Truth and Facts
Rejection of the Slingshot Argument in Defence of the Correspondence Theory of Truth

Area 11 – Scienze storiche, filosofiche, pedagogiche e psicologiche

The slingshot argument is a simple but dangerous logical weapon used against the concept of fact and against the correspondence theory of truth. Gödel, Church, Quine and Davidson used it with different aims. Those who accept the slingshot argument, like the Holists, reject the idea of discrete “fact” as the entity which each true sentence stands for. The slingshot used by Davidson and that employed by Gödel are analyzed to introduce the profound differences between the holistic and the classical theory of meaning. Moreover, it is possible to show that Davidson, despite his complete acceptance of the slingshot argument, maintains in his Holism strong similarities with correspondentism. This shows that correspondentism is never completely eliminable. This book is a demonstration that all the slingshot arguments are unacceptable, because they are founded on an ambiguous and misleading concept of identity.

SINTESI