What is a correspondence theory of truth?

Abstract

It is often thought that instances of the T-schema such as "'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" state correspondences between sentences and the world, and that therefore such sentences play a crucial role in correspondence theories of truth. I argue that this assumption trivializes the correspondence theory: even a disquotational theory of truth would be a correspondence theory on this conception. This discussion allows one to get clearer about what a correspondence theory does claim, and toward the end of the paper I discuss what a true correspondence theory of truth would involve. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.