The Correspondence Theory of Truth

Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to, or with, a facta view that was
advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly
embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation
(to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). This basic idea has been expressed in many ways, giving rise to an
extended family of theories and, more often, theory sketches. Members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant
relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation,
reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, conditions, situations,
events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the
theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences.

The correspondence theory of truth is often associated with metaphysical realism. Its traditional competitors, pragmatist, as well as
coherentist, verificationist, and other epistemic theories of truth, are often associated with idealism, anti-realism, or relativism. In
recent years, these traditional competitors have been virtually replaced (at least from publication-space) by deflationary theories of
truth and, to a lesser extent, by the identity theory (note that these new competitors are typically not associated with anti-realism).
Still more recently, two further approaches have received considerable attention. One is truth maker theory: it is sometimes viewed
as a competitor to, sometimes as a more liberal version of, the correspondence theory. The other is pluralism: it incorporates a
correspondence account as one, but only one, ingredient of its overall account of truth.

Thomas Aquinas (1224/61274)

St. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican priest and Scriptural theologian. He took seriously the medieval maxim that grace perfects
and builds on nature; it does not set it aside or destroy it. Therefore, insofar as Thomas thought about philosophy as the discipline
that investigates what we can know naturally about God and human beings, he thought that good Scriptural theology, since it treats
those same topics, presupposes good philosophical analysis and argumentation. Although Thomas authored some works of pure
philosophy, most of his philosophizing is found in the context of his doing Scriptural theology. Indeed, one finds Thomas engaging in
the work of philosophy even in his Biblical commentaries and sermons.

Within his large body of work, Thomas treats most of the major sub-disciplines of philosophy, including logic, philosophy of nature,
metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, philosophical theology, the philosophy of language,
ethics, and political philosophy. As far as his philosophy is concerned, Thomas is perhaps most famous for his so-called five ways of
attempting to demonstrate the existence of God. These five short arguments constitute only an introduction to a rigorous project in
natural theologytheology that is properly philosophical and so does not make use of appeals to religious authoritythat runs
through thousands of tightly argued pages. Thomas also offers one of the earliest systematic discussions of the nature and kinds of
law, including a famous treatment of natural law. Despite his interest in law, Thomas writings on ethical theory are actually virtue-
centered and include extended discussions of the relevance of happiness, pleasure, the passions, habit, and the faculty of will for the
moral life, as well as detailed treatments of each one of the theological, intellectual, and cardinal virtues. Arguably, Thomas most
influential contribution to theology and philosophy, however, is his model for the correct relationship between these two disciplines,
a model which has it that neither theology nor philosophy is reduced one to the other, where each of these two disciplines is
allowed its own proper scope, and each discipline is allowed to perfect the other, if not in content, then at least by inspiring those
who practice that discipline to reach ever new intellectual heights.

In his lifetime, Thomas expert opinion on theological and philosophical topics was sought by many, including at different times a
king, a pope, and a countess. It is fair to say that, as a theologian, Thomas is one of the most important in the history of Western
civilization, given the extent of his influence on the development of Roman Catholic theology since the 14th century. However, it
also seems right to sayif only from the sheer influence of his work on countless philosophers and intellectuals in every century
since the 13th, as well as on persons in countries as culturally diverse as Argentina, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Italy,
Japan, Poland, Spain, and the United Statesthat, globally, Thomas is one of the 10 most influential philosophers in the Western
philosophical tradition.
Ren Descartes (15961650)

Ren Descartes is often credited with being the Father of Modern Philosophy. This title is justified due both to his break with the
traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy prevalent at his time and to his development and promotion of the new, mechanistic
sciences. His fundamental break with Scholastic philosophy was twofold. First, Descartes thought that the Scholastics method was
prone to doubt given their reliance on sensation as the source for all knowledge. Second, he wanted to replace their final causal
model of scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic model.

Descartes attempted to address the former issue via his method of doubt. His basic strategy was to consider false any belief that
falls prey to even the slightest doubt. This hyperbolic doubt then serves to clear the way for what Descartes considers to be an
unprejudiced search for the truth. This clearing of his previously held beliefs then puts him at an epistemological ground-zero. From
here Descartes sets out to find something that lies beyond all doubt. He eventually discovers that I exist is impossible to doubt and
is, therefore, absolutely certain. It is from this point that Descartes proceeds to demonstrate Gods existence and that God cannot
be a deceiver. This, in turn, serves to fix the certainty of everything that is clearly and distinctly understood and provides the
epistemological foundation Descartes set out to find.

Once this conclusion is reached, Descartes can proceed to rebuild his system of previously dubious beliefs on this absolutely certain
foundation. These beliefs, which are re-established with absolute certainty, include the existence of a world of bodies external to the
mind, the dualistic distinction of the immaterial mind from the body, and his mechanistic model of physics based on the clear and
distinct ideas of geometry. This points toward his second, major break with the Scholastic Aristotelian tradition in that Descartes
intended to replace their system based on final causal explanations with his system based on mechanistic principles. Descartes also
applied this mechanistic framework to the operation of plant, animal and human bodies, sensation and the passions. All of this
eventually culminating in a moral system based on the notion of generosity.

John Locke (1632-1704)

The English philosopher and political theorist John Locke laid much of the groundwork for the Enlightenment and made central
contributions to the development of liberalism. Trained in medicine, he was a key advocate of the empirical approaches of the
Scientific Revolution. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he advanced a theory of the self as a blank page, with
knowledge and identity arising only from accumulated experience. His political theory of government by the consent of the
governed as a means to protect life, liberty and estate deeply influenced the United States founding documents. His essays on
religious tolerance provided an early model for the separation of church and state.

David Hume (1711 - 1776)

He was a Scottish philosopher, economist and historian of the Age of Enlightenment. He was an important figure in the Scottish
Enlightenment and, along with John Locke and Bishop George Berkeley, one of the three main figureheads of the influential British
Empiricism movement.

He was a fierce opponent of the Rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, as well as an atheist and a skeptic. He has come to be
considered as one of the most important British philosophers of all time, and he was a huge influence on later philosophers, from
Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer to the Logical Positivists and Analytic Philosophers of the 20th Century, as well as on
intellectuals in other fields (including Albert Einstein, who claimed to have been inspired by Hume's skepticism of the established
order).

Even today, Hume's philosophical work remains refreshingly modern, challenging and provocative. In later life, however, he largely
turned away from philosophy in favor of economics and his other great love, history, and it was only then that he achieved
recognition in his own lifetime.
Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753)

An Irish philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, best known for his theory of Immaterialism, a type of Idealism (he is sometimes
considered the father of modern Idealism). Along with John Locke and David Hume, he is also a major figure in the British Empiricism
movement, although his Empiricism is of a much more radical kind, arising from his mantra "to be is to be perceived".

He was a brilliant critic of his predecessors, particularly Descartes, Malebranche, Locke and Hobbes, and a talented metaphysician
capable of defending the apparently counter-intuitive theory of Immaterialism. He also had some minor influence on the
development of mathematics (and calculus in particular).

Berkeley's earliest published works were on mathematics and on optics (the latter, dealing with matters of visual distance,
magnitude, position and problems of sight and touch, was controversial at the time, but became an established part of the theory of
optics). But all the philosophical works for which he has become famous were also written while he was still a young man in in his
20s.

In 1710, still only 25 years old, his "Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge" was published, his first exposition of the
then revolutionary theory that objects exist only as perception and not as matter separate from perception, summed up in his
dictum "Esse est percipi" ("To be is to be perceived"). The work is beautifully written and dense with cogent arguments, no matter
how counter-intuitive the system may appear at first sight.

He called the theory Immaterialism (conceived as it was in opposition to the prevailing Materialism of the time), although it was
later referred to by others as Subjective Idealism. The theory propounds the view that reality consists exclusively of minds and their
ideas, and that individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas, not the objects themselves. The position that the mind is the
only thing that can be known to exist (and that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified) is known as Solipsism, and
forms the root of the later doctrine of Phenomenalism. It can also be seen as an extreme type of Empiricism, whereby any
knowledge of the empirical world is to be obtained only through direct perception.

Berkeley, recognizing the possible theological loopholes in his theory, argued that if he or another person saw a table, for example,
then that table existed; however, if no one saw the table, then it could only continue to exist if it was in an infinite mind that
perceives all, i.e. God. He further argued that it is God who causes us to experience physical objects by directly willing us to
experience matter (thus avoiding the extra, unnecessary step of creating that matter).

So, Berkeley's view of reality might be summed up as follows: there exists an infinite spirit (God) and a multitude of finite spirits
(humans), and we are in communication with God via our experience. Thus, what we take to be our whole experience of the world is
analogous to God's language, God's way of talking to us, and all the laws of science and Nature we see around us are analogous to
the grammar of God's language. There is, then, in this theory, no need to postulate the existence of matter at all, as all reality is
effectively mental.

Although Berkeley insisted that his theory was not skeptical in nature, and that he was not actually denying the existence of
anything, it was largely received with ridicule at the time, and even those few who recognized the genius of the arguments were
unconvinced by them (Dr. Samuel Johnson is reputed to have kicked a heavy stone and exclaimed, "I refute it thus!"). His "Three
Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous" of 1713 was published as a defence against the criticisms his first work received. In it, the
characters Philonous and Hylas represent Berkeley himself and his contemporary.

In 1734, Berkeley published "The Analyst", a direct attack on the logical foundations and principles of calculus and, in particular, the
notions of fluxion or infinitesimal change which Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727) and Gottfried Leibniz had used to develop calculus.
Berkeley saw this as part of his broader campaign against the religious implications of Newtonian mechanics and against Deism. It
was arguably as a result of this controversy that the foundations of calculus were rewritten in a much more formal and rigorous
form, using the concept of limits.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the 20th century philosopher Karl Popper (1902 - 1994) published a paper in 1953 called "A
Note on Berkeley as a Presursor to Mach and Einstein" in which he described 21 theses from Berkeley's work and showed how they
mirrored concepts in modern physics.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

One of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology,
ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses
on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large part of Kants work
addresses the question What can we know? The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to
mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible
realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active
role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the minds access only to the empirical realm of space and time.

Kants contributions to ethics have been just as substantial, if not more so, than his work in metaphysics and epistemology. He is the
most important proponent in philosophical history of deontological, or duty based, ethics. In Kants view, the sole feature that gives
an action moral worth is not the outcome that is achieved by the action, but the motive that is behind the action. And the only
motive that can endow an act with moral value, he argues, is one that arises from universal principles discovered by reason. The
categorical imperative is Kants famous statement of this duty: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time
will that it should become a universal law.

Sir Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

He is generally credited with being one of the founders of Analytic Philosophy, and almost all the various Analytic movements
throughout the 20th Century (particularly Logicism, Logical Positivism and Ordinary Language Philosophy) owe something to Russell.
His major works, such as his essay "On Denoting" and the huge "Principia Mathematica" (co-author with Alfred North Whitehead),
have had a considerable influence on mathematics (especially set theory), linguistics and all areas of philosophy.

He was a prominent atheist, pacifist and anti-war activist, and championed free trade between nations and anti-imperialism. He was
a prolific writer on many subjects (from his adolescent years, he wrote about 3,000 words a day, with relatively few corrections), and
was a great popularizer of philosophy.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

The German rationalist philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), is one of the great renaissance men of Western thought.
He has made significant contributions in several fields spanning the intellectual landscape, including mathematics, physics, logic,
ethics, and theology. Unlike many of his contemporaries of the modern period, Leibniz does not have a canonical work that stands as
his single, comprehensive piece of philosophy. Instead, in order to understand Leibniz's entire philosophical system, one must piece
it together from his various essays, books, and correspondences. As a result, there are several ways to explicate Leibniz's philosophy.
This article begins with his theory of truth, according to which the nature of truth consists in the connection or inclusion of a
predicate in a subject.

Baruch Spinoza

Bento (in Hebrew, Baruch; in Latin, Benedictus) Spinoza is one of the most important philosophersand certainly the most radical
of the early modern period. His thought combines a commitment to a number of Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological
principles with elements from ancient Stoicism, Hobbes, and medieval Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system.
His extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being and knowledge serve to ground a moral philosophy centered
on the control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. They also lay the foundations for a strongly democratic political
thought and a deep critique of the pretensions of Scripture and sectarian religion. Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth-
century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza.