Either the folks who responded that they accept correspondence theory didn't understand the question, or they interpreted "correspondence" in some creative way.

Might it be that you are thinking of the question in too narrow a way and not they collectively misunderstanding it?

Correspondence is not accepted by anyone who's familiar with the topic. It's fairly straightforward to demonstrate that truth can't be analyzed in that way.

Which topic? It remains the most popular conception in metaphysics, of that I'm quite confident.

What's the demonstration?

Might it be that you are thinking of the question in too narrow a way and not they collectively misunderstanding it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Since I don't know who they were or why they responded as they did, there's no way to resolve the question.

Which topic? It remains the most popular conception in metaphysics, of that I'm quite confident. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What makes you think this?

What's the demonstration? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm in the middle of a project. I think you'd find Soames' book to be a great investment. Plus you can get his books about the history of AP, although he said something about Davidson that didn't turn out to be correct.

What makes you think this?

Lots of reading, graduate school experience, that sources like IEP and SEP will state this as uncontroversial and people like to complain if they get things wrong, the polling data, etc.

Are you thinking of correspondence narrowly as just Bertrand Russell's work, Moore, etc? That might be the disconnect. The term gets used broadly for all theories that attempt to explain truth in something like a corresponding relationship to reality, e.g. "it is currently raining outside," is true if water is falling from the sky outside.

We're done. :smile:

:up:

It's fairly straightforward to demonstrate that truth can't be analyzed in that way.

BTW, I agree with you here. I feel like there have been knock down arguments against correspondence for millennia at this point, e.g. Plotinus asks how one might step outside one's beliefs and experiences to compare them with the world. Yet it has trucked along nonetheless.

But I think this has to do more with vague commitments to realism. Maybe not though, truth-maker theories (facts, states of affairs, etc.) seem pretty popular.

Might you be conflating foundationalism with monism here? Hegel has a circular and fallibalist epistemology, but it is monist. Artistotle thinks that "what is best know to us," our starting point, are concrete particulars, the "many." But what are "best known in themselves," are unifying, generating principles (the unifying "one(s), which virtually contain the many. Nor is Aristotle particularly rigid; he admonishes us not to expect explanations that are more detailed than the topic area under discussion allows in the ethics (pace analytics who have tried to quantify "moral goodness"). Both have a monistic theory of logic/Logos, but neither are foundationalists. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, but not in a tactical sense. Didn't realize it was a point of contention.

Cheshire is saying that this view, that may cement logical monism, especially in the sense of using logical principles as laws, is an internalist conceit. Cheshire points to the way classical logic is self-contained and self-protecting. It's a castle built on air, and potentially leaving us deluded.

Cheshire would prefer to see us start from where we are, here in the world, with our problems in view instead of down in a brain-vat. — frank

I wouldn't put it that well, but yes, that's essentially what I'm saying. Perhaps not start with our imagination.

BTW, I agree with you here. I feel like there have been knock down arguments against correspondence for millennia at this point, e.g. Plotinus asks how one might step outside one's beliefs and experiences to compare them with the world. Yet it has trucked along nonetheless. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems to me that the problem with some people's understanding of correspondence rules it our while a more sensible understanding makes it central to human life. Even Tarski's 'T-sentence' essentially expresses the logic of correspondence. The sentence "snow is white" is true if an only if snow is white. (As Aristotle would have it "to say of what is so that it is so" (loosely paraphrased).

The reality being corresponded to is not the arcane reality of the "in itself" but the ordinary empirical reality of human experience. Of course we can't check to see if our assertions correspond to the imagined (for us) reality of the in itself, but we can at least in prinicple check whether our assertions correspond to the common human experience and judgement we share and inhabit.

Yes, I think you're correct, one can think of correspondence in a looser sense and I think it is in this looser sense that it remains so popular amongst philosophers. And one can add notions of pragmatism, coherence, or identity to the correspondence view without necessarily altering its core intuition.