Hahn 1

Karl Hahn

Truth as Correspondence: On a Possible Thomistic Difference

What is truth? The question is not unheard of, but within certain strains of recent and

contemporary analytic philosophical discourse it is heard with diminishing frequency. This is not

to say that one cannot find a great deal of conversation devoted to the analysis of is true in the

predicate form. But curious is that questions of and about truth in its nominalization figure less

and less prominently in the contemporary landscape, in part because it is assumed that such

questions concerning “truth,” and most certainly concerning “the truth,” are most properly and

most innocently assimilable into discussions of this or that set of truth conditions for this or that

set of propositions within this or that norm-governed language game, whether idealized,

relativized, or otherwise.

I wish to argue in this paper that such attempts at assimilation rest upon a mistake and

that the mistake in question consists, at least in part, of a misapprehension of what is entailed by

and metaphysically required for a correspondence theory of truth. To make this argument, I shall

take up and represent those questions in and about the philosophy of truth of which the opening

articles of Aquinas’s Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate and the corresponding articles of the

Summa Theologica provide the paradigm articulation. I will attempt to show what a Thomistic

notion of truth requires for its articulation and that it is a correspondence theory of a unique sort

which it articulates. Insofar as it aids explication, I will have recourse to contemporary figures,

but it is with St. Thomas that I will make my beginning and it is to his primary texts that I will

pledge most of my attention. So within those texts of Aquinas’s which I have chosen, what are

the marks of the distinctively Thomistic conception of truth?

Hahn 2

There is first of all the peculiarity that Aquinas takes the starting point of his specific

enquiry into truth to be an intrinsic part of and to be indispensably contextualized by a wider

universal enquiry into being. “Now, as Avicenna says, that which the intellect first conceives as,

in a way, the most evident, and to which it reduces all its concepts, is being. Consequently, all

the other conceptions of the intellect are had by additions to being.”1 So the horizons of

investigation against which truth is to be pursued as a peculiar object of enquiry are constituted

by a systematically inter-related set of questions concerning the range and application of terms

for the expression of modes of being, of substance and quiddity and goodness and oneness, terms

denoting concepts which are what they are because they participate in the universal classification

of what is.2

From such a starting point it is plain that certain constraints and conditions emerge which

function to delineate what is to count as an adequate account of truth. In this regard, it is first of

all obvious that for Aquinas a purely semantic conception of truth simply will not do, since such

a conception must be seen to put the cart before the horse. For we can analyze the nature and

function of those linguistic and propositional predications of truth with which such semantic

theories are characteristically concerned only after we have satisfactorily addressed the task of

providing an account of the limits, conditions, and realities known within and about the ongoing

enterprise of our reflective engagement with the world of entities and the relations between them.

For if truth is had by addition to being,3 then the truth about truth cannot be free of metaphysical

commitment to some substantive conception of what is and of what it is to be. Thus from a

Thomistic point of view any account of truth is bound to be incomplete precisely to the extent

1 De Veritate, Q. 1, A. 1, resp. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., “Some predicates [such as “is true”] may be said to add to being inasmuch as they express a mode of being

not expressed by the term being.”

Hahn 3

that it is not also an account both of the kind of beings who ask and answer questions about the

nature of truth and of the objects of enquiry about the truth of which such beings are concerned.

Truth, on this view, both expresses and is a mode of being, in and of the order of being. What

then is Aquinas’s substantive account of the place of truth within this order?

“As good has the nature of what is desirable, so the true is related to knowledge. Now

everything is knowable in as far as it has being. Therefore it is said in De Anima iii. That the soul

is in some manner all things.”4 Such is, in characteristically condensed form, the substance of

Aquinas’s metaphysics of truth. Of this metaphysics of truth it seems to me that there are three

inter-connected theses to the truth of which Aquinas is committed.

The first of these theses is that the primary sense of truth is of the truth that is in the

intellect. Or in other words it is the thesis that the true is most properly the addition to being of a

relation to the intellect. Thus Aquinas says of the true that, “As good adds to being the notion of

the desirable, so the true adds a relation to the intellect.”5 It follows that for this relation to be a

genuine mode of being it must be a relation between known and knower such that what the

knower knows is what is, such that it is in fact being which is related to the intellect, and not

some illusion or distortion of being, an illusion or distortion which in fact communicates what is

not. It is therefore the case that the predicate notion “is true” is primarily a term which expresses

the mode of this relation between being and the intellect, according to which it is a relation of

agreement. So Aquinas writes that, “The first reference of being to the intellect, therefore,

consists in its agreement with the intellect.”6 From this, however, it is plain that the predicate

notion “is true” does not primarily express a modification of the state of affairs constituted

4 Summa Theologica I. Q. 16, A. 4, co. 5 Ibid. 6 De Veritate, Q. 1, A. 1, resp.

Hahn 4

directly by what is, but rather it expresses a modification of the relation of knowing subject to

what is.7 Aquinas furthermore explains the genesis and the nature of this modification in the

terms of a causality exerted by what is upon the mind. But of this causality a more detailed

account is obviously required. So how does Aquinas describe it?

To provide an answer to this question, I shall be required to articulate the second of the

three afore-mentioned theses. It is the thesis that truth is the effect of a cause, that the truth of

this or that item of mental content is an effect of the corresponding object upon the mind. Any

true proposition which I assert and of which I know that it is true is true because it gives

expression to the proper consequence of the object of enquiry upon my mind, when that mind is

adequately receptive to what is and so open to being transformed by the object about which it

enquires.8 So Aquinas contends that “all knowing is produced by an assimilation of the knower

to the thing known, so that assimilation is the cause of knowledge.”9 This is because the act of

knowing, whatever the propositional content may be by which such knowledge is to be

expressed, is principally an actualization of the mind by the object of knowledge.10 Thus Aquinas

writes that, “The intellect, in so far as it is knowing, must be true according as it has the likeness

of the thing known, which is its form as a knowing power.”11 The mind or soul, when it is

ordered in and by the specific relation of being that is constitutive of truth, becomes formally like

its object, and this formal agreement, or con-formity, of the mind to its object is the proper being-

in-act of the mind as intellect. From this it follows that the sense in which the intellect most

7 De Veritate, Q. 1, A. 2, resp. “A thing is not called true, however, unless it conforms to an intellect. The true,

therefore, is found secondarily in things and primarily in intellect.” 8 Summa Theologica, I. Q. 16. A. 8. Ad. 3.“A proposition…is said to have truth in a special way, in so far as it

indicates the truth of the intellect, which consist in conformity of the intellect with a thing.” 9 De Veritate, Q. 1, A. 3, resp. 10 Ibid., I. Q. 79. A. 2, co. 11 Ibid., I. Q. 16. A. 2, co. Emphasis added.

Hahn 5

properly has being as a knowing power is in the intellect as true. To a fuller explication of this

latter claim I now turn, for contained in it is the third of the three theses with which I am and so

far have been engaged.

To begin, Aquinas holds that this mode of formal conformity of the intellect to the

character of its object is in fact a mode of perfecting.12 But since such conformity properly

obtains only where there is true knowledge, it follows, as Aquinas writes, that, “the perfection of

the intellect is truth as known”13 and that the true “names that towards which the intellect

tends.”14 All this is to say that truth, and more accurately the truth, is the distinctive good of the

intellect. That this is so, means simply that the conformity of thing to intellect is that in which the

intellect has achieved the goal of its particular doings. The act of understanding by which mind is

assimilated to the subject-matter of its enquiry is therefore that in and through which the mind

fulfills what is its own to fulfill within the order of things, the overall order which, as I indicated

earlier, is the order of beings and of human beings. So it is that truth is not just some isolated

theoretical fetish of the intellect, but is rather, in being the good of the intellect, also and for that

reason a good of the human being as actor and agent, knower and doer. For it is only insofar as I

am properly receptive to what is, insofar, that is, as my intellect is true, that I will be in a position

to apprehend the constitution of the world in which I act and am. What such an apprehension

provides is, among other things, a practical orientation within and a theoretical comprehension of

the order of things, both of which modifications of my being are indispensable for my success as

12 De Veritate, Q. 21, A. 1, resp. “And so a being can be perfective in two ways. (1) It can be so just according to its

specific character. In this way the intellect is perfected by a being, for it perceives the formal character of the being.

But the being is still not in it according to its nautral existence. It is this mode of perfecting which the true adds to

being.” 13 Summa Theologica, Q. 16, A. 2, co. Emphasis original. 14 Ibid., Q. 16, A. 1, co.

Hahn 6

a rational agent. Thus, truth is a good both necessary to and integrally constitutive of the

distinctively human good.

So it is in the discursive space constituted by the systematic inter-relation of the above

outlined metaphysical commitments that Aquinas embraces a way of formulating the nature of

truth which he attributes to Isaac Israeli: “Truth is the adequacy of thing to intellect.” Or, truth is

the agreement of being with intellect, or, truth is correspondence of mind to reality.15 Yet of such

correspondence there is obviously much room for interpretation. One possible and in certain

circles quite popular interpretation has engendered a correspondence theory of truth according to

which the peculiar relationship constitutive of truth is held to obtain where there is agreement

between propositional mental content and objective reality. Such a view has recently been

defended by Eduardo Echeverria, who writes: “That [proposition] P is true depends on whether

what the proposition says to be the case actually is the case. In short, correspondence theories of

truth…define truth as correspondence between propositions and facts or states of affairs.”16 But

this view is false. Why is this the case?17

Consider the state of affairs of which this theory of truth is a possible description.18 Such

a theory is an attempt to characterize the difference in subject-matter between assertions that “P”

and assertions that “P is true.” For it is rightly noticed that, though the truth-conditions for both

assertions are the same (namely, that P), it is clear that assertions that P are true iff a certain

15 De Veritate, Q. 1, A. 1, resp. “True expresses the correspondence of being to the knowing power…” 16 Echeverria, Eduardo, “Relativism – Ancilla Theologiae et Fidei? Not so Fast!” in Calvin Theological Journal,

Vol. 49 (2014): 258–282 17 In attempting to answer the question, I will dissent from the ritual, common enough these days, of outing such a

view as “representationalist” before swearing upon my copy of the Philosophical Investigations that of all such sins

I shall chastely abstain. I reserve my religious observance exclusively for non-linguistic fetishes, I suppose. 18 In the discussion that follows I am indebted to and partly follow the arguments of MacIntyre’s “Truth as a Good:

Reflections on Fides et Ratio” printed in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2006: 197-215.

Hahn 7

relationship obtains between what is asserted by P and what is the case, while assertions that “P

is true” indicate that such a relationship between the sentence P and what is the case does in fact

obtain. Take for example the sentence that “Hilary is tall.” Assertions that “Hilary is tall” are true

iff Hilary is tall and false if Hilary is not tall. Yet though this is of course also the case for

assertions that “It is true that Hilary is tall,” assertions of this latter sort are indeed not assertions

that Hilary is tall but rather that the relationship between what is said about Hilary in “Hilary is

tall” and what is the case about Hilary, namely that he is tall, is one of agreement. Assertions that

“It is true that Hilary is tall” thus say nothing new about the state in which Hilary is in that is not

also said by the true assertion that “Hilary is tall,” though assertions of the truth of Hilary being

tall do specify the relationship between assertions that “Hilary is tall” and Hilary. So it is in light

of these considerations that, on the correspondence theory of truth here in question, it is taken to

be the case that the predicate notion “is true” in “P is true” or in “It is true that Hilary is tall”

gives expression to the property X of the proposition “P”, where that “P is X” means that P

conforms to some real state of affairs or, quite simply, that P corresponds to the fact of the

matter.

Yet it is plain that there can be no such fact of the matter. For there is nothing relevant to

the truth of P that can be characterized independently of P. What P reports, if true, is all there is

to the assertion that P. So the asserted sentence “Hilary is tall” reports that Hilary is tall, and it is

a true report iff it is true that Hilary is tall. No reference is made and no reference can be made to

a non-linguistic item as the source from which the linguistic item P derives its truth, since of

those realities of which P is a true assertion, P just is the relevant characterization without which

there is nothing to say. Thus, what a theory of fact/proposition correspondence forgets is that “it

is not sentences as such that are truth-bearers, but asserted sentences, sentences used by a

Hahn 8

particular speaker to make a particular assertion on a particular occasion.”19 So a correspondence

theory of truth of the sort proposed by Echeverria misrepresents the relationship expressed by the

sentence “P is true when in fact P” as a relationship of an impossible formal conformity between

a linguistic item and a non-linguistic item, when in truth the relevant relationship is one of

conformity between a particular intellect in a particular circumstance uttering the sentence P in

the assertive mode and the object about which P is asserted and of which it is true that P. Should

this latter relationship between intellect and object obtain, then it is the case that “the words that

would have to be used to specify the content of [one’s] thought are the same words that would

tell us how things are.”20 Or in other words, the truth of linguistic items is derivative of truth in

the intellect as true,21 rather than that it is derivative of the non-linguistic structures of alleged

facts or states of affairs. Thus Aquinas writes, “words are said to be true so far as they are the

signs of truth in the intellect”22 and so, “it is clear that the true is predicated, first of all, of

joining and separating by the intellect.”23

But there are obviously those who deny that the predicate notion “is true” has any such

significance. Thus it remains to consider one of those contemporary alternative and rival

conceptions of truth mentioned first at the start of this paper. Such a conception will be one

according to which “is true” is not a genuine predicate notion at all. On such a view it is the case

that, as Robert Brandom has written, “It is true that p’ is in all cases, both freestanding,

forcebearing, and embedded uses, equivalent to p.”24 Of truth itself it is correspondingly clear

19 Ibid., 200. 20 Ibid. 21 True here meaning: “Assimilated to the thing known” 22 Summa Theologica, I. Q. 16. A. 1, co. 23 De Veritate, Q. 1, A. 3, resp. 24 Brandom, Robert. “Why Truth is Not Important in Philosophy.” Printed in Reason in Philosophy, Cambridge,

MA: President and Fellows of Harvard, 2009: 156-176. Here pp. 162. Emphasis original.

Hahn 9

that “it is not a concept that has an important explanatory role in philosophy.”25 This is because it

is a concept which adds nothing to the content of a proposition and can therefore explain nothing

about the content of our propositions.26 The predicate notion “is true” thus functions in much the

same way as a pronoun: it inherits the content to which it refers from the content of some

asserted proposition, just as he/she/it inherit the content to which they refer from the content of

some already given noun, but all “appearances to the contrary are the result of misunderstanding

[truth’s] distinctive expressive role.”27

What truth expresses on this view is one’s status as a same-sayer of the inherited

propositional content to which truth-predications refer.28 So for me to assert that “It is true that

Hilary is tall” is simply for me to express that I commit myself in my utterance to the content of

“Hilary is tall.” It is to express that under the relevant conditions, including the conditions under

which I utter the sentence “It is true that Hilary is tall,” I will say that Hilary is tall. The role of

truth is therefore found in the expression of one’s commitments to the assertion of this or that

item of propositional content, on this or that occasion of language use, under the circumstances

ruled and specified by this or that social practice of inference-making. So it is that the only

genuine explanation of propositional content comes in and through reference to what counts and

how it counts in inferences. Assertions that “P is true” are thus expressive both of a kind of

inferential know-how and of one sort of inferential commitment, namely, the commitment to

assertions that P in all inferences for which P is relevant. Thus Brandom writes that, “the slogan

that expresses the view I want to recommend…is: from knowledge to understanding; from truth

25 Ibid., 158. 26 Philosophy being of course the discipline of managing and hedging true and false propositions. 27 Ibid. Emphasis original. 28 Brandom’s view is a variation of the pro-sentential theory of truth, according to which it is the case that “What the

policeman said is true” is a way of referring to what the policeman said and reasserting it.

Hahn 10

to inference.”29So what can be said of this view from the perspective of a Thomistic theory of

truth as correspondence?

It is plain that such a view blatantly misses the point of truth as correspondence. For as

we saw earlier in our analysis of “Hilary is tall,” it is “an undeniable commonplace that the

utterance of the assertion ‘p is true’ communicates no more information about the subject matter

of which ‘p’ speaks than does the utterance of the assertion ‘p.’”30 What is primary about truth-

predicates is not what they say about what is the case, for they say nothing new about what is the

case. Predications of truth, on the view of truth as correspondence, are thus a matter of asserting

something of the relationship between mind and world, and not primarily a matter of asserting

something about the world. This is why Aquinas says that knowledge of truth is not knowledge

about what is, but rather knowledge about how what is is apprehended.31

Thus it is already the case for a Thomistic view of correspondence that predications of

truth to some proposition P are materially and inferentially equivalent to assertions that P. “P is

true” can do no more work for us in our inferences about P, then what P itself already does. But

what is at stake on a correspondence theory of truth is precisely the manner in which P is

cognized. So it is significant that, as shown earlier, Aquinas defines truth in terms of a certain

sort of causality. For it is therefore the case that knowledge that “P is true” is not equivalent to

assertions that P, because in the former case what is known is that P is apprehended rightly, that

the relevant object has been received properly in the intellect, that the special and important sort

29 Ibid., 166. Emphasis original. 30 MacIntyre, “Truth as a Good,” pp. 198. 31 Summa Theologica, I. Q. 16, Art. 2, co. “But the intellect can know its own conformity with the intelligible thing;

yet it does not apprehend it by knowing of a thing what a thing is. When, however, it judges that a thing corresponds

to the form which it apprehends about that thing, then it first knows and expresses truth.”

Hahn 11

of causality is expressed by P, while in the latter case what is asserted is only that some state of

affairs obtains.

Consider for example the case of falsity. It is again trivially true that “P is false” says

nothing about what is that is not already said by ~P. Yet apprehension of and judgment that “P is

false” is apprehension of and judgment that P possesses a causal property which hinders and

thwarts the achievement of that adequacy of thing to intellect which is the goal of enquiry about

any subject-matter. Thus Aquinas writes that “false asserts something, for a thing is false, as the

Philosopher says, inasmuch as something is said or seems to be something that it is not, or not to

be what it really is. For as truth implies an adequate apprehension of a thing, so falsity implies

the contrary.”32 We have returned to the original Thomistic thesis that the primary sense of truth,

and so also of falsity, in the acts of composition and division by which the intellect expresses the

relationship between itself and what is.33

But a pragmatist such a Brandom will likely retort that precisely because these Thomistic

uses of truth and falsity do not do additional inferential work for the community of contingent

reasoners, such uses, and the complex metaphysical entanglements which they entail, are to be

rejected as superfluous to the activity of philosophizing.34 I wholly reject the substance of this

rejoinder. It is mere and unabashed prejudice to suppose that properly cognitive uses of truth and

falsity are to be rejected simply because they are cognitive and not inferentially expressive.

Furthermore, it is plainly false that knowledge of truth and falsity is practically indifferent, just

because assertions that P is true are inferentially equivalent to assertions that P. For of one who

32 Ibid., I. Q. 17, Art. 4. 33 De Veritate, Q. 1, Art. 3, resp. “The nature of truth is first found in the intellect when the intellect begins to

possess something proper to itself…But when the intellect begins to judge about the thing it has apprehended, then

its judgment is something proper to itself – not something found outside in the thing.” 34 Such is, as I gather, the misguided opinion of James K.A. Smith.

Hahn 12

knows the truth about some subject-matter we say that he or she has achieved the good of the

intellect with respect to that subject-matter, or that he or she has achieved the proper end of

enquiry. So precisely because the notion of truth as correspondence is teleological, it cannot but

be practically significant that one pursue truth and avoid falsity, that one seek the truth about

some subject-matter, since such goal-oriented activity is that kind of activity, and the only kind

of activity, by which the progress of enquiry is both intelligible and measurable, and, in the

overall scheme of human action within the order of being, ultimately desirable.

So my thesis that the contemporary neglect of the notion of “the truth” rests upon a

mistake can now be refined. It is the thesis that such systematic neglect has only the appearance

of philosophical justification, for those theories of truth predicated upon just such neglect can

only appear to be plausible in light of a serious misapprehension of what is indeed asserted by

assertions that such-and-such is true. My thesis is then, quite baldly, that deflationary accounts of

truth are false, and that they can be seen to be false from the perspective of a correspondence

theory of truth which properly conceives of correspondence as a property not of propositions but

of minds. I have concluded this paper with some terse remarks to the effect that such a

correspondence theory of truth is necessary if we are to answer satisfactorily the question which

ought always to inform our philosophical enquiry: what is the point of philosophy and why ought

I pursue it?

Hahn 13

References

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, English Dominican Translation, ed. Anton C. Pegis,

1945.

Aquinas, Thomas. Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, trans. Robert W. Mulligan and Robert W.

Schmidt, Henry Regnery Company, 1954.

Brandom, Robert. “Why Truth is Not Important in Philosophy.” Printed in Reason in

Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard, 2009: 156-176.

Echeverria, Eduardo, “Relativism – Ancilla Theologiae et Fidei? Not so Fast!” in Calvin

Theological Journal, Vol. 49, 2014: 258–282

MacIntyre, A., “Truth as a Good: Reflections on Fides et Ratio” printed in The Tasks of

Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006:

pp. 197-215.