The Vagueness of Correspondence

I agree with George H. Smith that the word correspondence -- as in the correspondence theory of the truth -- "is a somewhat unfortunate choice of words." (Why Atheism) Smith writes that while true propositions -- statements that such and such is the case --  can be said to correspond to facts, the term is still fraught with ambiguity. He goes on to say that an idea, unlike a proposition, is best not spoken of those terms. "The theist may have an idea of God," he writes "and this idea may be clear or muddled, coherent or confused, logically consistent or self-contradictory -- but this idea, strictly speaking, can be neither true nor false. An idea neither affirms nor denies that something is a fact (to have an idea of God is not necessarily to affirm that God exists), so it makes no sense to evaluate the truth [or] falsity of an idea per se." This seems right. I can hold the idea unicorn without embracing the proposition unicorns exist.

Correspondence framework problematically states that something inside your head resembles something out there. And that raises the question "Does it really?" You might think that in the case of a proposition, two things do exist: the proposition and the fact it purports to state. But this is misleading, as Smith writes:

Consider the proposition "The cat is on the mat." What do I mean to express when I utter this proposition (assuming, of course that I believe it to be true)? Do I mean to say -- as the term correspondence might suggest -- that my proposition, "The cat is on the mat," somehow corresponds to a fact? Am I affirming the existence of a relationship (known as "correspondence") between my statement and the fact to which it refers?

Although this abstract relationship is implied by my statement, it seems peculiar to suppose that this is what I primarily have in mind.... What I mean to do, simply and directly, is to identify a fact -- namely, that the cat is indeed on the mat, rather than somewhere else.

My proposition is primarily intended to identify a fact, not to render an assessment of its own truth in terms of correspondence. The latter judgment -- which philosophers call a reflexive  judgment -- is a secondary judgment that assesses the truth-value of my primary judgment. Thus, whereas my primary judgement is an assertion of fact..., my reflexive judgment is a judgment of this judgment...."  

So I agree with Smith (and by implication Ayn Rand) that rather than talking about true statements corresponding to facts, we ought to talk about true statements recognizing or identifying facts. An advantage of this way of thinking is that it steers clear of things like the sense-data approach to perception. Some philosophers have mistakenly thought that what we perceive are not entities out there but sense-data in our heads. If that were true, we might wonder about the correspondence of what's out there and in here. But this issue does not arise when we think in terms of recognition and identification. When we see a bowl of fruit on a table, few of us (outside of neuroscience and philosophy) would ask, "Does my fruit-bowl sense-datum correspond to a real bowl of fruit on a real table? How could I possibly know?" Have you ever asked yourself such questions (outside of a philosophy class)? I doubt it. You just see a bowl of fruit. 

Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying our judgments about perceptions are infallible. The bowl may hold edible fruit, but it may also hold exceptionally well-made waxed fruit. (Or it could be a hologram.) I may initially think I can eat the fruit. Yet further investigation could prove me wrong -- that I had misidentified what I saw. But this point has no implications for Smith's point about correspondence. We couldn't have the concept misidentification without first having the concept identification. Moreover, we rely on our perceptual apparatus to correct mistaken perceptual judgments. Thus mistaken perceptual judgments do not indict the efficacy of that apparatus.