Maxim Lebedev

Coherence Theory of Truth and the Realist/Anti-Realist Controversy

It is supposed (especially by its critics) that a coherence theory of truth must provide an alternative to representation-independent facts as truth-makers. I will try to show that it is not necessarily the case.

THESIS: Though correspondence theory of truth does involve realism, coherence theory of truth does not involve rejection of realism. Coherentism does not intersect with realist/anti-realist controversy: it just induces another domain of analysis.

The coherence theory differs from the correspondence theory of truth in two essential respects: they give different accounts of the relation between propositions and their truth conditions.

So there are two questions, answers to which are essential to clarify the nature of a coherence theory of truth:

1. What are the relata in the relation of coherence?

2. What does coherence involve?

Possible answer to 1st question: The bearers of truth value (e.g. propositions).

But what is the constitution of the "specified set of propositions"; and what is its epistemological status? It cannot be the set of all propositions since that set would contain contradictory pairs of propositions and so nothing would be true. And it cannot be the subset of only true propositions because we don't yet have an analysis of truth, and then there would be a vicious circle lurking here.

Coherentists generally agree that the specified set consists of propositions believed or held to be true. They differ on the questions of who believes the propositions and when. At one extreme, coherence theorists can hold that the specified set of propositions is the largest consistent set of propositions currently believed by actual people (e.g., J.O.Young [1]). According to a moderate position (e.g., Putnam [2]), the specified set consists of those propositions, which will be believed when people like us (with finite cognitive capacities) have reached some limit of inquiry. At the other extreme, coherence theorists can maintain that the specified set contains the propositions, which would be believed by an omniscient being (some early — British idealists' — versions: e.g., Blanshard [3]).

One can still think of the crucial relations of coherence as holding between propositions, but the relevant propositions with which P must cohere are defined in terms of their being the actual or hypothetical objects of belief. One gets different versions of a coherence theory of truth depending on how one uses belief to restrict the relevant class of propositions with which a proposition must cohere in order to be true. This means that the relevant subclass of propositions can vary from one individual or community to another and it is coherence with an individual's or community's belief system that determines truth with this regard.

So the notion of "specified set of propositions believed to be true" can be considered as still requiring further exposition. If we are understanding truth in terms of coherence with the beliefs of a given community that we must specify the concept of truth to that community and think of a proposition's being true "for that community." Then, if we are keen to give a more detailed definition, we can consider the specified set of propositions in question as the set of all trivially true sentences, which uniquely determines the extension of the concept of truth for all members of the linguistic community. Linguistic community is understood here extensively, as the set of all bearers of the language L.

Possible answer to 2nd question: Coherence must involve logical consistency.

If so, then, on the conception of truth relevant to an individual's or community's belief system, P can be true for S's belief system iff P is logically consistent with the set of other propositions S believes. But, evidently, it would not be enough to understand the coherence relation just as simply consistency — because, for example, two propositions, which do not belong to a specified set, could both be consistent with this set and yet be inconsistent with each other.

The coherentist might want to add some probabilistic connections between other propositions S believes and P. As BonJour pointed out [4] in connection with a coherence theory of justification, logical consistency is a notoriously weak sort of coherence, and a coherence theorist of truth will no doubt want to expand the kind of coherence that yields truth to include at least probabilistic connections. P will be true for S only if P is logically consistent with the rest of what S believes, and there are interesting probabilistic connections between other propositions S believes and P.

Another common way to deal with the coherence relation is to understand it as some form of entailment, which can be taken as strict logical entailment, or entailment in some looser sense. According to this version, a proposition coheres with a set of propositions iff it is entailed by members of the set. But this is, too, too weak by itself, because this approach will require a further elucidation of the notion "entailment", and so on.

At the same time correspondence theorists might not be bothered with this kind of questions, considering correspondence as a relation sui generis. "Over and above the rhetoric of derision, is there really any principled objections to the view that the all-important concept of correspondence is irreducible, is unanalyzable?" [5] It may well be asked, why then couldn't coherence be a sui generis relation, just as correspondence is?

Since any conceptual analysis must have a foundation, then there are conceptual "atoms" out of which all other concepts are formed and which cannot themselves be analyzed. But since any system has a structure, we can say the same about relations between them. It was argued by many philosophers that fundamental intentionality involves a number of sui generis relations, the ideas of which are absolutely fundamental but are also not reducible to any other relations. The human mind exemplifies certain properties (is in certain states) which have the capacity to correspond and/or to cohere. Their having that capacity is precisely what makes them intentional states. The intrinsic character of an intentional state determines both what could correspond to it and what kind of intentional state it is (belief, fear, hope, etc.) They can be considered as natural signs — in contrast to conventional signs — language and other symbols which represent things only in virtue of their being assigned symbolic status by conscious beings capable of representing aspects of the world independently of these conventional representations.

If we are asked what makes a state of mind an intentional state, we can respond: its capacity to correspond to reality. If we are asked what correspondence is, we can give utterly trivial examples such as the relation holding between my belief that I'm in pain and my pain (when I'm in pain), but if our questioner insists on some more illuminating analysis of the correspondence relation, we shrug our shoulders. This is the theory that Putnam derides as "magical". We know we can t say anything interesting about the fundamental concepts on which our account of intentionality is built, but we avoid criticism by claiming that those fundamental concepts are sui generis and indefinable and by observing that all theories must ultimately rest on such conceptual "atoms".

So, if we consider the relata in the relation of coherence to be true propositions, and the relation of coherence to be the consistency or entailment, then the COHERENCE ANTI-REALIST ARGUMENT will look as follows:

1. If there are representation-independent facts, then there are (potential) representation-independent truth-makers. ("Potential" here refers to the fact that contingently existing minds and their representations are also necessary for this relation to exist.)

2. There are no representation-independent truth-makers.

3. There are no representation-independent facts.

But if we consider the relata in the relation of coherence to be the set of all trivially true sentences, which uniquely determines the extension of the concept of truth for all members of the linguistic community, and the relation of coherence to be the relation sui generis, then the COHERENCE ARGUMENT is not anti-realist any more, as it is not realist as well:

1. Truth-makers (at least for propositions being expressions of a natural language) are beliefs.

2. Beliefs might or might not be based on representation-independent facts.

3. Representation-independent facts might or might not be truth-makers.

There can be no ontological claim imputed to the latter argument.

There are (at least) two features, historically proper to many, if not to most, versions of coherentism, but which don't necessarily make one a coherentist about truth (i.e. a correspondentist might accept them as well):

1. holding there are no truths without minds and their representations;

2. metaphysical idealism (position shared by, e.g., Bradley as a coherentist and Berkeley as a realist/correspondence theorist).

The only question relevant to whether or not one is a correspondence theorist of truth is one's analysis of the relation between the bearer of truth value and the relevant feature of the world that determines truth. This obviously goes together with the realist approach. As C.S.Peirce put it, "the realist is simply one who knows no more recondite reality than that which is represented in a true representation" (5.312).

This is not the case with the coherence theory of truth. The only relevant question is the analysis of truth, and so possible ontological commitments one might wish to impute to coherentists are irrelevant unless they are an essential part of that analysis (even though some coherentists or anti-realists might also have odd ontologies).

Correspondentists might argue — and they do — that the coherence theory is not a theory of truth at all [6]; they hence proceed from an assumption that they know what truth is, i.e. they have a definition of truth. And of course, they know what truth is: it is correspondence to facts. Indeed, the coherence theory of truth is not a theory of correspondence to facts. But coherentists never said it is.

The realist/anti-realist controversy does not conclude about the existence of an external world, since both realists and anti-realists can agree that in a way it exists. The question is if general types and categories are "figments of the mind" or are "real", i.e. belong to this external world. Accordingly, one is not a coherence theorist of truth just because one holds that there are no truths without minds and their representations The realist conception of truth acknowledges that truth presupposes representation, and representation presupposes minds. It follows therefore, that insofar as a coherence theory of truth is genuinely incompatible with some version of the realist correspondence theory of truth, metaphysical idealism could not imply a coherence theory of truth. The fact that minds are necessary for truth, then, does not entail anti-realism, and neither does a coherence theory of truth.

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1 J.O.Young, Global Anti-realism. (Avebury, Aldershot, 1995).

2 H. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History. (Cambridge, 1981).

3 B. Blanshard, The Nature of Thought (L., 1939).

4 L. BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 93-100.

5 R. Fumerton, Truth and Correspondence (manuscript).

6 R. Fumerton, Metaepistemology and Skepticism. (Lanham, Maryland, 1995), p. 142.