Truth by Wrenn Chase;

Author:Wrenn, Chase;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2014-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

5.7 The Equivalence Principle, Realism, and the Value of Truth

To evaluate a theory of truth properly, we must consider how it fares with respect to the Equivalence Principle, realism, and the value of truth. Let us look at correspondence theories with respect to each of these in turn.

At first blush, correspondence theories appear to do well with respect to the Equivalence Principle. This is because ‘corresponds to the facts’ is an expression we sometimes use as just a wordier synonym for ‘is true’. Thus, we might expect that the instances of ‘The claim that _ corresponds to the facts if, and only if, _’ to hold, since it is means the same ‘It is true that _ if, and only if, _’. Nevertheless, when we work out the details of what correspondence is and what it means for a claim to correspond to the facts, things become much less clear.

The classical correspondence view, which posits a state of affairs for every claim to assert to obtain, does fine here. States of affairs that obtain are facts, and true claims correspond to facts by asserting, of obtaining states of affairs, that they obtain. So long as we are willing to posit all the facts the theory requires, including negative facts, moral facts, mathematical facts, and modal facts, it will turn out that all and only true claims correspond to facts and the Equivalence Principle will be satisfied. But if we balk at positing all the required facts, there will be some non-paradoxical T-biconditionals that are not true.

The causal correspondence view likewise does well with the Equivalence Principle, but not perfectly. The idea that we should require a theory of truth to deliver the T-biconditionals is actually due to Tarski, and one of his most important contributions was to show that the definition of truth in terms of designation actually implies the T-biconditionals, for all the claims the definition applies to. The causal correspondence theory's variety of the Scope Problem, though, also points to difficulties it can have with the Equivalence Principle. Take the claim ‘The glass broke because Jack hit it with a hammer’. This is the sort of claim for which a definition of truth in terms of designation runs into difficulties. While the following may be consistent with the causal correspondence theory of truth:

(13) It is true that the glass broke because Jack hit it with a hammer if, and only if, the glass broke because Jack hit it with a hammer.

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