ABSTRACT
The chapter contains a discussion of the different versions of the correspondence theories in order to compare and contrast them with the referential theory. A number of prominent philosophers who have explicitly expressed the idea that the notion of correspondence may be interpreted in terms of designation, denotation, and reference are cited, but then it is emphasized that, with perhaps the exception of one philosopher, none of them made any substantial effort to construct a referential theory of truth. Russell’s version of the correspondence is discussed in length, with the conclusion that it is incompatible with the referential theory. It is then shown that the referential theory is immune from some of the main objections to the classical versions of the correspondence theories: it does not run into the regress argument, it deals with the coherentist objections, it does not presuppose the existence of facts that are independent of language, and, perhaps most importantly, it preserves the basic intuition underlying the correspondence theories that a sentence that expresses a truth uniquely specifies its referent, which allows it to account for the truth of negative, existential, universal, disjunctive, and conditional sentences much better than any correspondence theory.
