The Synthetic Unity of Truth

This chapter articulates a version of correspondence theory that holds that truth is always correspondence. Separating questions about the nature of truth from questions about the correct ontology permits a metaphysically neutral position. When assertoric language is deployed in such a way that its singular terms and unnegated existential quantifications carry ontological commitment to particulars that putatively belong to the right ontology and its predicates carry ontological commitment to properties and relations that putatively belong to the right ontology, then correspondence functions in what is called a direct way. The chapter holds that truth is always correspondence, but is rarely direct, and propositions native to different discourses can all be literally true via correspondence, although very often their truth constitutes an indirect kind of correspondence that does not require the right ontology to include objects, properties, or relations answering to the proposition's singular, predicative, or existential-quantificational constituents.