You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
PERHARS THE MOST PERVASIVE and longest living theory of truth has to do with a correspondence between a "true" belief and a "fact". Every true belief, and no false belief, corresponds to such a fact. The property common to all truths is such a correspondence. Most commonly associated with this theory is G. E. Moore (1959), although its history stretches back to Aristotle. Ignoring the semantics of "belief" (something may be true though noone believes it), the essential point is that something is true if it corresponds to a fact and false if it does not. Because of the tendency of this approach to lend itself to an all or nothing position, and its obliviousness to the context within which statements are embedded, and because of the difficulty in defining what is and what is not "fact", we can only talk of partial truths. Thus Carnap (1959) emphasizes the element of choice in describing phenomena, in the name of consistency, and with the aim of maintaining a useful symbolic system.
Under closer examination a "correspondence" of statements with facts tends to become less and less clear. To Carnap, then, truth has to do more with maintenance of system consistency. William James (1929) thought the essence of truth has to do with moral choice; beliefs are true to the extent that we act upon them and believe in them. To James, that which acts as constriction of imagination and creative action is, per se, a subtraction of an element from "truth".
There are the semanticists who feel that truth has "meaning" only within a context of specific language. Statements made in one language may lose specific "meaning" or the quality of "truth" if made in another language. For these there is really no "problem"