Dlaczego należy zapomnieć o korespondencyjnej teorii prawdy?

Abstrakt

It is often assumed that any attempt to undermine the so-called correspondence theory of truth is motivated by the conviction that truth is an idea which should be more or less forgotten in our postmodernist period. However, this is not always the case. One can believe that truth is one of our indispensable concepts but at the same time argue that the correspondence theory of truth is not a proper and illuminating theory of that concept. This position is reasonable, since - as it has been shown (e.g. by Huw Price and Michael Dummett) - without the notion of truth one would not be able to provide a coherent and satisfactory account of our discursive practice and linguistic meaning. Moreover, as it has been recently argued by David Lewis, the correspondence theory is not a stable account of that concept, and it faces the following dilemma: either (putting aside some minor and irrelevant differences) it turns into a minimalist or redundancy theory of some sort, or it becomes a (mostly) metaphysical theory about various kinds of things which make our statements true. Defenders of the correspondence theory have made some efforts to meet the challenge posed by Lewis, but those efforts do not seem successful. Hence we should perhaps not longer consider the correspondence theory as a major and clearly specifiable contender in the debate about truth, and thus significantly reshape it.