back to ideas for this text


Single Idea 9594

[from 'The Philosophy of Philosophy' by Timothy Williamson, in 3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique ]

Full Idea

Even if talk of truth as correspondence to the facts is metaphorical, it is a bad metaphor for analytic truth in a way that it is not for synthetic truth.

Gist of Idea

Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth

Source

Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 3.1)

Book Reference

Williamson,Timothy: 'The Philosophy of Philosophy' [Blackwell 2007], p.54


A Reaction

A very simple and rather powerful point. Maybe the word 'truth' should be withheld from such cases. You might say that accepted analytic truths are 'conventional'. If that is wrong, then they correspond to natural facts at a high level of abstraction.