I think I may be a little confused about your exact reason to reject the correspondence theory of truth. From my reading, it seems to me that you reject it because it cannot justify any truth claim, since any attempt to do so is simply comparing one model to another—since we have no unmediated access to ‘reality’. Instead, you seem to claim that pragmatism is more justified when claiming that something is true, using something along the lines of “it’s true if it works in helping me achieve my goals”.
There are two things that confuse me:
1) I don’t see why the inability to justify a truth statement based on the correspondence theory would cause you to reject that theory as a valid definition of truth. In your post, you seem to accept that there IS a world which exists independently of us, in some way or other. If I say, “I believe that ‘this snow is white’ is true, which is to say, I believe that there exists a reality independent from my model of it where such objects in some way exist and are behaving in a manner corresponding to my statement”… That is what I understand by the correspondence theory of truth, so even if I cannot ever prove it (this could all be hallucinations for all I know), it still is a meaningful statement, surely? At least philosophically speaking?
To me, there is a difference between ‘if the statement that snow is white is true, it is because I am successful in my actions if I act as if snow is white’ and ‘if the statement that snow is white is true, it is because there exists an actual reality (which I have no unmediated access to), independent of my thoughts and senses, which has corresponding objects acting in corresponding ways to the statement, which somehow affect my observations’. When people argue about what truth really means, I don’t see how it is only meaningful to advocate for the former definition over the latter, even if the latter is admittedly not particularly useful in a non-philosophical way.
2) Isn’t acting on the world to achieve your goals a type of experiment, establishing correspondence between one model (if I do this, I will achieve my goal) and another model (my model of reality as relayed by the success or failure of my actions)? I don’t see how, just because there is a goal other than finding out about an underlying reality, it would be any more correct or meaningful to say that this experiment reveals more truth than experiments whose only goal is to try to get the least mediated view of reality possible.
As far as I can see, if we assume even the smallest probability that our actions (whether they be pragmatic-goal-achieving or pure observation) are affected by some underlying, unmediated reality which we have no direct access to, then the more such actions we take, the more is revealed about this thing which actually affects our model.
Rather than saying “I believe snow is white” we should be saying “that whiteness is snow”, since we layer models around percepts rather than vice versa. If discovering the truth means to fit percept to a model, it seems obvious that you need access to a complete model to begin with, and thus follow the OP’s complaints about needing unmediated access to reality. This is I think responsible for the confusion surrounding this topic.
I think I may be a little confused about your exact reason to reject the correspondence theory of truth. From my reading, it seems to me that you reject it because it cannot justify any truth claim, since any attempt to do so is simply comparing one model to another—since we have no unmediated access to ‘reality’. Instead, you seem to claim that pragmatism is more justified when claiming that something is true, using something along the lines of “it’s true if it works in helping me achieve my goals”.
There are two things that confuse me: 1) I don’t see why the inability to justify a truth statement based on the correspondence theory would cause you to reject that theory as a valid definition of truth. In your post, you seem to accept that there IS a world which exists independently of us, in some way or other. If I say, “I believe that ‘this snow is white’ is true, which is to say, I believe that there exists a reality independent from my model of it where such objects in some way exist and are behaving in a manner corresponding to my statement”… That is what I understand by the correspondence theory of truth, so even if I cannot ever prove it (this could all be hallucinations for all I know), it still is a meaningful statement, surely? At least philosophically speaking? To me, there is a difference between ‘if the statement that snow is white is true, it is because I am successful in my actions if I act as if snow is white’ and ‘if the statement that snow is white is true, it is because there exists an actual reality (which I have no unmediated access to), independent of my thoughts and senses, which has corresponding objects acting in corresponding ways to the statement, which somehow affect my observations’. When people argue about what truth really means, I don’t see how it is only meaningful to advocate for the former definition over the latter, even if the latter is admittedly not particularly useful in a non-philosophical way. 2) Isn’t acting on the world to achieve your goals a type of experiment, establishing correspondence between one model (if I do this, I will achieve my goal) and another model (my model of reality as relayed by the success or failure of my actions)? I don’t see how, just because there is a goal other than finding out about an underlying reality, it would be any more correct or meaningful to say that this experiment reveals more truth than experiments whose only goal is to try to get the least mediated view of reality possible.
As far as I can see, if we assume even the smallest probability that our actions (whether they be pragmatic-goal-achieving or pure observation) are affected by some underlying, unmediated reality which we have no direct access to, then the more such actions we take, the more is revealed about this thing which actually affects our model.
Rather than saying “I believe snow is white” we should be saying “that whiteness is snow”, since we layer models around percepts rather than vice versa. If discovering the truth means to fit percept to a model, it seems obvious that you need access to a complete model to begin with, and thus follow the OP’s complaints about needing unmediated access to reality. This is I think responsible for the confusion surrounding this topic.