I haven’t particularly run across any philosophy explicitly making the connection from the correspondence theory of truth to “There are causal processes producing map-territory correspondences” to “You have to look at things in order to draw accurate maps of them, and this is a general rule with no exception for special interest groups who want more forgiving treatment for their assertions”. I would not be surprised to find out it existed, especially on the second clause.
Depends on what you mean by “explicitly”. Many correspondence theorists believe that an adequate understanding of “correspondence” requires an understanding of reference—how parts of our language are associated with parts of the world. I think this sort of idea stems from trying to fill out Tarski’s (actual) definition of truth, which I discussed in another comment. The hope is that a good theory of reference will fill out Tarski’s obscure notion of satisfaction, and thereby give some substance to his definition of truth in terms of satisfaction.
Anyway, there was a period when a lot of philosophers believed, following Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, that we can understand reference in terms of causal relations between objects in the world and our brains (it appears to me that this view is falling out of vogue now, though). What makes it the case that our use of the term “electron” refers to electrons? That there are the appropriate sorts of causal relations, both social—the causal chain from physicists who originated the use of the word to contemporary uses of it—and evidential—the causal connections with the world that govern the ways in which contemporary physicists come to assert new claims involving the word “electron”. The causal theory of reference is used as the basis for a (purportedly) non-mysterious account of satisfaction, which in turn is used as the basis for a theory of truth.
So the idea is that the meanings of the elements in our map are determined by causal processes, and these meanings link the satisfaction conditions of sentential functions to states of affairs in the world. I’m not sure this is exactly the sort of thing you’re saying, but it seems close. For an explicit statement of this kind of view, see Hartry Field’s Tarski’s Theory of Truth. Most of the paper is a (fairly devastating, in my opinion) critique of Tarski’s account of truth, but towards the end of section IV he brings up the causal theory.
ETA: More broadly, reliabilism in epistemology has a lot in common with your view. Reliabilism is a refinement of early causal theories of knowledge. The idea is that our beliefs are warranted in so far as they are produced by reliable mechanisms. Most reliabilists I’m aware of are naturalists, and read “reliable mechanism” as “mechanism which establishes appropriate causal connections between belief states and world states”. Our senses are presumed to be reliable (and therefore sources of warrant) just because the sorts of causal chains you describe in your post are regularly instantiated. Reliabilism is, however, compatible with anti-naturalism. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, believes that the sensus divinitatis should be regarded as a reliable cognitive faculty, one that atheists lack (or ignore).
One example of a naturalist reliabilism (paired with a naturalist theory of mental representation) is Fred Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information. A summary of the book’s arguments is available here (DOC file). Dretske tries to understand perception, knowledge, the truth and falsity of belief, mental content, etc. using the framework of Shannon’s communication theory. The basis of his analysis is that information transfer from a sender system to a receiver system must be understood in terms of relations of law-like dependence of the receiver system’s state on the sender system’s state. He then analyzes various epistemological problems in terms of information transfer from systems in the external world to our perceptual faculties, and information transfer from our perceptual faculties to our cognitive centers. He’s written a whole book about this, so there’s a lot of detail, and some of the specific details are suspect. In broad strokes, though, Dretske’s book expresses pretty much the same point of view you describe in this post.
Depends on what you mean by “explicitly”. Many correspondence theorists believe that an adequate understanding of “correspondence” requires an understanding of reference—how parts of our language are associated with parts of the world. I think this sort of idea stems from trying to fill out Tarski’s (actual) definition of truth, which I discussed in another comment. The hope is that a good theory of reference will fill out Tarski’s obscure notion of satisfaction, and thereby give some substance to his definition of truth in terms of satisfaction.
Anyway, there was a period when a lot of philosophers believed, following Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, that we can understand reference in terms of causal relations between objects in the world and our brains (it appears to me that this view is falling out of vogue now, though). What makes it the case that our use of the term “electron” refers to electrons? That there are the appropriate sorts of causal relations, both social—the causal chain from physicists who originated the use of the word to contemporary uses of it—and evidential—the causal connections with the world that govern the ways in which contemporary physicists come to assert new claims involving the word “electron”. The causal theory of reference is used as the basis for a (purportedly) non-mysterious account of satisfaction, which in turn is used as the basis for a theory of truth.
So the idea is that the meanings of the elements in our map are determined by causal processes, and these meanings link the satisfaction conditions of sentential functions to states of affairs in the world. I’m not sure this is exactly the sort of thing you’re saying, but it seems close. For an explicit statement of this kind of view, see Hartry Field’s Tarski’s Theory of Truth. Most of the paper is a (fairly devastating, in my opinion) critique of Tarski’s account of truth, but towards the end of section IV he brings up the causal theory.
ETA: More broadly, reliabilism in epistemology has a lot in common with your view. Reliabilism is a refinement of early causal theories of knowledge. The idea is that our beliefs are warranted in so far as they are produced by reliable mechanisms. Most reliabilists I’m aware of are naturalists, and read “reliable mechanism” as “mechanism which establishes appropriate causal connections between belief states and world states”. Our senses are presumed to be reliable (and therefore sources of warrant) just because the sorts of causal chains you describe in your post are regularly instantiated. Reliabilism is, however, compatible with anti-naturalism. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, believes that the sensus divinitatis should be regarded as a reliable cognitive faculty, one that atheists lack (or ignore).
One example of a naturalist reliabilism (paired with a naturalist theory of mental representation) is Fred Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information. A summary of the book’s arguments is available here (DOC file). Dretske tries to understand perception, knowledge, the truth and falsity of belief, mental content, etc. using the framework of Shannon’s communication theory. The basis of his analysis is that information transfer from a sender system to a receiver system must be understood in terms of relations of law-like dependence of the receiver system’s state on the sender system’s state. He then analyzes various epistemological problems in terms of information transfer from systems in the external world to our perceptual faculties, and information transfer from our perceptual faculties to our cognitive centers. He’s written a whole book about this, so there’s a lot of detail, and some of the specific details are suspect. In broad strokes, though, Dretske’s book expresses pretty much the same point of view you describe in this post.