Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 48:1 (Mar 2005)
Article: Truth, Contemporary Philosophy, And The Postmodern Turn
Author: J. P. Moreland

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JETS 48:1 (March 2005) p. 77

Truth, Contemporary Philosophy,
And The Postmodern Turn

J. P. Moreland

J. P. Moreland, professor of philosophy of religion at Biola University, 13800 Biola Avenue, La Mirada, CA 90639, delivered this plenary address at the 56th annual meeting of the ETS on November 18, 2004 in San Antonio, TX.

It is difficult to think of a topic of greater concern than the nature of truth. Indeed, truth and the knowledge thereof are the very rails upon which people ought to live their lives. And over the centuries, the classic correspondence theory of truth has outlived most of its critics. But these are postmodern times, or so we are often told, and the classic model, once ensconced deeply in the Western psyche, must now be replaced by a neo-pragmatist or some other anti-realist model of truth, at least for those concerned with the rampant victimization raging all around us. Thus, "we hold these truths to be self evident" now reads "our socially constructed selves arbitrarily agree that certain chunks of language are to be esteemed in our linguistic community." Something has gone wrong here, and paraphrasing the words of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Newman, "We came, we saw, and we conked out!"

The astute listener will have already picked up that I am an unrepentant correspondence advocate who eschews the various anti-realist views of truth. In what follows I shall weigh in on the topic first, by sketching out the correspondence theory and the postmodern rejection of it, and second, by identifying five confusions of which I believe postmodern revisionists are guilty. I shall close by warning that not only are postmodern views of truth and knowledge confused, but postmodernism is an immoral and cowardly viewpoint that people who love truth and knowledge, especially disciples of the Lord Jesus, should do everything they can to heal.

I. What Is The Correspondence Theory Of Truth?

In its simplest form, the correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition is true just in case it corresponds to reality, when what it asserts to be the case is the case. More generally, truth obtains when a truth bearer stands in an appropriate correspondence relation to a truth maker:

JETS 48:1 (March 2005) p. 78

Certain clarifications are called for. First, what is the truth bearer? The thing that is either true or false is not a sentence, statement or other piece of language, but a proposition. A proposition is, minimally, the content of a sentence. For example, "It is raining" and "Es regnet" are two different sentences that express the same proposition. A sentence is a linguistic object consisting in a sense perceptible string of marking...

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