The correspondence theory of truth, however, describes truth as a correspondence relation between a model and the world itself. Not another model of the world, the world. And that, I contend, is impossible. We do not have direct access to the world.
What do you mean by “direct access to the world”? It seems natural to describe looking at something in the world as “access”, reading of world’s state, communicating information about its state to my mind. Just as information can be read from a hard drive and communicated to the state of a register in a CPU, similarly it can be read from the state of a tree outside my window and communicated to the state of my brain, or that of a camera taking a photo.
We may form a model of correspondence between the state of the tree and the state of a camera (between the tree and its photo). Such correspondence may result from camera’s observation of the tree, the act of accessing the tree, that communicated information about the tree into the form of state of the camera. The model that describes the correspondence between the tree and the camera is not the same thing as the photo itself, perhaps a person may form that model.
The same situation occurs when instead of a photo in a camera there is knowledge in a mind. I may consider whether your knowledge of a tree corresponds to the tree. Or I may consider whether my own knowledge of a tree corresponds to the tree. The two models, the model of the tree and the model of the first model’s correspondence to the tree, don’t need to be represented by the same mind, but nothing changes when they are.
We may then further consider whether the second model (of the correspondence between the photo and the tree) corresponds to the actual correspondence between them, by considering how it formed in the mind etc. This third model may also be located in someone else’s mind. For example, I may have looked at a photo and thought that it’s accurate, but you may consider my judgement of photo’s accuracy and decide that the judgement is wrong, that the photo does not represent what I thought it represented, that instead it represents something else.
There are just these strange artifacts of knowledge in people’s heads that may be understood as relating all kinds of things in the world, including representations of knowledge, and the act of understanding them as relating things constitutes production of another artifact of that kind. Given that the parts of the world that hold these artifacts are in principle understood very well (building blocks like atoms etc.), pragmatically it doesn’t matter whether “models are fundamental” or “reality is fundamental”, in the sense that the structure of how representations of knowledge relate to things in the world (including other representations of knowledge) would be the same even if all mentions of reality are rewritten in a different language.
What do you mean by “direct access to the world”? It seems natural to describe looking at something in the world as “access”, reading of world’s state, communicating information about its state to my mind. Just as information can be read from a hard drive and communicated to the state of a register in a CPU, similarly it can be read from the state of a tree outside my window and communicated to the state of my brain, or that of a camera taking a photo.
We may form a model of correspondence between the state of the tree and the state of a camera (between the tree and its photo). Such correspondence may result from camera’s observation of the tree, the act of accessing the tree, that communicated information about the tree into the form of state of the camera. The model that describes the correspondence between the tree and the camera is not the same thing as the photo itself, perhaps a person may form that model.
The same situation occurs when instead of a photo in a camera there is knowledge in a mind. I may consider whether your knowledge of a tree corresponds to the tree. Or I may consider whether my own knowledge of a tree corresponds to the tree. The two models, the model of the tree and the model of the first model’s correspondence to the tree, don’t need to be represented by the same mind, but nothing changes when they are.
We may then further consider whether the second model (of the correspondence between the photo and the tree) corresponds to the actual correspondence between them, by considering how it formed in the mind etc. This third model may also be located in someone else’s mind. For example, I may have looked at a photo and thought that it’s accurate, but you may consider my judgement of photo’s accuracy and decide that the judgement is wrong, that the photo does not represent what I thought it represented, that instead it represents something else.
There are just these strange artifacts of knowledge in people’s heads that may be understood as relating all kinds of things in the world, including representations of knowledge, and the act of understanding them as relating things constitutes production of another artifact of that kind. Given that the parts of the world that hold these artifacts are in principle understood very well (building blocks like atoms etc.), pragmatically it doesn’t matter whether “models are fundamental” or “reality is fundamental”, in the sense that the structure of how representations of knowledge relate to things in the world (including other representations of knowledge) would be the same even if all mentions of reality are rewritten in a different language.
Are you familiar with Kant? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon