Correspondence: The Hammer that thinks Temperature does not exist
We have a wonderful method for knowing that have served us well for thousands of years. It’s called correspondence. John tells you that Sara is behind the door. You look behind the door and you find Sara. John was speaking the truth.
What did just happen?
You found a way to see whether John was telling the truth. You used your senses and when you saw Sara behind the door, you found out that John’s belief corresponded with reality. If you hadn’t found Sara behind the door you would have thought that John’s belief was just in his head.
We have the remarkable ability to believe things that may not correspond to reality. Because people for thousands of years have been lying to each other, we have figured out ways to protect ourselves from liars. One such way is correspondence.
In most of our everyday tasks, correspondence is invaluable. It works well.
So do our senses. They get us around and unless we tamper with them they will do the job well. With them we determine whether we should take our umbrella with us today, whether our coffee needs more sugar, and whether our beloved is home from work.
And yet…even though they can tell us whether she is home from work they cannot tell us whether she’s in love.
And if we were to sat down with our beloved and read a poem, and we disagreed on whether the poem was beautiful, correspondence would not be able to help us find the beauty behind the door, like we found Sara.
So some people opt to declare beauty, love, right and wrong as non-existent and therefore unknowable because they cannot find them behind the door.
They are like the persons with the hammer who declare that temperature is non-existent and impossible to measure because it cannot be done with a hammer.
Astounding as this may seem, this is a belief widely held today. People actually believe that there is no right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. These things exist only in our heads. And because they exist only in our heads they cannot be true or false. They are, as people say “subjective”.
Whereas Sara behind the door is not just in our heads. She is behind the door too.
How do we solve this problem? Correspondence obviously cannot help us. Because beauty is not a “thing”. And correspondence is only good for things. Stuff. Stones. Tables. Chairs. Bodies. Corpses – for beauty, rightness and the soul you need something else. Something more delicate than a hammer.
