who chaired the session, as also to Emest LePore, who served as commentator.
What follows is a defence of what is at root a correspondence theory of truth for sentences with empirical content. Two extreme positions can be distinguished in regard to what it is in reality to which such sentences correspond. 2 At the one extreme is the position of those, such as Davidson, who a...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.406.5016 http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//articles/Putting_the_World.pdf |
| Summary: | What follows is a defence of what is at root a correspondence theory of truth for sentences with empirical content. Two extreme positions can be distinguished in regard to what it is in reality to which such sentences correspond. 2 At the one extreme is the position of those, such as Davidson, who accept the so-called 'slingshot argument ' as demonstrating that there is at most one all-embracing entity, the Great Fact, to which all true sentences correspond. 3 At the other extreme is the position, defended for example by the authors of "Truth-Makers"4, which sees correspondence for empirical sentences as pertaining to the verbs of such sentences, so that the job of making true is carried out by individual states or events. Interestingly, Davidson too seems in some passages to embrace this latter option. Thus for example he assertS that it is the whiteness of snow that makes 'Schnee ist weiB ' true (1984, p. xiv), each of these sentences ['I am writing my name', 'I am writing my name on a piece of paper', etc.] is made true by the same action (1980, p. 110), [a certain flight] makes it true [that Amundsen flew to the North Pole] 1. The present paper is based on a talk presented at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 1988.1 am grateful to Prof. Davidson |
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