is true if it expresses what is the case. But, once again, “what is the case” just seems to be another word for “true”, so we are again left with the correspondence theory saying that true statements are true and false statements are false.

Truth as a property of syntactic expression

There’s an intuitive idea, that a statement is true if it corresponds to reality. But it usually isn’t defined that way because of the difficulty of explaining “corresponds to reality”.