1-1 Correspondence

[Jeremias Resendez]

This Manual reissues DoD 5110.4-M in accordance with the authority in DoD Directives 5105.53 and 5110.4 to provide guidance for managing the correspondence of the Secretary of Defense (SecDef), Deputy Secretary of Defense (DepSecDef), and Executive Secretary (ExecSec) of the Department of Defense as well as OSD and DoD Component correspondence.

To mark the completion of the Darwin Project and the 214th anniversary of Darwin's birth, use our new interactive to explore 3D images of the rocks Darwin collected on a Beagle voyage inland expedition in the foothills of the Andes in 1834.

Our new website section explores the central role of experimentation in Darwin's work. How did his experimental approach evolve and what were the contemporary meanings and uses of experimentation? What were Darwin's 'fool's experiments'? How did he investigate elusive phenomena like the expression of emotions, and get involved in ethical debates over experiments on animals? You can also have a go at two of Darwin's plant experiments with our new interactive.

For the 163rd anniversary of the publication of Origin, we've added a new page to our Works in letters section on Cross and self fertilisation. These complement our existing pages on the 'big book' before Origin, Origin itself, the subsequent editions of Origin, Orchids, Climbing plants, Life of Erasmus Darwin, Journal of researches, Living and fossil cirripedia, Forms of flowers, Movement in Plants, Descent of man, Expression of emotions, and Insectivorous plants (accompanied by this song with lyrics based on Darwin's letters).

The Darwin Correspondence Project goes to New York! Until 5 August, New York Public Library is hosting an exhibition about Darwin's life and work to celebrate the completion of the Darwin Correspondence Project.

Darwin's study of barnacles, begun in 1844, took him eight years to complete. The correspondence reveals how his interest in a species found during the Beagle voyage developed into an investigation of the comparative anatomy of other cirripedes and finally a comprehensive taxonomical study of the entire group. Despite struggling with a recurrent illness, he continued to write on geologicy, and published notes on the use of microscopes. Three more children, Elizabeth, Francis, and Leonard, were born during this period, but the death of Darwin's father in 1848 left the family well-provided for.

Darwin played an important role in the controversy over vivisection that broke out in late 1874. Public debate was sparked when the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals brought an unsuccessful prosecution against a French physiologist who had performed vivisection on dogs.

The correspondence theory of truth is often associated withmetaphysical realism. Its traditional competitors, pragmatist, as wellas coherentist, verificationist, and other epistemic theories oftruth, are often associated with idealism, anti-realism, orrelativism. In recent years, these traditional competitors have beenvirtually replaced (at least in terms of publication space) by deflationarytheories of truth and, to a lesser extent, by the identity theory(note that these new competitors are typically not associatedwith anti-realism). Still more recently, two further approaches havereceived considerable attention. One is truthmaker theory: it issometimes viewed as a competitor to, sometimes as a more liberalversion of, the correspondence theory. The other is pluralism: itincorporates a correspondence account as one, but only one, ingredientof its overall account of truth.

Traditional versions of object-based theories assumed thatthe truth-bearing items (usually taken to be judgments) havesubject-predicate structure. An object-based definition of truth mightlook like this:

Note that this actually involves two relations to an object:(i) a reference relation, holding between the subject term of thejudgment and the object the judgment is about (its object);and (ii) a correspondence relation, holding between the predicate termof the judgment and a property of the object. Owing to its reliance onthe subject-predicate structure of truth-bearing items, the accountsuffers from an inherent limitation: it does not cover truthbearersthat lack subject-predicate structure (e.g. conditionals,disjunctions), and it is not clear how the account might be extendedto cover them. The problem is obvious and serious; it was neverthelesssimply ignored in most writings. Object-based correspondence was thenorm until relatively recently.

Correspondence theories of truth have been given for beliefs,thoughts, ideas, judgments, statements, assertions, utterances,sentences, and propositions. It has become customary to talkof truthbearers whenever one wants to stay neutral betweenthese choices. Five points should be kept in mind:

Talk of truthmakers serves a function similar, butcorrelative, to talk of truthbearers. A truthmaker is anything thatmakes some truthbearer true. Different versions of the correspondencetheory will have different, and often competing, views about what sortof items true truthbearers correspond to (facts, states of affairs,events, things, tropes, properties). It is convenient to talk oftruthmakers whenever one wants to stay neutral between thesechoices. Four points should be kept in mind:

(One might observe that, strictly speaking, (1) and (2), beingbiconditionals, are not ontologically committed to anything. Theirrespective commitments to facts and states of affairs arise only whenthey are combined with claims to the effect that there is somethingthat is true and something that is false. The discussion assumes somesuch claims as given.)

Historically, the correspondence theory, usually in an object-basedversion, was taken for granted, so much so that it did not acquirethis name until comparatively recently, and explicit arguments for theview are very hard to find. Since the (comparatively recent) arrivalof apparently competing approaches, correspondence theorists havedeveloped negative arguments, defending their view against objectionsand attacking (sometimes ridiculing) competing views.

There are four possible responses to objections of this sort:(a) Noncognitivism, which says that, despite appearances tothe contrary, claims from the flagged domain are not truth-evaluableto begin with, e.g., moral claims are commands or expressions ofemotions disguised as truthbearers; (b) Error theory, whichsays that all claims from the flagged domain are false; (c)Reductionism, which says that truths from the flagged domaincorrespond to facts of a different domain regarded as unproblematic,e.g., moral truths correspond to social-behavioral facts, logicaltruths correspond to facts about linguistic conventions; and(d) Standing firm, i.e., embracing facts of the flaggeddomain.

The objection in effect maintains that there are different brandsof truth (of the property being true, not justdifferent brands of truths) for different domains. On the face of it,this conflicts with the observation that there are many obviouslyvalid arguments combining premises from flagged and unflaggeddomains. The observation is widely regarded as refutingnon-cognitivism, once the most popular (concessive) response to theobjection.

Objections of this sort, which are the most common, protest that thecentral notions of a correspondence theory carry unacceptablecommitments and/or cannot be accounted for in any respectable manner.The objections can be divided into objections primarily aimed at thecorrespondence relation and its relatives (3.C1, 3.C2), andobjections primarily aimed at the notions of factor state of affairs (3.F1, 3.F2):

3.C2: The correspondence relation is verymysterious: it seems to reach into the most distant regions of space(faster than light?) and time (past and future). How could such arelation possibly be accounted for within a naturalistic framework?What physical relation could it possibly be?

Some correspondence theories of truth are two-liner mini-theories,consisting of little more than a specific version of (1) or(2). Normally, one would expect a bit more, even from a philosophicaltheory (though mini-theories are quite common in philosophy). Onewould expect a correspondence theory to go beyond a mere definitionlike (1) or (2) and discharge a triple task: it should tell us aboutthe workings of the correspondence relation, about the nature offacts, and about the conditions that determine which truthbearerscorrespond to which facts.

Concerning the correspondence relation, two aspects can bedistinguished: correspondence as correlationand correspondence as isomorphism (cf. Pitcher 1964; Kirkham1992, chap. 4). Pertaining to the first aspect, familiar frommathematical contexts, a correspondence theorist is likely to adoptclaim (a), and some may in addition adopt claim (b),of:

Correlation does not imply anything about the inner nature of thecorresponding items. Contrast this with correspondenceas isomorphism, which requires the corresponding items tohave the same, or sufficiently similar, constituent structure. Thisaspect of correspondence, which is more prominent (and more notorious)than the previous one, is also much more difficult to makeprecise. Let us say, roughly, that a correspondence theorist may wantto add a claim to her theory committing her to something like thefollowing:

The basic idea is that truthbearers and facts are both complexstructured entities: truthbearers are composed of (other truthbearersand ultimately of) words, or concepts; facts are composed of (otherfacts or states of affairs and ultimately of) things, properties, andrelations. The aim is to show how the correspondence relation isgenerated from underlying relations between the ultimate constituentsof truthbearers, on the one hand, and the ultimate constituents oftheir corresponding facts, on the other. One part of the project willbe concerned with these correspondence-generating relations: it willlead into a theory that addresses the question how simple words, orconcepts, can be about things, properties, and relations;i.e., it will merge with semantics or psycho-semantics (depending onwhat the truthbearers are taken to be). The other part of the project,the specifically ontological part, will have to provide identitycriteria for facts and explain how their simple constituents combineinto complex wholes. Putting all this together should yield anaccount of the conditions determining which truthbearers correspond towhich facts.

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