Philosophy of Language: Truth and Fact
Professor: Chienkuo Mi
Department of Philosophy, Soochow University
Fall Semester, 2005
Course Description:
There is a historically important piece of reasoning which, if correct, would be disastrous
for (1) the theory that true sentences correspond to facts, propositions, states-of-affairs, or
situations; (2) the thesis that facts serve as the causal relata; (3) the claim that there are
non-truth-functional sentence connectives such as “necessarily”, “possibly”, and “because”;
and (4) the proposal that quantifiers and modal operators may be combined. This
technical-sounding argument was originally attributed to Frege, has further been developed
by Church and Godel into a logically precise form, and finally has come to be called “the
slingshot argument” by Barwise and Perry.
“The slingshot argument” has been formulated in various forms for different philosophical
purposes. However, the point of this argument is to show that if a true sentence corresponds
to any entity, all true sentences would correspond to the same entity, i.e., “The True”, “The
Great Fact”, or “The Eleatic One”. The conclusion of the slingshot can be validly derived only
if two assumptions have been accepted: (1) the assumption that logically equivalent
sentences are co-referential or correspond to the same fact, and (2) the assumption that the
reference (or the corresponded fact) of a sentence remains the same if an expression or
singular term in the sentence is substituted by a co-referential expression or term. These two
assumptions will be carefully examined in order to exhibit the full strength of the formal
reasoning of this argument.
The philosophical significance of the slingshot argument can be best revealed by
associating it with the discussions of some important concepts such as “truth” and “fact”. The
main focus of this course is to argue that there are indeed two different levels conflated in the
issues here: the semantic (or linguistic) level and the metaphysical level. It is important to
make the clear distinction so that the plausible intuition of the correspondence theory can be
saved and the devastated effects of the slingshot can be avoided.
Keywords：the slingshot, truth, fact, correspondence theory
Required Textbook:
Neale, Steven Facing Facts. Oxford University Press, 2001
Suggested References:
Barwise, J. Situations and Attitudes. Center Studies Language Information, 1999
Olson, K. An Essay on Facts. Cambridge University Press, 1987
Neale, S. Descriptions. Bradford Book, the MIT Press, 1990
Course Evaluation:
1. In-class presentation, 30%
2. Final Term Paper (10 pages minimum), 70%
3. You are strongly encouraged to write your term paper in English