Roy
Harris
Online
Getting at the Truth
Beginning students in philosophy are nowadays confronted with a bewildering variety of ‘theories’ of truth, as if these were items on shelves in the philosophical supermarket, and customers were invited to take their pick. There are, according to current dictionaries of philosophy, at least the following available: the ‘correspondence’ theory, the ‘coherence’ theory, the ‘pragmatic’ theory, the ‘logical superfluity’ theory, the ‘semantic’ theory, the ‘non-descriptivist’ theory, the ‘verificationist’ theory, the ‘deflationary’ theory, the ‘redundancy’ theory and the ‘disquotation’ theory. Some of these products seem to overlap in disconcerting ways. But what is often not clear from the label is whether or not they have anything to do with clarifying what the lay public regards as issues of truth and falsehood.
From an integrationist perspective, the words true and false
are terms applicable in the first instance to what people say or write.
(‘What John said was not true’; ‘It was never proved
that the accusation was false’; ‘They assured us it was going
to rain, but that turned out not to be true’.) They are included
among what are sometimes pompously called ‘metalinguistic predicates’.
Considered from this point of view, they are terms that come already accompanied
by a number of assumptions about when it makes sense to describe something
as being true. For instance, it makes no sense to describe the word elephant
as being true or false, or even the sentence Elephants have trunks
(unlike John’s statement ‘Elephants have trunks’).
Nor does it make sense, from the same lay perspective, to describe questions
or commands as being true or false. Thus while Mary’s statement
‘The window is open’ may be true, her question ‘Is the
window open?’ is neither true nor false. Nor is her telling someone
‘Open the window’.
In general, people are in no more doubt about when it makes sense to describe what is said as true or false than they are about when it makes sense to describe something as green or unexpected or triangular. But it is important to distinguish between making sense of what is said and making sense of its being said at all. These are often confused. Consider: Bill’s prediction ‘Napoleon Bonaparte will be the next president of the United States’. If you say ‘That makes no sense’ (because you know that Napoleon Bonaparte is dead, or have other good reasons for supposing that he will not be a candidate), you are commenting on what Bill is asking you to believe; but it still makes perfectly good sense for it to have been said. If you have any doubts, says Bill, you can wait until the next election and see whether Napoleon Bonaparte wins it. The case is different from: ‘Napoleon Bonaparte will soon be facilitated’, where the problem is understanding what it is you are being told to look out for. Here ‘That makes no sense’ would be a comment on the internal coherence of the statement.
There may be some cases where it is doubtful whether what is puzzling about a statement is due to the difficulty of making sense of what is said or the difficulty of making sense of its being said. Apart from these marginal cases, however, it seems clear that in most cases your describing something as true (or false) presupposes that what is said (as distinct from its being said) makes sense as far as you are concerned.
Some philosophers have attempted to make truth the basis of a theory of meaning. This is common to various forms of so-called ‘truth conditional semantics’. Thus, following Tarski 1944, it is claimed that knowing what it means to say ‘Snow is white’ is – or is in some fundamental way conditional upon – knowing what would have to be the case if it were true that snow is white. Other philosophers have rejected this account of meaning as leading to an infinite regress. The integrationist objection is much simpler: attempts to derive meaning from truth put the cart before the horse. Unless we first assign a meaning to what is said, there is no question of deciding whether or not what is said is true.
Logicians commonly insist that it is ‘propositions’ that are true or false; but that is a vacuous claim until we have some clear account of what a proposition is, and how, if at all, it differs from a statement. The entry proposition in one popular dictionary of philosophy begins: ‘Different sentences are said to express the same proposition: for instance, the French “il pleut” and the German “es regnet” express the same proposition as the English “it is raining”’ (Mautner 1997: 454). This seems to suggest that ‘the proposition’ in question is something that the French, German and English sentences have in common, rather than the statements that these three sentences might be used to make. But it is difficult to see how we know that the three decontextualized sentences have anything in common at all, or why sentences from just those three languages suffice to identify the proposition in question. Similarly, according to another philosopher, the proposition expressed by ‘The protons will not decay’ is ‘the shared meaning of this sentence and all its synonyms, in English or elsewhere (e.g., ‘die Protonen werden nicht zerfallen’)’ (Wagner 1995: 658). But if this were so, in order to identify the proposition in question we should first need to know all the languages in which the sentence ‘The protons will not decay’ has ‘synonyms’. (For it might turn out that in one of the languages we don’t know there is a synonym that calls in question what we had previously – but mistakenly – thought was ‘the shared meaning’.) That requirement of linguistic omniscience far exceeds the linguistic knowledge available to most speakers of English.
The notion of a proposition, according to these interpretations, emerges as corresponding to something unknowable (in the sense that, with our limited grasp of human languages, we could never be sure whether we knew it or not). That absurdity points to a certain desperation in the attempts of philosophers to have their linguistic cake and eat it. Their predicament is this. They want logic to be independent of languages, but at the same time they are at a loss to know how to get round the fact that unless a proposition can be verbally identified, logical structures such as the syllogism cannot even get off the ground. (Such structures are typically claimed to link true premises to true conclusions. Without truth, the link collapses.)
This dilemma is one of many bequeathed to his successors by Aristotle, and it remains unresolved. In effect, the Western tradition’s conception (or misconception) of logic arises directly from attempts to make universal generalizations about truth. Recognizing once and for all that this is a chimerical enterprise might well spell the end of Western formal logic, but it might also be the beginning of wisdom where human reason is concerned.
REFERENCES
Mautner, T. (ed.) (1997), The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy,
rev. edn., London, Penguin Books.
Tarski, A. (1944), ‘The semantic conception of truth and the foundations
of semantics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
4, 341-75.
Wagner, S.J. (1995), ‘Proposition’. In: Audi, R. (ed.), The
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, pp.658-9.
