ABSTRACT
Like the correspondence theory, metaphysical realism rests on a contentious methodological presupposition about its objects of inquiry. Pragmatists, Richard Rorty suggests, are better off without a theory or definition of truth, and they should stick to the purely "negative point" that "one [can]not use truth as an explanatory notion". Donald Davidson thinks that truth is a property of sentences and the concept of truth for a particular language is to be elucidated by a "truth theory" that is modeled on Alfred Tarski's notion of a recursive truth definition. In "Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth" Rorty reaches a conclusion about the theoretical status of truth. Truth is not a fit object for theoretical investigation because truth does not have an essence or a hidden nature of which competent truth-users might be ignorant, any more than functional concepts like "can opener" or "shopping cart" have hidden essences.
