On
the Proposed Exhaustion of Truth
Abstract
In the paper’s first
part, I present an umbrella thesis - the exhaustion
thesis - which captures the core component of the various deflationary
positions on truth: the claim that the content of the truth predicate is
exhausted by the content of that to which the predicate applies. I argue that
this thesis is only trivially supported by the common thought that truth withstands substantive analysis,
for predicates in general do not succumb to such analysis. I then consider two
positive articulations of the exhaustion thesis
and argue that neither begins to show that the thesis is explanatorily
adequate.
1: Introduction
Deflationism is perhaps
the prevailing conception of truth within contemporary philosophy. The chief
reason for this ascendancy, I think, is that deflationary theories present
themselves to be neutral between all
disputes in epistemology and metaphysics. This offers deflationism a
straightforward dialectical advantage over the more traditional theories that
seek to explicate being true via
notions which essentially embroil the concept in substantive disputes to do
with the nature of mind, knowledge and the world. In crude terms, deflationism
allows one to say something simple about truth without concomitantly deciding
upon the character of nigh-on every other concept of philosophical concern. To
a great degree, then, the accrued value of deflationism is due to a favourable
contrast with more traditional theories. While I think that such invidious
asymmetries are true enough, they furnish little reason to favour deflationism
in itself. My argument will be that an anti-substantive account of the property
of truth may, indeed should, be common ground for all. What else is required
from deflationism as proprietarily understood is a thesis about the content of
truth - the exhaustion thesis. But
insofar as this thesis has been articulated and defended it is beset by
insuperable conceptual and empirical problems, or so I shall contend.
2: The Exhaustion Thesis
Deflationism is a
familiarly mixed bag; nonetheless, its core may be captured by what I shall
call the exhaustion thesis:
(ET) The content
(/sense/cognitive significance) of is
true is exhausted by the content of
that to which it applies, or a
specification thereof.[1]
ET does not tell us what
true means, what subjects grasp when
they are competent with the concept of truth, for ET gives no suggestion what
content amounts to; its message, rather, is that truth brings with it no more
content than must already be grasped to entertain that which is being evaluated
as true. This thought is, for sure, somewhat impressionistic, although I offer
it not as a precise analysis but more as the identification of a schematic
relationship which may be variously realised. What is neatly captured though, I
think, is the characteristic flatness
of deflationary theories: the content of P
is true is not explicated by mentioning P
or any of its constituent words as subjects or relata of a further predicate;
rather, the content of the predication is explicated by the use of P itself: there is no underlying predication which may articulate that P is true other than the
predication contained in P itself.[2]
In this sense, ET should be understood as a proposed adequacy condition on accounts of truth. The
condition has both a negative and positive aspect. If an account of truth
proposes that the concept has to do, say, with the employment of ideal
rationality in epistemically ideal conditions, then ET rules against the
account, for surely the content of that to which we apply the truth predicate
is not typically concerned with ideal
rationality under any conditions. The point holds generally: tendentious
notions from epistemology or metaphysics appear to be expressed by just those judgments which are
transparently about such issues. On the other hand, various contrary accounts
are compatible with ET and the extent to which they are is the extent to which
I shall understand them to be deflationist.
Roughly, Ramsey (1927), Ayer (1936),
Strawson (1950), and Williams (1976) hold that the truth predicate plays a
purely pragmatic or grammatical role that does not involve the expression of a
property. On such an account, ET is vacuously satisfied, or perhaps may be
offered as an explanation of the semantic inertness of truth. Alternatively,
Horwich (1990), Field (1994), and Soames (1999) suggest that is true does have an independent
content, expresses a property, but that such a content is fully specified via
the specification of the content to which the predicate applies (as we shall
see, this idea can be variously realised). Similarly, prosentential theories of
truth (e.g., Grover (1992) and Brandom (1994)) analyse truth in terms of an
anaphoric role relaised by predications of truth, such that the predications inherit the content of that to which the
predication is made. Again, ET is transparently satisfied.[3]
One may think of inter-deflationary disputes and differences as disagreements
over how to cleave properly to ET.
ET can be usefully understood as
commending a degenerate version of what is perceived to be the traditional
analytical endeavour. This view of conceptual analysis has it that a concept C is explicated (in some sense) by the
articulation of C in terms of a
uniform set of more primitive concepts which apply just when the target concept
applies; that is, analyses seek instantiations of the schema TM:
(TM) ("x)[F(x)
↔ …x…].
The predicate on the
left flank expresses our target concept C,
and the blank on the right flank is to be filled by a complex predicate that
express the content of the target predicate. Among the restrictions on the
filling is that it should be antecedently understood and not include ‘F’ itself
as a proper part. As regards truth, the following are paradigm cases:
(CT) ("x)[TRUE(x)
↔ ($p)(x
represents p and p obtains)]
(PT) ("x)[TRUE(x)
↔ x is a member of a maximally
coherent belief set]
(JT) ("x)[TRUE(x)
↔ x would be rationally agreed
upon at the end of inquiry]
It is moot whether such
proposals are best thought of as strict instances of the TM paradigm or as
loser elucidations (Wright (1999)). Still, the crucial feature is retained that
truth is a non-primitive concept which may be unpacked into metaphysical and/or
epistemological notions which uniformly hold for all truths.
Now ET amounts to a deflation of the
advertised analyses in the sense that the blank of TM is not to be filled;
rather, we need to find a way of letting that claimed to be true to stand alone
on the right flank of the equivalence. We may thus think of ET as commending a
null instance of TM vis-à-vis truth,
not in the sense that nothing at all can go on the right flank, but that there
is no predicate which uniformly occurs there to capture the cognitive import of
is true across all potential subjects. This is a direct consequence of
the ET injunction that we don’t require any
explicatory concepts other than those expressed in the sentences
(/propositions) claimed to be true. This approach is cognate with what I early
termed the flatness of deflationary
accounts: a sentence’s truth is not explained by a further predication to the
sentence or its parts, but by the articulation of its content - the predication
of is true is explained by flattening
it onto that claimed to be true. Thus,
any (partial) uniformity we might find in accounting for what it would take for
a range of sentences to be true will simply be a reflection of the
co-occurrence of concepts expressed in the sentences. With this in mind, we do
not need to have a commitment to any particular theory of content to see that
the analyses above contravene ET, for if the concepts expressed in the subjects
of the truth predicate are sufficient to
capture the predicate’s content, then uniform notions of rationality or correspondence
are explanatorily otiose precisely because they are not common features of all
concepts.[4]
But to deny any such unpacking is just to relinquish TM on its proprietary
understanding, for no particular predicate, whether complex or simple, is
called upon to fill the blank in every instance. The nomenclature,
‘deflationism’, signals that any such putative filling will speciously inflate
truth. Consider Horwich (1990, p.6):
Unlike most other
properties, being true is
insusceptible to conceptual or scientific analysis. No wonder that its
‘underlying nature’ has so stubbornly resisted philosophical elaboration; for
there simply is no such thing.
Similar thoughts are
expressed by Quine (1960, 1970/86), Leeds (1978), Grover, et al. (1975), Soames
(1999), and Field (1994), among many others. As indicated above, there are many
subtle and fundamental distinctions between these thinkers. Nevertheless, all
may be understood to reject the uniform TM model on the grounds of ET. This
common theme is typically expressed by the thought that an adequate account of
truth will consist of a specification (in some form, implicit or explicit) of
each instance of the schema DT:
(DT) TRUE(P) iff P,
where ‘TRUE(P)’ picks out sentences which variously
attribute truth to a clause P:
(1)a. It is true that
snow is white iff snow is white
b.‘Grass is green’ is true iff grass is
green
c.
The proposition (claim/belief/conjecture, etc.) that the sky is blue is true
iff the sky
is blue.
Thus, the content of P is true is given by P
itself, not P in relation to any
other elements; there is no general, uniform analysis that answers the question
What is truth?.[5]
It does not follow, though, that there is no property of truth, that ET can
only be vacuously satisfied.
The problem with such nihilism, first pointed out by Tarski
(1944, 1956), although noted by Ramsey (1927), is that the predicate ‘is true’
takes subjects in which that (sentence, proposition, etc.) claimed to be true
is not recoverable by the mere deletion of lexical or punctuational material.
The standard examples of such subjects are quantifier and quasi-quantifier NPs:
(2)a.
Everything/Something Bill said is true
b. What Bill said is true
c. The sentence Bill uttered is
true
d. Bill’s claim is true.
‘True’ ineliminably
occurs in such constructions, it cannot be parsed away on the model of (1).
This feature of ineliminability is most often highlighted by the failure of a
potential regimentation of such constructions into first-order quantification
theory: a quantifier would be asked to bind two variables ranging over truth
bearers (sayings, utterances, etc.), but such variables are objectual, and so
in need of predicates. The elision of ‘is true’ would issue in ungrammatical
nonsense; e.g.,
(3) ("x)[Bill said x
→ x].[6]
So much, of course, is not a
demonstration that there is a
property of truth, still less is to it say anything about what the property
might amount to. It does, though, undercut any inference from the eliminability
of the truth predicate in constructions such as (1)a-c to truth’s not being a
property. But if there is a property
of truth, then why does it, as revealed in (1)a-c, appear not to enter
ineliminably into the determination of the truth of truth predications?
The resolution of this quandary, due, in
essence, to Quine (1960, 1970/86) and endorsed by Leeds (1978), Soames (1984,
1999), Horwich (1990), and Field (1994),
is to give truth no more credit than that which is due from its
provision of a predicate for the stranded variable in constructions such as (3).
That is, truth earns its conceptual keep, as it were, by allowing us to
generalise, or be otherwise indefinite or circumlocutory about that we wish to
assert. If we were always only concerned with presented individual sentences,
then, by DT, truth would be a superfluous indirection. Sometimes, of course,
the service is indispensable, when, say, our truth claim covers an infinity of
sentences/propositions.
So, rather than being anomalous, (2)a-d
highlight the need for truth,
notwithstanding its insubstantiality. Still, truth is merely ‘useful’.[7]
This is the message of DT. Given any sentence as value of the bound variable
argument of the truth predicate, we have an instance of the left-hand side of
DT, which may then be substituted for its disquotation
or, more generally, the clause to which truth is attributed. We may model this
logic by a simple argument form, the a
priori acceptability of whose instances putatively reveals that the truth
predicate, even where not merely an indirection, has a content still caught by
the content it applies to, and so remains in line with ET. Thus, where (i) is
the form of a truth predication to a quantifier NP (e.g., ‘Everything Bill says
is true’):
(DISQ)
(i) ("x)[F(x) → TRUE(x)] (Assumption)
(ii) F(P) (Assumption)
(iii) F(P) → TRUE(P) (UI
(i))
(iii) TRUE(P) (MPP (ii), (iii))
(iv)
P (DT)
The argument goes
through whatever ‘P’ we chose; effectively, from (i), the restriction, F, on the quantifier subjects of is true acts as a disquotational licence
for the assertion of that claimed to be true. This idea is quite explicit in
Field (1986) and Horwich (1990), where, in terms of content, the truth
predicate serves as an abbreviation of the DT instances of the sentences
(/propositions) covered by the quantifier’s restriction. Thus, (i) says no more than (AT):
(AT) If F(S1), then S1; and if F(S2), then S2; and if F(S3), then S3…
The truth predicate acts
as a proxy for a substitutional quantifier; that is, truth bearers can be
values of objectual variables rather than substitutends for sentential place
holders, but the effect of the truth predicate is to reduce the generalisation about the sentences/propositions covered
to the compendious assertion of the infinite conjunctions/disjunctions of the
truth bears; and so we commit ourselves to no more than that which the
sentences covered say. Following
Quine (1960; 1970/86), let us refer to this means as semantic ascent: truth allows us to sally back and forth between
language talk and world talk without extending the content of truth beyond the
contents expressed in the ‘language’.
Now,
semantic ascent might provide an explanation for why we should have a
deflated predicate, but it hardly demonstrates that the truth predicate is deflated. It is perfectly coherent to
think of truth as a concept that is not adequately captured by DT’s instances
but which also enables semantic ascent. There is some confusion about this.
Horwich, as quoted above, bases the claim
that truth has no ‘underlying nature’ on the fact that, “unlike most other
properties”, it fails to succumb to TM in the sense that it has no uniform
analysis. Clearly, if most properties
do have essences which my be picked out on the right flank of instances of TM,
then the recalcitrance of truth - the ‘fact’ that the truth of ‘Snow is white’
is flat with the whiteness of snow, while the truth of ‘Grass is green’ is flat
with the greenness of grass, etc. - would alone perhaps license the
deflationary reading. But, I should say, it is not unreasonable to think that
properties in general fail to succumb
to TM. To show this in detail is beyond my present scope. I am only currently
interested in arguing that it is more reasonable to view the failure of TM vis-à-vis truth as a symptom of the
general inadequacy of TM, rather than as a revelation about truth in
particular, still less as a direct argument for deflationism. Let us begin by
taking Horwich at his word in 1990.
Horwich neglects to mention any of those
other properties apart from truth that have given way under analysis, but he
explicitly intends the claim to cover both colloquial and scientific or formal
notions. But does Horwich seriously think that we have analyses of chair,
beauty, to play, to paint, to be, bold, funny, on, from, and so on
indefinitely? And what of the history of the philosophical analysis of the
notions of knowledge, cause, freedom, good, probable, meaning, consciousness,
self, etc.? On a simple inductive measure, it appears that our failure to find
an underlying nature to truth tells us more about analysis than it does about
truth. We can, of course, explicate the notions which have traditionally
occupied philosophers in various ways, some of which might commend broad
agreement, but the endeavor to yoke such explications under TM has been
singularly unsuccessful.[8]
One does not require any particular explanation of this failure - that, say, there is no analytic/synthetic
distinction (Quine (1953)) - to recognise the failure in itself (but see
below). What of ‘scientific analysis’?
Presumably, Horwich has in mind the
identification of natural kinds. Now it might be that we understand our colloquial natural kind terms to denote essences,
to be rigid (Kripke (1980); Putnam
(1975)), but it would be illegitimate to move from this semantic thesis to the
thought that science attempts to discover such essences, still more so that it
has been successful in doing so (Putnam (1990); Chomsky (2000)). Let us agree
that the very reason some natural kind term K
features in a scientific theory is that it is projectible: through it we can frame counterfactual supporting
predictive generalisations about the phenomena at issue. In this sense, K is a primitive predicate as far as the
containing theory is concerned. We do not employ K simply as a convenient proxy for some more complex predicate G. To do so would be to settle for
fundamentally superficial generalisations. On very rare occasions we can
‘reduce’ one theory to another, but this typically involves either
modifications to both theories (e.g., the explanation of chemical elements at
the atomic level) or does not issue in predicates for predicates but manageable
disjunctions, which themselves do not feature in the proprietary
generalisations. (e.g., heat-in-gases or heat-in-solids…). If we do find
underlying properties, then, ipso facto,
we have found better theories of the phenomena at issue - it is far from clear
that we have analysed anything at all.
These points, I think, should be
trivially acceptable. That they may not be is perhaps due to the feeling that
if being a K is not to be
pleonastic, then K must have some constitution, as if there is some underlying
property to, say, beauty or swimming, even if our science will not stretch to
it. Well, science explains what it can, but it does not proceed from our
colloquial concepts and categories, it proceeds from whatever concepts and
categories - extant or created - capture generalisations that explain and
predict the data at hand and any novel data as it arises. It does not begin
with our intuitive ontological schema (or any other for that matter) and
attempt to discover the ‘underlying reality’. The point, then, is not so much
that we should not hold our breath for a scientific theory of, say, swimming in
general, but that there is no reason whatsoever to think that being a swimmer is a natural kind.
Theories, we may say, mold their concepts in the search for finer explanations;
any correspondence with our intuitive concepts about the same phenomenon will
be accidental.[9]
Notwithstanding these essentially
empirical complaints, the TM model suffers from a general conceptual problem to which Fodor
(1975, 1981, 1998a) has long been drawing our attention. Not all concepts can
have analyses, for that would lead to endless analysis in that any concept
featured in an analysans would be the analysand for some further analysans.
There must, therefore, be primitive concepts. But to be primitive just means
not to be defined, not to possess an analysis. The TM format, therefore, cannot
apply to every concept. Which ones are exempt? Well, wherever the line is drawn
between the defined and the defining appears to be arbitrary in at least two
ways. First, it is not clear that there is any principle which determines that
possession of a given concept entails possession of another. One may, of
course, appeal to standard containment taxonomies: e.g., dogs ` mammals ` animals ` natural objects (as
opposed to artifacts). This might take us a certain distance, but clearly not
all the way. Examples from biology are unduly convincing because there is a
natural organisation into species, phyla, etc., although the nature of such
containment is highly contentious and patently does not reflect our intuitive
concepts. However, for most concepts there is not such a natural hierarchy.
Moreover, it is unlikely that possession of one concept involves possessing the
containing concepts. If we use lexical acquisition as a guide, then,
ontogenically, the most basic concepts appear to be ‘middle terms’: dogs, say,
as opposed to poodles or mammals. Accordingly, paradigm theories of concepts, for example, would reverse the kind
of containment indicated above: our notion of an animal, say, is based upon the
features of certain common and easily discriminable cases or paradigms; perhaps
we thus arrive at animal from dog! I do not want to suggest that such
accounts are correct (see n.9), only that independent of a (to some degree)
confirmed theory of human conceptuality, it is difficult to make sense of the
notion that a range of concepts are constitutively basic.
Second, unless there is some principle in
play which dictates when analysis should terminate, then to stop just here appears unjustified: Why
should one have begun the procedure at all or not stopped at any earlier stage?
With regard to truth in particular, why should representation or ideal rationality or facts or coherence or… cabbage be thought to be more primitive
than truth or a suitable place to
stop? The concepts seem to be as much in need of analysis as truth itself. But
such remarks hold, I think, for all purported analyses. Consider knowledge and its traditional justified true belief gloss. If we leave
to one side the familiar counterexamples (beginning with Gettier (1963)) where
justification and truth come apart, it is still unclear why we should find the
constituents of the analysans any less opaque (or transparent) than the target
notion. The traditional empiricist answer to this quandary has been to base
all concepts on phenomenal features -
the Given. This at least has the virtue of positing a base which is not
analysable further (albeit by definition). Yet if the philosophy of the
previous century taught us anything, it is surely that such phenomenalism is
false. It would not be stretching the point, I think, to say that the failure
of phenomenalism signals the failure of the TM model in general, for the
problem with it is not so much that being
a grandmother, say, is not definable in phenomenal terms, although it is
not, but that there is no reason whatsoever for holding that all we can think
about unpacks into a shared primitive base: the real problem is: What does being a grandmother have to do with being a quark or being a carburetor?
Horwich (1999, pp.239-40, n.2) has
latterly revised his 1990 judgment in apparent response to objections to his
implied commitment to TM; his present claim is merely that “there is nothing to
be said - not even very roughly speaking - about what [truth] consists in”.
So, even on the assumption that the TM format is forlorn, truth is still
peculiar in that, again unlike most other properties, presumably, we cannot
even sketch, gloss or elucidate what truth is. In essence, the thought seems to
be that whereas most concepts at least present themselves as being analysable - they possess some rough and ready
gloss that might potentially be made precise - truth fails to meet even this
necessary condition for analysis.
Horwich’s earlier remarks asked us to
notice that truth is unlike “most other properties” so that we might be drawn
to deflationism as a good (the best?) explanation for why truth is so peculiar.
The historical failure to analyse truth, let us agree, does militate for
deflationism, at least against the traditional analyses. But the weaker present
case against a substantive account of truth appears to be wholly unsupported.
Familiarly, associated with truth are a set of intuitions or platitudes, such
as its being the goal of inquiry, its being glossable as correspondence to the
facts (the correspondence intuition),
its relations with the concepts of proof, knowledge, justification,
reliability, etc., its role in deduction (truth is that which validity
preserves), its role in semantic theorising (e.g., the relation between
sub-sentential satisfaction conditions and truth being taken to be explanatory
of compositionality), and so on. Prima
facie, these associations are not to be denied; the question for everyone is how they are to be
accommodated into one’s general account. The
deflationist is free to argue, as Horwich (1990, 1998), Field (1994),
and Soames (1999) do, that all these associations can be explained without
departing from DT, or be otherwise diagnosed, but that is precisely to admit
that, pre-theoretically, we can say
quite a bit - roughly speaking - about truth.
Clearly, then, it is not that
deflationism is supported by the
independently established ‘fact’ that we cannot say anything about truth, as
deflationism is supported by the
failure of TM, albeit trivially; rather, the ‘fact’ is being offered as a
supposed happy consequence of
deflationism, under which we are enjoined to diagnose the apparent associations
truth supports as essentially separate notions which have been fallaciously
yoked to truth under inflationist dogma. Yet we are not given any reason to
welcome this consequence, still less a reason to think that deflationism is to
any degree confirmed. Of course, it is perfectly legitimate for the
deflationist to seek to explain as much as he can with the minimum of
conceptual resources. I am not here disputing deflationism as a methodology,
although, as I shall shortly argue, I think the core exhaustion thesis faces
insuperable problems. My present complaint, rather, is that, independent of
what else deflationism might have going for it, once we are free of the pull of
TM in general, there is no reason to view DT as licensed by default or even so
much as commended because truth is not amenable to analysis. There is a growing
awareness of the false dichotomy - TM or deflationism - that lies behind
Howich’s reasoning. For example, in opposition to deflationism, Wiggins (1980),
Wright (1992), and Davidson (1990, 1997), in their different ways, have sought
to integrate the kind of associations pointed to into a richer conception of
truth while also explicitly shunning TM. Similarly, those of a pragmatist bent
seek to stand apart from deflationism vs. the TM format (e.g., Misak (1998)).[10]
But none of these parties are perforce drawn to think that there is an essence
to truth, quite the opposite in fact. The message appears to be that of Karl Krauss: ‘If I’m asked to choose the
lesser of two evils, I’ll choose neither’.
I am not, therefore, suggesting
that truth is indeed substantive or robust, nor even that the deflationists are
incorrect to think that they can help themselves to a property as thin as truth
is on their model. Boghossian (1990) has insisted that deflationism’s property
of truth is, in some sense, degenerate, language dependent, non-factual. On
this matter, at least, I am with the deflationists[11],
but for general reasons: for the vast majority of conceivable properties, if we
want to provide an analysis or give necessary and sufficient conditions for
their realisation (in short, something more robust than an explicatory gloss),
then we can do no better than disquotationally read them off corresponding
predicates. We do of course depart from such disquotational purity for various
explanatory ends. If one is not sure of the difference between being
melancholic and being sad, then it is of no help to be told that ‘is
melancholic’ applies to x just if x is melancholic. Likewise, we often
stipulate in, for example, legal or official contexts, where we require some
way of discriminating cases (e.g., we shall say that the tenant is the undersigned who…’). Similarly, for the purposes of
discussion or the avoidance of vagueness we often agree on some paraphrase of a
vague or contentious concept (e.g., being
tall is being over 6ft; being a
realist is being someone who accepts classical logic over the area of
discourse in question). Indeed, it might be that we never concern ourselves
with disquotational specifications of properties precisely because they are
trivial, but, and this is the point, it is only such specifications we understand
to be unhedged, non-stipulative, indisputable, unrevisable, independent of our
particular and variable capacities of discrimination. I can, then, see no
distinction between the deflationist attitude to the property of being true vis-à-vis analysis and the one which is appropriate in general. My
complaint is not that truth is more robust than deflationism claims, but that
the non-robustness of truth is quite trivial; the status of truth vis-à-vis TM is in no way peculiar. If
some property P does have a significant
constitution, then it will not be unearthed by conceptual analysis of ‘is P’.
If, therefore, deflationism’s specific
claim that the instances of DT constitute, in some sense, an adequate account
of truth is to be supported, more is required than the mere renunciation of
analysis. Otherwise put, that nothing of interest can be said about the
constitution of being true does not
mean that an adequate account of the content of ‘is true’ is similarly trivial.
3: On the Proposed Meaning of Truth
If ET is to be
confirmed, then it is not enough merely to appeal to the failure of the TM
model, for that should be common ground. What is required is a positive account
of the content of truth that does not go beyond the instances of DT. There are
perhaps just two broad approaches to this desideratum that are currently being
pursued: the equivalence and dispositional views.
The equivalence view is simply that
instances of DT express an equivalence of meaning; that is, P is true means the same as/is
synonymous with/is cognitively equivalent to
P. This view is consonant with the nihilism of Ramsey, Ayer, Strawson, and
Williams; for clearly, if ‘is true’ is empty, fails to express a property, then
its predication to a sentence adds at best a pragmatic dimension, rather than a
change of content. Perhaps Frege (1952, 1976) also held an equivalence view,
although it would be inaccurate to regard him as a nihilist; rather, his view
appears to be that truth is an inherent aspect of content, so that an attribution
of truth is simply making explicit what is already present in the thought. The
prosentential theory is committed to the
equivalence view in that it claims that the predication of truth across
all subjects forms a sentential inheritor
which anaphorically inherits its content from an antecedent sentence. Thus,
P is true inherits its whole content from P; What Bill said is true inherits its
whole content from whatever Bill said, etc.; the difference between the members
of the pairs is at best pragmatic. Field (1994) has also commended an
equivalence view, where P and P is true play the same cognitive role in speakers’ idiolects:
defined over the sentences one understands, ‘is true’ is semantically inert (I
shall presently look more closer at Field). Quine (1960, 1970/86) also appears
to hold an equivalence view, but since his views on content are orthogonal to
the typical deflationist position, he is awkward to place. He certainly would
resist any claims of synonymy.
It bears emphasis that, while the present
view is one of equivalence, it is not of the traditional TM stripe, where a
predicate is offered as an explicit definiens. An open sentence, however, is
available in terms of which we can generalise DT:
(ST) ("x)[TRUE(x)
↔ (Sp)(x =
‘p’ & p)],
where ‘p’ is a substitutional variable ranging
over the sentences of a given language or idiolect. This, however, is a mere
schematic abbreviation of the infinite set of instances of DT; it offers no
conceptual enlightenment, still less
does it answer to TM on its proprietary understanding.
The dispositional
view does not seek to establish a relation of synonymy between truth
predications and their disquotations;
even so, DT is understood to fix the content of truth. The position I have in
mind is that of Horwich (1990). His claim is that “a[n] [English] person’s
understanding of the truth predicate, ‘is true’ - his knowledge of its meaning
- consists in his disposition to accept, without evidence” every instance of
(propositional) DT (op cit., p.36).
The idea is flush with Horwich’s (1998) general account of meaning, under which
the meaning of a word W is
constituted by a community’s disposition to accept a set G of sentences featuring W, where this disposition is understood to explain all uses of W outside of G. In the present case, the set is the instances of DT,
which, per deflationism, explain all other uses of ‘is true’. Soames (1999) has
a similar view, based on the analytical and a
priori status of the propositional version of DT (i.e., (1)c.); to possess
the concept of truth is to a priori
accept the instances of DT for those sentences one understands. Soames is not
committed to the dispositional analysis of Horwich; indeed, refreshingly,
Soames (op cit., p.231) avers that
deflationism is perhaps too vague a label to admit precise analysis, and that
the equivalence relation of DT is itself obscure. Still, like Horwich, Soames
rejects the equivalence view and contends that a mere recognition of the
primitive status of instances of DT constitutes
possession of the concept of truth, although one should hope for a more
detailed analysis.
Whatever general virtues these two views
may possess as regards elegance, simplicity, etc., they are untenable.
Let us grant that instances of
DT do have a peculiar status; it is unclear though, just what such a status is.
Consider the sentential version of DT, an instance of which is
(4) ‘Kleptomaniacs are mendacious’
is true iff kleptomaniacs are mendacious
Now if, according to the
equivalence view, the two flanks of the equivalence have the same meaning, then
(4) must, in some sense, be a priori
or necessarily true, it cannot be a mere contingent truth we could learn or
forget. But that ‘mendacious’ has to do with mendacity is wholly contingent.
Nor does (4) acquire an a priori
status if we index the predicate to English, for an English speaker would not ipso facto know that the quoted sentence
is English. Likewise, even if the predicate is indexed to ‘my language’, the
sentence fails to be a priori true,
for one may not have a clue what the embedded sentence means. The problem with
(4) is simply that it cannot be a priori
for a speaker unless she knows what ‘Kleptomaniacs are mendacious’ means, but
(4) in no way reflects this fact. Otherwise put, one can perfectly understand,
and indeed accept, the left-hand side without understanding the right-hand
side; the two flanks are thus hardly synonymous. In general, sentential
instances of DT will be a priori only
for those sentences one understands. This feature is now widely recognised
(Field (1986, 1994), Wright (1992), Gupta (1993), Soames (1999), Collins
(forthcoming)). In response to this problem, Field (1994) proposes pure disquotationism:
(PD) (i) The content of
the truth predicate, as understood by speaker S, is restricted to the
sentences S understands.
(ii) For each speaker S, P
is true is cognitively equivalent to P.[12]
Heuristically, (4) may
now be couched as (5):
(5) ‘Kleptomaniacs are mendacious’
is true iff it is true-as-I-understand-it
From PD(i), if S understands the left flank of (5),
then S understands the quoted
sentence; by PD(ii), the truth predication, as S understands it, means the same as the quoted sentence; and so the
right flank of (5) amounts to ‘Kleptomaniacs are mendacious’.
An alternative response to the problem
is to reject sentential DT in favour of a propositional version:
(6) The proposition that
kleptomaniacs are mendacious is true iff kleptomaniacs are mendacious.
The thought here is that
one cannot understand the left flank unless one understands its subordinate
clause.[13]
Thus, (6) is inherently a priori, one
does not need to relativise truth explicitly to what one understands.
There is, however, a large fly in the
ointment (Collins (2002)). Field’s proposal amounts to relativising truth to
idiolects. This feature alone has been read as having the absurd consequence
that one’s own concept of truth waxes and wanes with the width of one’s
linguistic competence (e.g., Gupta (1993) and David (1994)). But the problem I
have in mind also applies to the non-idiolectic propositional version: one can
clearly predicate truth to sentences/propositions one cannot formulate. So,
simply as a datum about our use of ‘is true’, we apply the concept outside of
our idiolects. How, then, might our grasp of truth be exhausted by the contents
we can otherwise entertain when the concept applies beyond such contents? This
problem appears insuperable for Field’s proposal, and the propositional
‘solution’ goes no way to resolving it: it appears to be simply a datum about
truth that its predication does not entail that one understands its subject, so
any account that restricts truth so that such an entailment holds appears to
have missed a central feature of the concept. I shall not dwell on this
quandary for deflationism, although I do think it is inescapable.[14]
Instead, I want to pursue a broader complaint that is suggested by this problem
and question the very idea that an equivalence is what we should be after in
explaining truth.
Let us grant with Field that, if a speaker
S does
understand P, then S would hold an attitude A to P
is true just if he held A to P.
To concede this is to do no more than acknowledge that the left-right,
right-left entailments of DT instances would not typically be denied by
competent speakers. Clearly, we have not advanced beyond data, for in no way
are we enlightened as to why we find this pattern of judgment. Specifically, an
account of the meaning of true should
enter into an explanation of why we find such a relation between P and P is true.
I am not here insisting on any form of
reductive account, my claim is only that meaning should stand in an explanatory
relation to our linguistic judgments; the nature of meaning is left open by
this demand. What is ruled out is the thought that an adequate account will not
go beyond a specification of the kind of sentences we are find intuitively
acceptable. This demand, I think is quite natural and applies generally.
Consider:
(7)a. If Joe expects to
shave himself, then Joe expects to be shaved.
b. If Harry wonders who Joe
expects to shave himself, then Joe doesn’t expect to be shaved.
c. If Bill was persuaded by Mary
to leave, then Bill left (not Mary).
d. If Bill ate, then Bill ate
something.
Every competent speaker
of English knows a priori that the
sentences of (7) are true, but that is the beginning of the investigation. We
want to know why speakers make such judgments. We need theories of anaphora,
empty categories (to act, inter alia,
as subjects for infinitive verbs), and semantic selection features (e.g., that eat always selects for a patient, i.e., the thing eaten. Cf., sleep), as well as, of course, an
account of the conceptual features of lexical entries: the factive character of persuade,
etc. The case of ‘true’ is no different. The equivalence view merely presents
data as explanation. Field (1994), however, appears to have a rejoinder to this
complaint.
The equivalence view does not say what
either P or P is true mean, it simply tells us that they mean the same thing.
Field (1994), though, suggests that this claim is compatible with various
accounts of meaning, such as verificationist and inferential role theories.[15]
In itself, however, this suggestion is question begging, for it assumes that
any adequate account of meaning would establish that DT instances express a
cognitive equivalence and that this would tell us all we want from a theory of
truth. As readily conceded above, DT instances are not to be denied, and if we do understand the quoted sentence,
then an acceptance of one flank should rationally lead to the acceptance of the
other. But it is precisely this kind of pattern of judgment, inter alia, we want explained, and it is
far from clear that there are independent reasons for thinking that any
investigation will turn out as Field expects. For one thing, Field’s account is
restricted to particular speaker’s idiolects - the sentences they understand.
But, as we just saw, surely any theory of meaning will assign some
interpretation to P is true, where a
given speaker does not understand P.
For any such speaker and theory, therefore, cognitive equivalence will not be
upheld. It is far from clear, then, that any theory of meaning could immediately support Field’s PD.
Even if we put this problem to one side (see n.14), while the instances of DT
are not to be denied, we cannot treat
cognitive equivalence as an independent datum; that such equivalence is
supported by a theory of meaning might reasonably be taken to militate against
the theory. For example, correspondence theorists such as Davidson (1969),
Devitt (1984), Musgrave (1989) and Alston (1996) accept the DT instances, but
deny that they express a cognitive equivalence: the instances are intuitively
acceptable just because we understand the language in question, but truth is
not explicated by the acceptability of the instances in themselves but by
language-world relations which DT instances reflect. Davidson (1984, 1990, 1997), Wiggins (1980),
and others likewise accept the instances, but suggest that they have an
interpretive role, rather than being mere a
priori trivialities. For example, according to Davidson’s interpretive
conception of the job of a truth theory, heterophonic
DT instances - e.g., ‘Der Schnee ist weiss’ is true iff snow is white - are
equally characteristic of truth as their homophonic siblings, although such
instances are certainly not disquotational and only support cognitive
equivalence if one is an English-German bilingual. Even deflationists, such as Horwich (1990,
1999) and Soames (1999), deny a cognitive equivalence relation (see below). In
short, while the acceptability of DT instances might be a datum, their proper interpretation certainly is not. The
options are wide open: an adequate theory of meaning might or might not confirm
a cognitive equivalence, or the instances of DT might not have a settled
status; perhaps they can be read in a number of ways, as, indeed, appears to be
the case. This would not be surprising, for, presumably, it is one of the jobs
of a theory of meaning to fix the notion of sameness
of meaning (or its cognates) in such a way as to explain our judgments; it
is not the job of the theory to tell us what we really mean, whatever that might mean. It bears emphasis that
Soames, as alluded to above, essentially shares this view that it is obscure
just what the relation is between P is
true and P.
Finally, it is of no help to appeal to
semantic ascent as constituting, in some sense,
the meaning of true. The
thought I have in mind is often expressed by the claim that true is a formal device for semantic
ascent or compendious assertion, perhaps to be accounted for in terms of
attachment and detachment rules, as if it were a logical constant. Some such
rules might account for the meaning of true,
but the lesson above recapitulates: it is far from obvious if such rules would
constitute the sameness of meaning between P
and P is true. Semantic ascent
certainly does not establish any such equivalence. Indeed, the very
‘usefulness’ claimed for the truth predicate appears to involve P is true expressing a different thought
from P.
On Field’s (1994) proposal, the thought
that Everything Gödel said is true
reduces to the DT instances of what Gödel said, for ‘is true’ offers us a mere
abbreviation by which we can assert an indefinitely large set of sentences
picked out by the subject of the predicate, in this case: ‘everything Gödel
said’. Thus:
(GT) If Gödel said ‘S1’,
then S1; and if Gödel said ‘S2’, then S2;…
But if the
generalisation is just an abbreviation of GT, and we can always ‘restore the
effect of objective reference’, then we appear to understand everything Gödel
did (and much more): each consequent of each conditional in GT. But does the
thought that everything Gödel said is true allow us thoughts about the
continuum hypothesis? Obviously not: the semantic competence drawn upon to
understand the lexical items and syntactic form of the generalisation does not
involve competence with any set theoretical hypotheses. This simple point might
be missed by a use-mention confusion. If we accept that everything Gödel said is true, then we should certainly assent to each conjunct of GT, and, if
we know that Gödel said ‘The continuum hypothesis is consistent with ZFC’, then
we should assent to ‘The continuum hypothesis is consistent with ZFC’, but so
much does not establish that we understand what the sentence means, and so does not establish that it is cognitively
equivalent to its truth predication. In this respect, GT and the argument form
DISQ are highly misleading. We can entertain the generalisation and, with supplied
premises, assent to each consequent
of each conditional conjunct without having competence with each of the
entailed conjuncts of GT. The very ‘usefulness’ of truth, therefore, appears to
involve us in sentences or propositions we do not understand, ones which are
not, for us, cognitively equivalent to their truth predications. Of course,
Field believes that he can account for truth predications to sentences one does
not understand, but whether he can or not, the general thought that the meaning
of truth is constituted by its usefulness now depends on the adequacy of the
account for what were perceived to be marginal cases. As it happens, Field
account of these now central cases faces serious problems (see n.14). Does the dispositional view fare better?
The dispositional view does not claim
that P is cognitively equivalent to P is true; rather, the thesis, as
expressed by Horwich (1990, 1998, 1999), is that a speaker’s a priori disposition to assent to
(propositional) instances of DT is what constitutes a speaker’s possession of the
concept of truth. It does so because such a disposition is “explanatorily
basic”, i.e., the disposition explains all other uses of ‘true’. Soames (1999)
does not accept this appeal to dispositions, but does similarly claim that it
is one’s primitive acceptance of (propositional) DT instances that constitutes
one’s grasp of truth.
There is little to recommend this view
of truth. Firstly, the claim that speakers are disposed to accept a priori instances of DT is an
unsupported empirical claim. It might be true, but it is far from obvious.
Consider: would the mathematically ignorant be as ready to accept a DT instance
whose embedded sentence tokens concerned topology as one concerned with the
colour of snow? One might want to say that they should accept the instances equally, but that would be due to some
antecedent thought about what the instances mean; that is, the putative
dispositions would reflect an independent semantic competence rather than be
constitutive of it.[16]
Secondly, the claim that acceptance of
instances of DT explains all other uses of ‘true’ appears to be simply false.
How does DT relate to ‘true’ as used attributively of ‘friend’ or of ‘volume’
in measurement theory?; or when ‘true’ heads a phrase such as ‘true of Bill’?
These are common uses of the adjective, but
they clearly cannot be accommodated by the DT schema. No doubt Horwich
would appeal to the standard bracketing which isolates predicative uses of
‘true’. Some such bracketing at some stage of investigation will no doubt have
to be made as the various semantic aspects of the word are delineated. Note,
though, that Horwich is supposed to be telling a story about the word ‘true’,
not an exclusive story about the VP ‘is true’ when it takes subjects with
clausal complements. Are we to suppose that ‘true’ divides into a range of
homonymous words ‘true1’, ‘true2’, etc., each
with different semantic properties? Surely not; but if not, then one’s
accepting DT is not “explanatorily basic”.
Horwich (1990, p.36) issues his claim as
a “stipulation”, but I am at a loss to know what this means other than its
being code for ‘Regardless of whether people are in fact disposed to accept a priori instances of DT, and regardless
of whether such instances have any bearing on most uses of ‘true’, to so accept
instances of DT constitutes what it is to possess the concept of truth; if one
is not so disposed than one does not possess the concept’. Fine; one is free to
define new meanings.
If a dispositional story could be
coherently told for a range of words, one might feel more sympathetic to
Horwich’s general approach vis-à-vis
‘true’. Horwich’s (1998) most persuasive examples are of colour words, where
one is supposedly disposed to accept ‘That’s red’, say, when confronted with
red surfaces in normal light, etc., and connectives, where the disposition
is to accept every instance of, say, A and
B, when one accepts A and B, and vice versa. There
are problems with the former case because it is highly tendentious, even with
colour words, whether a recognitional ability can constitute possession of a
concept, for it is moot whether recognitional abilities compose. One might be
able to recognise red things and recognise apples, but it does not necessarily
follow that one could recognise red apples, yet it seems that possession of the
constituent concepts (plus syntax) is necessary and sufficient to grasp the complex concept (see, e.g., Fodor
(1998b, Chps.4, 5)). Horwich’s (1998, Chp.7) response to this problem is to
suggest that what constitutes a complex meaning need not be the same kind of
property that constitutes the meanings of its parts. Thus, while the meanings
of ‘red’ and ‘apple’ might be constituted by recognitional abilities, the
meaning of ‘red apple’ need not be; so, the account we give of individual words
is not constrained by their composition into phrases and sentences. Even at
this schematic level, however, a profound problem looms. This remedy to the
initial problem essentially divorces a subject’s competence with words from her
competence with the complexes in which the words occur. But if there are two
different kinds of property at issue, then how do they relate such that grasp
of the primitive properties is necessary and sufficient for grasp of the
complex? That is the apparent datum we want explained, and multiplying
properties, far from answering it, threatens to make it unanswerable (see
Higginbotham (1999) and Collins (2001)).
A further problem is intimated by the
‘etc.’ in my statement of Horwich’s account. The conditions under which one would be correct to say ‘That’s red’ are
open ended, for no actual situation
is so accommodating that mistakes are precluded, but ‘is red’ simply does not
mean ‘looks red to me now’. The worry is a traditional one and is acute for
Horwich. The very point of Horwich’s account is to explain meaning in terms of
our use of words, but if the
prevailing situation is never sufficiently accommodating, then the “explanatory
basic uses” are never realised. Of course, no-one other than philosophers are
to be found asserting instances of DT,
but we can easily specify the conditions under which a ‘normal’ speaker would
be correct to do likewise (modulo the worries raised above), but we
simply cannot do this with colour words, at least not in a way which would
remotely give us the meaning of the words. The root of Horwich’s problem, here
made vivid, is that meaning should explain why we use words the way we do, not
the converse. Horwich’s notion of
disposition is ungrounded, i.e., it is not an expression of an underlying
semantic competence. I shall return to this point shortly.
Horwich’s other chief example is
logical connectives. These terms do offer the best case for a dispositional
account of meaning, but do so for the same reason that they offer the best case
for a conceptual/inferential role theory: connectives serve the purpose of
coordinating clauses - their function is their meaning. It is thus possible, if
we put pragmatic issues to one side, to specify
the tautological schemata whose instances one should accept. But
connectives are peculiar precisely in this regard; a theory which works best
for such words is perhaps not one we should expect to work well in general.
They are exceptions which prove the rule.
Horwich offers no other examples,
although in (1990) he suggests that a disposition to accept Peano arithmetic
constitutes one’s possession of the concept of natural number. I am not sure if
this is a serious proposal. The concept of a natural number was not invented by
Peano (or Dedekind); also, does Horwich’s proposal mean that if one accepted
Robinson’s Q, say, as opposed to
Peano arithmetic, then one would lack the concept of natural number? The reason
this suggestion is absurd is that we can decide
between axiomatisations and definitions, not just about natural number, but
throughout mathematics. We might construe the choice as deciding between alternative concepts or as choosing the
right codification of the one concept,
but we clearly do not think the decision determines whether we possess a
concept tout court. Of course, words
which have associated axioms or inferential rules are a tiny minority; for the
vast majority of words nothing whatsoever springs to mind. For closed class
words, such as the determiners, articles, prepositions, pronouns, reflexives,
affixes, etc., the very idea of there being respective sets of sentences, which
our acceptance of constitutes what we mean by the words, strikes me as simply
incoherent.
. The above problems are really symptoms of
the fact that dispositions are not explanatory; specifically, a
speaker/hearer’s dispositions are at best data as to what the subject
understands. Imagine an alien speaker who is disposed to accept a priori DT instances. We would, on the
basis of this disposition alone, perhaps
conjecture that he shares our concept of truth. But imagine that, on further
investigation, we found that he dissented from, say, the left-right entailment
of (propositional) instances of DT; there would be numerous ways to proceed:
maybe the alien has a different concept of the biconditional from us, or maybe
he has a different concept of proposition, or maybe he has a different concept
of truth and our initial conjecture was mistaken. Horwich’s advice to find the
“explanatory basic” disposition makes no sense here, for it is wholly unclear
whether dispositions stand in any explanatory relations to one another. What
appears to be required is a notion of the alien’s underlying semantic
competence, for none of the options
adumbrated are a priori preferable to
any other, and without a structure of which the dispositions are expressive, it
makes as much sense for the dispositions to stand alone as it does for them to
be integrated in any of numerous ways. The point, of course, applies to
ourselves, where we antecedently know what we mean.
Consider the sentences of (7). The best
explanations we have of why we find them intuitively obvious involve quite
abstract principles, some of which the human child appears to possess innately.
One is free to deny this and attempt another explanation, but a dispositional
one is not available precisely because it is our typical judgments we want explained. Consider the
following grammatical chestnut.
Let us say that anyone who is disposed to
assent to Bill is eager to please is
similarly disposed to Bill is eager to
please someone, but not It is eager
to please Bill; while anyone who is disposed to assent to Bill is easy to please is similarly
disposed to It is easy to please Bill,
but not the deviant Bill is easy to
please someone. Now what assent dispositions for sets of sentences
respectively featuring easy and eager will explain this difference? The
question cannot be eluded by a bracketing of syntax from semantics; that would
be illicit, for Horwich’s ‘explanatory basic’ dispositions are supposed to
explain all meaning-relevant
differences between easy and eager, i.e., every feature which enters
into the determination of our normal pattern of usage. Well, the pattern is
hardly self-explanatory; the dispositions as they stand appear to reflect an
‘underlying’ feature of the respective adjectives that enters into the
interpretation of every construction
in which they occur. Thus, no given number of respective constructions for the
adjectives will be apt to be explanatory basic. Nor, patently, will a schematic
approach, as offered for connectives, work: it is unclear whether jointly
accepting the members of the respective paraphrase pairs is necessary for an understanding of the
respective adjectives, but it is not sufficient,
for if it were, then, absurdly, understanding easy, say, would reduce to knowing that its host sentences may be
paraphrased one way as opposed to another.
This becomes clear if we take a closer look at the constructions.
Roughly, easy (on the present reading) does not take external NP arguments,
as the acceptability of the pleonastic subject it demonstrates; thus the whole complement clause - to please - is the single argument of easy. In simple terms, the sentence
means that it is Bill’s being pleased that is easy to bring about; Bill himself
is not easy, hence the nonsensical Bill
is easy to please someone. On the other hand, eager does take external NP arguments - it is Bill who is eager -
which, in the example at hand, may thus control
the empty subject of the infinitive complement to please. Again, this explains why It is eager to please Bill is clearly deviant if the pronoun is
read pleonastically (the sentence is perfectly acceptable with it referring to a pet dog, say), and so
why it is not a paraphrase of Bill is
eager to please. In short, the difference is to do with the argument
structure of the adjectives, but such structure is general in the sense of
being independent of what any particular construction is ‘about’. One’s
disposition (conditional or schematic or otherwise), therefore, to assent to
this or that set of sentences is of no moment: any set would do as well as
another, for any set which is not gibberish will reflect the argument
structure. This conclusion, of course, holds across the board for any lexical
item that selects arguments.
Such simple reflection on fairly
elementary syntactic features of words brings into relief the fundamental
shallowness of the idea that meaning may be explained by use.
A final worry for Horwich is that while
he rejects the cognitive equivalence view, he neglects to explain what kind of
relation the ‘iff’ of DT is. If the instances of DT are to be a priori or analytic, then the relation
clearly cannot be the material biconditional, for that carries no more
information than sameness of truth value. The relation must be, in some sense,
definitive or meaning based. This is what worries Soames (1999, p.231): there
are no ideas about the relation which are free of deep problems. Horwich,
however, does not consider the relation at all; it is enough if we simply
accept the instances. But such indifference threatens the very rationality of
semantic competence. One accepts a DT instance because, in part, of how one
understands the relation. If one thought that the relation was not some form of
equivalence, then, presumably, one’s conditional assent dispositions based on
DT instances would be quite different. But the mere specification of the
instances is insensitive to the relation, it is as if the instances were single
words, or perhaps grunts. Horwich would presumably appeal to another
disposition to accept some set of sentences featuring ‘iff’ that constitutes a
speaker’s understanding of the equivalence relation, but the same problem
recapitulates: What dispositions would differentiate between a material and a
meaning-constituting relation? This question appears unanswerable, because the
dispositions are supposed to be explanatorily prior to semantic categories and
relations. A range of further compositional problems also arise, touched on
above, concerning how two sets of
dispositions relate to one another to account for a complex expression. I have
looked at these problems elsewhere (Collins (2001)). Suffice it to say that, as
it stands, there is little reason to think that dispositions enter into an
explanation of the meaning of ‘true’, or any other word, for that matter. This
is hardly surprising: dispositions constitute nether the theoretical nor
evidential base for any serious proposal in linguistics.
4: Concluding Remarks
I have not attempted to
essay a positive story about truth. I should say that we need to await a
genuinely explanatory semantic theory or, perhaps concomitantly, a working
account of the conceptual systems that underlie our thought, before any
worthwhile story about truth can be
told. Deflationism is popular at the moment; it is thought by many to be the
end of the story, or perhaps at least the beginning. This popularity is
principally due to the problems with the substantive alternatives, but these
problems just do not translate into reasons for deflationism. When we look at
the positive claims concerning the content of truth we find insuperable
problems of both a conceptual and empirical nature. Such, at least, has been my
argument.[17]
Notes
[1] For the purposes of this paper, I assume that there is no issue about the extension of the truth predicate, which may be specified disquotationally. This is not an innocent assumption, not least because of the semantic paradoxes; furthermore, it suggests nothing as to how other forms of ‘true’ are to be accommodated, e.g., where the adjective modifies a singular noun (see below).
[2] Such flatness is the chief characteristic of what Field (1986, 1994) calls pure disquotationism.
[3] Cf., Grover (1992, p.180): “a token of a sentence like… ‘”Snow is white” is true’, has as its propositional content - in a given context - the content of its antecedent [viz., ‘Snow is white’].
[4] One way of understanding this thought is that ET says that the content of ‘S’ also accounts for the truth of ‘S’. Thus, if ‘S’ means that p, then ‘S’ is true just if p.
[5] Deflationism, when expressed directly in terms of DT as opposed to ET, creates certain taxonomic problems. For instance, Tarski (1956) does furnish an answer to What is truth? in terms of satisfaction. This has led to a debate over whether Tarski’s definitional format is deflationary or not (see Etchemendy (1988), Davidson (1990), Horwich (1990), Field (1986, 1994), and Schantz (2000)). Once our focus is on ET, I think it is clear that Tarski should count as a deflationist, even though there is much more to his format than Convention T. Similar remarks hold also for Kripke’s (1975) fixed point model.
[6] The ineliminability of ‘is true’ is not dependent on first-order readings of (2)a-d. The same result obviously holds for the treatment of quantifiers as cardinality functions (so-called, generalised quantifiers) which take an n-tuple of sets as argument and give a natural number as value as a Boolean function of the cardinality of the sets. On this understanding, the elision of ‘is true’ would result in a set missing from the argument of the quantifier, viz., the set of truths in the domain over which the quantifier is defined.
[7] It is not obvious what is meant by the thought that we have a truth predicate because it’s useful. The ‘explanation’ is hardly genetically adequate. If it is intended as a synchronic functional explanation, then usefulness does not translate into a theory of the predicate’s content (cf., Chomsky (1975) on the communicative ‘purpose’ of language).
[8] Fodor (1998a) attacks paradigm theories (as accounts of concept/property constitution), along with network theories, theory theories, et al. just as if they were species of TM (also see Leslie (2000)). Fodor might be right to reject all extra-denotational accounts of concepts, but, for my purposes, what is interesting about the proliferation of these alternative accounts of concepts is that they are motivated precisely by the failure to advance with TM.
[9] For an instructive elaboration of this thought concerning our concept of light, see Churchland (1996); for similar thoughts concerning biological concepts, see Hull (2000).
[10] An anonymous referee drew my attention to Misak’s interesting paper, which criticises deflationism in much the same spirit as my previous points. It is worth noting, though, that the current complaint is not premised on any particular alternative to deflationism, such as a form of pragmatism. The point is a general one: we are not in an either-or situation, so a rejection of one limb - TM - does not commend the other.
[11] For deflationary responses to Boghossian, see, e.g., Kraut (1993) and Soames (1999, chp.8).
[12] Field lets his notion of
cognitive equivalence remain somewhat impressionistic; he does not, however,
associate it with synonymy for familiar Quinean reasons. So to have something
definite in mind, the relation may be expressed as (CE):
(CE) ("S)("C)[P is cognitively equivalent to P* for speaker S ↔
(i) S holds P under
cognitive attitude C iff S holds P* under C;
(ii) there is no Q such
that if S were to hold Q under C, then S would hold
P under C but not
P*, or P* under C but not P].
The second clause says that the equivalence in the first clause is non-defeasible: there are no cognitive grounds which would lead S to adopt differing attitudes towards P and P*.
[13] Recanati (2000) dubs this feature of ‘that-clause’ reports (inter alia) iconicity.
[14] See Collins (forthcoming). Field (2001) suggests that his (1994) response to the problem is inadequate, but that it can be easily rectified by the thought that one’s understanding of a truth predication to a sentence one does not understand is equally indeterminate as one’s understanding of the sentence itself. This thought, however, appears to be simply a stipulation. Patently, there is some difference between English monolingual A and English-German bilingual B in their understanding of ‘”Der Schnee ist weiss” is true’, but it just does not follow that A’s understanding of the truth predication is of the same status as his understanding of ‘Der Schnee ist weiss’, and Field gives no reason to think that it is.
[15] In principle, any
non-truth conditional account of meaning is compatible with deflationism. But
such an account, of course, constitutes perhaps the dominant tradition.
Horwich’s (1998) semantic deflationism
and Field’s (1994) methodological
deflationism correctly see that a deflationism about truth is half the job
- truth must also be removed as the core component of a theory of meaning.
[16] Horwich, in line with his (1998) commitments, might make appeal to the dispositions of the community of English speakers. This would recapitulate the problem. Even if we were able to talk sensibly about such a community, most of its members would surely be leery of assenting to any claim about topology.
[17] My thanks go to an anonymous referee for constructive
criticism and a number of suggestions from which this paper has greatly
benefited.
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