Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 21:04:52 +0100
From: Colin Wight <Colin.Wight-AT-aber.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: criteria of success


What worms? Who is talking about worms?

Anyway....

>Colin, you sound as though you're implicitly advancing a correspondence
>criterion (as opposed to definition, as per the truth discussion) of truth
>here: 
>"So-and-so is Jesus (son of God)" is true (although of course we could be
>wrong) iff So-and-so is, indeed (to the best of our knowledge), Jesus (son
>of God).  
>Isn't this "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white?  

Er, who was that masked man who denied this? Was it Santa? Nah! Was it
Jesus? Naaahhh! Was, was it Colin? Naaaaahhhh. 

I think that I was decidely ambivalent on the correspondence theory of
truth, arguing, and following Collier that I thought of it as a description
of truth, but not a criterion. I don't think it can be a criterion because
if we know that "snow is white" we know that "snow is white", hence knowing
that X is true iff  X is true is redundant as a criterion, but functions as
a decription. However, semantically I do I admit that I slightly prefer
Bhaskar's term "expressive" since it captures more, for me, of what's going
on. But I am not going to get into a discussion about this, because I no
longer know that when we talk about Bhaskar whether we are talking about
Bhaskar, the awful understanding of Bhaskar that someone like Suchting
advanced, the Bhaskar list, postmodernism, dog shit, big macs, santa,
Jesus, or what (I'm being serious, at least it we take serious to mean
facetious).

However, being more serious (well only slightly), my position was I think
(somebody help me please am I going mad - I did defend the correspondence
theory as a description of truth, please tell me i did?) that there were
more aspects to truth than this and that the correspondence theory (RB's
Epistemic-ontic) was dependent upon an alethic one. Hey BTW, I've been
reading Santayana, he also argues for an alethic one, although he never
calls it this. So, Ruth....go and pick on somebody else you big bully (Now
I am really joking, really, really, really)

Cheers,

>

============================================

Dr. Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Wales
SY23 3DA
Tel: (01970) 621769 


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