ABSTRACT
Austin summarizes his version of the correspondence theory thus: ‘a statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions (the one to which it ‘refers’) is of a type which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions’. Austin does belatedly recognize that ‘a more developed language’ has in its grammar and syntax characteristics that make it more learnable, adaptable, precise and so on; but, he insists, they ‘do not make statements in it any more capable of being true or capable of being any more true’. Strawson calls this a ‘purified’ version of the correspondence theory and seems to accept two features of it, the affixing of the predicate ‘true’ to statements rather than, as the semantic theory does, to sentences; the emphasis on the purely conventional nature of the relation of correspondence which implies a rejection of any kind of structural correspondence.
