Table Of ContentTRUTH AND ITS NATURE (IF ANY)
SYNTHESE LIBRARY
STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Managing Editor:
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University
Editors:
DIRK VAN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley
THEO A.F. KUIPERS, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University, California
JAN WOLENSKI, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
VOLUME 284
TRUTH AND ITS NATURE
(IF ANY)
Edited by
JAROSLAY PEREGRIN
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Prague. Czech Republic
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA. B.Y.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5280-3 ISBN 978-94-015-9233-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/ 978-94-015-9233-8
Printed on acid-free paper
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Origina1ly published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
TARSKI'S LEGACY (INTRODUCTORY REMARKS)
JAROSLAV PEREGRIN ..................................................................................... vii
I. PAST MASTERS ON TRUTH
FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING
GARY KEMP ...................................................................................................... 1
CARNAP, SYNTAX, AND TRUTH
A. W CARUS .................................................................................................... 15
JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH
MAJEDA OMAR ............................................................................................... 37
II. T ARSKI AND CORRESPONDENCE
SEMANTIC CONCEPTION OF TRUTH AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY
JAN WOLENSKI ............................................................................................... 51
TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE, SA TISF ACTION
PETR KOLAR ................................................................................................... 67
DO WE NEED CORRESPONDENCE TRUTH?
FREDERICK STOUTLAND ................................................................................. 81
TA RSKIAN TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE
-REPLIES TO SOME OBJECTIONS
ILKKA NllNILUOTO ........................................................................................... 91
III. THE SUBSTANTIALITY OF TRUTH
THE CENTRALITY OF TRUTH
DONALD DAVIDSON ...................................................................................... 105
MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF TRUTH: DAVIDSON CONTRA RORTY
JEFFMALPAS ............................................................................................... 117
THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES
EMBODYING THE SEMANTIC CONCEPTION
MANUEL GARCiA-CARPINTERO ..................................................................... 129
NEGATIVE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE
VLADIMiR SVOBODA ...................................................................................... 149
vi
IV. THE INSUBSTANTIALITY OF TRUTH:
THE PROS AND CONS OF DEFLATIONISM
DEFLATIONARY TRUTH, ABOUTNESS AND MEANING
PAUL HORWICH ............................................................................................ 163
THE SUBSTANCE OF DEFLATION
JERRY SELIGMAN .......................................................................................... 173
DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY WORK?
EDOPIVCEVIC .............................................................................................. 187
RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH:
A CRITIQUE OF DEFLA TIONISM
PREDRAGCICOVACKI .................................................................................... 203
JAROSLAV PEREGRIN
TARSKI'S LEGACY
Introductory Remarks
I. THE HEYDAY OF CORRESPONDENCE
The nature of truth is, needless to say, one of the central philosophical conundrums.
Pilate was neither the first, nor the last to ask what truth is: philosophers, from Plato
and Aristotle to the most recent masters, have all pondered the question. Logicians
and analytic philosophers of this century have become somewhat obsessed by it; and
this obsession has been fatally reinforced by the logico-mathematical investigations
of the concept oftruth carried out in the thirties by Alfred Tarski 1.
Frege, the avowed father of the analytic tradition, wrote that the word 'truth'
points out the direction for logic in the same sense in which the word 'beautiful'
points out the direction for aesthetics and the word 'good' for ethics; he also claimed
that logic treats truth as physics treats mass or heat2. However, his logical apparatus
denigrates truth (together with its opposite, falsity) by making it into an object on par
with other objects within our universe of discourse, and turns sentences into ordinary
names of one of the two objects. Many have considered this resignation on the
explication of the notion of truth unwarranted.
The following period of analytic philosophy went on under the Russellian banner
of logical atomism (which found its expression not only in Russell's writings, but
also in Wittgenstein's Tractatus or in Camap's Aujbau\ its devotees preferred to
see truth in tenns of picturing reality, in tenns of correspondence between language
and the world (Wittgenstein, 1922, §2.222). Sentences, the story went, correspond to
(or pictures) possible states of affairs, and true sentences correspond to those states
of affairs which are not only possible, but which also actually obtain, i.e. which are
facts. Under this view, a sentence is true because it depicts a fact; it is made true by
the fact. This appeared to be a satisfasctory answer to the question about what truth
is; and Tarski's work was then hailed as giving the correspondence intuition a finn
mathematical footing.
However, this is not to say that the correspondence construal of truth was
embraced universally and without objections. There were, of course, scholars who
pointed out the vacuity of this approach, its incapability to explain anything, from the
beginning. Thus Hempel (1935, p.51): "None of those who support a cleavage
vii
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), vii -xviii.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
viii JAROSLA V PEREGRIN
between statements and reality is able to give a precise account of how a comparison
between statements and facts may possibly be accomplished, and how we may
possibly ascertain the structure of facts."
The criticism then increased during the second half of the present century, the
basic point being that nobody has succeeded in making the idea of correspondence
clear to the point where it could be taken as a real explicatum for the concept of
truth. Thus the trouble with the correspondence theory is not that it is false, but
rather that it is unclear whether it can properly be called a theory. Is 'corresponding
to a fact' really something over and above 'being true', something which can
explicate 'being true' (or embody its reason or its cause)? When saying that truth is
correspondence, do we reduce the concept of truth to an independently understood
concept, or do we in such a case need a new and peculiar concept of correspondence,
which cannot be explicated save with the help of the concept of truth? Hence, does
the correspondence theory really say anything nontrivial, is it a theory worth the
name?
The role of Tarski's teaching in this context is rather controversial. Tarski
himself called his doctrine correspondence theory of truth; and this has led to his
being considered as having laid the foundations of a genuine correspondence theory.
However, others point out that Tarski's theory is in fact far from a real
correspondence theory in the intuitive sense and claim that what Tarski really did
was to replace the correspondence theory with a better one.
2. TAR SKI
Tarski's approach to truth was that of a scientist trying to explicate an obscure
concept. His idea was to first assemble essential principles characterizing the
concept and then to encapsulate the principles into an explicit definition of truth. But
as is well known, he discovered (and from here stems much of our current debate
about truth) that this straightforward task faces unexpected difficulties: for the
fathomable principles which seem to be constitutive of the apparently substantial
concept of truth proved to be somehow meager, and, moreover, their transformation
into a definition or explication proved itself to be unexpectedly tricky.
In fact, the only principle constitutive of the concept of truth Tarski recognized
was the well known T-schema (1), in which the letter x is to be replaced by a name
of a sentence and the letter y by the very sentence itself, and which thus yields
instances, T-sentences, like (2).
(1) x is true if and only if y
(2) 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white
And as schema (1) appeared to resist a logically allowable expression in the form of
a general statement, the concept of truth appeared to be governed by nothing more
(and nothing less) than the infinity of its instances, the T -sentences.
TARSKI'S LEGACY: AN INTRODUCTION ix
The question how to turn the principles implicitly governing the concept of truth
into an explicit definition (or explication) of the concept hence coalesced with the
question how to get a finite grip on the infinity of T-sentences. Tarski's famous and
ingenious move was to introduce a new concept, satisfaction, which could be, on the
one hand, recursively defined, and which, on the other hand, straightforwardly
yielded an explication of truth.
A surprising 'by-product' of Tarski's effort to bring truth under control was the
breathtaking finding that truth is in a precisely defined sense ineffable, that no non
trivial language can contain a truth-predicate which would be adequate for the very
language4. This implied that truth (and consequently semantic concepts to which
truth appeared to be reducible) proved itself to be strangely 'language-dependent':
we can have a concept of truth-in-L for any language L, but we cannot have a
concept of truth applicable to every language. In a sense, this means, as Quine (1969,
p. 68) put it, that truth belongs to "transcendental metaphysics", and Tarski's
'scientific' investigations seem to lead us back towards a surprising proximity of
some more traditional philosophical views on truth.
3. TARSKI'S THEORY AS A PARADIGM
So far Tarski himself. Subsequent philosophers then had to find out what his
considerations of the concept of truth really mean and what are their consequences;
and this now seems to be an almost interminable task. The fact is that no consensus
has been reached not only about the nature of truth, but not even about the
significance of Tarski's contribution towards disclosing the nature. However, before
we can consider the significance, we should ask whether Tarski's views are indeed
so unshakable to become a 'prolegomenon to any future theory of truth'. Is the T
schema really valid, and if so, how adeptly does it characterize the concept of truth?
Is Tarski's 1935 theory unquestionable and does it offer an explication of the
concept of truth?
The T -schema itself seems to be relatively uncontroversial - despite the fact that
many philosophers and logicians have indeed raised a number of objections to its
universal validity and have thus indicated that the T -schema is, in fact, not
universally valid5; and despite the fact that even the precise content of the T
sentences has sometimes been subject to disputes6. It seems to be plainly accepted by
almost every philosopher that there is at least an important 'core' of sentences of
natural language for which the T-schema does hold, and thus that the schema
highlights an important characterization of the concept of truth.
However, what about the theory Tarski erects on the basis of the schema, and
what about his unexpected results to the effect that truth is undefinable? Is all of this
quite undisputed? To a large extent it is, and in fact it often counts as an ignorance to
express any doubts in this respect. Tarski's theory of truth, it is said, is a
mathematical theory, the correctness of which has been proved and is thus immune
from dispute.
x JAROSLA V PEREGRIN
It is obviously hard to challenge Tarski's theory as a mathematical theory -
hardly anybody doubts that the proofs he offered are correct. However, what is
possible is to challenge its claim to be a theory of truth, and the claim that the results
it yields (e.g. the impossibility to define truth for the language in the very same
language) really concern truth in the ordinary sense of the word.
One popular line of such an attack is exemplified by Etchemendy (1988). The
author claims, in effect, that Tarski's theory of truth for a language cannot tell us
anything nontrivial about the language, especially not about truth in that language -
for its theorems are logical truths, they hold simply in virtue of logic and definitions
of the terms they contain. According to this criticism, Tarski told us nothing about
truth, but rather devised a new (and maybe better) formal concept to replace the
concept of truth, which was recognized to be susceptible to paradox.
A new and substantial line of criticism of Tarski's theory of truth was recently
put forward also by Hintikka (1991; see also Hintikka and Sandu, 1996). Hintikka
claims, needless to say startlingly, that Tarski was wrong to state that a consistent
language cannot contain its own truth predicate; and he concludes that the Tarskian
approach to truth should be radically reassessed. Of course he does not deny that
Tarski's results do hold for the usual logical languages which were investigated by
Tarski; what he claims is that they do not hold for other logical languages which are
more adequate to natural language and hence to the ordinary concept of truth.
Hintikka presents a logical system which he calls independence-friendly logic (and
which is an elaboration of his older theme of game-theoretical semantics); in this
language, it is demonstrably possible to define truth for the very language7•
4. THE PURSUIT OF AN EXPLICIT DEFINITION OF TRUTH
Earlier we stated that almost every philosopher and logician agrees that the
T -schema tells us something about the behaviour of the truth-predicate (despite the
various reservations mentioned) and in virtue of this, if the predicate expresses a
concept, it characterizes this concept, i.e. the concept of truth. The point of
disagreement concerns the question of how nontrivial and how important this
characterization is. Whereas some philosophers claim that from the viewpoint of
grasping the nature of truth the T -schema is marginal, others insist that it is central.
(And it is symptomatic that philosophers on both sides of the barricade tend to shield
themselves with Tarski.)
Let us start with first of the mentioned views. It amounts to the conviction that
although T -sentences may well hold, as far as concerns their ability to capture the
nature of truth they are not so terribly important. The proponents of these kinds
views maintain that if we want to get a grip on the concept of truth via searching out
principles which govern it, then dwelling on T -sentences is a waste oftime - for we
have to fmd more explicit and more telling principles, which say what truth really is.
Some of the post-Tarskian philosophers continued to defend the claim that truth
is correspondence. However, in view of the objections mentioned above, they
provided alternative versions of the correspondence theory of truth, deemed to be
Description:The question how to turn the principles implicitly governing the concept of truth into an explicit definition (or explication) of the concept hence coalesced with the question how to get a finite grip on the infinity of T-sentences. Tarski's famous and ingenious move was to introduce a new concept,
