ABSTRACT
THE Correspondence Theory of Truth is rather out of fashion at the moment. It is often referred to as obviously false—something that need be mentioned only to be dismissed. That is not to say that it has been replaced by one of its traditional rivals—the Coherence Theory, for example. On the contrary. It is sometimes said that a consideration of the way in which we employ the word 'true' in ordinary language indicates that its use is as a term of logical appraisal, i.e. the word 'true' is not descriptive but appraisive in a sense to be called 'logical'; for this reason the notion of truth cannot be defined in terms of properties like correspondence with fact. Moreover, to say that a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to the facts is to confuse what it is to say that a statement is true with the grounds for appraising it as such. 1 The problem of truth is one concerning the meaning of 'truth'. To say that true statements correspond to the facts cannot constitute an elucidation of the meaning of 'truth'; at the most it can be an account of the grounds for saying that a statement is true. But it is often said also that the Gorrespondence Theory will not do even as an account of the grounds for appraising a statement as true. For, it is said, that theory presupposes that there is a simple relationship between language and the world; it presupposes that statements mirror or copy the world. Language is not really like that; hence the theory must be wrong.
