The term "correspondence theory of truth" has circulated among modern philosophical writers largely through the influence of Bertrand Russell, who sets the view (which he himself adopts) that "truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact" against the theory of the absolute idealists that "truth consists in coherence," that is, that the more our beliefs hang together in a system, the truer they are.

Ancient and Scholastic Versions of the Theory

The origins of the word correspondence, used to denote the relation between thought and reality in which the truth of thought consists, appear to be medieval. Thomas Aquinas used correspondentia in this way at least once, but much more often he used other expressions and preferred most of all the definition of truth that he attributed to the ninth-century Jewish Neoplatonist Isaac Israeli: Veritas est adaequatio rei et...