Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth. It would be impossible to survey all there is to say about truth in any coherent way. Instead, this essay will concentrate on the main themes in the study of truth in the contemporary philosophical literature.
It will attempt to survey the key problems and theories of current interest, and show how they relate to one-another. A number of other entries investigate many of these topics in greater depth. Generally, discussion of the principal arguments is left to them. The goal of this essay is only to provide an overview of the current Theories. Many of the papers mentioned in this essay can be found in the anthologies edited by Blackburn and Simmons and Lynch b.
Also, a number of the topics discussed here, and many further ones, are surveyed at more length in papers in Glanzberg The problem of truth is in a way easy to state: what truths are, and what if anything makes them true. But this simple statement masks a great deal of controversy. Whether there is a metaphysical problem of truth at all, and if there is, what kind of theory might address it, are all standing issues in the theory of truth.
We will see a number of distinct ways of answering these questions. Much of the contemporary literature on truth takes as its starting point some ideas which were prominent in the early part of the 20th century. There were a number of views of truth under discussion at that time, the most significant for the contemporary literature being the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth.
These theories all attempt to directly answer the nature question : what is the nature of truth? They take this question at face value: there are truths, and the question to be answered concerns their nature.
In answering this question, each theory makes the notion of truth part of a more thoroughgoing metaphysics or epistemology. Explaining the nature of truth becomes an application of some metaphysical system, and truth inherits significant metaphysical presuppositions along the way. The goal of this section is to characterize the ideas of the correspondence, coherence and pragmatist theories which animate the contemporary debate. In some cases, the received forms of these theories depart from the views that were actually defended in the early 20th century.
Perhaps the most important of the neo-classical theories for the contemporary literature is the correspondence theory. Ideas that sound strikingly like a correspondence theory are no doubt very old. They might well be found in Aristotle or Aquinas. When we turn to the late 19th and early 20th centuries where we pick up the story of the neo-classical theories of truth, it is clear that ideas about correspondence were central to the discussions of the time.
In spite of their importance, however, it is strikingly difficult to find an accurate citation in the early 20th century for the received neo-classical view. Furthermore, the way the correspondence theory actually emerged will provide some valuable reference points for the contemporary debate. For these reasons, we dwell on the origins of the correspondence theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at greater length than those of the other neo-classical views, before turning to its contemporary neo-classical form.
For an overview of the correspondence theory, see David The basic idea of the correspondence theory is that what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are — to the facts. This idea can be seen in various forms throughout the history of philosophy.
Its modern history starts with the beginnings of analytic philosophy at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the work of G. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Let us pick up the thread of this story in the years between and about Yet at this point, they do not hold a correspondence theory of truth. Indeed Moore sees the correspondence theory as a source of idealism, and rejects it.
Russell follows Moore in this regard. Hylton provides an extensive discussion of Russell in the context of British idealism. An overview of these issues is given by Baldwin In this period, Moore and Russell hold a version of the identity theory of truth.
They say comparatively little about it, but it is stated briefly in Moore ; and Russell According to the identity theory, a true proposition is identical to a fact.
Propositions are what are believed, and give the contents of beliefs. They are also, according to this theory, the primary bearers of truth.
When a proposition is true, it is identical to a fact, and a belief in that proposition is correct. Related ideas about the identity theory and idealism are discussed by McDowell and further developed by Hornsby The identity theory Moore and Russell espoused takes truth to be a property of propositions.
Furthermore, taking up an idea familiar to readers of Moore, the property of truth is a simple unanalyzable property. Facts are understood as simply those propositions which are true. There are true propositions and false ones, and facts just are true propositions. For further discussion of the identity theory of truth, see Baldwin , Candlish , Candlish and Damnjanovic , Cartwright , Dodd , and the entry on the identity theory of truth.
Moore and Russell came to reject the identity theory of truth in favor of a correspondence theory, sometime around as we see in Moore, , which reports lectures he gave in —, and Russell, b.
They do so because they came to reject the existence of propositions. Among reasons, they came to doubt that there could be any such things as false propositions, and then concluded that there are no such things as propositions at all. Why did Moore and Russell find false propositions problematic?
A full answer to this question is a point of scholarship that would take us too far afield. But very roughly, the identification of facts with true propositions left them unable to see what a false proposition could be other than something which is just like a fact, though false.
If such things existed, we would have fact-like things in the world, which Moore and Russell now see as enough to make false propositions count as true. Hence, they cannot exist, and so there are no false propositions. As Russell , p. As we see clearly in Russell , for instance, he takes propositions to have constituents. If that is what the unity consists in, then we seem to have nothing other than the fact that Ramey sings.
But then we could not have genuine false propositions without having false facts. As Cartwright also reminds us, there is some reason to doubt the cogency of this sort of argument. But let us put the assessment of the arguments aside, and continue the story. From the rejection of propositions a correspondence theory emerges.
The primary bearers of truth are no longer propositions, but beliefs themselves. In a slogan:. Views like this are held by Moore and Russell b; Of course, to understand such a theory, we need to understand the crucial relation of correspondence, as well as the notion of a fact to which a belief corresponds. We now turn to these questions. In doing so, we will leave the history, and present a somewhat more modern reconstruction of a correspondence theory.
For more on facts and proposition in this period, see Sullivan and Johnston The correspondence theory of truth is at its core an ontological thesis: a belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity — a fact — to which it corresponds. If there is no such entity, the belief is false.
Facts, for the neo-classical correspondence theory, are entities in their own right. Facts are generally taken to be composed of particulars and properties and relations or universals, at least. The neo-classical correspondence theory thus only makes sense within the setting of a metaphysics that includes such facts. Hence, it is no accident that as Moore and Russell turn away from the identity theory of truth, the metaphysics of facts takes on a much more significant role in their views.
This perhaps becomes most vivid in the later Russell , p. For more recent extensive discussions of facts, see Armstrong and Neale Consider, for example, the belief that Ramey sings. Let us grant that this belief is true. In what does its truth consist, according to the correspondence theory? It consists in there being a fact in the world, built from the individual Ramey, and the property of singing.
This fact exists. What is the relation of correspondence? One of the standing objections to the classical correspondence theory is that a fully adequate explanation of correspondence proves elusive.
So far, we have very much the kind of view that Moore and Russell would have found congenial. But the modern form of the correspondence theory seeks to round out the explanation of correspondence by appeal to propositions. Indeed, it is common to base a correspondence theory of truth upon the notion of a structured proposition.
Propositions are again cast as the contents of beliefs and assertions, and propositions have structure which at least roughly corresponds to the structure of sentences. At least, for simple beliefs like that Ramey sings, the proposition has the same subject predicate structure as the sentence. With facts and structured propositions in hand, an attempt may be made to explain the relation of correspondence. Correspondence holds between a proposition and a fact when the proposition and fact have the same structure, and the same constituents at each structural position.
When they correspond, the proposition and fact thus mirror each-other. In our simple example, we might have:. Propositions, though structured like facts, can be true or false. In a false case, like the proposition that Ramey dances, we would find no fact at the bottom of the corresponding diagram.
Beliefs are true or false depending on whether the propositions which are believed are. We have sketched this view for simple propositions like the proposition that Ramey sings. How to extend it to more complex cases, like general propositions or negative propositions, is an issue we will not delve into here.
It requires deciding whether there are complex facts, such as general facts or negative facts, or whether there is a more complex relation of correspondence between complex propositions and simple facts. The issue of whether there are such complex facts marks a break between Russell and Wittgenstein and the earlier views which Moore and Russell sketch.
According to the correspondence theory as sketched here, what is key to truth is a relation between propositions and the world, which obtains when the world contains a fact that is structurally similar to the proposition.
Though this is not the theory Moore and Russell held, it weaves together ideas of theirs with a more modern take on structured propositions. We will thus dub it the neo-classical correspondence theory. This theory offers us a paradigm example of a correspondence theory of truth. The leading idea of the correspondence theory is familiar. It is a form of the older idea that true beliefs show the right kind of resemblance to what is believed.
In this theory, it is the way the world provides us with appropriately structured entities that explains truth. Our metaphysics thus explains the nature of truth, by providing the entities needed to enter into correspondence relations. For more on the correspondence theory, see David , and the entry on the correspondance theory of truth.
Though initially the correspondence theory was seen by its developers as a competitor to the identity theory of truth, it was also understood as opposed to the coherence theory of truth. We will be much briefer with the historical origins of the coherence theory than we were with the correspondence theory. Like the correspondence theory, versions of the coherence theory can be seen throughout the history of philosophy.
See, for instance, Walker for a discussion of its early modern lineage. Like the correspondence theory, it was important in the early 20th century British origins of analytic philosophy. Particularly, the coherence theory of truth is associated with the British idealists to whom Moore and Russell were reacting. Many idealists at that time did indeed hold coherence theories.
Let us take as an example Joachim This is the theory that Russell a attacks. Joachim says that:. But a few remarks about his theory will help to give substance to the quoted passage. This is not merely a turn of phrase, but a reflection of his monistic idealism. Individual judgments or beliefs are certainly not the whole complete truth.
Such judgments are, according to Joachim, only true to a degree. One aspect of this doctrine is a kind of holism about content, which holds that any individual belief or judgment gets its content only in virtue of being part of a system of judgments. Any real judgment we might make will only be partially true. We will not attempt that, as it leads us to some of the more formidable aspects of his view, e.
As with the correspondence theory, it will be useful to recast the coherence theory in a more modern form, which will abstract away from some of the difficult features of British idealism. As with the correspondence theory, it can be put in a slogan:. To further the contrast with the neo-classical correspondence theory, we may add that a proposition is true if it is the content of a belief in the system, or entailed by a belief in the system. We may assume, with Joachim, that the condition of coherence will be stronger than consistency.
With the idealists generally, we might suppose that features of the believing subject will come into play. This theory is offered as an analysis of the nature of truth, and not simply a test or criterion for truth.
It is the way the coherence theory is given in Walker , for instance. See also Young for a recent defense of a coherence theory. Let us take this as our neo-classical version of the coherence theory. The contrast with the correspondence theory of truth is clear. Far from being a matter of whether the world provides a suitable object to mirror a proposition, truth is a matter of how beliefs are related to each-other. The coherence theory of truth enjoys two sorts of motivations.
One is primarily epistemological. Most coherence theorists also hold a coherence theory of knowledge; more specifically, a coherence theory of justification.
According to this theory, to be justified is to be part of a coherent system of beliefs. An argument for this is often based on the claim that only another belief could stand in a justification relation to a belief, allowing nothing but properties of systems of belief, including coherence, to be conditions for justification.
Combining this with the thesis that a fully justified belief is true forms an argument for the coherence theory of truth. The steps in this argument may be questioned by a number of contemporary epistemological views. But the coherence theory also goes hand-in-hand with its own metaphysics as well. The coherence theory is typically associated with idealism.
As we have already discussed, forms of it were held by British idealists such as Joachim, and later by Blanshard in America. An idealist should see the last step in the justification argument as quite natural. Knowledge traditionally has been understood as "justified true belief.
Do you think that some propositions are somewhere in between true and false? If so, think of some examples and explain why you don't want to say that they're absolutely true or absolutely false. Do you think that some propositions are true for some people but not for others? If so, think of some examples and explain why you want to say that "what's true for one person may not be true for another. Given the above account of truth and justification, can there be unjustified true beliefs? Cash on the internet.
False content can bring purveyors of lies big ad money. A few individuals have realised this and cashed in.
The worst fake stories are the ones that go viral the quickest, preying on our worst human tendencies. Lies are the new get rich quick scheme. One can look back and see how we got here. Thanks to the rise of blogs over the years, we have become used to consuming opinions. They offer a valuable perspective on the comings and goings of the world. Now we are a grey area between news and opinion that can be steeped in hidden agendas and increasingly, flat out lies.
News should be objective, present both sides, and be based purely on fact. It takes some getting used to, and is a very scary scenario to take in. So, how do we maintain the integrity of our public world? Opinions should be branded opinion. Packaging fabrications as Truth should be a punishable offense under the law.
The determining factor, though, of how and when we move to a Truth-based, global society is how much we want to. We must revere Truth and demand it at all levels, not just the news. Science might not always get it right, but its foundation is the empirical search for the Truth. Where strong societal belief in Truth and its values exists, open thinking, reason, and science thrive. May bring a marked shift towards Truth. A revived, blanket belief in the need for Truth.
Truth is our moral compass in times of uncertainty. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 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. 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. Russell , secs. Main worries about 4 are: a its invocation of an additional, potentially mysterious, relation, which b seems difficult to tame: Which fact is the one that mis-corresponds with a given falsehood? 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. 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. 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.
Objection 1 : 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: a Noncognitivism, which says that, despite appearances to the contrary, claims from the flagged domain are not truth-evaluable to begin with, e. 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. Objection 2 : 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. Woozley , chap. This makes it rather difficult to explain why some thinkers emphatically reject all correspondence formulations.
The objections can be divided into objections primarily aimed at the correspondence relation and its relatives 3. C1, 3. C2 , and objections primarily aimed at the notions of fact or state of affairs 3. F1, 3. C1 : The correspondence relation must be some sort of resemblance relation. C2 : The correspondence relation is very mysterious: it seems to reach into the most distant regions of space faster than light?
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. F2 : 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. Strawson 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: it should tell us about the workings of the correspondence relation, about the nature of facts, and about the conditions that determine which truthbearers correspond to which facts. 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: correspondence as correlation and correspondence as isomorphism cf. 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. 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: truthbearers are composed of other truthbearers and ultimately of words, or concepts; facts are composed of other facts or states of affairs and ultimately of things, properties, and relations.
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: it will lead into a theory that addresses the question how simple words, or concepts, can be about things, properties, and relations; i. 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. Fodor 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. C1 and 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: correspondence will be a semantic or psycho-semantic relation. 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 false ones are states of affairs that do not obtain, and the true ones are states of affairs that do obtain. 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. F1 : each true truthbearer, no matter how complex, will be assigned a matching fact. 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: that would require too vast a number of conventions.
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: if there is a prima facie structural resemblance between a mode of speech or thought and some ontological category, it is inferred, pessimistically, that the ontological category is an illusion, a matter of us projecting the structure of our language or thought into the world.
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: if x is elementary, then x is true iff x corresponds to some atomic fact.
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: a as tracing the ontological relations between complex facts and constituent simpler facts, or b as tracing logico-semantic relations, exhibiting how the truth-values of complex sentences can be explained in terms of their logical relations to simpler constituent sentences together with the correspondence and non-correspondence of simple, elementary sentences to atomic facts.
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. Wittgenstein , 2. F2 by doing without funny facts: atomic facts are all the facts there are—although real-life atomists tend to allow conjunctive facts, regarding them as mere aggregates of atomic facts.
An elementary truth is true because it corresponds to an atomic fact: correspondence is still isomorphism, but it holds exclusively between elementary truths and atomic facts. 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.
Problems: Logical atomism is not easy to sustain and has rarely been held in a pure form. Among its difficulties are the following: a What, exactly, are the elementary truthbearers? 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.
Section 8. Russell finds himself driven to admit negative facts, regarded by many as paradigmatically disreputable portions of reality.
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