The following points might be made for preferring 2 over 1: However, some worry that truthbearer categories, e. Some, though not all, will regard this as a significant advantage. Facts, on the other hand, cannot be identified with the meanings or contents of sentences or mental states, on pain of the absurd consequence that false sentences and beliefs have no meaning or content. What are the constituents of the corresponding fact? The main point in favor of 1 over 2 is that 1 is not committed to counting non-obtaining states of affairs, like the state of affairs that snow is green, as constituents of reality.
One might observe that, strictly speaking, 1 and 2 , being biconditionals, are not ontologically committed to anything. Their respective commitments to facts and states of affairs arise only when they are combined with claims to the effect that there is something that is true and something that is false. The discussion assumes some such claims as given.
The lure of 3 stems from the desire to offer more than a purely negative correspondence account of falsehood while avoiding commitment to non-obtaining states of affairs. It can also be found in the translation of Wittgenstein , 4.
Language, Power and Truth: The social reality of Michel Foucault. 3 .. The last section of this thesis will focus on the role of truth in social reality. I will start with . reality. - Discourse generates knowledge and 'truth': [ ]. With regard to the last point, it may be added that a distinction can be made .. we separate the person from all the accounts that are produced of him? To start with, that Bin .. discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this.
The translation has Wittgenstein saying that an elementary proposition is false, when the corresponding state of affairs atomic fact does not exist—but the German original of the same passage looks rather like a version of 2. A fourth simple form of correspondence definition was popular for a time cf.
Main worries about 4 are: Which fact is the one that mis-corresponds with a given falsehood? What keeps a truth, which by definition corresponds with some fact, from also mis-corresponding with some other fact, i. The main positive argument given by advocates of the correspondence theory of truth is its obviousness. Even philosophers whose overall views may well lead one to expect otherwise tend to agree. Indeed, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us: In view of its claimed obviousness, it would seem interesting to learn how popular the correspondence theory actually is.
There are some empirical data. The PhilPapers Survey conducted in ; cf. Bourget and Chalmers , more specifically, the part of the survey targeting all regular faculty members in 99 leading departments of philosophy, reports the following responses to the question: The data suggest that correspondence-type theories may enjoy a weak majority among professional philosophers and that the opposition is divided.
This fits with the observation that typically, discussions of the nature of truth take some version of the correspondence theory as the default view, the view to be criticized or to be defended against criticism. Historically, the correspondence theory, usually in an object-based version, was taken for granted, so much so that it did not acquire this name until comparatively recently, and explicit arguments for the view are very hard to find. Since the comparatively recent arrival of apparently competing approaches, correspondence theorists have developed negative arguments, defending their view against objections and attacking sometimes ridiculing competing views.
Definitions like 1 or 2 are too narrow. Although they apply to truths from some domains of discourse, e. The objection recognizes moral truths, but rejects the idea that reality contains moral facts for moral truths to correspond to. The logical positivists recognized logical truths but rejected logical facts. There are four possible responses to objections of this sort: The objection in effect maintains that there are different brands of truth of the property being true , not just different brands of truths for different domains.
On the face of it, this conflicts with the observation that there are many obviously valid arguments combining premises from flagged and unflagged domains. The observation is widely regarded as refuting non-cognitivism, once the most popular concessive response to the objection. Though it retains important elements of the correspondence theory, this view does not, strictly speaking, offer a response to the objection on behalf of the correspondence theory and should be regarded as one of its competitors see below, Section 8.
Correspondence theories are too obvious. They are trivial, vacuous, trading in mere platitudes. Such common turns of phrase should not be taken to indicate commitment to a correspondence theory in any serious sense. In response, one could point out: This makes it rather difficult to explain why some thinkers emphatically reject all correspondence formulations.
From the Classic to the Contemporary , Cambridge, Mass.: Discourse and is located at http: So we might as well proceed on the assumption that we have a real hope of comprehending the answer, of being able to "handle the truth" when the time comes. Unlike Plato, Aristotle feels the need to characterize simple affirmative and negative statements predications separately—translating rather more literally than is usual: Facts are too much like truthbearers. Deflationists maintain that correspondence theories need to be deflated; that their central notions, correspondence and fact and their relatives , play no legitimate role in an adequate account of truth and can be excised without loss.
The objections can be divided into objections primarily aimed at the correspondence relation and its relatives 3. C2 , and objections primarily aimed at the notions of fact or state of affairs 3. The correspondence relation must be some sort of resemblance relation. The correspondence relation is very mysterious: How could such a relation possibly be accounted for within a naturalistic framework?
What physical relation could it possibly be? Negative, disjunctive, conditional, universal, probabilistic, subjunctive, and counterfactual facts have all given cause for complaint on this score. All facts, even the most simple ones, are disreputable. Fact-talk, being wedded to that-clauses, is entirely parasitic on truth-talk. Facts are too much like truthbearers. Some correspondence theories of truth are two-liner mini-theories, consisting of little more than a specific version of 1 or 2.
Normally, one would expect a bit more, even from a philosophical theory though mini-theories are quite common in philosophy. One would expect a correspondence theory to go beyond a mere definition like 1 or 2 and discharge a triple task: One can approach this by considering some general principles a correspondence theory might want to add to its central principle to flesh out her theory. It would be much simpler to say that no truth is identical with a fact. However, some authors, e. Wittgenstein , hold that a proposition Satz , his truthbearer is itself a fact, though not the same fact as the one that makes the proposition true see also King Nonidentity is usually taken for granted by correspondence theorists as constitutive of the very idea of a correspondence theory—authors who advance contrary arguments to the effect that correspondence must collapse into identity regard their arguments as objections to any form of correspondence theory cf.
Concerning the correspondence relation, two aspects can be distinguished: Pitcher ; Kirkham , chap. Pertaining to the first aspect, familiar from mathematical contexts, a correspondence theorist is likely to adopt claim a , and some may in addition adopt claim b , of:. Together, a and b say that correspondence is a one-one relation. This seems needlessly strong, and it is not easy to find real-life correspondence theorists who explicitly embrace part b: Explicit commitment to a is also quite rare.
However, correspondence theorists tend to move comfortably from talk about a given truth to talk about the fact it corresponds to—a move that signals commitment to a. Correlation does not imply anything about the inner nature of the corresponding items. Contrast this with correspondence as isomorphism , which requires the corresponding items to have the same, or sufficiently similar, constituent structure.
This aspect of correspondence, which is more prominent and more notorious than the previous one, is also much more difficult to make precise. Let us say, roughly, that a correspondence theorist may want to add a claim to her theory committing her to something like the following:.
The basic idea is that truthbearers and facts are both complex structured entities: The aim is to show how the correspondence relation is generated from underlying relations between the ultimate constituents of truthbearers, on the one hand, and the ultimate constituents of their corresponding facts, on the other.
One part of the project will be concerned with these correspondence-generating relations: The other part of the project, the specifically ontological part, will have to provide identity criteria for facts and explain how their simple constituents combine into complex wholes. Putting all this together should yield an account of the conditions determining which truthbearers correspond to which facts. Correlation and Structure reflect distinct aspects of correspondence.
One might want to endorse the former without the latter, though it is hard to see how one could endorse the latter without embracing at least part a of the former. The isomorphism approach offers an answer to objection 3. This is not a qualitative resemblance; it is a more abstract, structural resemblance. The approach also puts objection 3. C2 in some perspective. The correspondence relation is supposed to reduce to underlying relations between words, or concepts, and reality. This reminds us that, as a relation, correspondence is no more—but also no less—mysterious than semantic relations in general.
Such relations have some curious features, and they raise a host of puzzles and difficult questions—most notoriously: Can they be explained in terms of natural causal relations, or do they have to be regarded as irreducibly non-natural aspects of reality? Some philosophers have claimed that semantic relations are too mysterious to be taken seriously, usually on the grounds that they are not explainable in naturalistic terms. But one should bear in mind that this is a very general and extremely radical attack on semantics as a whole, on the very idea that words and concepts can be about things.
The common practice to aim this attack specifically at the correspondence theory seems misleading. As far as the intelligibility of the correspondence relation is concerned, the correspondence theory will stand, or fall, with the general theory of reference and intentionality. It should be noted, though, that these points concerning objections 3.
If truthbearers are taken to be sentences of an ordinary language or an idealized version thereof , or if they are taken to be mental representations sentences of the language of thought , the above points hold without qualification: If, on the other hand, the primary truthbearers are taken to be propositions , there is a complication:. Though they have no room for 1 from Section 3, when applied to propositions as truthbearers, correspondence will enter into their account of truth for sentences, public or mental.
Commitment to states of affairs in addition to propositions is sometimes regarded with scorn, as a gratuitous ontological duplication. But Russellians are not committed to states of affairs in addition to propositions, for propositions, on their view, must already be states of affairs. This conclusion is well nigh inevitable, once true propositions have been identified with facts.
If a true proposition is a fact, then a false proposition that might have been true would have been a fact, if it had been true.
So, a contingent false proposition must be the same kind of being as a fact, only not a fact—an unfact; but that just is a non-obtaining state of affairs under a different name. Russellian propositions are states of affairs: The Russellian view of propositions is popular nowadays.
Somewhat curiously, contemporary Russellians hardly ever refer to propositions as facts or states of affairs. This is because they are much concerned with understanding belief, belief attributions, and the semantics of sentences. In such contexts, it is more natural to talk proposition-language than state-of-affairs-language. It feels odd wrong to say that someone believes a state of affairs, or that states of affairs are true or false.
For that matter, it also feels odd wrong to say that some propositions are facts, that facts are true, and that propositions obtain or fail to obtain. Nevertheless, all of this must be the literal truth, according to the Russellians. Many philosophers have found it hard to believe in the existence of all these funny facts and funny quasi-logical objects. This deep structure might then be expressed in an ideal-language typically, the language of predicate logic , whose syntactic structure is designed to mirror perfectly the ontological structure of reality.
Austin rejects the isomorphism approach on the grounds that it projects the structure of our language onto the world. On his version of the correspondence theory a more elaborated variant of 4 applied to statements , a statement as a whole is correlated to a state of affairs by arbitrary linguistic conventions without mirroring the inner structure of its correlate cf.
This approach appears vulnerable to the objection that it avoids funny facts at the price of neglecting systematicity. Language does not provide separate linguistic conventions for each statement: Rather, it seems that the truth-values of statements are systematically determined, via a relatively small set of conventions, by the semantic values relations to reality of their simpler constituents. Recognition of this systematicity is built right into the isomorphism approach.
At bottom, this is a pessimistic stance: Advocates of traditional correspondence theories can be seen as taking the opposite stance: Wittgenstein and Russell propose modified fact-based correspondence accounts of truth as part of their program of logical atomism. Such accounts proceed in two stages. At the first stage, the basic truth-definition, say 1 from Section 3, is restricted to a special subclass of truthbearers, the so-called elementary or atomic truthbearers, whose truth is said to consist in their correspondence to atomic facts: This restricted definition serves as the base-clause for truth-conditional recursion-clauses given at the second stage, at which the truth-values of non-elementary, or molecular, truthbearers are explained recursively in terms of their logical structure and the truth-values of their simpler constituents.
Logical atomism exploits the familiar rules, enshrined in the truth-tables, for evaluating complex formulas on the basis of their simpler constituents.
These rules can be understood in two different ways: Logical atomism takes option b. Logical atomism is designed to go with the ontological view that the world is the totality of atomic facts cf. F2 by doing without funny facts: An elementary truth is true because it corresponds to an atomic fact: There is no match between truths and facts at the level of non-elementary, molecular truths; e. The trick for avoiding logically complex facts lies in not assigning any entities to the logical constants. This is expressed by Wittgenstein in an often quoted passage , 4. Though accounts of this sort are naturally classified as versions of the correspondence theory, it should be noted that they are strictly speaking in conflict with the basic forms presented in Section 3.
According to logical atomism, it is not the case that for every truth there is a corresponding fact. It is, however, still the case that the being true of every truth is explained in terms of correspondence to a fact or non-correspondence to any fact together with in the case of molecular truths logical notions detailing the logical structure of complex truthbearers.
Logical atomism attempts to avoid commitment to logically complex, funny facts via structural analysis of truthbearers. It should not be confused with a superficially similar account maintaining that molecular facts are ultimately constituted by atomic facts. The latter account would admit complex facts, offering an ontological analysis of their structure, and would thus be compatible with the basic forms presented in Section 3, because it would be compatible with the claim that for every truth there is a corresponding fact.
For more on classical logical atomism, see Wisdom , Urmson , and the entries on Russell's logical atomism and Wittgenstein's logical atomism in this encyclopedia. While Wittgenstein and Russell seem to have held that the constituents of atomic facts are to be determined on the basis of a priori considerations, Armstrong , advocates an a posteriori form of logical atomism. On his view, atomic facts are composed of particulars and simple universals properties and relations.
The latter are objective features of the world that ground the objective resemblances between particulars and explain their causal powers. Accordingly, what particulars and universals there are will have to be determined on the basis of total science. Logical atomism is not easy to sustain and has rarely been held in a pure form.
Among its difficulties are the following: How are they determined? Wittgenstein disapproves of universal facts; apparently, he wants to re-analyze universal generalizations as infinite conjunctions of their instances. Russell and Armstrong , reject this analysis; they admit universal facts. Russell finds himself driven to admit negative facts, regarded by many as paradigmatically disreputable portions of reality. Wittgenstein sometimes talks of atomic facts that do not exist and calls their very nonexistence a negative fact cf.
Atomism and the Russellian view of propositions see Section 6. By the time Russell advocated logical atomism around , he had given up on what is now referred to as the Russellian conception of propositions which he and G. Moore held around But Russellian propositons are popular nowadays. Note that logical atomism is not for the friends of Russellian propositions. The argument is straightforward. We have logically complex beliefs some of which are true. According to the friends of Russellian propositions, the contents of our beliefs are Russellian propositions, and the contents of our true beliefs are true Russellian propositions.
Since true Russellian propositions are facts, there must be at least as many complex facts as there are true beliefs with complex contents and at least as many complex states of affairs as there are true or false beliefs with complex contents. Atomism may work for sentences, public or mental, and for Fregean propositions; but not for Russellian propositions. Logical atomism is designed to address objections to funny facts 3. It is not designed to address objections to facts in general 3. Here logical atomists will respond by defending atomic facts.
According to one defense, facts are needed because mere objects are not sufficiently articulated to serve as truthmakers. Armstrong and Olson also maintain that facts are needed to make sense of the tie that binds particular objects to universals. In this context it is usually emphasized that facts do not supervene on , hence, are not reducible to, their constituents.
One of the key discourses that Foucault identified as part of his critique of power-knowledge was that of neoliberalism , which he related very closely to his conceptualization of governmentality in his lectures on biopolitics. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Discourse disambiguation.
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Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? Moreover discourse analysis must seek to unfix and destabilise the accepted meanings, and to reveal the ways in which dominant discourses excludes, marginalises and oppresses realities that constitute, at least, equally valid claims to the question of how power could and should be exercised.
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