Identifying the Identity Theory of Truth

Abstract

Jdentity theories of truth have reappeared on philosophical scene. For example, and most recently, Jennifer Hornsby began her Presidential Address to Aristotelian Society by saying 'I want to promote what I shall call (unoriginally, and for sake of its having a name) the identity theory of truth.'l A rough description of this theory, which will do just to get us started, is that it is what results when you substitute identity for correspondence in a statement of a correspondence theory. Hornsby's opening remark is kind of announcement philosophers are used to. But her promotional strategy is curiously negative. She goes on to deny that theory has 'the ambitions of a definition' and claims that 'it acknowledges truth's indefinability', explaining that '[t]he interest of theory derives from what it can be seen, from what it says, to be opposed to philosophically' (1997, p. 3, n. 5). One of things it is opposed to, it soon becomes clear, is correspondence theory, and this opposition is significant: '[T]he identity theory is worth considering to extent to which correspondence theories are worth avoiding' (1997, p. 6).2 Hornsby's position can be illuminated by comparison with that of another current defender of an identity theory of truth and her former collaborator,3 Julian Dodd, who is likewise anxious to stress theory's deriving its interest from its opposition to correspondence: so much so that in one article he begins drawing on contrast in second sentence and then goes on immediately to accuse correspondence theorist of 'double vision', of seeing 'correspondence where there can only be coincidence' (Dodd 1995, p. 160). In a later article he goes further, defending his preferred version of identity theory against an accusation of triviality: