Don’t Forget About the Correspondence Theory of Truth

Abstract Contra Lewis, it is argued that the correspondence theory is a genuine rival theory of truth: it goes beyond the redundancy theory; it competes with other theories of truth; it is aptly summarized by the slogan ‘truth is correspondence to fact’;and it really is a theory of truth. In one of his very last publications, David Lewis asks us to forget about the correspondence theory of truth [2001: 275-80]. The correspondence theory, according to Lewis, is not one of the rival theories of truth. There are only four theories of truth that are genuine rivals: the redundancy theory, the coherence theory, the pragmatic theory, and the epistemic theory. The four really are rivals, Lewis says, because they are ‘incompatible’ [275]. Take, for instance, the redundancy theory and the pragmatic theory. The redundancy biconditional, (1), and the pragmatic biconditional, (2), are both ‘meant to be a priori’ [275]: is ‘manifestly not a priori’ [275], the two theories conflict. The same strategy, mutatis mutandis, is supposed to show that any two of the four are genuine rivals.Lewis is using ‘is not a priori’ as short for something like ‘its truth value cannot be determined by a priori means’. He is saying that (3)’s truth value, whatever it may be, is manifestly not determinable by a priori means. Note the special sense of incompatibility: two theories, meant to be a priori, are incompatible, if the result of putting them together in a certain way is manifestly not a priori. Theories that are incompatible in this special sense might still be compatible in the ordinary sense. Nevertheless, Lewis holds that two theories conflict when they are incompatible in his sense: they are rivals-though theories that are not incompatible in his sense might still be rivals for other reasons.