HLW Chap4: Truth 040921.doc
~17 pp ~8400 words including outline
040903 light revision of pragmatism section
040914 light revision of Nietzsche section
040921 light revision before colloquium and MPS – needs to be cut for both
041222 light revision; completion of account of satisfying convention T
OUTLINE
I. Intro and Overview
Pontius Pilate quote
Bacon quote (quotes Pilate?)
3 main theory families:
Correspondence
Coherence / pragmatism
Eliminativist
II. Correspondence theory
Aristotle; Aquinas
Most natural
Two types of problem:
A. Metaphysical
What are truth bearers?
What are facts?
Are there negative facts? Russell
Are possibilities facts? (making “There is more than one way to skin a
cat” true)
What is correspondence?
Wittgenstein’s picture theory
Davidson and Devitt – [added 040828]
B. Epistemic problems
Can’t know relation is satisfied. Leads to Coherence and pragmatist views.
III. Coherence and Pragmatic views
Truth must be found within our experience. Berkeley.
James quotes – Pragmatism lecture 6
Rorty quote
Critique
IV. Eliminativism
intro
Nietzsche on truth – from 1870’s notebooks
Wittgenstein sec 136 quote
Austin adding to Bacon remark – “Pilate was ahead of his time”.
Explanation of eliminativism
Critique –
Disquotation doesn’t work for quantified sentences (Everything he said was true).
Doesn’t work for quoted sentences in another language.
Doesn’t work for requests “Say something true” is not the same as “say something”
[check literature, D&S, for other critiques?]
Main problem: Truth is very important. Intuitively has to do with the relation of
language and reality.
V. Alternative Account: Normative Indicator Account
VI. Possible Additional Topics
1. Verisimilitude – approximation to the truth.
[importance in assessing Kuhn and idea of progress in science. Despite criticism, seems
there can be verisimilitude in case of quantitative – if there are 99 bottles of beer on the
wall, then the claim that there are 87 bottles of beer on the wall is closer to the truth than
the claim that there are 3 bottles of beer on the wall, and the degree of greater
verisimilitude appears to be itself quantifiable.
2. “The Truth” – is there such a thing as _the_ truth? Isn’t a form of relativism correct?
Eye witnesses all have different accounts of something (blind men and the camel).
Supposing there is a “God’s Eye View” is an illusion best dispensed with – there are
incommensurable theories and paradigms. We see the world through our theories.
[note paradox already in saying “there is no such thing as the truth is the correct (= true)
view”]
3. Law of non-contradiction, etc – refer to another chapter on language, logic and
paradox.
_________________________
HLW Chap4: Truth 041222.doc
INTRODUCTION
“WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate,and would not stay for an answer.” So
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) begins his essay, “Of Truth”. The line is echoed some 350
years later by J.L Austin in his essay on truth (1950). Austin notes that “Pilate was
ahead of his time”, and suggests that to seek to produce a theory of truth may be a
mistake. I will argue we can give an account of truth as a robust relation between
language and the world.
Different authors divide up theories of truth in different ways. I will discuss three
main families of theories of truth that have developed over time; each theory family has
several members. The oldest and perhaps most natural account of truth is a
Correspondence Theory – truth is correspondence with reality, or, true beliefs and
statements correspond with the facts. The second family includes Coherence, Pragmatist,
and Verificationist accounts of truth. These views are largely motivated by objections to
correspondence theories coupled with epistemic considerations, theories about what we
can know about what we call “true”. They begin with the observation that we call a
belief “true” when it fits in with the rest of our beliefs and experience. They conclude
that this is all that truth is, coherence with experience or the body of our established
beliefs.
The third, and generally most recent main family of theories of truth, are the
deflationary theories. These generally hold that truth is not a substantial relation at all,
not a relation between beliefs and reality, nor between beliefs and other beliefs. On one
version, to say that a belief is true is just to endorse the belief; to say that what someone
said is true is but to endorse it without repeating the statement. Thus talk of truth is in
principle eliminable; we could manage without any such concept.
At the end, I’ll sketch and defend a theory which I will call a Normative Indicator
theory. This theory recognizes a normative element in the truth relation, and derives truth
from meaning, on the account of meaning set out earlier. In some ways this account of
truth runs a truth-conditional account of meaning backwards, deriving truth from
meaning, by locating truth in satisfaction of tokening conditions.
CORRESPONDENCE THEORIES
Implicit in much of what we ordinarily say about truth and veracity appears to be
a model of truth in which true statements and beliefs correspond to reality, whereas false
statements and beliefs do not. We say things like:
Don’t say what isn’t so.
Truth be told, he was not there that night.
How True! It was just as you describe it.
His statements correspond to the facts.
Many philosophers have endorsed this common sense correspondence view,
starting with Aristotle’s “stunningly monosyllabic” account: “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.” (Metaphysics 1011b25). Thus to be true, the saying corresponds to
“what is”, reality. Over a millenium later Aquinas tells us “A judgment is said to be true
when it conforms to the external reality.” (De Veritate Q.1, A.1&3.) Thus Aristotle gives
a correspondence account of saying, and Aquinas gives a correspondence account of
judging.
Unfortunately, rather more needs to be said (or rather less, if this view is wrong
from the beginning, as we shall see has been argued by eliminativists). Just what is it to
“say of what is, that it is”? How can a judgment or belief “conform to the external
reality”, as Aquinas has it? Presumably the external reality is physical, the belief is
mental. What is said is vocal noises, that which it represents is (typically) not. Suppose
there are facts. If correspondence is something like resemble, then how can a mental
state, such as my believing that p, resemble something that is not a mental state?
Berkeley was articulately sensitive to this problem – nothing can be like an idea but
another idea, he said, in criticism of theories that hold that thoughts correspond by
resemblance to a physical reality outside the mind. The relation of correspondence
between reality and beliefs and statements is mysterious, and many crtics have held it is
never adequately explained by correspondence theorists.
One notable attempt in the early 20th century is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Picture
Theory”. Wittgenstein develops a sophisticated account on which propositions, in their
logical structure, correspond to the facts by picturing them – showing them. The world,
says Wittgenstein, is the totality of facts, not things. True propositions correctly picture
the facts. Exactly what facts are, or the picturing relation, or the relation between
ordinary statements and propositions, remains somewhat elusive, at least to me. One
sometimes gets the feeling that the idea of fact was invented solely to be the
correspondent of sentences. Hence the nice fit.
Donald Davidson was a later advocate of a form of correspondence theory. By
extending the approach developed by Tarski for artificial symbolic logic systems to
natural language, he shows that we might define truth by systematically giving truth
conditions for sentences (systematic in that we display the compositionality of language –
the truth conditions are a function of words and sentence structure). At the heart of this
approach is showing how to generate “T-sentences” for a language L, sentences of the
form:
Sentence S is true iff p.
This realist approach to meaning has been developed especially by Michael Devitt over
the last 25 years.
Despite its fit with common sense, there are two main types of problem with
Correspondence theories of truth, which I will call metaphysical and epistemic,
respectively. The main metaphysical problem has been noted – the relation of
corresondence appears to be fraught with difficulties. What corresponds, and what does
the correspondence consist in? There are many particular cases that underscore the
problem. What of negative claims? Are their negative facts, such as no beer being in
my fridge to which beliefs can correspond? Is that negative fact different from the
apparently positive fact that all beers are outside my fridge?
Is the claim “Yes, we have no bananas” affirmative or negative? If it is negative (
= it is not the case that we have any bananas), does it correspond to a negative fact, a fact
that it is not the case that we have bananas? Russell thought so. Well then, does the
belief that we do not have both bananas and oranges correspond to a fact that we do not
have both bananas and oranges, a fact over and above the disjunction of the two single-
fruit-facts that we have no bananas or that we have no oranges? Russell thought the
answer to this one was no; logical compounds such as the belief that p or q, or that p and
q, are not made true by special disjunctive or conjunctive facts (a fact that p or q), but
rather just the fact p or the fact that q. But why draw the line where Russell draws it?
Why hold that no new fact corresponds to ‘p or q’ but a new fact corresponds to ‘not-p’ –
both are logical constructions out of atomic sentences. There was much disagreement
about the existence of negative facts. Perhaps Russell was inconsistent in drawing the
line where he did, or perhaps his distinction corresponded to the facts (!) – the bottom
line situation for a sentence p is that it is true or false – the columns of the truth table list
the possible facts, for each sentence letter it is either true or false.
There are additional problems for the correspondence view. What of
possibilities? We say that such and such is possible, and sometimes the claim we make is
true. Do true claims about what is possible correspond to possibilities? Are possibilities
facts, alongside the actual facts? What about reality makes “There is more than one way
to skin a cat” true? Does reality make it the case that there are exactly N ways to skin a
cat?
And what of counterfactuals? What part of reality corresponds to the true
statement “If I were you, I wouldn’t touch warm Miller Lite”? What are “facts”
anyway?
As if these metaphysical problems with facts and correspondence were not
enough, there are epistemic problems as well. We can’t get outside our heads to see if
our beliefs correspond to reality. Dwelling on this last thought, or ones similar,
eventually led to widespread dissatisfaction among philosophers, at least, with the
correspondence theory of truth. In its place several variations on Coherence theories
were developed. Let us turn to those.
COHERENCE, PRAGMATIST and VERIFICATIONIST THEORIES
The Empiricist tradition in philosophy has ancient roots, but grew and fluorished
in England during the Enlightenment and its scientific revolutions. Bacon and Hobbes
held that all mental content begins at the senses. This pregnant thought leads through
Locke to George Berkeley, writing at the beginning of the 18th Century. Berkeley
presents views that foreshadow much later empiricist thought – not just in philosophy
proper, but also including Mach and other physicists over the next several centuries.
Berkeley is an Idealist: all that is real are minds and their states. He holds that a
belief is not true because it corresponds to a mind-transcendent physical reality. We
never know such a reality, and the idea of matter is coherent. Rather beliefs are tools –
they enable us to predict future experience, future mental states. If I believe that there is
a beer in the fridge, this allows me to predict the experience I will have if I have the
experience of opening the fridge.
A. Pragmatism – James
Idealism developed and fluorished into the late 19th Century, perhaps in part
because it was the New Age metaphysics of the time, giving pride of place to a Spiritual
aspect of reality when science was displacing the spiritual. However resistance to
idealism developed in England and America. Some who resisted were realists who tried
to resuscitate correspondence between mind and non-mind. But among the most
prominent philosophers of the time were advocates of a new movement that rejected both
Idealism and the Correspondence theory of truth. The movement was pragmatism, and
its leading spokesman in the U.S. was Harvard philosopher-psychologist William James.
James sets out his account in "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" (Lecture 6 in
Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York: Longman Green and
Co (1907): 76-91) First James notes that the view that ideas copy reality seems
incoherent as a general account of truth. He asks "Where our ideas cannot copy
definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean?" and he answers:
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and
verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference
it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth,
for it is all that truth is known-as. …
The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens
to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an
event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication.
Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
Note the clear reliance on an epistemic argument – James says assimilation and
verification are “all that truth is known-as”. The result is a consequentialist theory of
truth – the truth of something, a belief, consists in its consequences. It becomes true in a
process of verification – literally “truth-ification”. The emphasis on verification in
experience was a short step from Berkeley’s instrumentalism, and a very short step to the
verificationism of the logical positivists and empiricists that dominated much thinking in
the 20th Century.
James echoes Berkeley’s instrumentalism, which is a form of consequentialism:
"...the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable
instruments of action....” The theory applies to language, including names, as well as
mental pictures: "Thus, names are just as 'true' or 'false' as definite mental pictures are.
They set up similar verification-processes, and lead to fully equivalent practical results."
However James holds that our use of names is constrained by history:
"Names are arbitrary, but once understood they must be kept to. We
mustn't now call Abel 'Cain' or Cain 'Abel.' If we do, we ungear ourselves
from the whole book of Genesis, and from all its connexions with the
universe of speech and fact down to the present time. We throw ourselves
out of whatever truth that entire system of speech and fact may embody."
Thus there is a hint of a causal theory of reference in James’ talk of connections across
time, a topic we shall consider in the chapter on reference. It is not clear that James is
aware that this appeal to the causal history of a term does not appear to be consistent with
his general view that truth – verification – lies in the future.
"Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth,
strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and also pursued
because it pays to pursue them. Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are
made, in the course of experience.
James replies to a realist about truth, such as a correspondence theorist, as follows:
“Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine a rationalist to
talk as follows:
'Truth is not made,' he will say; 'it absolutely obtains, being a unique relation that does
not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over the head of experience, and hits its
reality every time. Our belief that yon thing on the wall is a clock is true already, altho no
one in the whole history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of standing in that
transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it, whether or not
there be verification. You pragmatists put the cart before the horse in making truth's
being reside in verification-processes. These are merely signs of its being, merely our
lame ways of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has possessed the
wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all essences and natures. Thoughts
partake of it directly, as they partake of falsity or of irrelevancy. It can't be analyzed away
into pragmatic consequences.' “
James goes on to call this imagined defense of an alternative account of truth a
"tirade" - but perhaps it is closer to the truth than James' own account. James conflates
confirmation with truth, and hence regards truth as something that happens after a
hypothesis is made. But as we will see in the alternative account below, truth does not
depend on verification - but it is not "timeless" either, in the sense of a relation between
an eternal proposition and a tenseless fact. Nor is truth the product of a picturing relation
between sentence and fact.
James again:
" 'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as
'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any
fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course...."
James goes on to consider what his opponents offer as definitions of truth:
"When … you ask rationalists, instead of accusing pragmatism of desecrating the notion
of truth, to define it themselves by saying exactly what they understand by it, the only
positive attempts I can think of are these two:
1. Truth is just the system of propositions which have an unconditional claim to be
recognized as valid.[1]
[endnote [1]: A. E. Taylor [Alfred Edward Taylor (1869-1945), English philosopher],
Philosophical Review, vol. xiv, p. 288. ]
2. Truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under obligation to
make by a kind of imperative duty.[2]
[endnote2: H. Rickert [Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936), German philosopher], Der
Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, [J.B.C. Mohr, Tubengen and Leipzig, 1904] chapter on 'Die
Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.'
These are strange proposals -- but that is not James’ complaint. He goes on to
say that they are trivially true, but ill-defined, and that when they are made precise they
come down to his pragmatic proposal.
“But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation expressly say that they have
nothing to do with our practical interests or personal reasons. Our reasons for agreeing
are psychological facts, they say, relative to each thinker, and to the accidents of his life.
They are his evidence merely, they are no part of the life of truth itself That life transacts
itself in a purely logical or epistemological, as distinguished from a psychological,
dimension, and its claims antedate and exceed all personal motivations whatsoever. Tho
neither man nor God should ever ascertain truth, the word would still have to be defined
as that which ought to be ascertained and recognized."
Surely the definitions cited are odd, not "absolutely true", as James says they are. But
just as surely the "rationalists" are right to say that truth is independent of psychological
facts. One thing that is common to both James’ theory and the views he is attacking is
that they have abandoned the correspondence theory as an account of what agreeing with
reality can come to:
"....when we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed forms of agreeing that are
expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or fittings, or any other processes
pragmatically definable, the what of the 'agreement' claimed becomes as unintelligible as
the why of it. Neither content nor motive can be imagined for it. It is an absolutely
meaningless abstraction.[3]
[Endnote [3] reads: I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long ago gave up the whole
notion of truth being founded on agreement with reality. Reality, according to him, is
whatever agrees with truth, and truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This fantastic
flight, together with Mr. Joachim's [Harold Henry Joachim (1868-1938), English
philosopher] candid confession of failure in his book The Nature of Truth, seems to me to
mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when dealing with this subject. Rickert deals with
part of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls 'Relativismus.' I cannot
discuss his text here. Suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as
to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer. ]
One can certainly sympathize with James’ attempt to be naturalistic and to reject
mystical Idealist accounts of truth. And James sometimes seems to be a realist, not a
metaphysical reductivist as were so many of his anti-metaphysical brethren. In the 1909
Preface to “The Meaning of Truth”, James sticks by his guns in defining truth in terms of
experience, endorsing Schiller’s “true = works”, but James distances himself from
Schiller’s phenomenalism and says that he (James) holds that there are beliefs on the one
hand and facts on the other, but that: “ I start with two things, the objective facts and the
claims, and indicate which claims, the facts being there, will work successfully as the
latter's substitutes and which will not. I call the former claims true.”
But no matter how much one sympathizes with James as against his Idealist
opponents, from my standpoint, James’ entire account is vitiated by his inability to
imagine any form of correspondence between statements and reality except “copying”,
and his consequent conflation of truth with verification. But he is certainly in good
company; the succeeding half century was an exploration of conflating truth and
verification, in the hands of the logical empiricists. The decline of positivism was not the
end of these approaches; pragmatic approaches to truth outlasted the demise of those
forms of verificationism. One of the leading philosophers of the late 20th Century was
Richard Rorty.
B. Pragmatism – Rorty
Roughly a century after the Schiller-James proposals regarding truth, Richard
Rorty endorsed this pragmatist account of truth:
"Pragmatists say that the traditional notion that 'truth is correspondence to reality' is an
uncashable and outworn metaphor. Some true statements - like “the cat is on the mat” can be paired off with other chunks of reality so as to associate parts of the sentence with
parts of the chosen chunk. Most true statements - like "the cat is not on the mat" and
"there are transfinite numbers" and "pleasure is better than pain" - cannot."
("Texts and Lumps" 1985 New Literary History 17 pp. 1-15, reprinted in Objectivism,
Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol 1 CUP 1991. Passage quoted is from
pp. 79-80 in the latter).
In addition, Rorty continues, we have to worry whether talk of cats or numbers or
goodness is "the right way to break up the universe into chunks ...." Pragmatists
conclude it makes no sense to talk about truth as correspondence.
Now it seems to me pretty clear that Rorty has a very fixed idea, for a pragmatist,
of what a correspondence between language and reality might consist in. He talks of
parts of sentences being paired of with parts of (chunks of) reality. This is reminiscent
of Wittgenstein's picture theory of the correspondence between propositions - logical
sentences - and facts. Rorty seems to think that if there is to be any correspondence
between language and reality, it will be because parts of sentences correspond to parts of
reality.
But surely this is not the only way sentences might correspond to reality. All
sentences contain letters of the alphabet as parts, but no one expects each letter in the
sentence to correspond to a chunk of reality. Why would someone require of language
that individual words, like "of" or "not" correspond to a "chunk" of reality? [Perhaps this
word fetish is encouraged by the standard formulation of the principle of
compositionality, but as we have seen there is a serviceable alternative. As we have seen,
we can hold that the meaning of the whole is a function of the parts – without supposing
that the parts have meanings independently of their effect on the meaning of sentences.
The semiotic account I have argued for in earlier chapters allows us to take seriously that
it is a sentence as a whole that represents reality, not all of its bits like a picture. A
subpart of a photo represents a subpart of a scene, but there is no reason to believe that
this is true of non-compound sentences generally.
Linguistic representation is not pictorial, it is akin to the way a warning light or
other sign represents the state of some mechanical system. Perhaps the preoccupation
with individual words is also encouraged by philosophers’ historical preoccupation with
reference. But the most ardent fan of reference as the basis of meaning is unlikely to
think that _every_ word refers to some thing out in the world. Perhaps the entrenched
view holds because of the historical focus on timeless propositions, not events and acts
in the world such as sentence tokening. Perhaps, finally, the focus on words is
encouraged by logicians' formal semantics, in which most elements of a logical sentence
are assigned an individual or set or function or truth value to refer to. This is reference
mania, the avowed ideology of extensionalist formal semantics.
In any case, we have seen an alternative way of understanding the connection
between language and reality. The correspondence between language and reality is the
correspondence not between the structure of a static sentence and what is signified, but
between sign production and states of the world - a correlation between an event or act
in the world with a state of the world. No one doubts that the state of one part of reality
can be made to reliably correspond to the state of another. Then why not suppose that
among those signifying states might be human linguistic productions? Smoke means fire,
but not because the shape of smoke clouds mirrors the shape of fire. The state of a
warning light or gauge on the dashboard of the car can correspond to the state of the oil
pressure in the engine - not by having parts of the light paired off with parts of the facts
involving oil pressure, whatever that would be, but by having a causal connection
between oil pressure and light. There is no place here for worries about how to divide
reality up into chunks.
DEFLATIONARY ACCOUNTS
It is an understatement to say that many philosophers in the 20th century have
been pessimistic about truth. After all, what we take to be true is governed by a host of
conditions including presuppositions and cultural forces and power relations and
psychological limitations and sophistry and bewitchment by language – the list goes on.
And what know we of truth, beyond what we take to be true? Furthermore, what does it
add to any claim to prefix it with “It is true that _____”. As a result, many European
thinkers have treated truth as an illusory bubble; and Anglo-American philosophers have
deflated it.
NIETZSCHE
Nietzsche represents a notable attack on Truth just before the deflationist accounts
of the Twentieth Century. His has affinities to much later “postmodern” thinking, and he
delights in undermining the Enlightenment shibboleths such as Truth and Reason.
Nietzsche in effect argues that nothing that passes for truth is true. This is not a
reduction, but an outright rejection of truth as an illusion.
In "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (in Breazeale, Daniel (editor and
translator) Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the early
1870's (NJ: Humanities Press), Nietzsche writes:
"...we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of
trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities."
Nietzsche explains: "Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as
it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original
experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it
simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases - which means, purely and
simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises
from the equation of unequal things." (pp. 82-3)
Nietzsche concludes (p. 84):
"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in
short a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified,
transferred, and established.... Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are
illusions...."
Oh Woe! And Whoa! This vivid iconoclastic argument that language falsifies
reality through use of metaphor begins with a genetic fallacy. This is in part the
empiricist fallacy of thinking that words do, or are supposed to, name experiences.
Nietzsche speaks of concepts as "the graveyard of perceptions". This is simply a mistake.
Yes, concepts begin, in the psychology of some individual, in experience. But as
Wittgenstein and other critics of Lockean theories of meaning have pointed out, the point
of a word or concept is not to name experience. In an indicative sentence, words serve as
component pieces of an information bearer – generally a tokening of a sentence that bears
information about the world, not the language user. The word "beer" is not the name of
an experience, and hence not of an experience that it falsifies. “Beer” is the name of a
stuff that can be put in bottles, can be drunk -- and may eventually be experienced. Some
glasses of beer taste unlike other glasses of beer - this does not mean that something is
wrong with the word "beer". Nietzsche is apparently led to object to stimulus
generalization by a seriously misguided semantic theory.
Nietzsche draws the conclusion that language systematically distorts and
misrepresents because he thinks it is supposed to represent individual experiences in all
their particularity and uniqueness. He thinks that because experience is needed to learn
language, all language is about experience and any generalization falsifies that
experience. This mistakes the retina for the world. Perception is a process that includes
brain states and other states of the organism, but perception is not perception _of_ brain
states or, generally, of states of the organism that perceives. It is the empiricist / idealist
mistake all over again. Experience is just part of the process that links language to the
world; it is not the topic of language, and experience is not falsified by language that is
not about it. Nietzsche’s contemporary Gottlob Frege is quite clear on this difference – in
“On Sense and Reference” (1892) he carefully distinguishes the referent of language
from the ideas or images, the mental entities, that we may associate with a referring
expression. These mental entities are not part of the meaning of a referring expression.
The influence of these two figures is quite different – Nietzsche’s nihilist account of truth
influencing philosophy on the Continent, and Frege (via Russell) influencing AngloAmerican philosophy.
It is worth noting that like the pragmatist Rorty, Nietzsche is stuck by the
arbitrariness of the way we divide up reality. He takes as a prime example the
constellations, such as those that constitute the Zodiac – Virgo, the Gemini Twins,
Scorpio, the minimal Orion’s Belt. Well, for heaven’s sake, these are arbitrary.
Everyone is struck by the oddity of this enterprise – not that it is typical of how language
or concepts connect with reality. While the recognition of patterns in the stars is
arbitrary, the stars that make them up are not. Nor is the identification by a pedestrian of
the 2 ton Buick that is bearing down on him as he jaywalks. Perhaps the same fate
awaits the pragmatists that Russell used to explain the fate of the idealists at the
beginning of the 20th Century – they will be hit by not-so-arbitrarily constructed “chunks
of reality”.
WITTGENSTEIN again, and the beginnings of modern deflationary accounts
Wittgenstein developed the Picture Theory form of correspondence theory in the
second decade of the 20th Century. He rejected this approach in his later work. In
Section 136 of the Philosophical Investigations (1953) he writes:
At bottom, giving "This is how things are" as the general form of
propositions is the same as giving the definition: a proposition is whatever
can be true or false. For instead of "This is how things are" I could have
said "This is true". (Or again "This is false".) But we have
'p' is true = p
'p' is false = not-p.
And to say that a proposition is whatever can be true or false amounts to
saying: we call something a proposition when in our language we apply
the calculus of truth functions to it.
Now it looks as if the definition -- a proposition is whatever can be true or
false -- determined what a proposition was, by saying: what fits the
concept 'true', or what the concept 'true' fits, is a proposition. So it is as if
we had a concept of true and false, which we could use to determine what
is and what is not a proposition. What engages with the concept of truth
(as with a cogwheel) is a proposition.
But this is a bad picture. [It is as if one were to say "The king in chess is
the piece that one can check." But this can mean no more than that in our
game of chess we only check the king. Just as the proposition that only a
proposition can be true or false can say no more than that we only
predicate "true" and "false" of what we call a proposition. And what a
proposition is is in one sense determined by the rules of sentence
formation (in English for example), and in another sense by the use of the
sign in the language-game. And the use of the words "true" and "false"
may be among the constituent parts of this v game; and if so it belongs to
our concept 'Proposition' but does not AS we might also say, check
belongs to our concept of the king in chess (as so to speak a constituent
part of it). To say that check did not it our concept of the pawns, would
mean that a game in which pawns were checked, in which, say, the players
who lost their pawns lost, would be uninteresting or stupid or too
complicated or something of the kind.]
This is the seed of deflationary approaches to truth, with subforms minimalist,
disquotational, and eliminativist or redundancy or pleonastic views. Other early 20th
century proponents of deflationary approaches were F. P. Ramsey and A.J. Ayer. Both
this family of approaches and the coherence/pragmatist approaches have similar roots, in
that they take as inspiration a close look at what we seem to be doing when we say that
something is true. While the coherence approaches still think truth is a robust relation,
between truth bearers and experience, the deflationists are skeptical. When we look
REALLY closey at how we use the word “true” – truth-talk – we find it often functions
merely as a way of endorsing what others have said - “That’s true” “How true!”
“Everything he said is true.”
Now it may well be very tedious to repeat everything he said, so this is a very
attractive succinct way of endorsing what he said, like nodding one’s head vigorously (In
another connection, Wittgenstein argued that saying “I am in pain” is a sophisticated
“Ouch!) But as Wittgenstein notes in section 136, saying ‘P is true” for some sentence P
is apparently equivalent to just asserting P. So in principle, truth talk appears to be
eliminable, even if it is very convenient to talk of the truth of statements rather than reasserting the statements. Thus truth, being eliminable, turns out not to be a substantial
relation at all.
This view has several contemporary defenders. Deflationary views have been
advanced by Paul Horwich (Truth, 1998) and Hartry Field (Truth and the Absence of
Fact, 2001). Horwich’s “minimalist” account takes propositions to be truth-bearers”: a
proposition that P is true if P. Field’s account is about sentences, and is a
“disquotational” account: “Sentence “P” is true if P.
Problems with Eliminativism
Several objections have to be overcome to produce a successful elimination of
truth as a substantial relation. Eliminativism works best with direct quotation. It is not
obvious how to extend it to deal with cases where we don’t actually produce the sentence
we say to be true. Foremost among those cases are quantified truth claims – where we
claim unspecified claims are true. For example, it has been pointed out that disquotation
doesn’t appear to work for statements such as “Knowing Luke, I am sure everything he
said was true”. We may not know exactly what Luke said, and so cannot replace this
statement that mentions “true” with a specific list of sentences that are equivalent but
which eliminate use of “true”. It also seems useful to say “some of what he said is true,
but not all” - it is not clear that we can paraphrase this if we don’t know what he said.
Similarly, it doesn’t work for requests such as “Say something true” (which is
certainly not the same as “say something”), or “Do you solemnly swear to tell the whole
truth and nothing but the truth?”. These are important considerations.
The deflationist wants to replace general talk of a correspondence between
sentences and reality with some biconditionals. Well, a lot of biconditionals. These are
to have the form:
T: "S" is true if S.
for each sentence S. Since the schema can be applied to the filled-in schema, there are an
infinity of sentences for each object sentence that does not talk of truth. This deflation
looks a bit like inflation. While we can certainly agree with the deflationists that mastery
of the schema is a good thing, we might well claim that to master the schema is to
understand that there is a correspondence between language and reality.
Each instance of the schema establishes an instance of the correspondence - it
gives the truth condition for a sentence. If we know that each thing in collection A has a
property provided there is a particular thing in collection B, then T is a relation, a
mapping, between A and B. If collection A is the set of sentences of some language, and
B is states of the world, then this is a correspondence between A and B.
Let us consider an analogy from mathematics:
Suppose I say that counting is the establishment of a _correspondence_ between language
(numerals) and reality - the ordered members of collections of objects. A math
deflationist says: No. There is no correspondence. Counting is just the mastery of an
infinite set of sentences that have the form:
C: The count of an object is "N" just in case the object is the Nth in an ordered collection.
No mention of correspondence in the schema. This is true. Yet again this "deflation"
does not appear to avoid correspondence, and it looks to be an inflation. We must
master a infinity of sentences - and they each appear to correlate numerals with objects,
that is, establish a correspondence.
These and other examples suggest that the Main Problem with eliminativism is
simple: Truth is very important. Intuitively truth has to do with the relation of language
and reality. No case for eliminativism has a sufficiently well-motivated argument that a
satisfactory account of truth cannot be given that accommodates our intuitions and makes
precise the correspondence. Many of the arguments against correspondence theories are
based on very unimaginative accounts of the form the correspondence between language
and world must take – typically as sentential picturings of reality. That approach may
well be bankrupt, but if it is not the only approach to explaining the relation of true
sentences to reality, then to deny the picture theory is hardly to motivate eliminativism.
Eliminativism has a heavy burden of proof; one not met.
V. The Truth about Truth: Normative Indicator Account
Despite deflationary accounts, ordinary folk regard truth as important, and go to
some lengths to try to get at it. They also suppose truth is sometimes attainable. Not the
whole truth, perhaps, but serviceable size amounts. They also tend to think that truth is
not relative, but objective. Truth is discovered, not made, contrary to James’ attempt to
package the epistemology of truth discovery as its essence. And many stubbornly hold
that truth is to be found in a correspondence between what one says and the way things
are.
This may all be hopelessly naïve, as sophisticated thinkers have held. But in this
case (and perhaps a few others), it may be that there is something to be said for the
untutored view. Perhaps the lay account of truth is, in fact, true. Perhaps the
philosophers who robust accounts of truth raise a dust and then complain that they cannot
see, in Berkeley’s memorable phrase. But if so, the ordinary view needs explication and
foundation. I’ll suggest a conceptual framework to support it, based on the basic features
of language that have been discussed in earlier chapters. I will argue that truth is closely
related to meaning.
We have seen that the representational power of language owes to generable
tokening rules that constrain the production of sentences. If this approach is at all
correct, at the heart of language there must be a correspondence between correctly
tokened sentential signs and the extra-linguistic world. On the account of meaning
developed in chapters two and three, indicative sentences have tokening conditions.
Those conditions are states of the world – the reality side of the truth equation. The rules
stipulating the condition that must hold for the sentence to be tokenable constitute a
normative element. Unlike the occurrence of a reliable natural sign, a tokening of a
linguistic sign – a sentence - can comply with the tokening rule that governs it, or it can
fail to do so Linguistic tokens can be semantically correct, or fail to be so. When a token
is produced under the conditions stipulated by its tokening rule, it is true. When a
sentence is produced in violation of its tokening rule, it is false.
Thus the English sentence “There is a beer in my fridge” should be tokened in
normal speech only if there is a beer in my fridge. If I token the sentence when there is a
beer in my fridge, that is, when the tokening condition rule is satisfied and so the
tokening is semantically permissible, then I have said something true. If I say to you
“there’s a beer in my fridge” when there is no beer in my fridge, I have said something
false. What I say is incorrect because it violates the tokening rule that governs tokens of
the type “there’s a beer in my fridge”.
The account of the generation of tokening rules can be applied to negations in a
straightforward way: the tokening rule for negations is generated from the tokening rule
for non-negated sentences so as to be tokenable just when the latter is not. Thus Rorty’s
example of “the cat is not on the mat” has a tokening condition generated from “the cat is
on the mat”. It is semantically permissible to token “the cat is not on the mat” whenever
the cat is not on the mat. The sentence is not a picture of anything, and in particular, not
of a negative fact. There are also tokening conditions for the abstractions that Rorty cites
as problems for correspondence theories: “there are transfinite numbers” and “pleasure is
better than pain”. There may be controversy between constructivists and logicists about
just what those tokening conditions are for existence claims in mathematics, but however
that is settled, a class of true claims in that domain is made possible.
This account in terms of generable tokening rules puts some meat on the
monosyllabic bones of Aristotle’s definition of truth as “to say of what is, that it is, and of
what is not, that it is not.” The appeal to tokening rules gives an explanation of what “to
say of” comes down to. One says of what is that it is, if one says, e.g., that that there is a
beer in the fridge when there is a beer in the fridge. In general, one says of what is that it
is if, and only if, one tokens sentences in compliance with their semantic tokening rules,
their meaning. Thus we can define truth in terms of meaning.
This account also has the merit of satisfying our intuitions that truth is very
important, a goal for proper language use. The account developed here also shows how
truth is concerned with a proper connection between language and reality. If either the
world or the meaning of a sentence were to change, a true sentence could become false
(and if a true sentence becomes false, then either the world or the meaning of the
sentence changed). And finally, since meaning has a normative element, we see in what
way there is a normative element in truth. Signs are supposed to show how the world is –
and when they do what they are supposed to do, they are true. We may say that a claim
or answer is correct, as an alternative to saying it is true. When an instrument does what
it is supposed to do, we say that it is accurate – and we say the same about linguistic
reports, that they are accurate. The close connection between truth and correctness and
accuracy reflects the norms that constitute meaning. Deflationary theories, and perhaps
others, leave it a mystery why truth is good.
We might find slight additional confirmation in the reported etymology of True –
tree. Hence, apparently, another common non-linguistic sense of “true” to indicate
straight. Perhaps Nietzsche would say that a metaphor was at work here: the relation
between the linguistic and the straight sense may be that a true statement is like a sign
that points directly to the world (and not to a deceitful intention or mistaken belief in the
head of producer of falsehoods).
There is one last consideration. For artificial languages, Tarski provides a
recursive account of truth in terms of T-sentences:
T: “S” is true if and only if S.
Tarski shows how to generate these sentences for logical languages. This approach is
often called a semantic conception of truth. Tarski suggests that a constraint on any
account of truth that it have as consequence the T-sentences. That is, applied to sentence
tokenings, it should generate, for each sentence S of a language a T sentence of the form
A tokening of “S” is true if and only if S.
I have characterized truth as follows: a tokening of a sentence is true if and only if the
sentence was tokened in compliance with its tokening conditions. The tokening
condition for sentence “S” is described by the schema ‘token “S” only if S’. Hence, if S,
then a tokening of “S” will tokened in compliance with its tokening condition. Hence it
is true. So a token of “S” is true if S. And if a token of “S” is true, then its tokening
convention is complied with. Hence S will be the case. So on this account “S” is true if,
and only if, S. Convention T is satisfied.
The account given here captures the spirit of the correspondence theory, while
avoiding the metaphysical problems that are raised by implausible picture theories or
other accounts of a supposed correspondence between propositions and facts. We see
that we need not hypothesize propositions to be the bearers of truth - instead truth is a
product of correct acts of sign generation, in the case of language, the production of
sentences. Truth, as we have seen, is a product of sentence production - in particular, the
causal constraints on sentence production. In that sense, a sentence is born true or false,
contrary to what James holds. This property of its nativity is hardly miraculous, but hard
won, a reflection of adherence to conventional constraints on sentence tokening. Thus it
is reasonable to hold that tokens of indicative sentences are the truth bearers in natural
language. Sometimes we say that a sentence is true. In some cases we mean a sentence
token, as in “the sentence on the board is true” when I have written “Today is Tuesday”
on Tuesday. It is a token that is on the board, and tokenings of that same sentence later in
the week will fail to produce truth. Some sentences are such that all their tokenings are
true; these Quine called “eternal sentences”. Examples come from math and from use of
fully specified referents that largely free one from context (“July 9, 2003 is a Tuesday” ).
However, even in the case of eternal sentences, it still makes sense to regard sentence
tokens as the bearers of truth. To say of the sentence type that it is true can be regarded
as elliptical for saying that all its tokens are true.
CONCLUSION
We have surveyed some main theories of truth: correspondence, coherence and
pragmatist, and eliminativist. The burden of argument lies with rejection of the common
sense view that truth lies in correspondence between language and reality, and that
burden was not met. At the same time the classic advocates of correspondence theory
have not provided an adequate explanation of how sentences can correspond to reality.
I developed an account that builds on the general account of how language works
that was developed in earlier chapters. Signs have meaning. Natural signs mean in virtue
of causal connections between sign and signified. Natural language meaning is closely
related, but the connections are established by generable conventional rules. In both
cases, the result is the same – signs will carry information. When a sign in natural
language means what it is supposed to mean, it is true. Thus truth is a substantial
property, and concerns the connection between language and the world. Truth is
desirable not just for its consequences, but intrinsically, as part of correct use of
language.