Correspondance Thoery of Truth on Negative Truths
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What special problems, if any, arise for The Correspondence Theory Of Truth with regard to negative claims (for example “There is no cat on SKs matt”). Can The Correspondence Theory of Truth over come the problems associated with this type of claim?
A negative claim denotes the absence of something. Unlike positive claims such as “The cat is on the matt” which refers to something positive, some state of affairs or some fact. To say “The cat is not on the matt” refers to something that is not there, an absence of a certain state of affairs. This, you may well think, is obvious enough and brings no real problems to our ideas of truth. However if we are to maintain the correspondence theory of truth we have to address such negative claims. Correspondence theorists claim that the words we use correspond to something in reality or some state of affairs, but a negative claim does not follow this rule, it does not have a truthmaker. A negative claim does not refer to anything in reality, instead it refers to realities lack of something. In a sense a negative claim is that of an abstract one, not relating to anything physical but instead to an abstract thought, an absence. A negative claim does not have a truth maker as you cannot point to the non existing cat that isnt on the matt or at least we must try to find a truthmaker for these negative facts that is compatible with the correspondence theory of truth.
George Molnar Talks in his paper “Truthmakers for Negative Truths” about the idea of exclusion as suggested by Grossman and Raphael Demos. Exclusion being the idea of negative truths having positive Truthmakers. More precisely, negative truths finding their Truthmakers in “Logical Incompatibility”. This means that a negative facts truthmaker is its logical incompatibility with the real fact. For me to say “I am not the king of England” denotes its truth from the fact that we have a queen not a king, or to use an example by Demos ” the statement ÐI believe that john is not at home,Ð is really the statement ÐI believe a contrary of (John is not at home),Ð “# However this still does not hold any help for our correspondence theory as we are still not pointing to a structured reality that implies a state of affairs. Instead, as suggested by Bertrand Russell it is a relation between propositions not between propositions and reality.
Molnar, in his paper, later goes on to talk about the causality of negative facts. How can it be true that, to use Molnars example, “he suffocated due to a lack of oxygen”. How can a negative fact have causal power? It seems that the lack of oxygen is the cause of death however the proposition of there being no oxygen is not the only negative proposition one could postulate, You may also say there was no smoke, gas, fumes etc. However only one negative appears relevant in the given situation, that of the lack of oxygen. As Sartre also suggested we choose the negative fact based on our expectations or the context of the statement. Molnar says in his paper (a point taken form Tooley) “we pick out factors that are causes in the sense of being relevant to the explanation of an effect .”# However this implies to me that the reason oxygen is the relevant explanation is because it has a causal power, why else would it be relevant?. How is it possible that the lack of oxygen does not cause suffocation? Molnar refutes the idea that it has causal power in the sense we are talking here. He claims that the only causal power a negative claim has is in the sense of “explanatory causality”. This is to say that negative causality is a means of contrasting causal differences rather than having the property of being able to physically cause something (“causally operative”).
It may be possible to break certain negative propositions down into positive ones. For example “he suffocated because there was to much carbon dioxide in his blood”, this is not to say that we are using logical incompatibility. The part of the example “Ðbecause of a lack of oxygen” is the mere causal explanatory term it is not necessarily the truth that we are trying to establish. In other words it could be said that some negative propositions are merely simplifications of more complex statements e.g. the underlying causes laid out by the connective explanatory causality. This would however make the metaphysics of correspondence theory extremely cluttered as such propositions would need to be identified then broken down before we could find their truthmaker. This would not be a killing blow to the correspondence theory but it would however be undesirable. It may also be pointed out that this idea does not apply to all negative propositions.
It is possible to talk here of the idea of absences. This idea has been put forward by philosophers such as Nathan Oaklander and Silvano Miracch as somewhat of a criticism of correspondence theory (mainly those views of Russell). The basic idea is that negative propositions are merely linguistic tools, they are not supported by any Ðreal negative fact they are just an absence with no correspondence to anything. Bertrand Russell counters the idea of absences with the suggestion that “the absence of a fact is itself a negative fact”#. I feel this statement by Russell is true. Absence of truth is truth of absence, to say there is merely an absence of truth is to simply state a negative in a different way. I feel we cannot
dismiss the negative as merely non existent in terms of propositions, we must acknowledge them and maybe, if we cannot
bring them into our ontology, redefine them.
So far we have seen many possible aides for the correspondence theory in terms of negative facts but none that we may uphold. I think here it is important to note the fact that the idea of negative truths has by no means been shown to refute correspondence theory, but it is very clear that the correspondence theory of truth has, so far, been unable to entail such negative propositions into its ontology due to no means of finding a positive truthmaker for such negative propositions. I feel it is also clear that there may be an answer that does not require a positive truthmaker but as of yet has not been seen.
Another possible answer, again, raised in Molnars article is the idea of totality facts. To use a similar example to sum up Molnar “the rat is on the matt” cannot be a truthmaker for “The cat is not on the matt”, but again as laid out by Molnar, a further fact of “there is only a rat on the matt” is added. This view means we must accept a hierarchy of first order