Correspondence or Coherence?
This author previously wrote on correspondence truth which requires that truth must correspond to reality. The truth, or the falsity of a statement, depends on whether the statement accurately describes the world and its properties.
Evidence is the currency in this theory of the nature of truth and historically is the sort of truth found in courtrooms. “Do you swear (or promise) to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” presupposes that the witness is giving eyewitness or expert testimony to be entered into a record of evidence. The Federal Rules of Evidence govern what evidence is admissible and how such evidence is admitted. Its eleven articles cover such topics as relevancy, witness and (famously) hearsay evidence. The savvy attorney will object to evidence damaging to the client. Any closing arguments or briefs must rely on the evidence in the record and not on any evidence that has not been admitted.
Mathematicians immerse in the principle of correspondence truth. From a set of facts, new facts are deduced. A formula must accurately model real-life situations. The Newtonian laws of motion describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces upon it. These three laws are used to accurately explain and predict what was observed in experiments and in nature. Mathematics relies on a correspondence to reality that is sufficient to launch with pinpoint accuracy a spaceship from Earth’s surface and send it hundreds of thousands of kilometers to an awaiting lunar surface.
