Maxim Lebedev
We must distinguish controversies about the nature of truth (in general) from metaphysical controversies concerning the content of specific claims or beliefs, claims or beliefs about the physical world, morality, mental states, causation, properties etc. What does make someone a realist with respect to truth (alethic realist)?
Minimal requirements on realism are:
1) Being true is a property
Realists about truth will agree that there is a property of being true and that at least one kind of thing has that property. But they don't need to be realists about universals. There may be a number of different things that they would like to characterize as being true or false: sentences, claims, assertions, propositions, states of affairs, thoughts, beliefs etc.
2) Mind‑independence of truth‑makers
While most realists about truth are not extreme metaphysical idealists, they could be without sacrificing their alethic realism (e.g., Berkeley). We might say that a realist thinks that truth is determined in part by facts which are independent of people's beliefs (or other intentional states).
This is why we must not confuse the realist's requirement of representation‑independence of truth makers with a rejection of a coherence theory of truth. If we consider the relata in the relation of coherence to be the set of all trivially true sentences, which uniquely determines the extension of the concept of truth for all members of the linguistic community, then the coherence argument is not anti-realist, as it is not realist as well:
1. Truth-makers (at least for sentences of natural language) are beliefs.
2. Beliefs might or might not be based on representation-independent facts.
3. Representation-independent facts might or might not be truth-makers.
There can be no ontological claim imputed to the latter argument. The only relevant question is the analysis of truth, and so possible ontological commitments one might wish to impute to coherentists are irrelevant unless they are an essential part of this analysis.
The realist/anti-realist controversy does not conclude about the existence of an external world, since both realists and anti-realists can agree that in a way it does exist. The question is if general types and categories are "figments of the mind" or are "real", i.e. belong to this external world. Accordingly, one is not a coherence theorist of truth just because one holds that there are no truths without minds and their representations The realist conception of truth acknowledges that truth presupposes representation, and representation presupposes minds. It follows
therefore, that insofar as a coherence theory of truth is genuinely incompatible with some version of the realist correspondence theory of truth, metaphysical idealism could not imply a coherence theory of truth. The fact that minds are necessary for truth, then, does not entail anti-realism, and neither does a coherence theory of truth.