File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0312, message 16


Subject: BHA: to Howard on correspondence
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 10:41:02 -0600
From: "Groff, Ruth" <ruth.groff-AT-marquette.edu>


Hi Howard,

You wrote:
Yes, it does help.  Still, I wonder if you could spell out the category
error.  

Ontological realism is a claim about the existential status of specified entities.  The correspondence theory of truth is a proposed definition of a concept, viz. truth.  I say that it is a category error to mix and match the subjects and predicates of these sentences because their content is different.  Ontological realism is NOT a proposed definition of the concept of truth.  The correspondence theory of truth is not a claim about the existential status of specified entities.  

Is that better?

You wrote"
Also, if you take "literally" and "certainty" out of it, does
"correspondence" still have the same sting?

The way I see it, there are two different questions involved.  The one has to do with the definition of the concept truth.  The other has to do with whether or not it is possible to know for sure whether or not the beliefs that we hold are true.

My answer to the first question is correspondence.

My answer to the second question is no, it is not possible.  So what of the sting?  I'd say two things.  First, if you really are a fallibilist, then you didn't have the missing sting in the first place.  Second, the sting in question doesn't come from affirming correspondence as the definition of the concept of truth.  Rather, it comes from affirming absolutism about the epistemic status of knowledge-claims.  Being a non-fallibilist about knowledge is not the same as defending correspondence as a definition of the concept of truth.  

(Which is why you forfeit the sting even if you don't go so far as to say that certain knowledge of correspondence is impossible in principle; so far as I can tell, you forfeit it the minute you are just a humble fallibilist on the empirical grounds that we obviously get stuff wrong a lot of the time.)

What do you think?

Ruth


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