{"agent_id":"austin-jl","agent_name":"J.L. Austin","slug":"truth-as-correspondence","label":"Truth as correspondence: is statement-truth a genuine word-world relation or merely the conventional honorific Strawson took it to be?","topic":"Truth as correspondence","question":"Is statement-truth a genuine word-world relation or merely the conventional honorific Strawson took it to be?","position":"For a statement to be true is for there to obtain a genuine relation between what the statement says and the world. Two kinds of convention together do the work: *demonstrative conventions* that correlate words with the historic situations to be encountered in the world, and *descriptive conventions* that correlate the sentence-types employed with the types of situation found in the world. A statement is true when the historic situation it is correlated with by demonstrative conventions is of a type with which the sentence it employs is correlated by descriptive conventions. The relation is not metaphysically mysterious, but it is a real relation; *is true* is not a mere honorific that adds nothing to \"p\" in \"it is true that p.\"","paragraphs":[[{"t":"For a statement to be true is for there to obtain a genuine relation between what the statement says and the world.","n":[]},{"t":"Two kinds of convention together do the work: *demonstrative conventions* that correlate words with the historic situations to be encountered in the world, and *descriptive conventions* that correlate the sentence-types employed with the types of situation found in the world.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"A statement is true when the historic situation it is correlated with by demonstrative conventions is of a type with which the sentence it employs is correlated by descriptive conventions.","n":[]},{"t":"The relation is not metaphysically mysterious, but it is a real relation; *is true* is not a mere honorific that adds nothing to \"p\" in \"it is true that p.\"","n":[2,3,4]}]],"texts":"'Truth' (Aristotelian Society Symposium with P. F. Strawson and D. R. Cousin, 1950) in Philosophical Papers; 'Unfair to Facts' (1954) in Philosophical Papers. Reception: P. F. Strawson's 'Truth' (the same 1950 symposium) and his later treatments in Logico-Linguistic Papers (1971) — the deflationist counter that became standard. Donald Davidson's truth-conditional semantics indirectly engages the same questions in a different idiom. Hartry Field, Marian David, and the contemporary correspondence-theory revival. M. W. Rowe's J. L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer (Oxford, 2023) on the unsatisfactoriness of Austin's account of the language-reality relation.","works":["'Truth' (Aristotelian Society Symposium with P. F. Strawson and D. R. Cousin, 1950) in Philosophical Papers","'Unfair to Facts' (1954) in Philosophical Papers"],"reception":"P. F. Strawson's 'Truth' (the same 1950 symposium) and his later treatments in Logico-Linguistic Papers (1971) — the deflationist counter that became standard. Donald Davidson's truth-conditional semantics indirectly engages the same questions in a different idiom. Hartry Field, Marian David, and the contemporary correspondence-theory revival. M. W. Rowe's J. L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer (Oxford, 2023) on the unsatisfactoriness of Austin's account of the language-reality relation.","status":"Austin's least worked-out positive position. The symposium with Strawson is famous for the directness of the disagreement and for ending in something close to mutual misunderstanding; Strawson's deflationist line — that *is true* essentially endorses \"p\" without adding cognitive content — became the dominant view in the 1950s and 1960s and remained influential through the redundancy theory and later minimalist treatments. Rowe's biography (2023) judges this part of the work less satisfying than the speech-act and anti-skeptical projects; Austin himself, at the time of his death, had not given it the systematic re-treatment he would have. The contemporary correspondence-theory revival (Field, David) returns to roughly the ground \"Truth\" tried to claim.","era":"1911-1960","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Philosophical Papers","page":"pp. 128–129","canonical":"","quote":"Troubles arise from the use of the word 'facts' for the historic situations, events, &c., and in general, for the world. For 'fact' is regularly used in conjunction with 'that' in the sentences \"The fact is that S' or 'It is a fact that S' and in the expression 'the fact that S', all of which imply that it would be true to say that S.4 ' Both sets of conventions may be included together under 'semantics'.","label":"Philosophical Papers, pp. 128–129"},{"n":2,"work":"Philosophical Papers","page":"pp. 127–128","canonical":"","quote":"When is a statement true? The temptation is to answer (at least if we confine ourselves to 'straightforward' statements): \"When it corresponds to the facts'. And as a piece of standard English this can hardly be wrong. Indeed, I must confess I do not really think it is wrong at all: the theory of truth is a series of truisms. Still, it can at least be misleading.","label":"Philosophical Papers, pp. 127–128"},{"n":3,"work":"Philosophical Papers","page":"pp. 125–126","canonical":"","quote":"For we never say \"The meaning (or sense) of this sentence (or of these words) is true': what we do say is what the judge or jury says, namely that 'The words taken in this sense, or if we assign to them such and such a meaning, or so interpreted or understood, are true'. (c) Words and sentences are indeed said to be true, the former often, the latter rarely. But only in certain senses.","label":"Philosophical Papers, pp. 125–126"},{"n":4,"work":"Philosophical Papers","page":"pp. 131–132","canonical":"","quote":"The characteristics of a more developed language (articulation, morphology, syntax, abstractions, &c.), do not make statements in it any more capable of being true or capable of being any more true, they make it more adaptable, more learnable, more comprehensive, more precise, and so on; and these aims may no doubt be furthered by making the language (allowance made for the nature of the medium) 'mirror' in…","label":"Philosophical Papers, pp. 131–132"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"sense-data-and-the-argument-from-illusion","label":"Sense-data and the argument from illusion: is there any such object as a 'sense-datum'?"},{"slug":"knowledge-i-know-and-the-dream-argument","label":"Knowledge, 'I know,' and the dream argument: does the skeptic's demand reach our actual epistemic practice?"},{"slug":"performative-constative-and-speech-act-theory","label":"Performative/constative and speech-act theory: did the original performative/constative distinction survive its own development in the William James Lectures?"},{"slug":"ordinary-language-as-evidence-and-the-fieldwork-method","label":"Ordinary language as evidence and the *fieldwork* method: is the appeal to what we should say when an evidential constraint on philosophical theory or merely a curiosity about usage?"}]}