  The following points might be made for preferring (2) over (1): (a) Form (2) does not imply that things outside the category of truthbearers (tables, dogs) are false just because they don’t correspond to any facts. One might think this “flaw” of (1) is easily repaired: just put an explicit specification of the desired category of truthbearers into both sides of (1). However, some worry that truthbearer categories, e.g. declarative sentences or propositions, cannot be defined without invoking truth and falsehood, which would make the resultant definition implicitly circular. (b) Form (2) allows for items within the category of truthbearers that are neither true nor false, i.e., it allows for the failure of bivalence. Some, though not all, will regard this as a significant advantage. (c) If the primary truthbearers are sentences or mental states, then states of affairs could be their meanings or contents, and the correspondence relation in (2) could be understood accordingly, as the relation of representation, signification, meaning, or having-as-content. Facts, on the other hand, cannot be identified with the meanings or contents of sentences or mental states, on pain of the absurd consequence that false sentences and beliefs have no meaning or content. (d) Take a truth of the form ‘p or q’, where ‘p’ is true and ‘q’ false. What are the constituents of the corresponding fact? Since ‘q’ is false, they cannot both be facts (cf. Russell 1906-07, p. 47f.). Form (2) allows that the fact corresponding to ‘p or q’ is an obtaining disjunctive state of affairs composed of a state of affairs that obtains and a state of affairs that does not obtain.