Word count: 3000
Is Aristotle’s Dictum Gender Specific?
Abstract (79 words). We will present some new empirical evidence supporting
the view that men, more so than women, view accurate representation of the
world as a more valuable component of the ordinary notion of truth. These
results are especially intriguing in light of recent work by Buckwalter and Stich
(ms). Although generalizing the conception of truth outlined by Aristotle’s
dictum may seem intuitive to the philosopher, the data suggest that something
else may be at work in the folk-theory of truth.
Introduction
A number of philosophers have begun to employ social scientific methods to discover
whether the ordinary person’s conception of some philosophical concept coincides with what the
philosopher has thought the folk concept is. When some evidence shows that the two views fail
to overlap, we then have reason to believe that a philosopher’s intuition about the folk concept is
inaccurate. Proponents and detractors alike have called this movement “experimental
philosophy.”
Whereas most of the recent work in experimental philosophy has focused on people’s use of
target concepts in philosophical psychology, ethics, and action theory, less attention has been
paid to concepts in epistemology and metaphysics.1 The methodological novelty of this
approach and the relative narrowness of its application have suggested to some that the scope
and influence of experimental approaches in philosophy are somehow limited to these areas or
1
We are not arguing here that those associated with experimental philosophy have ignored issues in metaphysics
and epistemology. We merely want to point out that there are far fewer experimental studies having to do with core
philosophical areas, i.e., metaphysics (e.g., ontology, nature of truth, etc.) and epistemology. Of the most famous
studies undertaken in core areas we should include the following important articles: Weinberg, Nichols and Stich
(2001), Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich (2004), Alexander and Weinberg (2007), and Beebe and Buckwalter
(2010) [listed chronologically].
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completely impotent (see Roy and Davidson, forthcoming); however, others have not been so
dismissive. For example, Laurie Paul (2010) and Alvin Goldman (2007) have argued that in
some cases empirical results can inform or help clarify traditional philosophical debates in
metaphysics. Our approach here is to employ empirical methods to better define questions on
the nature of truth. We do not believe (even for an instant) that the results we share in these
pages are the final word on the folk concept of truth. On the contrary, we hope that the work we
have completed in this paper is merely the beginning of a cooperative approach where the appeal
to empirical findings can profitably interact with core areas of philosophical research.
The aim of this paper is to consider whether and how differences in gender, race, age, or
religious affiliation might matter for the common sense pre-theoretic view of truth. In a series of
recent studies inspired by Arne Naess’ 1938 attempt to characterize the non-philosophers’
concept of truth, we asked respondents a number of questions designed to probe their conception
of truth. Naess’ work suggests that there are areas where men and women might think very
differently about truth. We assumed the widely held philosophical view that truth is the same for
everyone and across contexts as a null hypothesis. The results of our studies suggest that this is
not the case. Among the findings was the result that in some situations, statistically significant
differences between men and women appear with respect to whether and how truth is related to
accurate description. We describe these findings more fully in Section 3. We will argue on this
basis that men, more so than women, would accept the classical Aristotelian characterization of
truth appealed to by philosophers, especially by Tarski (1944). We discuss the implications of
these gender differences for Tarski’s view and for philosophical treatments of truth in Section 4.
These results are especially intriguing in light of recent work by Buckwalter and Stich (ms), who
have contended that men and women systematically differ in the intuitions they report in
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response to canonical philosophical thought experiments. We will frame these issues in terms of
Tarski’s Semantic Theory of Truth, but any philosophical story about truth that appeals to the
intuitions of ordinary people or their dispositions to assent to various formulations will need to
account for these results should they be validated by further empirical investigation.
1. Tarski on truth and Aristotle’s dictum
Almost every contemporary theory of truth is at least partially formulated in terms of its
conformity with or differences from Tarski’s so-called semantic theory of truth. Tarski’s project
was to give a correct formal characterization of the ordinary notion of truth. Thus Tarski is an
especially rich target--not because he thought he was getting truth ‘right’, but precisely because
he thought he was tracking the ordinary notion of truth. Tarski’s papers on truth express two
contraints on acceptable formalizations of truth: formal correctness and material adequacy. An
account of truth (for a given formal language) is formally correct when it is constructed in a
manner that allows us to avoid both circular definition and semantic paradoxes. An account of
truth is materially adequate when the term “true” in the specified formal language “aims to catch
hold of the actual meaning of an old notion,” the “classical” or “common sense usage” (Tarski
1944, passim).2 Tarski understands this adequation extensionally—the set of true sentences
defined in the formal language should be the same set the competent users of the ordinary notion
would identify. We take it that one may meaningfully ask whether Tarski succeeds.
There are two ways in which Tarski’s project may be understood to fall short. He could fail
to hit his target or he could be aiming at the wrong target. The well known critique of Tarski’s
view that his semantic theory is only a theory of truth for formal languages, or his own admission
that certain natural language uses of the locution ‘is true’ escape the scope of his theory would be
Hereafter we will refer to Tarski’s “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics” as “the
1944 paper” or “Tarski’s 1944 paper.”
2
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example of the first kind of failure. Our suggestion is that there is an important sense in which
Tarski may have fallen short in the second sense and further that he recognized that this was a
real possibility.
When Tarski presents the semantic theory in his 1944 paper, he frames his account of the
“classical” or “common sense usage” in terms of what we will call: Aristotle’s dictum. Tarski
has two distinct discussions of Aristotle’s dictum. The first, and oft quoted, states:
We should like our definition to do justice to the intuitions which adhere to the
classical Aristotelian conception of truth--intuitions which find their expression in
the well-known words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics:
To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to
say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true. (Tarski 1944,
p. 342)
The second discussion of the concept of truth is found far later in the second, “polemical,”
section of the 1944 paper. There Tarski indicates that he does not want to become embroiled in
the debate over which conception of truth is correct (Tarski 1944, p. 355). In §17: ‘Conformity
of the Semantic Conception of Truth with Philosophical and Common-sense Usage’, Tarski
returns to the question of how we ought to think about the matter of the material adequacy
requirement. Tarski expresses certainty that the semantic conception is in accord with the
Aristotelian notion cited above, but he also suggests that if some maintain that the ordinary
concept of truth is different from the classical Aristotelian notion, then the issue “can be settled
scientifically… with the help of the statistical questionnaire method” (Tarski 1944, p. 360). In
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the subsequent footnote Tarski cites the work of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1938) as an
example of empirical work relevant to settling the issue.3
Tarski hoped that his semantic theory of truth would offer a means to formalize the ordinary
or common sense notion of truth; the condition requiring material adequacy is the formal
constraint that ties his view to the ordinary or common sense notion. But what if the semantic
theory—in its well known form—aims at the wrong target? Tarski’s citation of Naess’
experimental research suggests that he was open to the use of empirical investigation to “settle”
the question of what the ordinary conception of truth looks like.
To say of what is, that it is and of what is not, that it is not clearly involves the attempt to
offer an accurate representation of how things are in how things are said. In other words: if a
statement accurately describes or represents the world, then it is true; if a statement does not
accurately describe or represent the world, then it is false. Naess (1938) reported that men and
women expressed significantly different views about whether or not truth was “absolute.”4 This
led us to look for gender differences in responses related to objectivity and accuracy. We note
that Naess found that his results also varied with educational attainment and age. We suspect that
further analysis will also show many of the same difference that Naess found in our data. For
this experiment, our focus was gender.5 Our data indicate that there is a statistically significant
difference between men and women with respect to their acceptance of the accurate description
in at least some of the cases we examined.
Naess was the originator of what became known as the “Oslo Group.” The Oslo Group coined the term “empirical
semantics” for the kind of work they did. According to Campbell Crockett, “empirical semantics is an attempt to
formulate and verify hypotheses about the uses of words, while avoiding any entanglement with philosophical
commitments” (Crockett 1959, p. 103). See Crockett (1959) for a review of the Oslo Group’s work on empirical
semantics through the 1950s.
4 Naess 1938, 124.
5
We have forthcoming studies showing how age and the amount of philosophical education affect one’s views on
truth.
3
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3. Experimental studies
Condition 1: The Bruno Condition
Participants were approximately 200 people from around the world who responded to XXXX
studies.6 Subjects were randomly assigned to 1 of 9 distinct conditions. Respondents used
Qualtrics, an online survey instrument, to answer 17 questions about the randomly assigned
condition.7 Of the 17 questions, question #1 was tailored for the vignette and it was used to test
whether the subjects were not just clicking through random responses. Participants were asked
to read a brief vignette and then respond to a series of 16 further questions intended to
characterized their views on truth. Specifically we asked: “[W]ith respect to the case of [agent’s
name in the condition], how much do you agree or disagree with the following statement?”
Subjects rated each statement on a likert scale from 1 (‘strongly disagree’) to 5 (‘strongly
agree’).
In this paper, we focus on 2 of the 9 conditions; our data will reflect the results from only one
of the 17 questions we asked participants. The statement of interest to us here is:
If a claim describes how the world is, then it is true.
We will call the first condition the Bruno condition. Subjects were 41 participants in the XXX
studies, which included 24 male and 17 female respondents:
6
The studies were approved by Institutional Review Boards at XXX, XXX, and XXX, and we thank XXX for
funding part of our research.
7
One methodological problem someone may raise against our study is that it is difficult to tell whether the subject is
honestly responding to the statement or that the subject may have just given arbitrary responses. We cannot help but
submit to this criticism. There is no principled way of determining whether the subject responded honestly. What
the data show, however, is some kind of significant effect arbitrary responses would not yield. So, we believe the
burden shouldered by the critic is far more massive than the one we must bear.
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Bruno has just finished painting his house. Bruno painted his house the same
color as the sky on a clear summer day. Bruno claims his house is blue.
The Bruno condition was framed as a straightforward empirical example involving an ordinary
color experience. For the statement, if a claim describes how the world is, then it is true, the
mean male response was 3.96 out of 5, and the mean female response was 3.07 out of 5. This
difference is statistically significant (t (39) = 2.305, p<.027). When thinking of the Bruno
vignette, males tended to agree more strongly than women with the statement that a claim is true
if it describes how the world is. In other words, the results yielded the view that the degree to
which men accept that accurate description entails truth is greater than the degree to which
females accept that truth is entailed by accurate description. Females were essentially neutral;
males on average expressed a definite commitment to accurate description.
Condition 2: The Donna Condition
Discovering gender differences in ordinary conceptions of truth is inherently fascinating, but
we felt that one condition in a single experiment was insufficient for us to suggest categorically
that male conceptions of truth differ significantly to women’s conception of truth. We devised
an additional pair of vignettes to test the extent to which ‘word framing’ (how the vignette is
described) mattered for ordinary conceptions of truth. We hypothesized that responses to one
vignette might yield gender differences in conceptions of truth but the other would not.
Subjects received either Donna “only English” or Donna “no German” vignette. The only
difference between them is in the interchange of these phrases. We believed that no statistical
difference would be present when subjects were told that Donna only speaks English. There is
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no easy explanation for this, but we believe it has to do with the positive fact that Donna only
speaks English. This is tremendously restrictive. Perhaps respondents believe that only
speaking English is more restrictive than not being able to speak German. The latter formulation
leaves it open whether Donna speaks Dutch, Polish, etc., while the former leaves no question in
the respondent’s mind that Donna is unable to speak anything but English. Our hypothesis was
borne out. In the Donna “no German” condition, subjects were 40 participants in the XXX
studies, which included 25 males and 15 females. After being presented with the Donna “no
German” case, subjects were asked how much they agree or disagree with the following
statement: “If a claim describes how the world is, then it is true.”
Here is the vignette we used:
Donna is traveling in Germany, but does not speak German. She watches as a
sailor asks for der Stadtplan and is handed what looks like a map of the city.
Donna asks for der Stadtplan in a shop and is sold a city map. Donna still speaks
no German, but believes that asking for der Stadtplan is a good way to obtain a
city map from a German shopkeeper.
The mean male response was 3.56 out of 5, indicating agreement, and the mean female
response was 2.6 out of 5, indicating disagreemnt. This difference is statistically significant (t
(37.701) = 2.521, p<.016). So, just as in the Bruno condition, the Donna no German condition
yields results where males, more so than women, tend to agree more strongly that accurate
description of the world necessarily entails truth.
We revised the Donna No German condition in the following way (call it “Donna only
English” condition):
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Donna is traveling in Germany, and she only speaks English. She watches as a
sailor asks for der Stadtplan and is handed what looks like a map of the city.
Donna asks for der Stadtplan in a shop and is sold a city map. Donna still speaks
only English, but believes that asking for der Stadtplan is a good way to obtain a
city map from a German shopkeeper.8
What we found shocked us! Like in all of the other vignettes, respondents were asked how much
they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: if a claim describes how the world is, then
it is true. Subjects were 39 participants in the XXX studies, which included 19 males and 20
females. The mean male response was 3.53 out of 5, and the mean female response was 3.05 out
of 5, which fails to yield a statistically significant difference (t (37) = 1.258, ns). When the
vignette claims that Donna speaks only English, male and female respondents do not exhibit a
significantly different difference. In comparing Donna No German with Donna Only English our
data seem to show a) that males affirm the accurate representation condition of truth in a stable
way across contexts, but b) the responses of females are more sensitive to the presence of certain
contextual elements of a situation.
4. Discussion
Our empirical results suggest that there is not universal commitment to accurate description
or representation among “the folk.” Specifically, we found that in particular areas these
differences appear to correlate in statistically meaningful ways with a person’s gender. We want
to suggest that the ordinary notion of truth is far more complex than we have been led to believe.
This has important implications for any theory of truth that, like Tarski’s semantic theory, is
8
The underscore indicates what was changed from the Donna “no German” condition.
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committed to the centrality of accurate description to the “ordinary concept of truth.” If the
ordinary concept does not always involve accurate description, then it does not always conform
to Aristotle’s dictum. This has implications for Tarski’s theory and for broader projects about
truth as well.
Our data seem to support a prima facie case for claiming that Tarski was aiming at the wrong
target; Aristotle’s dictum is not co-extensive with the ordinary notion of truth. This does not
amount to a reason to reject Tarski’s work out of hand. Rather, we must distinguish between the
form and content of Tarski’s project. The formalization project is still a sound project, but if the
full project is to be rehabilitated it will need to be worked out relative to a more fully developed
and empirically informed concept of the “ordinary notion,” perhaps by reconceiving the
satisfaction relation. Alternatively, one could fully embrace the position articulated by Hartry
Field that the semantic theory’s greatest virtue comes in its formalization of truth in a model.
What our results suggest is that accurate description is not a universal feature of truth. If we
have really discovered difference between the ordinary conception of truth for men and for
women, then should we automatically think that this entails that pluralists about truth are on the
right track? Not so fast.
If we had discovered that there were no significant differences across conditions or between
genders, etc., that would ground an experimental case against the plausibility of truth pluralism.
But we did not find that. Rather, the results are indifferent to the extent that they could reflect
real and distinct kinds of truth, or they could be distinct expressions of an as yet unrecognized
singular notion. It should be the case that some components of a theory of truth should be static,
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and, even in pluralists’ theory of truth, there are platitudes or truisms about truth that hold in
almost all circumstances.
Critics of our experiment will likely raise two problems. One may argue that because we did
not ask participants to agree or disagree with Aristotle’s dictum, our experiment shows nothing
about either Aristotle’s dictum being gender specific or Tarski’s view that the ordinary person’s
conception of truth coincides with the classical conception. Clearly we did not ask the
Aristotle’s dictum question. But we meant our questions to be theoretically shallow such that
ordinary people’s conception of truth could come to the top. But this is a question of how to
interpret Aristotle’s dictum. It seems pretty straightforward that Aristotle’s dictum is about the
(to borrow from Tarski) “adequation of something that represents or describes the world,” i.e.,
material adequacy. If that’s something other than accurate description, then whatever it is it must
involve adequate description.
A second criticism might be that participants are responding to the gender of the agent in the
vignette. One may believe that men and women answered differently because they have an
affinity for the agent involved in the vignette. We attempted to design the vignettes to elicit
specific responses or trigger certain conceptions of truth in contexts involving different cases:
mathematic condition, pragmatic case, empirical case, agreement condition, consistency with
group opinion, or objectivity conditions. The vignettes were designed to put people in frames. In
some frames, accurate description does not seem to be important. Nevertheless, given the
statistically significant differences we found in the Bruno and Donna No German conditions, we
are left to sort out an explanation of why these gender differences were present in these cases.
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What we have found does not offer conclusive data or a final characterization of the ordinary
pre-theoretic conception of truth. In fact, we are willing to bet that more interesting discoveries
will take place with further experimentation. So, despite the interesting findings we report here,
we hope that future empirical research – our own research included – will hone in on what the
ordinary conception of truth is.
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