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Dallas Willard on Alternatives to Correspondence

Moreland & Craig, eds., Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal (Routledge: 2002), p. 37.

The anti-correspondence, representationalist theories which now fill up the recent philosophical past are far from coming together in an adequate account of the mind-world relation or lack thereof. It is not as if there were now available some solid insight grounding an alternative to the type of accessible correspondence described above. In fact there is no generally acceptable alternative to correspondence. There is a series of successively discredited theories from Locke to Hume, to Kant to Hegel (or Fichte) to positivism and phenomenalism in their various forms; and then “language” (the “new way of words”) is substituted for the way of “ideas” or “experience,” and the old battles fought over gain. This time about how words tie to the world, and the outcome being a lingo-centric predicament instead of an ego-centric predicament. One cannot easily suppose that there is a philosophically credible alternative to the correspondence theory of truth. We do not have “something better” on hand.