Fact, Truth And Conformity

The Correspondence theory of truth, as the oldest theory of truth and the theory that agree with our intuition of truth perfectly, has received loves and en-dearments from lots of philosophers since ancient Greek. However, it has raised pretty much criticisms as well. It commonly believed that we can describe the correspondence theory as (CT):a proposition is true, if and only if it corresponds to a fact. Obviously, the concept of correspond and fact are crucial for the the-ory characterized as (CT). Therefore, both the philosophers who want to defend correspondence and those who reject correspondence focus on such two concept-s, especially on the concept of correspond, in their works for or against to the correspondence.Through observe and study the intuition of correspondence, especially how the concept of correspond come on the stage of the correspondence theory, i.e., the change in the characterization of the correspondence theory from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, I believe that the philosophers on both sides of the debate have endowed the concept of correspond with some characters that it doesn’t have. The intuition of correspondence is not that a truth is true because it corresponds to some reality, but that a truth is true in virtue of some reality. The concept of correspond is just a general word for the different ways by which truth depend on the reality.As we can see, such deconstruction of the status of correspond has strength-ened the significance of the concept of fact in the correspondence theory. After a famous dispute, which concerned truth and fact, broke out bewteen Austin and Strawson in1950s, whether the fact are real entities or just pseudo-entities had became a central issue in the debate between the both sides just mentioned above. On one hand, some critics follow strawson, by studying the linguistic expression of fact, i.e., we usually use that clause to denote a fact, believe that facts are just true propositions or pseudo-entities which were assumed ad hoc in order to explain the truth of propositions. There also are some philosophers who want to demonstrate that if facts are real entities, then the slingshot argument will prove that there is only one fact, the great Fact. On the other hand, the defenders of correspondence have provided two possibilities to depict the concepts of fact, the worldly facts and the propositional facts. However, as we will prove, the two con-cept of facts are all confronted with some difficult which cannot be settled within themselves respectively.In order to defend the correspondence theory, the concept of fact must be reconstructed. By introducing the concept of ontological genesis, and investigate how the fact unities are able to terminate the Bradley Regress, I construct a new ontology of fact. According to my opinion, facts do not have objects as component as worldly facts do, and they are also not independent of objects as propositional facts do. The relation between facts and objects are that objects are the ontolog-ical genesis of facts. Facts are just the instantiation of. attribute(s) by object(s). Given such a concept of fact, the intuition of correspondence, i.e., truth has its foundation in reality, can be characterized easily by the concept of truthmaker, i.e., if a proposition is true, then there must be a fact or a set of facts which make such a proposition true.