BY DR. AGONSON
A friend asked me if I believe in the coherence or the correspondence theory of truth. I gave him the rather laconic answer “Not sure.” I feel like I should have a better answer, though.
We use and often abuse the word truth because of a sort of mystical authority it “truthfully” has over us. Thus are all politicians liars, for even if they speak the truth they do so for the sake of power; and all poets tell the truth even when they lie, for “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and no true Scotchman…
I have a hard time making coherence theory correspond to what I know of truth, but likewise do I find correspondence theory incoherent. The former merely takes an obvious test of truth, the truth that a truth must be coherent before we can say that it is true, and says that’s what truth is; but a lie must also be coherent before it can be believed. The latter seems, when boiled down, either a mere tautology (for which I do not see the use) or a mysticism that is yet beyond my reach.
A physicist might, with patient pain, explain some great theory of his to me; it may or may not be true, but I, who will be politely hiding my boredom, cannot say whether it is true. Take that a few steps further; the tragicomedy of physicists is that the greatest physicist, or even the last physicist standing on the great and towering lighthouse of knowledge his forebearers have erected for him, will never find all of the physical world coherent; there will always be dark corners man’s reason will never illumine. We might posit some omniscient being, but what has happened to the theory? Are we limited creatures unable to know truth? It becomes hard for me, under the coherence theory, to find anything true: “two and two is four” is coherent because “one and one is two,” but the truth that “one and one is two” is incoherent to the extent that is a dogma either accepted or denied, an utter tyrant that will either lift up those mad mathematicians who bow to it or damn the wise sophists who so much as question it. It can only be coherent in that it makes other things coherent just as light is only known by making things known.
So, I turn to correspondence theory. Take again the longsuffering physicist trying to expound upon his little interest to a bored student more interested in the movements his classmate’s ponytail. Let us say this lector deals with the theory of black holes. I will never know if it corresponds to reality because I will never know a black hole. As soon as I got close enough to tell, I would henceforth tell nothing to no one forevermore but be trapped in time like an insect trapped in amber (or so I understood the physicist to have told me in less metaphorical language when I happened to be paying attention). So, we know we don’t know, but, to allude to Rumsfeld, what of the unknown unknowns. If the edges of our knowledge show us things about which we can only theorize, what of the undoubtedly real things beyond the twilight of theories? Again, we might call up our all-knowing ally, but what happens to our theory of truth? The theory tells us that true things correspond to reality, but since truth is our handle on reality, what use is the theory? There are parts of reality that not only will I not know, but about which man can never learn.
Really, my rejection of both theories is my assertion of ignorance. Truth tells me some particular thing is true, but truth does not tell me truth is true. If I doubt truth itself, I do become incoherent (this statement is a lie), and not only do I cease to correspond to reality, I untether myself from reality. If I make any claim to knowing truth, I know that truth is something too simple to be analyzed.
Tale Told 