correspondence VS. coherence
[WORK IN PROGRESS]
In the writings of James F. Ross and the philosophical literature generally, these two terms designate truth criteria, and are usually opposed to one another.
As one popular 20th century introduction to philosophy put it:
[The correspondence theory of truth] maintains that truth consists in or depends on a relation between a belief or piece of knowledge and a fact in the real world. This is the common-sense theory in so far as common sense can be said to have a theory at all. We ordinarily think that, when we hold a belief, say, about the physical world, the belief is made true or false not by other beliefs but by something in the physical world to which it refers. My belief that this room contains a table is true because it corresponds to the facts about the room; the belief that there is an elephant in the room is false because it does not correspond to the facts about the room. I have taken examples from the physical world, but the same thing applies to beliefs about minds or experiences. My belief that I had toothache yesterday is only made true by the fact that I had toothache. (A. C. Ewing, The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy, Ch. 3 on Truth)
And from the same book:
The coherence theory was developed in the nineteenth century under the influence of Hegel and the associated school of idealists. According to this theory truth is not constituted by the relation between a judgment and something else, a fact or reality, but by the relations between judgements themselves. This avoided the difficulty as to how we could know that judgements corresponded to something which was not itself a judgement. It was held that to say a judgement was true meant that it fitted into a coherent system with other judgements. Since coherence admits of degrees, it follows from this theory that a judgement can be more or less true. No judgement is absolutely true because we never attain a completely coherent system, but some judgements are truer than others because they approach nearer to this ideal.
These definitions from an old introduction to philosophy won’t do justice to the complex spectrum of modern philosophies of truth and how they employ correspondence, coherence or both, but they suffice to give us a general idea of what people have in mind when they reference this dichotomy.
Leaving aside the technical definitions that philosophers may give to these terms, I think it is fair to say that, as a practical matter, we all use both criteria (coherence and correspondence) when deciding whether a belief is true or not. We may think a belief is probably true, because it appears to comport with the facts as we know them (correspondence), but to reinforce our conviction that the belief is true, we will likely check to see if it is compatible (coherence) with other beliefs we have.
[[We may think belief A is probably true, because A appears to comport with the facts as we know them (correspondence), but to reinforce our conviction that A is true, we will likely check to see if A is compatible (coherence) with other beliefs we have.]]
For example, let’s say that Bill tells me he bought a watch from a Cretan, and the Cretan lied to him about the condition of the watch. I’m inclined to believe that the Cretan lied about the watch he sold, because that comports with the evidence of Bill’s testimony (correspondence), but also, my conviction that the Cretan lied is reinforced by my past experience of dealing with mendacious Cretans (coherence).
I find that the terms “correspondence” and “coherence” have some utility at a practical level, because they clearly reflect two separate yet important aspects of the processes by which we make judgments and forge convictions.
- However, when it comes to the use of these terms in philosophical discourse, we have to be more cautious, because they [typically] come laden with a lot of Cartesian baggage. James F. Ross [, for his part,] spurns both correspondence and coherence theories of truth in favor of a theory of intentionality (for a rough definition of intentionality see our glossary entry).
However, when it comes to the use of these terms in philosophical discourse, we have to be more cautious, because they [typically] come laden with a lot of Cartesian baggage. James F. Ross [, for his part,] spurns both correspondence and coherence theories of truth in favor of a theory of intentionality (for a rough definition of intentionality see our glossary entry). From Ross’s perspective both theories, in their Cartesian variants, constitute a kind of representationalism.
Representationalism is the idea that we cannot know the world directly. It implicitly (if not explicitly) draws a sharp distinction between the (“internal”) knowing subject and the (“external”) known object. Once the knowing subject is severed from the known object, it follows that knowledge of the interior life of the mind is more certain than knowledge of external objects. This leads to Descartes doctrine of immediate awareness, which holds that we are immediately aware of our own ideas and nothing else. We can be aware of the “external” world in a derivative sense, but we can have no “immediate awareness” of the external world, and it is immediate awareness that confers the highest degree of certitude. Based on this principle, Descartes went on to formulate his famous “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum). In other words, according to Descartes, one’s awareness of one’s own thinking is more certain than anything else, including even belief in one’s own existence! The judgment “I think” is prior to the judgment “I am”.
This leads to what has been called the “copy theory of knowledge,” because it portrays all knowledge as a mere mental copy of reality. Reality per se is inaccessible to our knowledge, according to this theory. The best we can hope for is knowledge of a representation (or copy) of reality.
What follows is my attempt to provide a bullet list summary of the reasons James F. Ross rejects both correspondence and coherence theories of truth in particular, and representationalist epistemology in general. [I will tackle correspondence first, because it is the most deceptively attractive and therefore, historically, has been the bigger of the two.]
[BUT IT HARD TO TALK ABOUT REPRESENTATIONALISM WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT ITS OPPOSITE INTENTIONALITY, AND VICE VERSA.]