Veritas: The correspondence theory and its critics (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Veritas: The correspondence theory and its critics by Gerald Vision Cory D. Wright Veritas: The correspondence theory and its critics. By Gerald Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. 298. ISBN 0262220709. $36 (Hb). Gerald Vision’s preferred formulation of the correspondence theory of truth is, roughly, that a sentence σ congruently describes a type of worldly circumstance such that the proposition σ expresses is true iff there is a relevant token whose type is congruently described by σ. (Reference, deixis, and context purportedly fix relevance conditions, and ‘congruent description’ is conspicuously lode-bearing.) Yet, readers aren’t presented with this neo-Austinian formulation until about 230 pages in, and even then it’s barely a sketch. So, despite dutifully playing the apologist throughout, V’s Veritas is best understood as an enthusiastic attempt to deflect criticism of a general correspondence outlook. Accordingly, the book can be divided into two ways in which V executes this deflection—one negative, one positive. (The exception is Ch. 7, which stands out as an interesting but ultimately irrelevant exegetical interlude, and which boldly contests a standard interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Willard Van Orman Quine as deflationists.) The negative way (Chs. 1–3, 9) is to undo entrenched caricatures, make disclaimers, and justify abstention and neutrality on key issues. For example, V forsakes traditional ‘correspondence’ idioms in his preferred formulation insofar as they are nonintegral to a correspondence theory’s success, and advises against specifying correspondence in terms of propositions mirroring or being structurally isomorphic to facts. For V, qualifying as a correspondence theorist only requires endorsing two nonnegotiable theses: that the truth of a semantically evaluable content is constituted or made true by worldly circumstances (not to be confused with advocating truth-conditional theories of meaning), and that truths don’t depend on being believed for their existence. He also unremittingly resists the felt need to further analyze the relations in his preferred formulation, despite acknowledging that correspondence theorists frequently face paralyzing questions about how anything can be said about a reality that is genuinely independent of our modes of thought and language. V simply concedes the point: what we call ‘facts’ or ‘truthmakers’ aren’t semantically evaluable. Instead, he uses the noncommittal ‘worldly circumstance’ as an umbrella term to defer murky semantic and ontological questions about the status of facts, events, states-of-affairs, and so on. (Yet, doing so requires disengaging from the very criticisms that plagued correspondence theorists in the first place, which makes for a disappointing response.) The positive way of deflecting criticism (Chs. 4–6) is to mount a vigorous attack on competitors of correspondence theories—particularly, deflationary minimalism. First, V confronts the oft-held objection that epigrammatic platitudes are so vacuous as to neither support correspondence theories nor rule out minimalism, and then raises counterobjections against deflationary minimalists’ own platitude-based strategies for defining truth predicates. One conclusion is that substitution of various platitudes—especially those where ‘because’ replaces the [End Page 476] ‘iff’ connective—reveals thoroughgoing substantive consequences, which undermines claims designed to parade deflationism as a metaphysically ungratuitous alternative to corresponding theories. Another is that, while deflationists’ employment of biconditional T-schemas (e.g. σ is true iff p) may yield explanations of truth predication or concepts of truth, those schemas—without further premises—are insufficient to justify claims about truth being an insubstantive property. All told, V’s Veritas lays out an interesting series of counterarguments against opposition to the correspondence theory of truth, even if it does little to advance the theory itself. Cory D. Wright University of California, San Diego Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America