The Criteria of Truth
The most familiar conceptions of truth define it in terms of coherence, correspondence, or confirmation. A coherence model of truth, variously advocated by Gadamer, Davidson, Rorty, and Foucault, frames it in terms of the ultimately harmonious integration of discursive “regularities” (to use Foucault's term) with a specific context or location. If the word truth means anything, Rorty might say, it means something like “this is how we do things around here.” Truth as coherence downplays any sharp distinction between the statement of truth and its reference—between nature and its “mirror.”
By contrast, according to a correspondence or realist theory—versions of which are defended by Gödel, Maddy, Bhaskar, and Norris—truth remains a function of the relation between an assertion and the extralinguistic reality it describes or refers to. Since there is no reason why such assertions should exhaust the full truth “out there” in reality, “one definitive aspect of correspondence theories is that what it takes for a sentence to be true might well transcend what we are able to know.” 1 Given some disputed statement, Dummett has famously characterized realism as “the belief that statements of the disputed class possess an objective truth value, independently of our means of knowing it: they are true or false in virtue of a reality existing independently of us.” 2
Dummett's own antirealism—an understanding of truth in terms of confirmation—thus “opposes to this the view that statements of the disputed class are to be understood only by reference to the sort of thing which
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