Truth, science, and psychology

According to the correspondence theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if the world is as the proposition says it is. This theory has been both promoted and rejected by philosophers and scientists down through time. In this paper, we adopt the correspondence theory as a plausible theory of truth and relate it to science. First, we briefly outline the major extant theories of truth. We then present the correspondence theory in a form that enables us to show that the theory uniquely fulfills a crucial function in psychological research, because the interpretation of truth claims as suppositions that concern states of affairs in the world clearly explicates what it means for a theory to be true, and what it means for a theory to be false. For this reason, correspondence truth has the advantage of allowing researchers to properly understand the assumptions of scientific research as claims about the factual state of the world, and to scrutinize these assumptions. It is concluded that correspondence truth plays an important part in our understanding of science, including psychology.