Walter Horn says: 18/04/2013 at 15:40 While I generally agree with Gila Shers criticism of Jennifer Hornsbys paper,

I think it is unfortunate that neither work addresses Tarskis reasons for preferring the correspondence theory to any identity (or elimination) theory. In his justly famous, The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics (_Philosophy and Phenomenological Research_, 1944, http://www.jfsowa.com/logic/tarski.htm#sec16), Tarski notes, Some people haveurged that the term true in the semantic sense can always be eliminated, and that for this reason the semantic conception of truth is altogether sterile and useless. But he cautions those eliminativists who doubt the need for correspondence that, [T]he matter is not quite so simple. The sort of eliminationdiscussed cannot always be made. It cannot be done in the case of universal statements which express the fact that all sentences of a certain type are true, or that all true sentences have a certain property. For instance, we can prove in the theory of truth the following statement: All consequences of true sentences are true. However, we cannot get rid here of the word true in the simple manner contemplated. (found on page 16 of 32 in the above-cited link) Tarskis point about generalizations seems to me simply to shine a light on an ambiguity in the Frege/Hornsby claim that true thinkables are the SAME as facts. Yes, in a way, they are the sameprecisely those properties that are ascribed must be exemplified for the statements to be true. But that what is true and the truthmakers are also not the SAME is illustrated by noting that we can, only through the magic of intentionality, bundle up all these individual facts into single, general statements. Facts arent like that at all. And, in Tarskis view, it is not only general statements that cause problems for the eliminativist. For example, The first sentence written by Plato is true. is also troublesome. On my own (representationist/copy theory) view, difference as well as identity is required for truthmakers. The identity is that between the properties that are being ascribed or represented in the true sentence (belief, thought, etc.) and the properties that are (when the sentence/belief/thought is true) actually exemplified in the world. The difference is provided by the difference between representation and exemplification. The dangers to intentional realist views of this kind come not, I think, from the McDowell-type considerations of latching adduced in Hornsbys paper, but from recent attacks, especially those of Ned Blocks, on the sufficiency of representationism to handle all possible cognitive nuances.

In any case, because Tarskis semantic version of correspondence nicely captures the intentional realists intuitions (using satisfaction for this purpose), it, again, seems to me a shame that neither Hornsby nor Sher mention his seminal work in these papers. Eliminativism misses the essential difference between truths and what makes them true.