JENNIFER HORNSBY VIRTUAL ISSUE NO. 1 Truth: The Identity ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Jennifer Hornsby The Aristotelian Society Virtual Issue No. 1 ! paraphrase of 'is true' deployed with the purpose of saying something important sounding (1984, p. 255). But of course this is not all that has ever been read into the phrase. Someone who says 're-rendered it operational' for 'got it going again', may be criticized for needless portentousness, but not on other grounds; but when 'corresponds to the facts' gets in, the phrase's wordiness should not be the only source of doubt. Certainly there are glosses on 'is true' that are platitudinous: 'is a fact' is one such – the one that the identity theory singles out for attention. Perhaps it is also a platitude that true sentences say how things are. And this again is unobjectionable, so long as the 'things' in question are ordinary objects of reference: the true sentence 'that book is red'; for example, says something about how things are by saying how one of the things (sc. that book) is (sc. red). 8 From the point of view introduced by the identity theory, it will be distinctive of correspondence theorists to seek items located outside the realm of thinkables, and outside the realm of ordinary objects of reference, but related, some of them, to whole thinkables. The idea is widespread, and it takes various guises. In the Russell of An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), the basic correspondents are percepts. Percepts can be 'surveyed but not defined'; utterances appropriately associated with them get their particular meanings from them; and propositions, the truth bearers, can be constructed out of percepts. In the Quine of Philosophy of Logic, the correspondents are cosmic distributions of particles. 'Two sentences agree in objective information, and so express the same proposition, when every cosmic distribution of particles over space-time that would make either sentence true would make the other true as well' (1970, p. 4). These very different candidates for things that make sentences true – percepts and particle distributions – reflect the very different obsessions of Russell and Quine, epistemological and cosmic. But what is common to their accounts, despite this vast difference, is a willingness to reconstruct thinkables from posited entities of a different sort, entities which make things true. ! ! 8 This platitude points up the independence of thinking from what there is. Whether you want to know the book's colour, or to know something of what I think about the book, you have to think of something that is not sustained in existence by your thinking. But the thing to which you are then related (that book) is obviously not something which corresponds to a thinkable. Davidson used to say that a relation like Tarskian satisfaction could provide the language-world links sought by a correspondence theorist of truth. But Davidson now regards this as a mistake (1990, p. 302). It must indeed be a mistake if opposition to correspondence theories can be combined with thought about mind-independent objects. ! 7
Jennifer Hornsby The Aristotelian Society Virtual Issue No. 1 ! Percepts and particle distributions, then, are supposed to be items which we can specify independently of an account of thinkables, items which may confer truth upon a thinkable. When they are introduced, however, we cannot hold onto the truism that inspires the identity theory. The fact (as it is) that autumn has begun, if it were to be a cosmic distribution of particles, would not be the same as what I think when I think (truly) that autumn has begun. It is evident now that the words 'corresponds with' do not have to be in play for an ontological gap between thought and the world to open up. This is something that we see in formulations used over the years by Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright in stating the semantic antirealist's case. Their formulations often appear to invoke a conception of a truth-maker which will suit a correspondence theorist but which an identity theorist cannot allow. 9 Dummett asked 'If it were impossible to know the truth of some true statement, how could there be anything which made that statement true'. Wright spoke of 'a truth-conferrer for a sentence': in the case where the truth of the sentence cannot be known, he said that this is something that 'the world fails to deliver up'. And he spoke of 'the states of affairs' that are in question when a sentence is undecidable as things that 'could not be encountered'. These ways of speaking give rise to an image of something with which a thinkable might have connected up, but a something which we are expected to think of the world as taking sole responsibility for. This is the image that an identity theory may help to rid us of. For when the conditions for the truth of a sentence are supplied by an identity theorist, nothing is brought in besides the thinkable that is expressed by the sentence itself. By introducing 'sources of truth', 'truth conferrers' and 'states of affairs', Dummett and Wright drive a wedge between what is demanded by a ! ! 9 See Dummett 1976, at p. 61 in the version reprinted in Dummett 1993. A different sort of illustration may be got from Frank Jackson, Graham Oppy and Michael Smith 1994. They argue for the compatibility of versions of non-cognitivism (in ethics, say) with minimalism about truth. They follow Michael Devitt in characterizing minimalism as holding that 'terms for truth and falsity are linguistic devices for talking about reality by appending the truth predicate'. Their claim then is that it might not be that any old sentence is such as to talk about reality: noncognitivists, they say, 'precisely deny that (e.g.) ethical sentences talk about reality'. But someone who is opposed to correspondence theories in all their versions will not allow this 'talking about reality'. Suppose that Devitt had characterized minimalism by saying that truth and falsity are terms for going on talking while adding a word or two. Would Jackson et al. then have said 'Non-cognitivists precisely deny that (e.g.) ethical sentences are used in talking' This example may serve to show how easily ideas of correspondence get in through the back door. ! 8
Page 1 and 2: TRUTH VIRTUAL ISSUE NO. 1 Tr u t h
Page 3 and 4: ABOUT In celebration of the 125th y
Page 5 and 6: BIOGRAPHY Jennifer Hornsby has been
Page 7 and 8: Jennifer Hornsby The Aristotelian S
Page 11: Jennifer Hornsby The Aristotelian S

JENNIFER HORNSBY VIRTUAL ISSUE NO. 1 Truth: The Identity ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?