Ideas from 'Truth' by J.L. Austin [1950], by Theme Structure
[found in 'The Nature of Truth' (ed/tr Lynch, Michael P.) [MIT 2001,0-262-62145-2]].
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3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 1. Correspondence Truth
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True sentences says the appropriate descriptive thing on the appropriate demonstrative occasion
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Full Idea:
A sentence is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions (the one to which it 'refers') is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions.
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From:
J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], §3)
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A reaction:
This is correspondence by convention rather than correspondence by mapping. Personally I prefer some sort of mapping account, despite all the difficulty and vagueness of specifying what maps onto what.
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3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique
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Correspondence theorists shouldn't think that a country has just one accurate map
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Full Idea:
Correspondence theorists too often talk as one would who held that every map is either accurate or inaccurate; that every country can have but one accurate map.
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From:
J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], n 24)
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A reaction:
A well-made point, for those who intuitively hang on to correspondence as not only good common sense, but also some sort of salvation for a realist view of the world which might give us certainty in epistemology.
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