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.
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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. …