Correspondence Theory of Truth

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Epistemology

Overview

The oldest and most intuitive account: truth is a matter of a thought or statement matching reality. Aristotle's formula — to say of what is that it is, is true — is its ancestor, and modern versions spell out the "matching" as a structural correspondence between propositions and facts. Its burden is to say what facts are and what the correspondence relation consists in.

Position on

• The Nature of Truth

  On what truth is: truth is a relation of correspondence between a truth-bearer and a mind-independent fact — a statement is true exactly when the world is arranged as it says.

Incompatible positions

• Deflationary Theory of Truth

  Question scope: The Nature of Truth

• Pragmatist Theory of Truth

  Question scope: The Nature of Truth

• Coherence Theory of Truth

  Question scope: The Nature of Truth

References

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Correspondence Theory of Truth
• Aristotle, Metaphysics 1011b25
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Deflationism About Truth (deflationism denies that truth is the substantive correspondence property the theory posits)
• William James, Pragmatism (1907), Lecture VI, which rejects truth as a static copying relation to a mind-independent reality in favour of truth as what works in the course of experience