The Formal Analysis of Normative Concepts

ence between visual images and external facts. The mental image or idea was thought to be like a mirror image or portrait or possibly a map which reproduces exactly or in some proportion the features of the object represented. The idea was true in proportion as it reproduced the objected represented.... The naive pictorial theory of correspondence was accordingly rejected by the more critical mechanists, and numerous attempts have been made to deal with the problem in terms of a symbolic theory of correspondence. The hypothesis of symbolic correspondence, however, creates a transition which has led many mechanists to suggest that it is not correspondence that is important in the truth of a sentence or formula, but the predictive power of these to produce expected results. The truth of a formula is its workability.29