5 - Truth and correspondence

Summary

Preceding chapters have elaborated and defended a therapeutic approach to concepts, meaning, and reference, but if I am to make good on my project of rendering the essentialist-correspondentist picture of language optional, a daunting hurdle still remains, namely, the semantics of truth – daunting, since truth is often understood in precisely correspondentist terms. The problem is this: if the truth of a belief (or statement, proposition, etc.) just is its correspondence to an object’s fundamental reality, and if it is inappropriate to think of our beliefs as standing in this sort of relationship to God, then it would appear that our beliefs cannot be true of God. The present chapter aims to render this conclusion optional by defending a non-correspondentist account of truth and then using this account to explain how theological beliefs could be true. The key moves are these: (a) to understand truth in terms of the practice of taking-true, that is, one’s judging some belief to be correct on the basis of one’s other beliefs, and thus using it to judge still other beliefs; (b) to understand this practice as carrying on the norms implicit in patterns of intersubjective recognition; and (c) to understand the normative Spirit of Christ as entering into and being carried on through these same practices, thereby supplying the condition of one’s possibly holding true beliefs about God.

Truth problems

Theologians and philosophers have traditionally assumed that truth is a matter of correspondence between beliefs, ideas, or words, on the one hand, and extra-mental, extra-linguistic reality, on the other. So René Descartes, for instance, asserts that “truth, in its proper signification, denotes the conformity of thought with object”; Immanuel Kant takes it for granted that truth is “the agreement of cognition with its object”; and Karl Barth remarks that theological claims are true if and only if “our words stand in a correspondence and agreement with the being of God.” Countless examples could be adduced, but the point is that theologians and philosophers have tended to accept some version of the so-called correspondence theory of truth, according to which a belief, statement, or idea counts as true if and only if it corresponds to or is isomorphic with an object. I will say more about this theory in a moment, but for now, it is important to note that although most theologians have accepted some version of it, the correspondence theory has been subjected to serious criticism, leading some to reason that if (a) truth is indeed a matter of correspondence, and (b) such correspondence is unworkable (at least with respect to God), then (c) our beliefs and sentences cannot be true of God. In due course, I will try to render conclusion (c) optional by calling into question premise (a), but in order to motivate the alternative account by means of which to do so, and to establish some criteria for that account’s adequacy, we need to spend some time considering the problems at issue in premise (b). Toward that end, this section begins by saying more about the correspondence theory and then considering some of the objections it faces.