The Imaginary Magical Super-Robot Theory of Truth
I want to refine what philosophers call the "correspondence theory of truth," articulating it as, what I call, the "imaginary magical super-robot theory of truth". Sometimes the correspondence theory of truth is regarded as untrue(!) or false(!) or meaningless, but I maintain that this stems from a misunderstanding, or more accurately an ambiguity - or more accurately still, a few ambiguities. There are ambiguities about what we mean when we speak of the correspondence theory of truth, and there are ambiguities about what we mean when we say that something is "meaningless." Is the word "unicorn" meaningless? No. Nor is the word "dragon." Unicorns and dragons don't exist, but that doesn't mean that these words are meaningless. Similarly, "caloric" isn't meaningless, and it isn't meaningless to say "The atomic weight of mercury is 16." That is a meaningful, yet false statement. For a statement t...