Propositionally inflected correspondence theories of truth have governed the mainstream of Anglo-American aesthetics since the 1920s. By “propositionally inflected” I mean any account in which propositions are the sole or the primary locus of truth. Although not all propositionally inflected accounts are correspondence theories, very few correspondence theories are not propositionally inflected. By “correspondence theories of truth” I mean theories that consider the correspondence of proposition to fact, or some equivalent correspondence, to be the sole or the primary criterion of truth. Even the alternatives offered by theorists such as I. A. Richards and Nelson Goodman, who explicitly challenge propositionally inflected correspondence theories, bear marks of the theories they reject. Together, the propositional view and correspondence theory are like banks within which mainstream discussions of “artistic truth” have flowed. Their erosion in recent decades has helped diversify Anglo-American aesthetics, but without significantly revitalizing the idea of artistic truth.

One can distinguish three historical stages in Anglo-American discussions of artistic truth. Stage 1 parallels the rise of logical positivism, and it lasts from the 1920s until the early 1950s.