![]() ![]() This escapes the difficulties of the existence theory because it abandons the suggestion that thinking is a simple direction of the mind toward an object -if it were that, its verbal expression would not have to be a complete sentence but could be just a name -and so opens up the possibility for thinking to be erroneous even though what is thought about, such as Theaetetus, is perfectly real. (These points are also stressed by Aristotle.) As simple examples of complete statements, Plato gives "Theaetetus is-sitting-down" and "Theaetetus is-flying." The first of these is true because Theaetetus is sitting down, and the second is false because he is not flying. Thought is compared with speech (it is the soul's dialogue with itself), and the important thing about speech is that in order to be true or false it must be complex -only complete statements are true or false, and these must consist of both nouns and verbs. The same theory is considered in the Sophist, but here an alternative is put forward. This view is rejected on the ground that just as to see or hear what is not is to see or hear nothing, and to see or hear nothing is just not to see or hear at all, so to "think what is not" is to think nothing, and that is just not to think at all, so that erroneous thought, on this view, would just not be thinking at all. In this latter dialogue Socrates tries to find what differentiates true from erroneous belief, and the first suggestion he considers is that whereas true belief is directed toward what is, false belief is directed toward what is not. Moore is probably correct, in his "Truth" article in Baldwin's Dictionary, in tracing its vogue to Immanuel Kant), but one that we may call the existence theory, which also crops up in the Theaetetus. There it was developed with an eye on a rejected alternative -not the coherence theory, which is a comparatively late invention (G. ![]() platoĪristotle did not originate the correspondence theory but took it over from Plato's Sophist. This simple statement is the nerve of the correspondence theory we shall continually return to it. This is an echo of Aristotle's "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true." Other Scholastics sometimes said that a proposition is true when and only when ita est sicut significat ("the thing is as signified") this too is in line with the Aristotelian account, in which "is" is not restricted to the meaning "exists" -the definition also covers the point that to say of what is so that it is not so, or of what is not so that it is so, is false while to say of what is so that it is so, and of what is not so that it is not so, is true. At one point he expanded this to adaequatio intellectus et rei, secundum quod intellectus dicit esse, quod est, vel non esse, quod non est. Thomas Aquinas used correspondentia in this way at least once, but much more often he used other expressions and preferred most of all the definition of truth that he attributed to the ninth-century Jewish Neoplatonist Isaac Israeli: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus (truth is the adequation of things and the intellect). The origins of the word correspondence, used to denote the relation between thought and reality in which the truth of thought consists, appear to be medieval. Ancient and Scholastic Versions of the Theory The term "correspondence theory of truth" has circulated among modern philosophical writers largely through the influence of Bertrand Russell, who sets the view (which he himself adopts) that "truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact" against the theory of the absolute idealists that "truth consists in coherence," that is, that the more our beliefs hang together in a system, the truer they are.
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